No Holds Barred: Why Jews are always viewed as aggressors

The roots can be traced to the New Testament claim of Jewish complicity in the death of Jesus.

By SHMULEY BOTEACH
shmuley boteach 224 88 (photo credit: Courtesy)
shmuley boteach 224 88
(photo credit: Courtesy)
It's a curious thing about the Jews. Whenever we get attacked, we get blamed for having provoked the attack and being aggressors rather than victims. This strange phenomenon did not begin with Israel's current war against Hamas. It has an unending series of precedents. It was true in the pogroms that followed the Black Death, when the Jews were accused of poisoning the wells of Europe. It was true of the massacres of 1648-49 in which hundreds of thousands of Jews were slaughtered by Bogdan Chmielnicki's Cossacks. Many Ukrainian and Polish historians still hold the Jews accountable for inciting the most savage slaughter of Jews outside the Holocaust, maintaining that Jewish administrators of estates persecuted the peasants in their midst, even though there is not a shred of evidence to support the slanderous allegation. And it was especially true of the Holocaust, when Hitler repeatedly portrayed the Jews as parasitic connivers out to embroil all of Europe in war. His most famous quote on the subject was in a speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939: "Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the Earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!" So the Jews provoked the Holocaust, just as Israel provoked the launching of over 6,000 rockets against its kindergartens, hospitals and family homes by Hamas. WHY IS it so easy to blame the Jews as aggressors even when it is perfectly clear that they are the innocent victims? Unfortunately, the allegation traces itself all the way back to the New Testament's claim of Jewish complicity in the death of Jesus. The Roman governor, by all accounts a callous, bloodthirsty brute, is portrayed as benevolently trying to save Jesus while the Jews are portrayed as a bloodthirsty mob who want a docile and peace-loving prophet dead. And don't think that because the Arabs are Muslims they are not affected by this slander. The New York Times reported on its front page just this past Saturday that Sheik Eid Abdel Hamid Youssef, a government-appointed preacher in a 1,000-year-old Cairo mosque, inveighed against the Jews: "God has inflicted the Muslim nation with a people whom God has become angry at and whom he cursed so he made monkeys and pigs out of them. They killed prophets and messengers and sowed corruption on Earth. They are the most evil on Earth." Yes, original Jewish culpability begins with the greatest lie ever told, that the Jews were responsible for killing the son of God, which is why Jesus himself says of them: "You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning" (John 8:44). The Roman proconsul Pontius Pilate emerges as a peace-loving humanitarian who is goaded by the Jews into killing Jesus: "'What shall I do, then, with Jesus who is called Christ?' Pilate asked. They all answered, 'Crucify him!' 'Why? What crime has he committed?' asked Pilate. But they shouted all the louder, 'Crucify him!' When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. 'I am innocent of this man's blood,' he said All the people answered, 'Let his blood be on us and on our children'" (Matt: 27: 22-25). NOWADAYS WE tend to have a somewhat rosy view of the Romans. In an ancient world populated by barbaric hordes, Rome was the light. We owe the Romans the decorum of the Senate and the beauty of their monuments. The truth, of course, is that the Romans were a warlike people who lived entirely by the sword. The real Rome was not the splendor of the Colosseum but the barbaric gladiatorial combat that took place within it. The Romans had a civilized outer veneer, but whose principal engine consisted of brutal soldiers imposing the Roman will on weaker adversaries and slaughtering them en masse if they rebelled. As Hyam Maccoby says, it would be hard to find two nations more unlike each other in the ancient world than the Romans and the Jews. The Romans celebrated conquest and military prowess; the Jews championed justice and their prophets preached a coming era of eternal peace. Urban life for Romans was centered on the cruelties of the arena with its gory spectacles, while the Jews looked toward the Temple of God in Jerusalem. As for Pontius Pilate, he was the cruelest proconsul ever sent by Rome to Judea, and crucified tens of thousands of innocent Jews for the most minor infractions. King Herod Agrippa I wrote a letter to the Emperor Caligula about Pilate's "acts of violence... provocations, corruption... continual murder of persons untried and uncondemned, and his never- ending, endless and unbelievable cruelties." Philo wrote of Pilate's "violence, robberies... continuous executions without even the form of a trial, endless and intolerable cruelties." Josephus, in Antiquities, shows that Pilate's excessive murders and brutality were so severe that they got him recalled to Rome in the year 36. EVEN JESUS uses Pilate as an example of barbaric cruelty which will be visited upon his disciples unless they repent: "There were some present at that very time who told [Jesus] of the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And [Jesus] answered them, 'Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus? I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish'" (Luke 13:1-3). As for the claim that the Jews rather than the Romans hated Jesus, Matthew notes that just five days before his crucifixion the Jews gave Jesus a rapturous welcome to Jerusalem. "A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road... and shouted, 'Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord'" (21:8-9). Is it really believable that these same Jews would turn against Jesus in under a week? How and why the later editors of the gospels got away with ingratiating themselves to the Romans by portraying the Jews as sadistic god-killers while the Romans came out as benevolent humanitarians is a mystery to which I am devoting an entire book slated for publication later this year. But it set the stage for the tiny State of Israel being portrayed, against all the evidence, as an inhuman aggressor while its adversaries are always weak and innocent victims. www.shmuley.com