Salon
A new study from Bar-Ilan University in regards to a fear of ISIS underscores the ongoing theory of intergenerational transmission of trauma as the study revealed that the fear of ISIS among third-generation Holocaust survivors was higher than the control group without a connection to the Holocaust.
The following is an excerpt from the Jewish Standard's April 20th article “Even Buddhists do it” by Larry Yudelson:
Dr. Selengut, writer of “Sacred Fury”, tries to understand religious violence through the lenses of sociology, psychology, and theology. His thesis is that violence carried out in the name of religion cannot be separated from the religion itself.
“Some is pure religion, some is the interplay of religion and and politics, but it's incorrect to say that religion has nothing to do with violence. All religions have elements that encourage violence against those who disagree with them or challenge their theology.
If the religion is threatened and the motivation of the violent religious people is not just out of anger, but is for the religion, that's not called violence. The violence is reinterpreted as nonviolence.
In Hinduism, if someone undertakes violence to protect the Hindu gods or institutions from a pure motivation, not from personal anger or rage, that killing is considered sacred killing. That put it into an entirely other realm.
It's a kind of dichotomy in the religion. People in the West often don't know about it. You can have people so anti-killing that they're vegetarians, yet the same adherents of the religion can be very violent against those who challenge their beliefs.
Or the extremist Christians who kill abortion doctors. In extreme anti-abortion groups this is considered legitimate theology. The Christian advocates against abortion doctors call it the Phineas Option. You'll know it from Pinchas killed Zimri – acting zealously for God’s sake without a specific Divine command – they use this as the ultimate religious justification.”
So why is this upsurge in religious violence happening now?
“One reason is the movement of globalization. As long as religions stayed in their own enclaves, there was no need for any interaction between different religions. Often religion renews itself. It goes in cycles. Religions become more moderate. Over time the essentials reassert themselves. We see that in contemporary Judaism as well. After a modernization of American Judaism, the internal life of Judaism moved back to the fundamentals.
And religious fundamentalism leads to religious violence.
Because it's beliefs are so strong, fundamentalism doesn't permit pluralism or diversity. There's only one truth and we must protect that truth. That feeling of us against them, that we are right and everybody else is wrong, permits the elements of a religion that do encourage violence to come forth. There are notions of violence in all religions but often they are dormant. With fundamentalism these elements are rediscovered. That encourages the violent outbursts.
We see that even in Judaism. In Meah Shearim recently, they beat up a soldier with peyos, because he was charedi but joined the army. Fundamentalism gives such power.”
What can be done to stop religious violence?
“It has to be two-pronged. A lot of it is up to the religious leaders themselves. The people who know the texts, who are part of the tradition, have to stand up and say that violence is a misreading of the tradition, an exaggeration.
All the statements against religious violence in the New York Times don't mean anything. When in iman who has standing as a very religious and learned and sacred figure takes on religious violence, that would have power.
I think it's the same thing in Judaism and Christianity. Religions can only be transformed internally. It can't be transformed by outsiders who are not privy to the theological thinking of a religion.
There is enough in each religion so that a student students of the religion can probably legitimate any kind of violence. In Judaism, the terrible, heartbreaking example would Yigal Amir, who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. There were those who said there was a group of rabbis who legitimated what he did.
It's the same thing in other religions. The vast, vast majority of Christians are against killing abortion doctors, but there is a subset that would define that is legitimate.”
Dr. Selengut said the roots of religious violence lie in the nature of religion.
“Religion is different than any other kind of commitment, because religion has to do with what is the ultimate truth. I take it on faith. I don't have to logically or rationally defend what I'm doing. What I do religiously partakes of another calculus, another reality, the truth beyond rational or ordinary life. I don't have to consider other elements.
For example, in politics, considering whether to bomb Syria or not – I have to think what are the consequences, politically, economically, internationally. It's a rational calculation. In religion, I'm not bound by these calculations. I know that it's true, I do it, and God told me to do it. I don't have to worry about logical objections and rational considerations.”
Read the full article at jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com
The Chicago Theological Seminary live streamed Carolyn Enger's April 26, 2017 performance of the Mischlinge Exposé. Watch it on demand now via YouTube:
Surely the leopard cannot change his spots
Nor the Moor his skin. Is that not impossible?
So does the Jew remain a deceiver
Although he's been baptized and ask like a Christian.
I'm speaking of the majority. Out of hundreds…
Perhaps one will remain a true believer.
Riederer, introduction to Schuster, Judischer Merckwurdigkeiten, vol. 4
P. 33
Some converts remembered that intermediate and indeterminate period between Judaism and Christianity, as a time of first transgressions. Gottfried remembered not only that first wagon ride which violated the Sabbath, but relishing foods he had never tasted before and the first time he crossed himself as he had seen Christians do so many times. Daniel Bon, too, vividly recalled the taste of new foods. The most wrenching change he recalled was putting aside his tefillin, which he had regarded with greatest sanctity and which he had worn without missing a single day until his baptism. These testimonies underscore the radical break made by converts from a world steeped in Jewish tradition to one of Christian tradition. If they experienced a phase of agnostic drifting or rational skepticism, it could not be expressed anywhere within the traditional community.
P.104
The attribution of special responsibilities and powers to the convert reinforced the converts own difficult personal passage into a new social and religious world... They saw themselves as apostles to the Jews and, at the same time, defenders of the Jews against some of the worst anti-Jewish calumnies and misconceptions prevalent among Christians. Like children of divorce, they dreamed that they could bring about the ultimate reconciliation between their two “parent” faiths.
P. 117
It is interesting to note that Moses Mendelssohn appeared to have suffered similar symptoms of anxiety when faced with the open challenge to conversion. After being challenged publicly by Lavatar in 1769, “The general strain of the affair aggravated his physical and psychological condition. Mendelssohn suffered long term consequences…ceased to write sustained philosophical works. When asked what he did during his long hours of enforced idleness he replied that he counted the roof tiles on his neighbors house.” While Mendelssohn’s anxiety stems not from fear of conversion but from reluctance to enter into public theological debate, the pressure on him indicates how difficult the entire business remained for even the most sophisticated German Jews.
P. 129, Quote from, Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn, 29-30.
“I think that for any man a change of religion is a dangerous thing
as a change of language is for a writer. It may turn out a success,
but it can have disastrous consequences.”
Simone Weil, “Lettre a un Religieux”
P. 157
The use of Yiddish as a language of conversion reflects the centuries-long Christian endeavor to penetrate Jewishness to its "secret core" and to use this information for the benefit of the Christian community of scholars and clerics. The emerging awareness of the private language of the Jews, and the imperative to master it in order to convert Jews from a position of familiarity, reached its peak in German lands in the last decades of the 18th century. A combination of acculturation and governmental pressure accelerated the use of German among urban Jews. The perception that Germanization lead to conversion died hard among German Jews. One typical traditionalist Jewish reaction to the proposed Prussian governmental reform plan to improve the teaching of German to Jewish students and mandate its use in communal records was, “Worum nit lieber gor schmadn?” (Why not just convert?)
P. 169, Quote from, Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community, 223.
Some of the most ardent advocates of the notion of the German state as Christian, such as Friedrich Julius Stahl, were converts from Judaism. For converts like Stahl, the ability of Judaism to change and reform itself posed a severe challenge to the old theological view of the fossilized, law-bound Mosaism against which Christianity had polemicized for centuries. Great Viennese jurist Joseph von Sonnenfels, converted to Catholicism as a child, who helped lay the principles for the Edict of Toleration of Joseph ll in 1782, believed that conversion of the Jews should be required for full emancipation. As historian Michael Meyer put it, "Any signs of religious vitality in the Jewish community would represent a threat to the very principle of Jewish moribundity on which they had made their own major life’s decision. The doctrine of historical development within a religious spirit that retained its unique identity could be applied properly only to Christianity, not to Judaism.”
P. 230, Quote from, Meyer, “German Political Pressure,” 7.
Poignant quotes from “The Rise and Destiny of the German Jew” by Jacob R. Marcus, PhD, which was published in 1934:
“The most highly centralized and organized states of the late Middle Ages were the French and English states, created by peoples of hybrid descent. The poorest, most loosely organized state, was the unwieldy Germanic Holy Roman Empire. The first large organized German state was not welded together till 1871. The boast of a Nordic genius for political and military leadership finds little support in Teutonic history.
We see, thus, that there is no indication whatever that race crossings are detrimental to the events of civilization. On the contrary, all the evidence seems to indicate that it is in just such areas where diverse peoples meet and mingle that civilization moves onward most rapidly. Culture has never been localized in any particular area where only a single racial group perseveres in its purity.
It is the resultant of diverse environmental and historical factors, and the areas in which it has developed from one level to another have shifted constantly from century to century and from land to land. More often than not it has drawn upon Mediterranean and Asiatics sources. As far as we know, it has been social organization and physical background which have made for civilization, rather than “blood.” Europe has certainly not suffered from its admixtures of diverse racial elements. The whole situation can be aptly summarized in the words of the very cautious Hankins: “It can be stated with comparative safety that the world’s geniuses have been with rare exception cross-bred, in areas of race mixture.”
The same argument applies to Germany itself. The Germans of modern days have become a great cultured nation and the civilizing influence not because of their Nordic stock but largely because of geographic and historic conditions. Like all other peoples, the racial amalgam that is today Germany borrowed heavily from all previous social orders and civilizations and showed a lusty ability for assimilation, the very trait that is found so objectionable in the Jews. It's typical culture reveals itself most distinctively in central and south Germany where there was a fusion of it least the Nordic and Alpine strains. The Franconian, Suabian, and Thuringian lands – where German culture first manifested itself – are not areas of Nordic types.” —From pages 60-61.
“If this were not sufficient to condemn the Jews, the German racists add another charge: the Jews are different because they have a “consciousness of blood and kind.” This is bad when Jews possess it – it becomes a virtue, ostensibly, when Germans possess it.
It is a curious phenomenon that not only Jews may be “Jewish” in the minds of ardent Nazis. Anything which the Nazis dislike becomes “Jewish”, whether it be men with hook-noses and earlocks, or department stores, or the horizontal type of architecture. Noted Catholic leaders like Erzberger and Adenauer become “Jewish” when they arouse the ire of the Nazis.” —From page 64
