One Destiny |
Editors Note: During
the Second World War a most terrible tragedy occurred in Europe.
Millions of people, most of them Jewish, were exterminated in
death camps because the evil men who ruled Europe at that time
viewed them as a mongrel race. In their demonic attempt to create
a super race of Aryan people, Hitler and
his bloody band put to death all of the undesirable
men, women and children they could lay their hands upon.
Words cannot come close to expressing
the horror of those years. Even today, over fifty years later,
the shock of reading the accounts of what went on in the death
camps makes a person reel in horror. How could men have been so
cruel? How could they continue to live with themselves, knowing
what they had done?
But this article is not about the
atrocities that took place, it is about healing. It is about the
need for all people who claim to worship the God of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob, (both Jew and Christian) to lay aside their
differences and realize that they do indeed, share One Destiny.
Sholem Asch was a Polish Jew who was
born in 1880. Asch believed that Judaism and Christianity are two
branches stemming from one great religion; a religion given by
YHVH, the Creator of the universe. Among Aschs many books
are three historical novels which deal with three major people in
the Christian faith. The first of these, The Nazarene, deals with
the ministry of Yeshua of Nazareth, through the eyes of three
different witnesses. A second book, Mary, tells the story of
Yeshua from the viewpoint of his mother, while a third novel
titled, The Apostle, puts forth the life of the Apostle Shaul or
Paul.
Although not himself a Believer in
Yeshua, Asch writes clearly and fairly about all three of these
great people. All of his books reflect a profound understanding
of Jewish life of the first century CE. These three historical
novels of Sholem Asch are great reading for anyone who wants to
know what the life and times of Yeshua the Messiah were like.
Unfortunately, all of Aschs books
are currently out of print. However, many used bookstores do
carry them. With so many people becoming interested in the Hebrew
roots of the Christian faith, perhaps a publisher will soon
decide to reprint his works.
Our thanks to Mr Randolph Parrish for
his work in bringing this edition of One Destiny to our
attention. Mr. Parrish has collected a number of other articles
which many of our readers may find of interest. Some are
available on paper, others on electronic media. He may be
contacted by writing to:
Randolph Parrish
6813 B. Loma Land
Scottsdale, AZ 85357
One Destiny:
An Epistle to the
Christians
by Sholem Asch
(An abridgment of the 1945 edition.)
In the
young manhood of our people, when it was imbued with lusty
shepherd strength, our fathers, rocking in the humps of their
camels across the desert, saw the stars in the sky. The stars
became transparent windows, and they saw the Almighty of all the
universe, and they fell on their faces before Him, stretched out
their hands and cried, "Thou art our God!"
From that time on, my people holds fast
to the vision of one living God over all the world and over the
whole of humanity, Who alone is worthy of being praised, and
sanctified, Who alone is capable of giving salvation. The vision
of an omnipotent God for all people was steadily before
Abrahams eyes from the beginning. The Jewish faith did not
develop from a family to a tribal one, from a tribal to a world
faith, but had pretended from its earliest beginnings to be the
only and all-encompassing one. That is why the Jewish God is such
a jealous God. He does not tolerate and will not admit any other
deities besides Himself He is the One and Only, the
Sole-Existing, and everything else is idolatry, impurity, and
vice.
A little less than two thousand years
ago, there came into our world among the Jewish people and to it
a personage who gave substance to the illusion perceived by our
fathers in their dream. Just as water fills up the hollowness of
the ocean, so did he fill the empty world with the spirit of the
one living God. No one before him and no one after him has bound
our world with fetters of law, of justice, and of love, and
brought it to the feet of the one living Almighty God as
effectively as did this personage who came to an Israelite house
in Nazareth in Galilee--and this he did, not by the might of the
sword, of fire and steel, like the lawgivers of other nations,
but by the power of his mighty spirit and of his teachings. He,
as no one else before him, raised our world from the void
and nothingness in which it kept losing its way and bound
it with strong ties of faith to the known goal, the predetermined
commandment of an almighty throne so as to become a part of the
great, complete, everlasting scheme of things. He, as no other,
raised man from his dumb, blind, and senseless existence, gave
him a goal and a purpose and made him part of the divine. lie, as
no other, works in the human consciousness like a second, higher
nature and leaves man no rest in his animal state, wakens him,
calls him, raises him, and inspires him to the noblest deeds and
sacrifices. He, as no other, stands before our eyes as an example
and a warning, and demands of us, barries us, prods us to follow
his example and carry out his teachings. Through his heroic life,
he casts us down like dust before his feet. No one but he sheds
about himself such an aura of moral power, which has molded our
world and oar character; and no ones strength but his own
has reached into our time, being the most potent influence in our
everyday lives, inspiring us to goodness and exalted things,
being the measure and scale for our deeds at every hour and
minute.
Many of us who, for one reason or
another, are unable to believe in--or whose religious nature
cannot conceive of--the physical resurrection of Jesus of
Nazareth on the third day after his cmcifixion, must nevertheless
admit, that in a moral and spiritual sense the Nazarene rises
from the dead every day, every hour, and every minute in the
hearts of millions of his believers.
If Jesus was not actually restored to
life three days after his burial, then he was resurrected every
day, every hour, and every minute in the first three hundred
years after his death. What must remain an eternal mystery to
those who are blind and deaf enough not to believe in miracles is
the spread of Christianity during the first three hundred years.
There was not enough reason for the pagan world to violate its
own nature and to stifle its Zeitgeist with what was--for it--so
foreign, so unrecognizable, so antagonistic, so Asiatic a faith.
If the Nazarene was revolutionary in blazing a new path for the
Jewish spirit, then his teachings, his essence, were not only
incomprehensible to the Graeco-Roman spirit but were the opposite
of everything which it considered to be the mission and the
purpose of humankind. If the pagan peoples suffered from the need
of a change in religion, they could have found enough material
for it within their own spiritual realm. It was possible, within
the framework of their own customs, thoughts, and conduct to work
out a religious ethic through the teachings of the Neo-Platonists
and the Stoics. And surely it is childish and naive to explain
the phenomenon by the fact that the apostles of the new faith
made its acceptance easier for the pagans though making
compromise with the old Jewish law. In the face of the danger in
which the pagan placed his very existence, what effect could it
have had if he imbibed the new belief with milk, as the apostle
expresses it, or with vinegar? What attraction could the
compromise with Jewish law have had for him when acceptance of
the belief--with or without compromises--made the newly converted
Christian a candidate for the distinction of being thrown to the
beasts in the arena?
I, as a Jew, whose every move is bound
up with the God of Israel, want to know nothing of any historical
wonder, of any faith, save only the wonder and the faith which
radiate from the God of Israel. The wonder is revealed to me in
two ways: first, the miracle of the preservation of Israel;
second, the miracle of the spread of the JudaeoChristian idea in
the pagan world. The whole thing to me represents a single,
divine event. I see in both phenomena the single will of the God
of Israel. Not only because I consider my Christian brothers as
the spiritual children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but also
because I see in pure Christianity an entirdy justified share of
faith in the God of Israel--through the Messianic idea--equal to
my own Jewish faith. The preservation of Israel and the
preservation of the Nazarene are one phenomenon. They depend on
each other. The stream must run dry when the spring becomes
clogged, and Christianity would become petrified if the Jews, God
forbid, should cease to exist. And just as the spring loses its
value, becomes spoiled and moldy when it has lost its mission and
does not water the stream, so would Jewry itself become
petrified, barren, and dry if there were no Christendom to
fructify it. Without Christendom, Jews would become a second
tribe of Samaritans. The two are one. And notwithstanding the
heritage of blood and fire which passionate enmity has brought
between them, they are two parts of a single whole, two poles of
the world which are always drawn to each other, and no
deliverance, no peace, and no salvation can come until the two
halves are joined together and become one part of God.
Whoever works, strives, and desires
that this may come to pass is on the side of God. Whoever does
otherwise belongs to the other party.
This is my spiritual credo. On this
foundation I have built my house. For this I have sacrificed
everything. With it I stand and with it I fall.
That is why, as a Jew, as an
"outsider", I claim the right to call you my brothers,
believers in the Messiah, and, as brothers, to talk with you
openly and freely. As children who have the same parents,
children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; Christians, Jews,
believers in the Messiah, give me your attention, because a
brother speaks to you in the name of millions of your brothers.
In the
dining car of the reserved train that runs from Berlin to
Warsaw--a special train for high-ranking military men and
government functionaries of the German Reich--there sat an
extraordinarily high official whose sudden appearance in the car
had evoked tense attention from the military men and dignitaries
seated comfortably around the table that was being served. The
official himself, whose modesty was well known, did everything
both by his unobtrusive behavior and his amiable smiles (which
were painstakingly forced from his nearsighted eyes and small
mouth) to bring his companions back into the easy humor in which
he had found them on entering the car. He did not succeed,
however.
His position as chief of the Gestapo,
his reputation as a pitiless, bloodthirsty, cruel man, his close
ties with the Fuhrer--all this kept not only the military men but
his retinue, his aides who accompanied him everywhere and formed
a guard to protect him, in an attitude of alert watchfulness.
Under the pressure of fear which his personality radiated from
itself, the orderlies served the food with trembling hands, which
communicated the nervous tension from the waiters to the guests.
On the second day, Gestapo Chief
Himmler in the company of his official retinue rode through the
crowded streets of the Warsaw ghetto to examine it before its
destruction.
What did the Gestapo Chief see?
That which was called the Warsaw Ghetto
was concentrated in the poorest, most overpopulated Jewish
quarter. The population of the Ghetto contained now, according to
official figures, upwards of five hundred and fifty thousand
human beings. People who had spent their whole lives under
civilized conditions, were driven out overnight from their homes,
which they or their fathers had built, from the cities and
countries to which they had belonged for hundreds of years and
scores of generations; were transported under the most inhuman
conditions to Poland and thrown into the Dantean hell which was
called the Warsaw Ghetto.
At that time, in the Ghetto, more than
twenty souls lived in a single room which in normal times would
have accommodated only one or two.
The Ghetto was cut off and isolated by
a thick wall from the poorest streets of the city of Warsaw.
German police and Gestapo men, armed with rifles and machine
guns, guarded the wall. To leave the ghetto without permission
meant to be shot without trial. A small portion, healthy young
people whom the Germans used in their war industry, got skimpy
rations--just enough to sustain the soul. The rest of the
population--the old, the women, the children--were sentenced to a
slow death of starvation.
All education for children and grownups
was forbidden; all social life and its pastimes were strictly
interdicted.
And yet the Ghetto went on, organized
itself, and continued to spin the thread of life, which even the
sharp German sword had not been able to cut. If one was unable to
live in freedom, in Gods shining sun, then one crept under the
earth. In the labyrinthine corridors of the old houses, work
continued, a fruitful cultural activity which could only be
carried out by a people that had survived the persecutions and
the sufferings with which Jewish history is so amply filled, a
people that is destined by the Almighty to live forever.
The Jewish student youth gathered the
children together. In the courtyards, war gardens had been
planted, and there, in spite of the Gestapo, regular classes for
the children were conducted.
In the darkened rooms, cut off from
electric light, evening courses were given for adults.
Musical concerts were held which ghetto
artists gave for their ghetto brothers. Lectures by learned men
and writers were read on scientific and literary themes. A
regular technical school was conducted with advanced courses
given by experienced teachers and savants.
In secret bakeries Jewish bakers baked
bread out of the white flour smuggled into the ghetto; often the
flour came from the Gestapo, which sold it dearly to the Jews,
Jewish women stood in secret community kitchens, and with their
accustomed skill, with family sorcery which they inherited from
their mothers, cooked meals and soups composed of nonexistent
materials. Other women and old men sat in attics or cellars and
sewed and patched old clothes.
And meanwhile death did its work. There
was a contest between the Angel of Death and the Gestapo as to
which could surpass the other.
When Himmler and his retinue, in
strongly armored cars, made their early morning inspection tour
though the streets of the ghetto, they noticed, among the sick
children who were playing there with the living corpses, also the
dead corpses, which had been ejected, stark naked and covered
only with papers, from the houses of the ghetto. But this was not
enough for the German powet--the Jews were not dying fast enough;
so the Nazis overtook the Angel of Death and left him behind.
"Eli, Eli, lama
sabachtani?"--"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?" That same cry was heard on the streets of Warsaw from
hundreds of souls who, with their crosses, were being whipped on
the way to Golgotha.
"Eli, Eli, lama
sabachtani?"--with this difference, that the cry on Golgotha
was heard in the company of the swords and spears of the Roman
idolaters, while the cry on the Warsaw streets sounded among
clubs and bayonets of people who had been converted, who called
themselves Christian folk.
"Ropes of death have encompassed
me, and toils of the pit have overtaken me. I meet with sorrow
and trouble. I then called on the name of the Lord. I pray thee,
Lord, release my soul."
"My tears have become my bread by
day and night as they say the whole time, Where is thy
God?"
And the answer which the Christian
martyrs once made to themselves as they waited for death in the
cellars of the Roman arenas, a death which they heard in the
roaring of the lions--that same answer and consolation were now
given by the Jews one to another as they joined hands together.
"Why art thou bowed down, my soul,
and why must thou murmur within me? Trust in the Lord, for I will
praise him, my supporter and my God."
"Whither shall I turn from Thy
spirit? And where shall I escape from before Thy
countenance?"
In the death trains which stretched
from the streets of the Ghetto to the places of execution were
all kinds of Jews. There were Jews who, from birth, had not known
that they were Jews, whom Hitler instructed in the Judaism in
which their parents had failed to instruct them. They did not
know or understand the meaning of their life, still less the
meaning of their death. There were Jews from Germany, Jews who
had reckoned themselves Germans throughout their existence. Many
of them considered themselves Aryan and campaigned within the
very ghetto walls for the recognition of their Aryan status. They
looked upon their Jewishness as a mistake, as an oversight on the
part of authority. There were Jews from Amsterdam and Antwerp who
thought themselves Hollanders and Belgians. Notwithstanding these
differences, all of them were thrown into the same pot.
And suddenly everything becomes
understandable, realizable, clear, and beautiful. Suffering
acquires a reason, an explanation--it is the highest price
exacted for ones faith. The Jew from Paris, Amsterdam,
Antwerp, Berlin, Frankfurt, becomes simply a Jew. The Jewish
Aryans, the Jews who are half-Aryans but want to become whole
ones, have disappeared. There are no longer nationalist or
assimilated Jews, no longer Jewish Bundists or Zionists; no
longer religious or irreligious Jews. There is only one kind of
Jew--the plain, unadorned Jexv, the son of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, who goes on his eternal way, the way of everlasting Zion,
the way of the salvation of Israel.
We do not know what will become of the
German people. The German people will live again after the war,
will even return someday perhaps to the moral standard set in the
days of Goethe and Schiller. Certainly the German people will
become again a portion of the civilized world, and we all hope
and wish for that time to come quickly, when German genius--and
who dares to deny it?--may become as productive for the welfare
of humanity as it has been for its destruction. But whatever the
fate of the German people as a whole, every German will bear the
mark of Cain on his forehead forever. And as it was with Cain, so
to every German for the remainder of his days on earth the
question will be put, "Where is thy brother Abel?"
Where are the European Jews? And as the Lord said to Cain, so to
every German will be said these words, "What hast thou done?
The voice of thy brothers blood cries up to Me from the
dust."
Because the earth will not cover up the
spilt blood of Israel.
And for this desecration which Hitler
made of the Jews, for this choice which he conferred upon them,
for the freedom with which he could slaughter a whole people, for
this crying sin, the guilt is carried, the accessory guilt if not
the full one, by the whole Christian world.
I have
hurled a terrible word. My deepest feelings rebel and protest
against this horrible charge. My hands trembled in writing it
down. Yet whatever the pain and anguish it may bring me, I must
let it stay. Because the sin which Hitler, the Nazis, and the
whole German people have drawn upon themselves could never have
been committed--at any rate, in the measure and form in which it
was committed--if it were not inspired, if it were not
sanctioned, or at the very least allowed by the criminal silence
of a wicked world, shot through with Jew-hatred, with
indifference to human wrongs.
Anti-Semitism is not a movement. It is
a disease. He who is infected with it is unable to have an
orientation, a judgment, or an opinion which is the result of
logical thinking or of actual facts. The anti-Semite has no
proof, no opinion, no consciousness even, because proof, opinion,
and consciousness are attained through independent thought. He
has no independent thought, he is imprisoned within the magic
circle in which his sufferings have immured him. He has no will
of his own. He is ruled by his disease, the name of which is
anti-Semitic insanity.
No one has exposed so clearly the
blindness, the lack of judgment, the disease of hatred as did
Tertullian, who lived at the end of the second and the beginning
of the third century, and who described in his Apology the blind
hatred of the Romans for the first Christians.
According to Tertullian, Christians
were hated to such an extent in those days that "a
Christian, you would have believed, is a man guilty of every
crime, a foe to the gods, to the emperor, to the law, to
morality, a sinner against the laws of nature...
"It is not the man who is guilty
of the specific crime; the guilt lies in the name alone. Since
Christian is the appellation of an offense, it is not
absurd that the offense should lie within the name itself."
Are not these words well suited to the Jews today?
"There is such general hatred,
blind hatred towards the name that everyone who has any mud to
throw upon it is readily believed--Caius Sextus is a good
man; a pity that hes a Christian. Another says,
Im surprised that Lucius Titus whos so bright
has suddenly turned Christian."
How many times does it happen to every
one of us to hear the same tune, with this difference only, that
the word "Christian" is exchanged in the mouths of
Christians for the word "Jew"? And to whom are the
words of the Christian apologist of the second century better
suited than to the Jews of today?
"Our triumph has both the glory of
martyrdom and of eternal life. Though we are annihilated, yet we
win the battle. When we are beaten, then we are victorious. In
the very mouth of destruction, we are saved.
"Though we are damned by you, we
are nevertheless raised and accepted by God."
There was not a single slander invented
by the lowest Greek and Roman pamphleteer against the first
Christians which the Christians themselves did not later carry
over against the Jews and the Jewish faith. How many victims
fell, how much Jewish blood was spilled, how much trouble, pain,
how many nights of fear, anxiety, terror, were caused by the
false accusation repeated through century after century that the
Jews required human blood for their rituals, an accusation which
the Roman pamphleteers had made against the early Christians!
He who would have become the hope of
Israel; he who was called upon by God to become the redeemer,
promised by God to their fathers; he whom the prophets had
foretold as the consolation and reward of all their sufferings
and troubles; he who was to have raised Israel to its greatest
heights, to become the crown of all their strivings, the light of
the world--became instead the source of death and destruction for
Israel. "How can we believe that Jesus is the Messiah when
he has become the origin of everything evil and wicked that has
come over Israel, since his name appeared in the world?" is
the painful cry heard in Jewish writings through the centuries.
What wonder that the Jews have refused so stubbornly to drink
from the well which has contained nothing but poison for them?
The responsibility for this lies with those who have contaminated
the spring of God with the poison of Satan and of death.
Is it not an irony, a piece of the
devils wit, that a society which dared to clothe itself with the
sacred name of him who is called "the king of the Jews"
should set itself the task of becoming the chastening rod for the
Jewish people? And the consequence of this was that the name
which should have evoked joy and song in the Jewish heart evoked
instead deadly anxiety and torturing fear. Jewish blood freezes
in ones veins when the blood and tears brought by that name to
the Jews are remembered.
When Jesus the Nazarene appears to his
disciples for the first time after his resurrection, the first
question which they ask of the Messiah is, "Lord, wilt thou
at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?" The
restoration of the kingdom of Israel was so important a condition
of the messianic faith that the apostles could think of nothing
else as the first thing that the Messiah would do when he came
back to life but to inaugurate the reign of Israel.
But of all this--the role of Israel in
the new faith, of its honor, of its preparation for the advent of
the Messiah, of its place in the messianic hierarchy--nothing
whatever is said now, no hint of it is instilled into the hearts
of believers. Of the twelve disciples, all Jews, all but one
faithful followers of Jesus, only Judas, the unfaithful, became
to Christians the symbol of the Jewish people. It would be more
fitting to have chosen James, the faithful pious Jew, whose
Epistle might well have been written by one of the Old Testament
prophets.
Gradually the church began to rid
itself of the entire burden of the heritage she had gotten from
the Jews. Jewish holidays were neglected, as were also Jewish
customs and Jewish ritual laws. The days were shifted--the
Sabbath was removed from Saturday to Sunday.
If it was easy for the Greek or the
Roman to forswear idolatry in going over to the new belief in a
Messiah, it was not at all easy for the Jew to acknowledge a
faith in his Messiah, which brought nothing but suspicion to him
and a mockery to the beliefs of his fathers--because the church,
in order to attract the Roman and the Greek to the fold, not only
made compromises with the Mosaic Code, but became more and more
estranged from Jewry, denied all connection with it, debased and
brought shame upon the Jews.
Notwithstanding the fact that the
Messiah was the Messiah of the Jews, that the fulfillment of
Jewish hopes and of Jewish prophecies were ascribed to him, that
the Messiah carried all the blessings of Israel, he was
nevertheless painted as the victim of Israel. No one but the
cursed Jews was to blame for his sufferings and death, which were
a necessary condition for his messianic mission.
In any case, the legend of the Jewish
crucifixion of the savior became the source of limitless,
torturing, and senseless hatred toward the Jews. The legend about
the Jewish crucifixion of the Messiah has cost millions of Jewish
lives. It carries a long streak of blood after it, right down to
our own time. It has become the microbe of hate in the spiritual
body of Christianity. It has caused and still causes daily
trouble for the Jews. It brings tears to mothers, anxieties and
terrors to children. I myself have suffered throughout my
childhood from the accusation of blood guilt. Every Christian
holiday was transformed by the legend into a day of fear and
sorrow for the Jews.
But greater than the damage it did to
Jews, greater even than the destruction of Jewish lives, was the
damage and destruction it wrought upon spiritual lives.
The condition has been created that the
church, on the one hand, has preached hatred toward the Jews, has
poisoned the minds, the hearts, and the souls of its adherents
with the most horrible legends concerning them, has attributed
everything evil to the Jews, has mocked at his faith, derided his
sufferings, laughed at his tears; and, on the other hand, has
wondered why the Jew does not embrace Christianity which despises
him, why he declines a faith which robs him of his dearly bought
hopes, his reward for all the miseries he has gone through--the
Messiah, in other words--and turns him over to his bloodiest
enemies; a faith which has provided him with the role of a Judas
and given him the position of the Wandering Jew. From one side,
Christians have hounded Jews, and from the other side they have
sought to make him accept their faith. He has been subjected to
every penalty of the law, every kind of persecution and misery;
his cries unto God have been interpreted as stubbornness, his
self-immolation for his faith has been regarded as the work of
Satan. They could do anything to the Jew--they could make his
life one long chain of tortures, confine him in crowded ghettos,
release him to the fury of the mob, which was constantly goaded
into a rage against him, restrict his rights, degrade his dignity
as a man, throw him into the bonfires lighted by the monks--but
his trust in God could not be broken, because it was not against
the weak, tortured Jew that the sword of the church struck--oh,
the weak Jew could have been overcome easily enough by the
sword--but it struck instead against the impregnable armor of the
destiny of the eternal Israel, and therefore it had to break.
If you believe that Jesus of Nazareth
is the Messiah, then you must also believe that the fact of his
being born among the despised and lowly Jews instead of among the
mighty, victorious Romans--a circumstance which would no doubt
have been much more convenient for Christianity--was no accident,
no historical caprice, but that it was Gods will that the
Messiah be born under these particular conditions and not under
some other ones. The coming of the Messiah was something that had
to be prepared: a whole line of patriarchs was necessary, all
standing under the eye of a living God, promises, prophecies,
merits, election both as to suffering and deliverance--in a word,
the whole heritage of the Jewish people, which the church at the
beginning had accepted as the unconditional necessity for the
preparation, the creation, and the appearance of the Messiah.
Because of this, the existence of the
Jews was postulated as a necessary condition for the origin of
Christianity and the church. But though he was flesh of their
flesh, soul of their soul, had come to them and for them, the
Messiah from the very beginning was endowed by the church with
attributes which it was unnatural for the Jewish spirit to
accept. "Think not that I am come to destroy the Law, or the
Prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill." Bound
up with the Torah, which had become second nature to him, the Jew
correctly saw the Messiah not as the disrupter of the Mosaic Law
but as one who would build upon it. The church, which
accommodated itself to the habits and customs of the pagan
peoples, offered the Jews a messianic idea which was entirely
foreign and incomprehensible to the Jewish mind.
But the church needed the Jews to bear
witness to its truth. It was impossible to win them over by means
of kindness, then it was necessary to try outrage and murder.
And so the long Jewish martyrdom
begins.
Christianity does not carry the sole
responsibility for the Jewish tragedy. Mohammedanism did not
distinguish itself any more nobly towards the Jews. Maimonides
and his family had to suffer at the hands of the Musselmen all
the persecutions, tortures, agonies, and wanderings which
Abarbanel suffered from the Catholic Church at the time of the
expulsion of the Jews from Spain. We have only to read the letter
of consolation from Maimonides to the Jews of Temen to get a
small idea of what the believers in the prophet did to the Jews.
But what do I have to do with Mohammedism? Did Mohammed pretend
to be the Jewish Messiah? Is Mohammed a product of the Jewish
spirit? Is Mohammed a fulfillment of the Lords promise? Did
Mohammed assure anyone at any time of anything but the sword? Was
it Mohammed who preached the Sermon on the Mount? Did Mohammed
create the culture and civilization of which I am a part, and in
the realization of which I see the greatest good fortune of
humanity? What have I to do with the desert tribe? The Christians
are my brothers.
The Darkest of Days "The following account is taken from a book (Konin: A Quest, 1955), by Theo Richmond. It quotes an eyewitness of events that took place in his village in Poland. The eyewitness was forced to gather the clothing and belongings of the victims. He describes two pits, the bottom of the larger one being covered by a layer of quicklime.
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