I am not quite up to typing a full-fledged post yet, though I will be soon. Still, I couldn’t resist posting a link to this piece on The Lede, by Robert Mackey.
Greek Bishop Equates Zionism to ‘Satanism’ – NYTimes.com:
The bishop, known as Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus, said during an interview on Greek television on Monday that Jews “control the international banking system.” He added: “Adolf Hitler was an instrument of world Zionism and was financed from the renowned Rothschild family with the sole purpose of convincing the Jews to leave the shores of Europe and go to Israel to establish the new Empire.”
In response to the outrage his statements caused, the bishop issued a statement, which Mackey quotes in full:
December 23, 2010
On the occasion of the concerns raised by the European Jewish Congress with regard to my interview with the MEGA television channel on December 20, I have to say the following:
1. The things I said during my television appearance on the show “Society Hour Mega” are strictly my personal views and opinions, which I have repeatedly expressed… verbally and in writing.
2. I respect, revere and love the Jewish people like any other people of our world according to the teaching of the incarnated Son of God and the true Messiah the Lord Jesus Christ the Savior and Redeemer, who was heralded by all the Prophets and was incarnated through the Jewish nation.
3. My public vehement opposition against International Zionism refers to the organ that is the successor of the “Sanhedrin” which altered the faith of the Patriarchs, the Prophets and the Righteous of the Jewish nation through the Talmud, the Rabbinical writings and the Kabbalah into Satanism, and always strives vigorously toward an economic empire set up throughout the world with headquarters in the great land beyond the Atlantic for the prevalence of world government and pan-religion.
4. I consider like any sane person on the planet the Nazi regime and the paranoid dictator Adolf Hitler as horrible criminals against humanity and take a stand with all honor and respect against the Jewish Holocaust and any other heinous genocide such as that of the Pontic Greek and Armenian people. Besides, the Greek nation mourns thousands of martyrs from the criminal Nazi atrocities.
+ The Metropolitan of Piraeus, Seraphim
On the one hand, I am not surprised; on the other hand, the whole thing leaves me speechless.
One of the many things to hate about this is the random slam of the Talmud, which routinely gets insulted by those completely illiterate in it. If this “Seraphim” (does he know it’s kind of weird to have a name in the plural?) opened up a daf of gemara he wouldn’t even be able to tell where a given thought begins or ends, let alone translate, yet he “knows” all sorts of things about it. He’s probably just mad at the overwhelming evidence in the Talmud that Jews never accepted Christianity’s magic, platinum, diamond-encrusted superiority. Doubtless he cries every night ever since someone told him that Chaza”l think Jesus grabbed his dick a lot.
To start, for those who might not know these words from Yonah’s comment:
daf gemara: a page of the Talmud.
Chaza”l: the transliteration of an acronym which, in Hebrew, stands for “the sages, may their memory be blessed”
This always gets to me as well.
First, I find myself wondering if this is actually true–as opposed to being just an expression of your entirely reasonable anger–and, if it is true, if it has in its original source the tone you give it here.
Second, though, despite the fact that I think your anger is reasonable, I’d ask you to keep in mind when you comment that there are Christians readers on this site who would, while finding your anger reasonable, quite reasonably see the way you refer to Jesus in this comment as offensive–whether or not it is true that Chaza”l had this to say about Jesus.
Richard is correct and I apologise for any distress the reference may have caused.
What I should have said is that it’s true, a priest reading (the translated Cole’s notes version of) the Talmud would not find that it has many sympathetic words to say about Christianity. I do think that’s important: not all Jewish texts love Jesus. But Jesus can’t just waltz in everywhere and expect to be loved, you know what I mean? It’s history, and troubled, oppressive history at that: stuff happens. It’s easy to tolerate minorities’ books and beliefs when they behave perfectly and angelically, even under horrible circumstances. It’s not so easy when it turns out they actually DO have some hard feelings.
But the solution is really not to freak out and declare a multi-thousand-page collection of oral tradition “satanic.”
OK, this was from a private comment I was asked to post:
As regards Jesus in the Talmud, yes in fact they do say some bad things about him… The rabbis certainly had many bad feelings toward a person/movement that they saw as damaging their fragile communities.
What you say about the disrespect and sympathetic Christian audience is very tough. As far as I know, neither Christians nor Muslims have ever altered their scriptures’ references to Jews; Rabban Gamliel remains a random loser in Acts, the rabbis of the Talmud (Pharisees) are synonymous with dumbassery, and vandalising the Temple with armed goons is clearly super cool and subversive. On the other hand, last year in yeshiva when a chavruta of mine and I decided to look up the passages in the Bavli that mention Jesus just to see, it was rather shocking to see a sudden swath of white page, where normally it should be crammed with so many words. Burned books, killing and censorship are the result of Chaza”l being disrespectful to Jesus. Jesus’s disrespect to our tradition is something we’re supposed to accept with good grace. I dunno.
I’m not saying that the answer is disrespect all around… but the power dynamics and how they leave little to no room for negative emotions from Jews is a little skeevy. Not that there’s anything really to do about it – like I said, you’re right.
I’d ask you to keep in mind when you comment that there are Christians readers on this site who would, while finding your anger reasonable, quite reasonably see the way you refer to Jesus in this comment as offensive
Suck it up, Christians have been on top for over a thousand years, they have the power and have been oppressing Jews with it for most of that time. This is exactly analogous to something that happened to me last week: A man writing on Usenet referred to the current obsession with other people’s weight as “obesity hysteria,” and when I objected that “hysteria” was sexist and anti-woman, he told me I was wrong. Then he asked whether calling it “obesity dickishness” wouldn’t also be sexist, and was schooled on the difference between jokes about the powerful and jokes about the oppressed.
Yonah, do you mean that there are references to Jesus in the Bavli but no commentaries on those references? Or that the references themselves have been excised?
Whether or not references have been censored depends on what edition of the Shas you read; Steinsaltz keeps it all in, for example, but he’s modern, living in Israel, etc. Otherwise, they might just be taken out, but the more common thing to do is to use a different name, euphemisms, and so forth.
It used to be that monks and so forth were trained to recognise the Hebrew letters in, say, “goy,” and would comb the Talmud mechanically looking for it. Then they would demand that it be changed (obviously regardless of context). For this reason even using the Vilna Shas, people learning the same thing can end up with different wording. In a sugiya I learned at the start of this year, this came up in the Gemara’s discussion of whether or not a Gentile’s chametz is problematic on Pesach (in short: it’s not really). Some students had “goy,” some had the synonym “nochri,” etc. It was a little startling to see the censorship issue come up even in this matter, which is so mundane and certainly not offensive to anybody — except bread.
Most of the Christian censors of the Talmud were apostate Jews, who could read these passages – and who had an even stronger motive to shut up Jewish criticism of Christian doctrine.
If this “Seraphim” (does he know it’s kind of weird to have a name in the plural?)
I know a different bishop named Seraphim, and he is named after St Seraphim of Sarov – I assume this man is too.
I think it’s eye-opening for modern Israelis to see solid old Judeophobic anti-Semitic anti-Zionism, when they might have a feeling of safety being coddled by the anti-colonial EuroLeft anti-Zionism, the illusion that somehow a modification of the policy, borders, or basic (constitutional) laws of the State of Israel (or its dissolution as a nation-state, there have been other forms of collective Jewish life, after all) might appease their critics and bring Israel into a situation more resembling normal statecraft. Supra-national supernatural threats get extirpated by Ghostbusters, and it’s good to remember that to some people, that’s all “we” are, Pinsker’s “ghost among the nations.”