Judaism from a Christian perspective

How was post-Holocaust Judaism influenced by Christianity and to what extent did it assimilate Christian customs and myths? A new book by the historian Israel Yuval, "Two Gentiles in Your Belly", shows the magnitude of the impact and links the roots of the first blood plot in the killing of Jewish children by their parents for fear that they would be led to extermination

Yair Shelagh

Seven years ago, Dr. Israel Yuval, a lecturer in the history of the people of Israel at the Hebrew University, stirred up his fellow academics when he published an article in the magazine "Zion" in which he claimed a connection between the first blood plot against the Jews (in which it was claimed that Jews slaughtered a Christian child and used his blood to bake unleavened bread ), which took place in Christian Europe in 1144 in the city of Norwich in England (and according to another version in the city of Würzburg in Germany) - and the actions of the Jews about fifty years earlier, in the atrocities that preceded the First Crusade. These were the riots of 1096, known in Jewish history as the "Judgement decrees".

According to Yuval, the fact that at the time of the decrees of the New Testament there were Jews who killed their children so that they would not fall into the hands of the Christians and be led to destruction, i.e. to convert, made the Christians believe that the Jews were capable of murdering children and they blamed this on the Christian children as well. This is how Yuval sought to explain the occurrence of the first blood plot precisely in the middle of the 12th century.

Despite several press publications about Yuval's thesis, which can be seen as placing indirect responsibility on the Jews for the formation of blood plots against them, it did not fail to turn its owner into a myth-buster and the holder of the familiar label of a "new historian", although in practice he certainly deserves the title. Perhaps because the medieval period he deals with is, after all, further away from today, and perhaps because the man himself, as much as his research shows a joy of innovation and even provocation, is reluctant to their media aspect.

Even so, the article received deadly criticism precisely from some of Yuval's academic colleagues. One of them, Prof. Ezra Fleischer from the Department of Literature at the Hebrew University, who researched the poems of lamentation for the dead of the Crusades, even ended his scathing review article with the following paragraph: , even if routine, in honor of the author whose words he criticized. The hand manes to comply with this convention. The building built by this author in the article reviewed here depends entirely on containment and is far-fetched from the ground up. The exposed, violent tendency of his arguments completely deprives him of the strength of a proper study. It is the type of article that would have been better if it had not been written than it was written, and if it had been written - it would have been better if it had not been printed, and if it had been printed - it would have been better if it had been forgotten as soon as possible."

Now comes Yuval and expands his thesis to include a detailed discussion of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. He does so in a new book, the timing of which is probably ideal for the subject: the Christian Millennium. The title of the book, "Two Gentiles in Your Belly" (jointly published by "Am Oved" and Alma College in Tel Aviv), indicates its content: Yuval deals less with the facts of Jewish and Christian relations and more with the images and myths that each of the religions has about its society. The title, taken from the prophecy told to Rebekah when the twins Esau and Jacob were running around in her womb, is related to one of these basic myths: both Judaism and Christianity saw in the other religion "Esau" and themselves as "Jacob".

Yuval already emphasizes in his introduction that the premise of his work is that, at least in relation to the medieval period, which is the focus of the book, the influence of religions on each other is not symmetrical, and since Judaism lived as a minority in Christian Europe, it must be assumed that the religion of the majority had a greater influence on the religion of the minority than the other way around. In a conversation with him he expands. According to him, this assumption is also valid in relation to the period of the Mishnah and the Talmud, "since the 'New Testament' preceded the creation of the Mishnah by 100 years and almost 400 years before the creation of the Talmud."

This assumption alone makes the book not easy to read for a Jewish reader, who is aware of the intensity of the suffering his ancestors suffered at the hands of the Christians and the magnitude of the aversion they developed towards Christianity. Yuval claims that behind these charges of hatred lies a reality in which the Jews actually internalized many Christian elements, or alternatively - designed many elements out of a desire to be an antithesis to Christianity (which, as you know, claimed to replace Judaism). He confirms his claim with the help of the entire Jewish tradition, to the extent that reading his book one can get the impression that in fact there is no Jewish element that was not shaped in the shadow of the Christian competitor. Yuval also says this explicitly in the introduction - "Being Jewish, in the deepest sense, means offering a religious identity that competes with Christianity." In this, he includes Sephardic Judaism, which, although it did not generally live in Christian countries, was also influenced by the founding myths of Judaism as shaped by the sages of the Mishnah and the Talmud, and these were certainly influenced, according to Yuval, by the confrontation with Christianity.

For example, Shavuot's design by the Sages as the holiday of giving the Torah (while the Bible is only the holiday of the firstborn) is described as equivalent to the description of the descent of the Holy Spirit by the apostles of Jesus on the fiftieth day after the crucifixion (Shavuot is also celebrated on the fiftieth day after the beginning of the counting of the Omer). The midrashim explaining the destruction of the Second Temple in "free hate" are described as an attempt to argue with the Christian argument that saw the destruction as a punishment for the crucifixion of Jesus. The similarity between Passover and the Christian Easter occupies a central place in the book, and in it is also the claim that the Passover Haggadah, centered on the commandment "The story of the exodus from Egypt", was designed out of a confrontation with the Christian tradition that saw Easter as the day when Christians gather to tell the story of their redemption. The Afikoman reminds Jubilee of the Christian holy bread, and the custom of raising the Torah book in the synagogue before or after reading it, which he even likens to the custom of raising the holy bread. The Sages' opposition to the writing of the Oral Torah that Yuval seeks to relate to the fear that when it is written it will become a universal Torah and be stripped of its original context, as happened to the written Torah that became the Christian "Old Testament".

He also makes a principled claim regarding the prevailing image of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, described as a mother and daughter relationship, in that Judaism preceded Christianity. According to Yuval, it is appropriate to talk about the relationship between two sisters, similar to Jacob and Esau. "This is not a situation in which Christianity sought to replace biblical Judaism while Judaism remained faithful to it, but a situation in which, in the same period of historical time, both religions - both Christianity and the new Judaism after the Holocaust, which is the Judaism we know - sought to replace biblical Judaism, and each of them claimed who is her true heir. In this context, Christianity even has priority over the new Judaism, because the 'New Testament' preceded the Mishnah and the Talmud."

Yuval's argument raises quite a few questions. On the one hand, at the level of the argument in principle it sounds trivial: what is more natural than the statement that between two cultures living side by side - certainly when one of them claims to replace the other - dialogue, confrontation and mutual influence take place. The claim that the majority society affects the minority society more than the other way around also sounds very reasonable. On the other hand, at the level of the individual examples, it seems that the argument is too sweeping: does everything that Judaism has done in the last thousand years really have no motive of its own other than the dialogue-confrontation with Christianity? One can also wonder about the plausibility of the basic image of Judaism and Christianity as two sister movements confronting each other over the common mother heritage; After all, Christianity itself speaks of its essence as a replacement for the Judaism that preceded it, and because with all the differences that occurred in the Jewish identity after the Holocaust, Judaism still continues a sequence that began much earlier. Also the focus on the story of the destruction of the house as an exclusive founding myth of the contemporary Jewish identity seems to be designed to establish the basic thesis, since the "presence" of the stories of the ancestors and the Exodus from Egypt is also evident to this day.

Yuval replies that "Judaism certainly has a history before the destruction of the Second Temple, and it is also true that not all Jewish myths begin with the destruction. But Judaism, as the historical phenomenon known to us today, is the new religion that was shaped by sages after the Holocaust, and in this context both the new Judaism and Christianity offer a non-territorial spiritual option for the situation after the Holocaust. Both are a response to destruction. Even the Passover holiday, which before the destruction was a holiday of gathering in the temple and offering a sacrifice, changes its character to a holiday centered on the story of the Jewish redemption - so to speak towards the past and actually towards the future, parallel to the Christian Easter holiday.

Apart from that, a careful reading of the examples that Yuval gives to indicate the Christian influence shows that most of them are nothing more than hypotheses based on circumstantial evidence, including the connection between the killing of the children in the Crusades and the development of the blood plot. In other words, the proximity of the times makes it possible to argue for a circumstantial connection between the events (and it also begs the question: did, in the quality of the 12th century communication, Norwich in England know about the events that took place 50 years earlier in central Europe? Yuval claims that they do, and according to him, explicit evidence has recently been discovered In this matter). In the end, even Yuval himself does not claim more than that: "It is true. This is a historical thesis, and in this thesis the researcher always tries to link phenomena between which there is no proven direct link. It is a hypothesis that is distinguished, like any scientific hypothesis, by its plausibility: its ability to explain as many facts as possible, and to be refuted by as few facts as possible. It is certainly not a proven fact, but it makes it possible to create a logical order in the chaos of history."

All of these questions, to which is added the pointed style of the arguments in the book, leave a feeling that after all, those who suspected Yuval of being motivated by provocation were not entirely wrong. The sensitive topic of the book also allows Yuval to be confronted with the claim that the Kabbalah scholar Gresham Shalom hurled at Hannah Arendt following her book on the Eichmann trial: "There is no love for Israel in her." Although this is not a statement on the level of intellectual-research confrontation, it brings up for discussion an equally important meta-research claim - a Jewish researcher dealing with Jewish studies, of course, should behave with research integrity, but shouldn't he put aside and humble the provocative instinct and innovation for its own sake, which in other contexts maybe Are not problematic and can even set the wheels of research in motion? Yuval says that "the book was written out of immense love for the nation and the people I deal with. I do not think that in my attempt to understand the historical phenomena in depth, on both sides, there is any harm to the love of Israel. Rather, the controversy sparked by the article I wrote seven years ago caused me great pain, because I actually had a great understanding of Fleischer's feelings and claims. I did not write the things out of a provocative desire. I remember in the US, after the first article, someone once presented me as a provocative researcher and it really upset me. Until they explained to me that it does not refer to the intention from which the research was born but to the result, which did provoke a provocation, and therefore it is a compliment. I also don't like being called a 'new historian', because I hate catalogs in general. A person works for years on research and in the end they tell him: the details are not important, because you are simply part of a historical trend that prevailed in research."

And if not from the joy of provocation, from what emotion was his research written, and could it even have been written without emotional involvement? Yuval says that "what motivated me was really the desire to understand; To understand what motivates people to throw their children to death, provided they do not convert their religion. And I'm not judging them at all, just asking to understand. The sources I deal with arouse in me astonishment and puzzlement, not anger. When I was working on this research, I visited with my daughters the city of Trier in Germany, near the basilica from which the Jews threw their children in 1096, and I couldn't help but involve my two perspectives at that moment, as a researcher and pain, and ask what I feel about this phenomenon. But overall I don't seek to judge them.

"I also have no interest in creating cheap topical implications from the research for the present day, let's say against the Jewish martyrology - in the spirit of the judgment of the late Prof. Yehoshaphat Hakavi regarding the Bar Kochba rebellion. On the contrary, I remember that shortly after the publication of my first article, the massacre committed by Baruch Goldstein in the Cave of the Patriarchs took place and I was constantly afraid that someone would try to connect the things and discard my research on the massacre. It is not that it is not possible to learn lessons from history for the present, but in my view a prerequisite for this is a careful study of the historical period in question, with all its special and subtle circumstances. Only then can a topical projection be approached, and not in the simplistic spirit in which these things are usually done."
{Appeared in Haaretz newspaper, 25/8/2000}