Addressing Jew hate again

One of the quickest ways to find Jew haters is to go to an online forum where questions are asked about Jews and Judaism.  On forums not moderated properly and where their own Terms of Service that prohibit hate speech are not followed despite proper reporting of abuses by many users, it is easy to see that Jew haters use such questions as opportunities to disseminate hate speech and try to infect others with their own inner turmoil.

A worn out question asking Jews what we think of Jesus started all of the following  under a fifth time it was asked on the same forum in one week.   It had been asked and answered four times that week already, but the missionaries were not satisfied because each one had been answered with an actual Jewish view. Jews answered all pretty much the same to the obvious, that Jesus isn't any part of our religion and other than that there is no official stance on the objects of worship of other religions except to note that God forbids Jews to worship them.  Jews are commanded to worship our incorporeal Creator with whom we have an eternal covenant and we are obligated to honor God in living the purpose of our covenant.  The New Testament replacement theology is meaningless to believing Jews, just as all other religions are meaningless to our faith and our path in life. Individuals opinions on whether or not Jesus as depicted in the New Testament are not doctrine and Jews answering questions about what Jews believe really shouldn't be attacked on a forum that supposedly has rules prohibiting hate speech, yet what we see there is that most often the people who display greatest contempt for Torah and Jews often pose as Jews to do so to claim they're just a schism of Judaism and "other" Jews hate them for their beliefs. That is as egregious a lie as their lies about Judaism and Torah.

The following is in response to someone who professes to be a Jew, yet has spent years on an online forum posting disruptive misinformation about Jews every day.

 What will appear below is an edit to an answer I've given that addresses yet another personal attack, attack upon all of Judaism, Torah and all practicing and believing Jews.  He believes Jesus is a god incarnate and despite the fact he was not born to a Jewish mother and has professed that he was a prophet of Jesus, who told him to say the things he says he claims he's more of a Jew than anyone else. Therefore, it is obvious his claim of being a Jew is false and while I believe he is delusional and in need of mental help with the voices in his head that tell him to make up such absurd and bizarre lies about what I and others believe and say in the face of our words that contradict his fallacies, IF it were true that Jesus told him to say those things, that in itself would be all the objective evidence anyone would need to know not to worship him. However, I do not believe that Jesus exists as the New Testament depicts. I know that God, nor any agent of God would entice someone to lie about others, and therefore his display provides objective evidence against him despite his claims.

Now..to what I had wanted to post but there wasn't room permitted:

edit: Despite ( screen name withheld) desperate attempts his displays have provided objective evidence to show why Jesus worship is irrelevant to believing Jews.  He used to profess to being a prophet of his god, Jesus, now he claims God raised a Jewish messiah from the dead but since Jesus was never a messiah his claim is nonsensical to Judaism. I do not believe that happened, either since if that happened, why did no one contemporary to the events write about it? Of course he's talking about Jesus, so he and the millions of Christians who believe Jesus to have been resurrected are still faced with the dilemma of knowing he did nothing God promised of the Davidic messiah Their doctrine had to redefine the whole concept. I trust what God told us what the Davidic messiah whose humble rule ushers in what we know as the "messianic age" will do and Jesus did none of it.  If you're focused on God in the Jewish scriptures you wouldn't worship Jesus or rely on a man as a sacrifice for sin. Tell the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah and Nehemiah that there is a dichotomy regarding God and community in Torah. Yet the personal attack lying about me and all believing Jews is the most convincing objective evidence of his deep obsessive contempt for everything honest and Torah itself. His deepest issue certainly appears to be with God whose words in Torah he openly rejects here before everyone by open displays to of projecting upon Jews that which he rejects.. He project to believing Jews who refuse to reject what God promised us about the Davidic messiah with an insane lie that we are without messianic belief. "Non Messianic Jew" could only possibly and honestly apply to the few Jews who reject God's promise of the Davidic messiah and to those fewer still who reject it to worship Jesus as a god. Of course  ( screen name omitted) is not a non messianic Jew since he meets no criteria to be a Jew. He is not a messianic Jew in any honest sense because he rejects Judaism’s messianic belief from the Hebrew Bible and instead is a Gentile believer in the Christian Old and New Testament’s redefinitions.  When Christians who hold contempt for Jews try to deflect the insulting nonsensical  label of “non messianic” to say it means Jews who do not believe in Jesus they are displaying entitlement belief they can redefine Judaism and Jewish law and negate God’s prophecies in the Hebrew Bible despite what God commanded. 

 Lying about what I believe with nonsense that  has never appeared even remotely in anything I've ever professed or written reveals contempt for  God who commands do not bear false witness, not to mention disrespect to a fellow human.

"Without a communicated covenant from God, you have no Jew" the person  displays openly there that he completely rejects that all Israel was present to witness God's presence at Sinai, that's fine, but to lie that all the world's Jews reject it is once again, projection on his part.  Judaism exists despite the claims of 2000 years of Christian dogma because God calls our covenant eternal and the eternal Torah has kept us intact. Lying about Jews in Yahoo does not make Judaism or the millions of believing and practicing Jews disappear, they only reveal the liar to have contempt for the things they lie about . He proves he cannot speak for the Jewish people when he makes charges that we believe things insulting to Judaism and our covenant's purpose.  Despite having had it explained in detail to him countless times over the years, he still repeats  that Jews do not know what our purpose is, and that appears to be because he reject God's purpose for Israel as the Torah reveals it, revealing his issue is really with God’s words in the
Torah and to all Israel, much more than his projections upon believing Jews.  I know he will continue to carry on as usual, he’s  doing a bang up job to show the world how much the covenant's purpose is still so needed in the world

Once again, I know that by giving someone who shows such extreme and obsessive hate to Jews such attention I have likely inspired him to feel justified to escalate his behavior even more.  This is simply a risk I will take to show what Jews are facing with increasingly disturbing "acceptance" by their fellow Christians. Why are so few other Christians not speaking out to this insanity? 

I am always happy when I see Christians who DO disown this type of behavior as not inspired by their belief in Jesus. 
I know that my Christian friends think I'm misguided not to believe as they do, but thank God, they've softened their view from believing that Jews and others who don't ...deserve eternal torture and any and all attacks they receive are deserved because of it..to believing more Jewishly actually..that there is a purpose for every people.  God has a purpose of Jews and the New Testament isn't it.   The world will be a nicer place if they'd simply accept that rather than waste their lives in devising nefarious ways to eliminate Judaism instead.  Think of all the wonderful things that could be accomplished in the world if the Hebrew Christians and mainstream churches and Christians that have supported them with donations could do ..if they took the more than 100 million dollars that was raised last year ALONE  from the top 10 various "Messianic Jewish" movements that fraudulently claim to be Jews and want to convert Jews to worship Jesus so he will return....and placed that money in charities.

If you don't believe the money was that much ( I think I've UNDER estimated it) go look like I did for the financial statements for their organizations. The Jews for Jesus group, one that they claim is one of the SMALLEST, raised more than 25 million last year according to their financial officer.


also see the writing here about the insulting antisemitic tag "Non-Messianic" to refer to believing Jews and what it logically implies about those who insist upon referring to the Jewish people who refuse to abandon Judaism's messianic belief for that of Christian dogma.

http://mamaspajamaparty.blogspot.com/2012/05/who-first-started-insulting-jews-with.html


EDIT
At the question I was adding this to address a Jew haters disruption, as often happens, seemed to draw other offal. 

the following addresses a different person, also notorious for obsessively appearing under questions asking Jews what Jews believe and think , who is not only not Jewish to give Jewish opinion, but repeatedly gives willful misinformation and insulting ad hominem to deflect from honest answers about Judaism. 

Below I give a reply to the nonsensical deflection asking me if I believe if Torah "saves" me and preaching Christian dogma about their concept of salvation that is antithetical to Torah and the purpose of the covenant of Israel that is a path of living as an example to the nations in striving to justice, mercy, righteousness and compassion, restoring the world to a state of holiness.  The covenant is a path that honors God's gift of life and the lives to follow our own.  The dogma of the NT rejects the justice and personal and collective accountability of God's creation to God and one another for appeasement of an incarnate deity whose human sacrifice placates and "atones" for all sins, past, present and future.  However, that is egregiously anti Torah since God calls human sacrifice an abomination in Torah and told Moses no man takes on the sin of another.

The Christian concept of salvation is absent in the Torah. There is no burden of sin that I was born with that needs an abominable human sacrifice to appease any foreign incarnate deity who was claimed to have placed it there in the first place. Your arrogant ignorance to ask me to understand what you reject is almost palapable in your contempt for the words of Jeremiah and Isaiah who upheld the covenant and did not entice people to reject it to worship a man as a god incarnate. There is nothing positive the NT has to offer that I could possibly obtain by turning my back upon my Creator, the words of the prophets and the covenant God established with Abraham. You are free to worship Jesus.  I'm free to worship the Creator he was depicted as crying out to while hanging on the cross.  Thousands of Jews who were crucified did likewise. Jews don't worship any of them.

Beginning the New Year Standing Against Antisemitic Propagandizing Posed as Judaism

Beginning the New Year Standing Against Antisemitic Propagandizing Posed as Judaism

This is the rest of an answer that wouldn’t fit on Yahoo Answers and sadly was required to expose deceptive projection made to demonize Jews and deflect from honest answers with ad hominem.

The person I’ll call “JM” has given an ad hominem response that projects what they do to Judaism

I’ll address what I quote from him after each. “You're going to get two types of answers here. One type of answer is from the Jews. The other is from Messianic Believers.” < This is not quite logical.  Believing Jews believe in God’s messianic promise, at least he honestly distinguished those who follow the Christian Bible and call themselves Jews *from* the Jews.

Yes, let us do exactly what James asks.

“Let's examine the type of answers that the Jews here are giving.”< Please do, please examine in detail and compare and contrast what is said.  “They use words such as "lies and deceit" "financial bait and switch scam" "false" "apostates" "distorted" "deceptive" "dishonest" and "pretending to be Jews and playing Jewish dress up". Now these words can be facts or they could just be opinions.”  

  Let the reader decide if Jews have provided the evidence with Torah and those who have misappropriated Jewish identity own words here provide the evidence to what Jews say.

It is an honest obligation to speak out against those who bear false witness against Jews.  Remaining silent to the unethical behavior of those who wish to hijack Jewish identity and impose upon Judaism beliefs that God’s commandments in the eternal covenant call blasphemy and separate a Jewish soul from God  would be tacit approval if we did not speak out. Yet James calls standing up for honesty “nothing else than insult and attack”

That’s projection. 

“The real question you need to be asking is whether you can trust any group that does nothing else than insult and attack the other group?”   “attack the other group”. Do you notice that the New Testament dogma and their definition of Judaism is dependent upon misrepresenting and insulting Jews and Jewish belief while he denies they do so in the very presence of the insult? Note that they even insist upon using a term coined to insult Jews as lacking messianic belief to apply to us despite dozens of times appearing across Yahoo answers of Jews showing it is insulting.

“ If it is wrong to attack and insult, then can you trust them with any other information, site, webpage, or document they source?”

I agree with that sentence as it stands alone, however it should be clear by now that Jews exposing deceptive tactics to create animosity toward Jews and deflect from their fraudulent behavior of misappropriating Jewish identity by inciting hate to Judaism and to justify imposing forbidden beliefs and practices upon everything holy to Jews is not “attack and insult” but defending against insidiously harmful deception.

I think that claim is interesting for him to have made when his answer praises those who attack Judaism and at least one individual Jew under this very question? Not only was a respected Orthodox Rabbinical student libeled, but another used a term coined to insult Jews with the fallacious claim that we have no trust in God’s promise of the messiah and that we’ve abandoned a principle of our religion that we still maintain in steadfast refusal to impose idolatry upon it. Then another who claims to be an author insult Torah and Jews and Judaism and lie about the Tanakh and what it is Jews believe and do.     His answer is ad hominem projection attempting to discredit Jews who are honest about Judaism and who give Torah precept to define Jewish identity.  The scriptures of no other religion have authority to negate what God obligates Israel to be. God’s commandments in Torah are  the sole determinant of defining who and what is or isn’t Judaism

Note that JM makes no claims about it being Judaism himself. But he supports those answers that do call the New Testament dogma, Judaism. While he makes no reference to the phrase “Messianic Judaism” himself, he calls them “Messianic Believers” while failing to note that their messianic belief is absent from and antithetical to the messianic belief of Judaism. The whole issue is that they misappropriate Jewish identity and fraudulently call themselves Jews and their clergy Rabbis.

Belief does not define Jewish identity, but it can separate a Jewish soul from God and his purpose as a Jew and remove him from the covenant if he accepts a foreign god and idolatry. Refusal to accept idolatry is a part of the thousands of years old reasons why Jews have remained an eternal covenant nation. Jews may worship only the incorporeal Creator that all experienced directly at Sinai.  

While behavior is far more important than faith in Judaism, the ethical precepts of Torah obligate us to speak out against bearing false witness and doing so to impose idolatry upon the Jewish people.

If you wish to compare and contrast Judaism to the Hebrew Christian claims of being the real Jews, you cannot use the insulting fallacy to libel Jews as “non Messianic”.  When they are called upon how insulting that lie is, they try to deflect by saying that only means that they worship Jesus and Jews don’t. The claim is that “messianic Jews” believe Jesus and non messianic Jews don’t.  No, all of Judaism remains messianic and they do not have authority or capacity to negate God’s word on the matter of the principle of the covenant of Israel.  Jews who believe in Jewish messianic belief don’t follow false or failed messiahs and no believing Jew could worship a man.

 

Besides, that isn’t what that term means to them, they tell us that we don’t have a messiah if it isn’t Jesus. They insist we are without messianic belief ..because we refuse to abandon the messianic belief of Judaism and Torah. NON means without, messianic refers to belief in God’s promise of the Davidic messiah.  Judaism retains the original and *unaltered* prophecy from God in the Hebrew Bible. No substitute permissible, just as the New Testament redefinition of the nature of God is not permissible within the covenant. To permit the nature of God to be altered and believe that God lied, would negate the covenant itself! The nature of humanity and our relationship with God is also not up for redefinition or negation.

Here is another blog entry that addresses the reality of that insulting term. http://mamaspajamaparty.blogspot.com/2012/05/who-first-started-insulting-jews-with.html

It is the Christian Bible that is NON Torah compliant. If they insist upon deflecting the issue of their hijacking Jewish identity by misrepresenting Judaism and Jewish belief, what else could you possibly believe that they say?

Jews are not telling anyone here anything false about their beliefs. We have gotten their beliefs directly from what they claim they believe right here.  We know that they are not a part of the Jewish people, not a part of the eternal covenant of Israel precisely because of the beliefs they express here before all.

 

The beliefs they express in their Statements of Fatih at any of the “Messianic Judaism” websites are the best evidence that they are antithetical to Torah despite their claims they “fulfill” Torah. They even had to redefine “fulfill’ to mean to put aside rather than to adhere to.

When the New Testament adherents calling themselves Jews address “non Messianic Jews” if they were to actually refer to Jews without messianic belief, that term could only honestly refer to secular Jews or to apostates such as the small number of their adherents who were actually born into membership in the Jewish people according to Jewish law who came from secular homes without Jewish education, or  atheists who don’t believe in God. To be without messianic belief is clearly not to be an adherent of Judaism.

If they don’t compare their beliefs to Judaism but to what Jews who don’t adhere to Judaism believe, why is that?  What is it they are trying to hide with such deceptive measures.

If you want to contrast the two religions, you need to honestly address the religion. Insisting you have entitlement to REMOVE from Judaism a principle of belief that it’s adherents have remained steadfast to defend against corruption for thousands of years is dishonest. It isn’t attacking anyone to point out that obvious and disturbing fact.   It is a principle of Judaism that we trust God’s promise of the messianic age and in fact Jews living the covenant helps the world toward such a state of universal justice, peace, brotherhood and knowledge and worship of the incorporeal God of Israel.  That there are people posing as Jews who are behaving in the ways we see demonstrated here under this very question is in fact, objective evidence that we are not in a post messianic age.  That people still worship Jesus and or any other entities, and that there are wars that rage and bigotries taught and there is attack upon Jews for upholding Torah without corruption is objective physical evidence we aren’t in a post messianic age. Their “second coming” was an attempt to circumvent those facts. 

Non Jews who have no legal (Torah) tie to the Jewish people have no authority or capacity to declare the Jewish messianic belief in what God promised Israel in the Torah to be non existent. If they say otherwise, they are lying.  There is that accusation JM wants you to believe is so evil to make, yet it really jumped out at me while reading his answer he has NO problem with the lies made about Jews and Judaism.   By praising those who lie that Judaism is absent of a belief Jews have held steadfast to for thousands of years and refuse to corrupt, he joins the lie. If he would lie that Jews and Judaism are without messianic belief, and the self-professed prophet of his god, Jesus would lie that Jews say that God cannot speak to anyone as he often claims, what could you believe about anything else either of them say? Now remember, I am using JM’s own admonitions and conditions regarding how we judge the answers.

And then you have JM telling us that the Jews are lying about what they believe. He lumps himself in with those who call themselves Jews there, yet he will deny that he is a Jew. So, what religion is he claiming that Jews lie about exactly? Is this more weasel wording?  I see nothing that the Jews have said here that misrepresents what the New Testament adherents continually tell us they believe or say. We are showing that what they say they believe is not compatible with Torah and ask people to read the mitzvot in Torah in context and judge for themselves.  I trust the reader can use their God given capacity to judge for themselves.

We know what they believe because they keep telling us what they believe and this is precisely how we know that it is not compatible with the eternal covenant of Judaism.  To worship a man as a god and simultaneously present themselves as having read and understood Torah shows us in this evidence that they believe that God lied to all Israel when God told them that God does not become a man.  If they believe the New Testament dogma that Jesus human sacrifice can atone for sin means that they reject outright what God told  Moses at Sinai in refusing Moses offer to take on the sins the Israelites who strayed. They obviously do not believe God telling Moses that no man may take on the sin of another, and Ezekiel the prophet, and other narratives throughout Torah and Tanakh declaring the same thing. They believe that humans are born in an evil state and their mangod must be appeased with a human sacrifice to “pay the price” and reconcile their evil nature, despite the fact that in Genesis God reveals that humans are born without sin and with propensities for good and evil and God gave humanity the ability to overcome our evil nature.  This is taught to all humanity, not just Jews, and taught the very next sentence after the very first time the word sin is mentioned in the Bible.

I’ve only scratched the surface of the deceptive nature of their efforts to hijack Jewish identity and replace and negate Judaism.  The only honest answers there are those who tell you that there is absolutely no movement of Judaism that is compatible with the Christian Bible and its replacement theology. They are not adherent to Judaism or the covenant of Israel. 

And I will also share there the links to their own Statements of Faith that they almost always hide with thumbs down so that others will not compare and contrast exactly what they profess to believe with Torah and with the beliefs of Judaism.

 

When they profess to celebrate Jewish holidays and festivals, they fail to say that how they celebrate them is to so egregiously pervert them that it is a horrific offense to believing and practicing Jews.

It is no different than the Greeks setting up idols in the Temple or Romans doing the same , than to see Christians  declare that worship of a man as a god and human sacrifice are Judaism.  NO different at all.  It is imposing idolatry upon Judaism and believing and practicing Jews would rather die than remain silent in the face of attempts to do away with the Torah. In fact, we are required to die rather than to become idolatrous. A Jew can violate almost every commandment in order to save a life, except commit idolatry, murder or incest and sexual abuse. While there are Jews thoughout the centuries who were sometimes forced to pose as Christian to save their lives, other Jews looked down upon them for so doing. I can understand both sides. 

Now as to his accusation of Jews lying about what they believe, in fact, what they hate most and have attacked me personally the most for doing over the years ( and a search of Answers can reveal this very openly )is when I post links to their own websites and particularly the websites of the different Hebrew Christian groups calling themselves Messianic Jews in fraudulence. Often there is histrionic response from them when ask people to compare and contrast on their own and use their own God given capacity of discernment to see just how their own formal statements fit Torah’s precepts and the Statements of faith of every movement of Judaism.  When I’ve listed the links that I’ve obtained from those who profess themselves to be Messianic Jews and post them, I’m often the target of vicious libels or malicious reporting and my answer is almost always hidden due to low rating by them because they do not want people to do that.  They know from past experiences it often creates a crisis in faith for those who had believed their lies that it is possible to be following Torah and Judaism and worship Jesus as a god and rely on his sacrifice as atonement.

That is indeed a lie to say that one can violate the very core of the covenant of Israel in blasphemous behavior and simultaneously be Torah observant.  To point out a blatant lie is not unjust, it is not viciousness, it is standing up for what God obligates us to do when we are commanded Do not bear false witness.

It is no less an attack on Christianity to declare it is not Judaism than it would be for someone to say that the Hindu religion is not Christianity.

“The other type of answer is provided by Messianic believers such as Devoted 1, Jesus made me kosher, Abiyah Messianic Torah, and DSM. Have you noticed how they are telling your what Messianic Jews believe and they are not attacking Jews or Judaism in the process?” < That is a lie right there. One of them lies about another respected Jewish user’s answers and each of the others makes insulting claims about Judaism and one uses a term coined to negate a principle of Judaism in a very insulting manner. To falsely claim Jews are without messianic belief is no less insulting than if you said non God believing Jews because that’s actually what they are implying when they lie to label Jews non messianic. They're lying that we don't believe our God's promise to us and a principle of our own religion. Judaism is not without our faith in what God promised. It is because we REFUSE to negate the eternal covenant and accept it's replacement with dogma that is directly forbidden and condemned by God in the Torah for Israel, they are attacking Jews and Judaism and projecting that it is attack when Jews speak out against their assaults to our identity and our communities.
The most repeated and common method is to attack Judaism with offensive lies and then when Jews point this out, we're accused of attacking Christianity and hating them for their belief in Jesus to deflect their misrepresentations about the laws in the Holy Scriptures of the Hebrew Bible, and their lies about what Jews do and believe. 

“The question is: Can you trust a Messianic Believer to tell you what they themselves believe?” <  Why is that the question? Did any Jew say you could not trust them to say what they believe?  If you trust them to tell you what they themselves believe why is it that they hate it so much when I share the links they’ve given in Yahoo answers to COMPARE and contrast their own formal and official statements of faith to what it is that Torah declares?They want you to read their links..but not while reading Torah and Tanakh in context and comparing and contrasting them on your own. They don’t want you to read their statements of faith and contrast them to the commandments of Torah that we point out contradict them.

I've never seen any post by a Jew that misrepresents what the New Testament adherent who professes to be a Jew declares themselves to believe.  When I've seen that claim made before by some of the users at that very question, they've never been able to come up with an example.

Note that the Christian missionary misinforming that he’s kosher claims that he is not following Rabbnic Judaism but right before that  he anachronistically refers to  Jesus as Rabbi because their New Testament calls Jesus a Rabbi.

Why would they simultaneously profess to reject Rabbinical teaching but yet their attempts to prove their Jewishness is most dependent upon adopting rituals and customs created after 90CE by Rabbis (the kippot, and some of the Pesach rituals for instance)   Christian theologians who know the history and archaeology know this reveals that the particular NT text referring to either Jesus or Paul as rabbis had to have been written after 90 CE, after the position Rabbi was created.

Rabbis didn’t exist until after 90 CE and if he can come up with something written before the destruction of the Temple referring to Rabbis, he will become world famous

They claim not to follow Rabbinic Judaism because they want to separate themselves from Judaism yet their practices and their own websites reveal they borrow from things the Rabbis created to keep and teach Torah in the absence of the Temple. They corrupt by imposing idolatry upon customs and practices that were created by the Rabbis they claim to disdain. Then they have the chutzpah to call their Christian clergy RABBIS.  Calling a New Testament adherent Rabbi is fraudulent.  That’s why Jews use the term fraudulent to   label their practices. A Rabbi is one learned and trained in Jewish law and who has received semicha. Someone who adheres to the new Testament could no more become a Rabbi than someone who is eating a T bone could be called adhering to a vegan diet.

Don’t take my word for anything I’ve said here. I hope you DO investigate. Please. I am depending on it.

That’s the only way you’ll discover what is real and that’s even what God obligates Jews to do in the Torah.

If you don’t trust my links..this means you don’t trust theirs also because some of the links I posted in past answers they hated so much were those I obtained from those who call themselves "Messianic Jews".

I have only ever met ONE who was an apostate Jew, all others were people who had various NON Torah /NON Jewish religion /law notions of Jewish identity.

A dream doesn't do it, being born to a Jewish father and being Baptised as a teen and worshipping Jesus doesn't make one an apostate, it makes one a Gentile hijacking Jewish identity. The British Israelite redefinition of Christians as the real Israel doesn't do it. Converting to "Messianic Judaism" and faith in the "Jewish Messiah Yeshua" doesn't do it. 

 Only God's word in Torah determines who is and what is of the covenant. That short list above includes just SOME of the self-professed ways that those who profess themselves to be the "real Jews" while calling all the world's adherents of Judaism, fake or "of the devil" ( that we don't even believe exists)

While I link to a past answer that gave the links I’d obtained,  I notice that every few months the MJAA website link to their Statements of Faith changes.  In each of the answers I’ve given, there is a slightly different link and currently it is this http://www.mjaa.org/site/PageServer?pagename=rd_aboutus_statement_of_faith and not the link that I’d given at the past answer below.  It may change shortly after this has been posted, who knows! But you can always search. I haven’t reclicked on all the old links, but I do have a list of links and references that the Christian missionaries calling themselves Jews and the Jew haters hijacking Jewish identity use. If more of those links don't work, let me know and I'll go post some of the newer references they've given.http://www.mjaa.org/site/PageServer?pagename=rd_messianicmovement_faq

Don't let them deflect that this is Jews misrepresenting what they believe OR that we "persecute them for their faith in Jesus". 
that's a retooling of the propaganda in Europe of the 1930's! That claim that Jews were persecuting Christians fueled many atrocities throughout the centuries.

This isn't about trying to convert them out of their Christian dogma, this is about them fraudulently claiming that their very different religion whose core doctrines directly contradict the core of Judaism *is* Judaism and that they have replaced the Jews with their New covenant of faith that is antithetical to the eternal covenant God has with the Jewish people.

That's a big difference.

I also recognize that there are those who sincerely believe they are ‘Jews” by adopting the Hebraisized versions of their Christian dogma and by imposing Jesus upon some Jewish outward rituals, but they have been misled and sadly, by people they believed in that they could trust. 

I do not believe all the people who call themselves “messianic Jews” are inherently bad people.  I have met a number who were simply misled and when they studied and investigated on their own, after their crisis of faith..some chose to be Christian, some chose to join the Jews and others were shaken into agnosticism or atheism. It’s always a shock when they discover what the Torah is really about.  It isn’t attacking anyone to point that out.

  http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090429100229AArdVD7  This answer is full of links I obtained from some of those who call themselves “messianic Jews” here under this question in Yahoo Answers. 

Now at this very blog there is a link that addresses most of the claims of the Christian missionary "Jesus Made" in his expression of how Jewish their practices are. You’ll see that repeatedly what he claims is Torah observant or practicing something Of Judaism is actually imposing idolatry upon it and insulting Jewish practice and belief so extreme that it is out right Jew hate in what they do.

Read A Side by Side analysis reveals much. http://mamaspajamaparty.blogspot.com/2010/02/difference-between-messianic-judaism.html  In fact, if you’re here because you want to learn in depth about this question and came from the link at Yahoo here in 2014, then you may wish to click on and read all the articles I have under “Hebrew Christian” at this blog.

 I’d written the comparative analysis of those claims several years ago after growing tired of posting the same refutations over and over. It really is astonishing that they can continue to claim in the presence of people who know about Judaism that when they impose Jesus worship upon holy observances that honor Torah they are being Torah observant.  For someone to worship Jesus and claim it is JUDAISM is no different than if someone were to stand in a Baptist church and worship their “Lucifer” or “Thor” or any other religion’s deity and call it the real Baptist faith.

In such a scenario ( you may think unlikely) many Baptists would remain silent to seeing multi-million dollar evangelical campaigns to impose worship that their Bible forbids to them upon their beliefs and practices and insist the world accept it as the "real Baptist" faith and go around teaching and soliciting money in the name of Baptists while professing that any Baptist who says otherwise is persecuting them for their faith? 

Well, it wasn't that long ago that Jews around the world laughed at the early attempts by Christian evangelicals to present Jesus worship as Judaism.  The stereotypes they employed were absurd, who would believe them?  Well, they weren't effective in converting Jews, but there were an astonishing number of Christians that were enticed, and then many in their numbers began working harder in learning how to pose as Jews. 

This is a lot to read and I know I've likely lost many people already.  That's ok.  Those that I haven't lost yet may decide to share what they've learned.
I believe I made the point clear way back that they aren't a part of the Jewish people and their religion isn't Judaism.
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I realize that their movement has now grown so large and so powerful monetarily and has been around now since 1967 meaning that there is a whole generation who grew up being lied to by those they loved that they were Jews and that actual Jews “hated them” for their belief in Jesus.  Jews don’t hate anyone who prays to Jesus for praying to Jesus. Jews don’t hate anyone who prays to any foreign god that Jews do not believe exists..Jews don’t worship those things though and we MUST speak out against those who bear false witness to teach that such behavior is acceptable within Judaism. God directly forbids the Jews from worshipping anything on earth or in heaven other than God and not doing our part to stand against the false witness is promoting injustice, the antithesis of Torah.

Throughout Jewish history when Jews adopted beliefs of the foreign gods of the people who surrounded us or who had ruled in conquest, the Jews suffered at the very hands of the people whose false and foreign gods they'd adopted.  That's a lesson repeatedly detailed in the Tanakh and afterward in history.

And Judaism does not accept that God lied to all Israel in their direct encounter with the Divine and Judaism does not permit that the religion would accept teaching that God lied saying God does not become a man.

So…if they’d simply follow their worship of Jesus without trying to hijack Jewish identity in so doing and without trying to impose that idolatrous worship into Jewish homes and mislead Jewish children in bearing false witness..Jews would not be obligated to speak out against it. 

If someone took your family name and were behaving in ways that were unethical, violated the laws of your people, brought dishonor and libeled you, it's hard to imagine anyone treated that way respecting those who did it , much less remaining silent.  How much worse when it is done in the name of God and religion and a part of the misbehavior is using propagandizing to make the target of their libel out to be someone justly condemned by God. 

Do you seriously want to say Jews "persecute" people for worshipping Jesus?

 I was told the following article was even an example of the lengths Jews will go to to persecute Jews who worship Jesus the last time I referred to this news item I have permission to share as long as I give the source and author.

This is the type of behavior that is increasing around the country and I'll be happy to share others incidents if they provide reputable reference and I can get permission to reprint any news item or link

The following is from the Jewish Herald Voice, and I have previously been given permission to quote articles for this purpose if I reference the author and source..

By MICHAEL C. DUKE

Missionary leader Jim Pratt stands in front of signs he posted on a public footbridge outside the JCC. Depending on his audience, Pratt refers to himself as “rabbi” or “messianic rabbi.”

On June 28, a group of Christian missionaries, posing as “Jews,” violated city and state ordinances by attaching signs to the footbridge that spans Brays Bayou, facing S. Braeswood Blvd., directly across the street from the Jewish Community Center of Houston.

These signs bore messages that encourage Jews to accept Jesus as “lord” and “savior.”

 

Houston City Code (Sec. 28-38) prohibits posting unauthorized signs on curbs, sidewalks, streets, public spaces or public property (Code 1968, § 3-2; Ord. No. 70-1747, § 1, 10-6-70). Similarly, State of Texas Transportation Code (Section 393.002) prohibits the posting of signs on the right of way of a public road. Maximum fines for violating both ordinances are $500 per sign, per violation.

 

Upon seeing the signs attached to the bridge, neighborhood resident, Ira Bleiweiss, informed the missionaries that their signs were violating city law. Bleiweiss is founder of Bridge Houston, a rapidly growing grass-roots Israel advocacy group that also is dedicated to promoting healthy Jewish-Christian relations.

 

The missionaries replied to Bleiweiss’ approach, saying that the law did not apply to them, Bleiweiss said. He then notified the Precinct 5 Constable office.

 

A constable responded to the call, but was told by the missionaries that they had a permit for the signs. After Bleiweiss determined that the missionaries did not have a permit, as claimed, he called Houston police. Before the HPD officers arrived, the missionaries removed their signs from the railing, but not before Bleiweiss took photos with his digital camera.

 

Bleiweiss met the officers, showing them photos and copies of the no-sign-posting laws. He also presented a letter from the city attorney’s office, indicating that the municipal ordinance will be enforced. The officers were professional and even-handed, Bleiweiss noted. They issued the missionaries a one-time warning.

 

“This messianic group doesn’t respect the commandment: ‘Thou shall not bear false witness,’” Bleiweiss observed. “Nor do they respect commandment 28-38 of the Houston city code: ‘Thou shall not post signs on public property.’ ”

 

The missionary group behind the signs is Beth Yeshua HaMashiach. Founded and supported by the Southern Baptist Convention, the church self-identifies as a “messianic synagogue.”

 

Nearly every Sunday for the past several years, Beth Yeshua has sent missionaries to proselytize Jews outside the JCC. These missionaries masquerade as “Jews” by wearing kippot and giving Hebrew names to Christian concepts. They argue that Judaism is an inferior religion, made complete only by acceptance of “Yeshua” (a Hebrew name they give to Jesus).

 

In the past, the missionaries had attached a large banner to trees facing the JCC, and placed missionary materials in a neighborhood mailbox, in at least one confirmed case. The JH-V reported in April that both tactics appeared to violate laws. Since that report, the mailbox fliers stopped, and the missionaries began holding their signs. June 28 was the first time the signs were seen attached to the footbridge.

 

Bleiweiss said he and several neighborhood residents repeatedly have asked the missionaries not to proselytize Jews outside the JCC. “How would Christians feel if Muslims were standing outside the local YMCA, telling them that their Christianity can only be completed by accepting Muhammad?” he asked.

 

“These messianics outside the JCC continue to show a complete disrespect, not only for interfaith, Jewish-Christian relations, but also a disregard for the law,” Bleiweiss said.

 

The missionaries have defended their operations by claiming freedom of speech. When challenged by Bridge Houston members on issues of credibility, respect and legality, the group’s leader has responded by speaking in tongues.

 

Bridge Houston recommends that people call the police if they see the missionaries violating laws.

 

Copyright © 2009 Jewish Herald-Voice. All rights reserved.

 

Who First Started Insulting Jews With "Non Messianic" to call all believing in Judaism?

Does anyone know who first coined the antisemitic and inflammatory insult displaying entitlement to remove the messianic belief from Judaism by calling all who adhere to Judaism, adherents of some nonexistent entity called "Non Messianic Judaism"?

I’m curious if the person who coined this term would openly admit to being the author of such a display of arrogant entitlement to try to negate a thousands of years old principle of Judaism.

I have only seen this term used by members of a particular group who follow the scriptures of a DIFFERENT religion than Judaism (New Testament) but claim to be Jews ("Messianic Jews")despite having no connection to the Jewish people according to the laws of the Jewish people (Torah). Their messianic belief isn't that of Judaism or the Jewish Bible.
A pretty new attempt that's increasing in use is to justify calling Jesus their “Jewish” Messiah, then openly insult all believers of the religion of Judaism by referring to Judaism as “Non Messianic”. They use this term to apply to Jewish believers (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and Renewal) in attempt to negate God’s prophetic vision of the Davidic Messiah found within the Tanakh for Jews. In discussions with Jews around the world, and as evidenced by many questions, answers and comments in response to this insult being applied to Jews in Yahoo Answers, no one I’ve encountered appears to have seen this insult before a little less than a decade ago, so I am curious who began it, and where it was first used.

The term itself reads very clearly as attempt to display entitlement to REMOVE from Judaism one of the very principles OF Judaism. “Non” means without. Messianic refers to a belief in the concept of a Messiah. Messiah is the English translation of the Hebrew word mosiach, meaning an anointed ruler. The prophetic vision of the Davidic messiah of the Jewish Bible is that an anointed ruler descended from the house of David will rule from Israel with humility, mercy and justice and usher in world peace, universal brotherhood and universal knowledge and understanding of God.

It is clearly wrong to call Judaism or any Jewish believer “Non Messianic”. A Jew who is atheist or secular could perhaps be labeled this if they do not believe the principles of the faith of Judaism. The Christian Bible's redefined concept of Messiah is "non Jewish" or Non Torah compliant. Jews don't claim Christians have no messianic belief because their concept is incompatible with that of the Torah and Judaism. It is a DIFFERENT messianic belief. There is no separate movement or branch or sect of Judaism that uses a name of Messianic Judaism because all of Judaism remains messianic in belief. There is as little need to name a separate movement of Judaism monotheistic Judaism as all of Judaism believes that God does not incarnate into human form as the Torah states.

Judaism remains messianic and retains the Jewish Bible’s concept of the Davidic messiah. For adherents of another religion's scriptures to display entitlement to both hijack the name of the Jewish covenant nation and purport to negate the messianic belief of Judaism is arogant and insulting.

PLEASE do not answer or contact me with attempts to try to justify the USE of this insult. Answers that attempt to *justify hateful insults* will be appropriately reported as hate speech.

I do not invite inflammatory speech. I am asking for a very specific bit of information while I’m explaining to any non Jews who stumble upon this who may not have read Jewish forums or q and a forums asking about Judaism what has been going on in the past few years in escalation of antisemitic attacks upon Jews and Jewish communities.

***I am asking for informational/educational purposes if anyone knows exactly who it was that first coined the inflammatory insult of “Non-Messianic” to refer to all of Judaism. ***

In order to counter hate one must be informed of the methods employed to spread the irrational bigotries. As in ages past, terms and concepts foreign to Judaism were created to incite hate to Jews and specifically used concepts that were attempts to REMOVE from Jews, the laws that define us as a covenant nation people and that attempt to remove specific beliefs from Judaism or claim we do and believe things we don’t to incite hate.

Removing laws of self-determination was done to render the Jews impotent as a people, as were the various dispersions and exiles of Jews in history. Claiming Jews believe and do things we don’t justified those persecutions.
The notion of Jews as a race rather than membership determined by Jewish law, and the notion that “chosen people” implied superiority are two that are still spread on a daily basis

Therefore, I am NOT asking for anyone to justify any of those notions used to negate Judaism and the Jewish people. There IS no rational, logical justification to display entitlement to claim authority to remove a principle of faith/belief with an insulting term. I want to know who coined it to try to understand the methods of spreading antisemitism and to educate against bigotry.

The same principle applies for ANY religion or any people. There is no justification to create terms of entitlement to negate the core doctrines or histories for others.

The 13 Principles of Judaism compiled in a list by Maimonides existed since the receiving of the Torah and still exists intact today for Judaism. See the following for explanation of them
http://www.jewfaq.org/beliefs.htm
Jews are increasingly being insulted with the deceptive term “Non-Messianic” to address us. It is clearly insulting and an ad hominem attack to address individuals who have clearly demonstrated belief in Judaism as being “Non Messianic Jews”! Daily there appear questions and answers and more commonly, harassment and personal attacks under closed questions that insult Jews with this term. There are many dozens of instances of Jews being TOLD we are Non Messianic when the individual clearly knows better, or of others answering questions about Judaism with doctrines from the New Testament (texts outside of and antithetical to Judaism) in lieu of Tanakh and Judaism. The NT adherent will claim that all “other” Jews are “non Messianic” to justify labeling themselves Jews in violation of Jewish law, call Jesus the messiah of Judaism (as Christians believe), and justify their missionary attempts to proselytize to and insult Jews and Judaism for explaining actual Judaism.

Despite having first asked people to refrain from insulting Jews with this term and explaining to those who may have first adopted it in ignorance of Judaism that Judaism NEVER Abandoned belief in God's prophecies of the messianic age as detailed in the Jewish Bible’s messianic prophecies and that the term is nonsensical at best to apply to any believing Jew in the world, the use of the term has escalated and in direct response to Jewish objections from Jews around the world. The application of this insult is now most often accompanied by other egregiously antisemitic insults. It is very clear to all Jews I’ve discussed this with from every movement and from Jews in a dozen countries, that its use is a purposeful attempt to inflame and insult Jews and Judaism and misinforms people that Judaism doesn’t have a messianic belief.

It’s like calling someone of another religion who worships a different god, as “godless”. (Oops, these SAME people have done THAT, too when Jews say that Jesus/Yeshua is not God)

I now wonder how soon it will be before they come up with even more insulting terms. Will they soon create a new moniker to refer to all of Judaism as godless because we don’t believe Yeshua/Jesus was god incarnate? Will they then likewise try to justify this new term to claim that because we also didn’t abandon Torah's concept of the nature of God to adopt their religion’s scriptures redefined concept of the nature of God, that we don’t have belief in God either? Judaism is both messianic and monotheistic. No matter the different movements’ disagreements of how to honor the eternal law, the core of the eternal covenant is common to all of Judaism. The “gospels” of the New Testament (even if translated into Hebrew) are not scriptures of Judaism.

Judaism worships the monotheistic Creator and believing Jews will never permit this to be altered within Judaism, and for this reason...those who insist on redefining and negating Judaism but feel entitled to take on the name and identity of the Jewish people also appear to feel entitled to now tell us because we have refused to abandon the prophecy of the Davidic messiah and messianic age found within Judaism’s own Holy Scriptures of the Tanakh in lieu of the REDEFINITION of the “New Testament” that we don’t have a messianic belief.

If that isn’t insulting, what is?

As I’ve detailed before in other writings, it clearly isn’t hate or bigotry to note the differences between the doctrines of different religions as all comparative religion courses require and as is necessary to learn about what people of the world believe from their own perspectives. So when the world’s Jews repeat for the umpteenth time as we have for centuries, that the Christian religion’s Old and New Testaments and their redefined nature of God and nature and job of the Davidic Messiah are outside of an antithetical to Torah and Judaism we aren’t displaying hate to their right to believe different things in their very different religion.

*The Jewish people still refuse to accept that any other religion has a right to *remove any of the the principles of the faith of Judaism from the Jewish people or from our Holy Scriptures*.

If you don’t choose to believe in the laws and ethical precepts of Judaism....don’t believe them. You don't have entitlement to negate them for adherents of Judaism.

Insulting Judaism to call it "non Messianic" creates an unsolvable dilemma for them when they use that term to insult Judaism while claiming Jewish identity. They use it in attempt to NEGATE one of the principles of the religion of Judaism with a term that means messianic belief is NON existent in Judaism, and then try to replace it with the REDEFINED and Torah violating concept from the New Testament calling *it* "Messianic Judaism" when their messiah belief isn't from Judaism or the Jewish Bible.

If Judaism didn't have a belief in God's prophetic vision of the Davidic Messiah in the *eternal* covenant then the creators of their "NEW" covenant replacement theology wouldn't have had it to morph from an anointed king who brings universal brotherhood, peace and worship of God into an incarnate sacrifice for sin. Unwittingly, by the evangelical Christians' creating the purposely inulting term "non Messianic" to negate the religion of Judaism that still retains the belief in what God promised Israel..despite themselves, they've exposed with that one insult term alone, that their New Testament isn't of the eternal covenant of Torah/Judaism at all!

To claim entitlement to negate for another people defining aspects of their doctrine that makes them a people reveals contempt for them, not vice versa. And if there is anything that can be objectively shown about Judaism in the existence of Jewish history is that while empires have come and gone, the refusal of the Jewish people to alter or abandon God’s Torah has kept us alive as a people and shall continue to do so.

Am Yisrael Chai.

Thoughts on Cultural and Religious Identity Theft

Avoid this if you don't like armchair philosphy :) AND I preface this with warning it is long-winded rambling stream of consciousness thoughts combined with other things I've even written elsewhere. I've had this in DRAFT form unpublished for more than a year from the time I wrote what is below and only came upon it again today because of a new post I'd placed on a topic that touches on a little of this one, too. See http://mamaspajamaparty.blogspot.com/2012/05/christopher-columbus-and-jews.html
=========================================

This is all about spirituality and self-identity and being true to oneself while respecting other people. Every people and every person has a sense of purpose to existence or strives to find and fulfill one. It's an aspect of human nature. I'm not discussing or debating atheism vs theism or going to promote a pissing contest over whose religion or philosophy is "best", but I will talk about what people believe.

I think a spiritual void in modern civilization appears to lead many people who have have an identity void to feel entitled to appropriate the paths and identities of *others*. Taking on an identity not really your own isn't exclusive to the malicious, the huckster, the con, or the willfully bigoted troublemaker. People can be genuinely fooled in sincere acceptance and trust what they want to hear.

Yet, no matter the origin or motivation, in their so doing, rather than bringing them a sense of real identity and contentment of self-knowledge, it results in strife and escalates conflict.

In modern civilization, not just in the United States, the “melting pot” of so many different and conflicting cultures, histories, religions and philosophies there are many people living in a "spiritual vacuum".

**I specifically refer to people whose spiritual path, or sense of a spiritual nature is devoid of grounding in a sense of "self", a sense of who they are and who their people are and what their people's collective purpose and message is to the world through their own identity.**

I see this in so many different people who flit from one group, one religion, one identity to another. These people without a grounded center, a sense of *self in relation to others* often readily justify latching onto anything that fills that that void. This is how we live in a world where a science fiction author can create an idea that we’re all alien spawn and all women secretly want to abort their babies and all human problems stem from experiences while in your mother’s womb…and hundreds of thousands of other people can be gullible enough to believe it and where celebrities are spokespersons to promote it. ( the late L. Ron Hubbard, his Scientology and the Hollywood celebrities that follow it)

We live in a world where ethnocentrism isn't considered a virtue but it is still widely accepted in the manner it has taken on new forms. Rather than what more overt forms of this thinking inspired in the past, to try to eliminate peoples and religious or spiritual paths once claimed “inferior” by outright mass murder, the socially acceptable methods employed are assimilation, appropriation and identity theft. Fake Indian nations and groups are big business and show utter arrogance in their sense of entitlement to take ritual items, symbols, names and stories and misappropriate them for whatever purpose suited them. The "Black Hebrew Israelites" with their New Testament doctrine and racist ideology and the equally deceptively named "Messianic Judaism" in it's different forms based entirely on which Church is sponsoring them, displays extreme self-righteousness in their entitlement to claim Divine authority to either negate outright, or redefine Torah to mean things antithetical to Torah and Judaism.

All while claiming utmost love for the very people's whose history, spirituality and cultures they've hijacked and misappropriated very offensively.

Too many people who possess this spiritual void and lack of who and what they are are easy prey for the charlatan. They claim no responsibility for bad behavior to do so because they come from a paradigm that teaches "let the buyer beware" and that freedom means that you're free to do anything or say anything you want to say if you can say it is your "freedom of speech" to do so.

A more respectful way to live and actually honor any other group is to stop ignoring the ill effects such entitlement perpetrates. It is not respect that inspires groups or individuals to appropriate the identity, symbols, culture and history of another people and pervert those things by turning them topsy turvy, most often to impose beliefs that are offensive to and violate the laws of the authentic nation people.

The impostor groups also simultaneously declare great love and loyalty to the identity they claim while the words they use to speak of the original people display hatred and insult to the laws, ethics, values and the actual peoples whose identity they hijack.

While I'm only detailing a couple of different groups this applies to more than just the two I'll talk most about here.
The surviving Native American Indian nations and the Jewish covenant nation people have many different groups who openly display bigotry and hostility to the original nation peoples they will claim to *be* while they simultaneously corrupt and distort their histories, traditions, laws, and their different spiritual beliefs.

Other common experiences shared by these very different peoples:
Any individual or group that speaks out *against* the bigoted display of entitlement to hijack and remove the right of a people to maintain their own unadulterated history and laws, is then chastised as the bigot and condemned for their hatred at not being "tolerant". The commonly hurled deflection is to say you hate us because you don't want to give us the freedom to choose what to believe. This is also projection, but it is often effective to their co-religionists.

Sometimes the mention of love of all people or brotherhood is even brought up to deflect the misrepresentation of identity or history or belief.

The Europeans would not have survived on the shores of the foreign continents had it not been for the mercy/civilized assistance of it's native inhabitants who taught them how to find and cultivate foods. This was the case for both North and South America.

From farming methods of the Natives of the northeast that taught Europeans how to rotate crops to ensure soil fertility that when imported to Europe staved off famines that had regularly plagued parts of Europe for thousands of years, to the 5,000 year old weaving techniques of the Peruvians that were incorporated into textile making, to medicines (aspirin among a great many others) to systems of law (Ben Franklin and other "Founding Father's" directly credit) borrowed from the Iroquois, the Europeans were far behind in many areas thought to represent "civilization". Modern farmers still use an adaptation of the Iroquois "three sisters" system of corn, beans and squash that preserve soil fertility.

In a time when the very lives of early European astronomers were being persecuted for their "heresies" to declare the solar system to be heliocentric, the Incas and others had accepted and gone far beyond this in astronomical knowledge.

The native inhabitants of the Americas helped the very peoples who committed genocides. And the effort to eliminate them still exists, although rather than through outright murder, this is continuing through assimilation, discriminatory laws and other forms of socially acceptable bigotries that are even sometimes perpetrated in ignorance.


What can we do if we are genuinely caring for another but wish to learn about them and the wisdom that another people may have to share and not misappropriate?

There is a difference in sharing wisdom and culture with one another in the methods I illustrated and in misappropriating the identity and spiritual wisdom and life of other nations.

As humans who wish to know brotherhood and respect for one another we also hope to learn from one another. We can learn from many different First Nations Peoples..but they key is to let us learn what they want to TEACH us.

ASK rather than take. Some things can't belong to every person. Mixing the customs and religions of the different nations who still survive is not respecting them. Their ways belong to them.

Use that guide for any people, not just the different nations of the Americas.
Those precepts are what I wish people would also do for Jews. The world would be a much nicer place if people behaved in a way that simply respected the rights of peoples to be different from one another in their own purpose and path.
Jews are more open with our beliefs and practices than many Native peoples, but we are also accustomed to seeing this openeness abused in the same manner. We don't proselytize when we share to help dispel misinformation that leads to hate.

Perhaps if history and sociology courses included the topic of cultural and religious identity theft, tragedies of the past may be averted from repeating themselves in new forms.

If we can't learn this lesson, we are indeed doomed to keep repeating the history. The legacy of culture vultures, no matter which one's bones they're trying to pick clean, will ultimately doom the vultures, too.

Finding out who you are and where you belong may lead you to a path you might not have always chosen for yourself before you began a search to learn about the past of your ancestors, but if you don't know where you came from, it is certainly easier to get lost.

You may decide that the people you came from are not the people you wish to belong to now and your loyalties and path is elsewhere or you may decide that someone else strayed away from where you should have been all along. But if you decide to be a part of a particular people or path, you can't redefine their criteria for membership/citizenship to suit YOU, you are obligated to abide by their laws. If you don't meet their criteria for belonging, you haven't really found your people if that's the case.

Shalom y'all.

Christopher Columbus and Jews

I've been sent links to this news item by seven different Jewish friends from around the country this week: http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/20/opinion/garcia-columbus-jewish/index.html
While I always thank all my friends for sharing items of interest to Jews I have great misgivings as a Jew as to how these discoveries are being reported. I feel such a strong gut feeling that this will be used as new fuel for hate propagandizing. I think this will be claimed as evidence of Jews believing we have entitlement to do and say whatever we can for gain to justify abuse of other peoples. Please read on to see why I say this and share if you'd like with anyone else who you think might be find equal cause for concern.

I say this because how Jews react to this news is very important. This history of the atrocities Christopher Columbus perpetrated is likely as little known by many Jews as the possibility he is a Jew. Before Jews begin to embrace Christopher Columbus as some kind of Jewish hero whose mission was really to save the Jews in secret, we cannot ignore or dismiss that his journals and the history of others writings of his life and travels clearly reveal that he treated the indigenous peoples horrifically and was not living the ethics of Judaism in his encounters with them. If he had desire to save Jews as his own people, he did so demonstrating a worldview that came from being assimilated into the sense of entitlement prevalent among the empires of Europe of the day to abuse others and use the profits deriving from torture of others to save Jews at the expense of the lives of innocents. That is clearly not a Jew that Jews want to hold up as any sort of hero. I just now "Googled" a few key phrases and here is just one article that addresses his horrific treatment of a people he noted displayed innocence, beauty and generosity
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-kasum/columbus-day-a-bad-idea_b_742708.html
I hope this is not dismissed because if it is, this will make the Jews who hold him up as a hero (even in ignorance of his atrocities) to be just as lacking in compassion for others and WILL be used as additional "evidence" to support a current common propagandizing lie that the Jews do to the Palestinians like the Europeans did to the Indians. If Columbus is **embraced as a hero among Jews** that will be a massive feather in the cap of the Islamofacist propagandist.

There has already been far too much propaganda being spread by Islamofacists and their supporters to try to equate Jews and the State of Israel with lies that Israel treats Palestinian Arabs the same way the Europeans treated the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas. An online Lakota friend informed me more than a decade ago they have even had people come to their tribal elders at both the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations in South Dakota and present lectures seeking their nation's support to speak out against the State of Israel with the lie that Israel was committing genocide to the Palestinians as the European and the U.S. government had long been doing to the Indians. Thankfully, he and others did not fall for this propaganda, but he said many of their younger people did. I was so shocked and at first I just couldn’t even believe anyone would fall for this. I then went to the Native American chat rooms of Yahoo and if any of the people there had seen anything like that. It gave me an even sicker feeling when several Indians of other nations replied that they had also "learned" about what Israel was doing to the Palestinians from people coming to their tribal gatherings.

So based upon this and what I have seen displayed in Yahoo Answers in the past 4 years, I cannot deny or dismiss the fact that they are the targets of propaganda for the purpose of legitimizing the lie that Jews treat Palestinians like the European invaders and the govts of countries in North and South America treats the Indians and feel entitled to do so.

It is interesting to know if Columbus was a Jew if for no other purpose than to set the history straight if the facts support this. It is just as important to make it equally clear and keep straight that his treatment of the indigenous people was not displaying the values, ethics, goals or beliefs of Judaism. He is no hero to the Jewish people. If he was a Jew he was a bad Jew.

Jewish history shows that Jews value getting the history right, no matter what it reveals. From what we show in our own Holy Scriptures, the Tanakh onward we've never shied away from the honest history about our own or calling out the bad Jews for being bad. Lessons are learned from understanding the good, the bad and the ugly...Jews don't need to be embracing him as a *Jewish hero* or a hero of any kind.

He did not embody the ethics of Judaism even if he did leave money to the poor as a Jewish custom or wished to keep some aspects of Jewish heritage and connection. If he was indeed a Jew, he definitely wasn't one of our good guys.

That needs to be in the news, too.

=====================EDIT=====================
I thought the following email I received a short time ago from a young man had enough interesting points to share here. He doesn't have a blogger account to post this himself under comments. He gave me permission to share his email here. This is from my friend "Feivel" as I will identify him by screen name, a 24 year old Orthodox Jewish Israeli American studying to be a Rabbi. He brought up some interesting points especially regarding Tomás de Torquemada (1420–1498), prominent leader of the Spanish Inquisition and the liklihood that Columbus fled as a Jew....then RETURNED to Spain.

Here is what he had to say:
"I have heard before that he was Jewish or a converso but you didn't hear this before the real nature of the man came about. When he was "the hero" no one said he was Jewish now that his legacy is being looked at honestly, he is all of a sudden a converso.

I have seen or read about some of that evidence and dots in his will as a way for his sons to say Kaddish? I doubt that. He left money to a Jewish man. Ok. That does not mean he was Jewish. Two Jews paid for the Armada? Well, ok but Isabella would NEVER have given him the green light if he was Jewish or even remotely suspected of it and if it it so obvious to scholars today then it would have been REALLY obvious to church officials back then who would have imprisoned his family upon seeing the will (which the church would have seen).
I think you are right. It is a way to not bash Columbus's reputation (he doesn't need any help in that category as his actions do that themselves) but a way to bash us.
Torquemada had the queens ear (110%) and if he had even hinted that he thought Columbus was a converso then Columbus would not only have not been given money and a green light but he would have been thrown in prison and maybe executed. They would have searched for and found the will with the "Jewish symbol" on it. That would have been enough.
I just don't put much stock in the fact that he was Jewish but I will admit that Simon Weisenthal's assertion that he was Jewish.....makes me not totally discount it...
I have the utmost respect for Weisenthal and his research so I keep an open mind. Clearly there were thousands of people who chose Catholicism over death or expulsion and a guy like Torquemada going against a guy like Columbus, expulsion would not have been an option I fear. So how can he keep it sooo secret in his own time but in our time its "obvious". If he was going to find a new homeland, then why sail back to Spain where he knew persecution might still await him. If he was found to be Jewish after the expulsion, hero or not, he would have been executed (probably quietly). Whatever we do, unless my time frame is off, we MUST put Torquemada in the picture and he was so evil and so vicious that he would not have allowed Columbus to live. Historical records have it that Torquemada could actually enter the king and queen's chambers without knocking and it is recorded that he stormed in one day and berated them when they contemplated allowing the Jews to remain in Spain or at least a few Jews. They listened to him and did as he "commanded". An odd position for a "simple priest" and oddly, of course, he himself was by Jewish law, Jewish. His maternal grandmother was a converso.
So I think you are 110% correct. To "accurse" Columbus of being Jewish or a Marrano is really going to be used as another tool in the arsenal of the anti-Semite.

My guess is that his being Jewish would have been further removed than Torquemada's heritage would have been and your blog is also right in that we do need to understand history accurately. IF he was a converso or a marrano (which seems to be the actual theory) then I would be interested in how he pulled off staying hidden and not in Torquemada's crosshairs.

IF he was a converso then he was a heretic. If he was a marrano then....well, that's a little more fuzzy but certainly he would have outwardly indicated belief in the trinity which is something most of us would die before we did (or at least I think I would but having never been faced with that dilemma who knows). I cannot imagine worshipping a false deity. We are commanded to preserve life at all cost but obviously there are exceptions and that is the major one. So claiming him as "one of our own" is not something I would do with any relish and would have to say if he was then he was an apostate and therefore, we can distance ourselves from him.

I will say that I think the motivation most people have in researching him is scholarly (as opposed to the "hitler was Jewish" thing that is going on now) but I think their conclusions are coming too quick and based on too little evidence."



ANOTHER EDIT:

For those who have doubts as to the evidence to show that Christopher Columbus was a brutal slave trader and responsible for the enslavement, torture and genocide of at least three million people he wrote were innocents, read this essay and note it's references.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/15026955/Thief-Slave-Trader-Murderer-Christopher-Columbus-and-Caribbean-Population-Decline
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Other references of his own words
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/columbus1.asp
http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bdorsey1/41docs/01-col.html
http://www.ushistory.org/documents/columbus.htm
http://earlyamericas.wordpress.com/anthology/columbus-letter-from-the-fourth-voyage/

Strange Cruelties: The Spanish Slaughter The Natives, West Indies, c. 1513 Bartolome de las Casas
details the Spanish treatment of the native peoples