Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil

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Historians differ over the motive for his conversion to Islam. Some suggest it was a reaction to a social slight inflicted upon him because he was a Jew, while others suggest he was forcibly converted at the edge of a sword (which prompted Maimonides to comment upon Anusim). Despite his conversion to Islam, his works continued to be studied at the Jewish Baghdad Academy, a well-known academy, into the thirteenth century. He was a follower of Avicenna's teaching, who proposed an explanation of the acceleration of falling bodies by the accumulation of successive increments of power with successive increments of velocity. In Jewish lore, Lilith was actually the very first woman ever created — before Eve. Lilith, whose name is related to the Hebrew word laila, meaning night, was feared because she was believed kill women in childbirth and snatch their babies. She was also known for her uncontrolled sexuality, and thought to force mortal men to lie with her so she could give birth to more demons. In contemporary Jewish feminist circles, Lilith has been reclaimed as an icon for her independence and she is the namesake of a popular Jewish magazine. Nephilim

Biden is sending secretary of state Antony Blinken to Jerusalem to investigate what’s going on, while Netanyahu is due in Washington next month. That will be interesting. Yet so far, the US has eschewed overt criticism. A shamefully supine approach is also being pursued by EU countries – and Britain. Visiting Israel last week, a Foreign Office minister, Lord Ahmad, blithely declared bilateral ties had attained “new heights”. Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman (eds.), History of Jewish Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1997. ISBN 0-415-08064-9 Conventional imperatives for treating Israel differently from other countries read like this: Israel is the Middle East’s only genuine democracy – it must be supported. It is surrounded by hostile regimes seeking its destruction – it must be defended. Remembering the Holocaust, Europe and America owe the Jewish people an eternal debt – it must be honoured.

Themes

You’d think Jewish leaders would understand this. You’d think they would understand it because many of the same Jewish leaders who call national self-determination a universal right are quite comfortable denying it to Palestinians. More recently, Donald Trump – who told the Republican Jewish Coalition in 2015: “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money” – invited Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress, who has said Jews are going to hell for not accepting Jesus, to lead a prayer at the ceremony inaugurating the American embassy in Jerusalem. The State of Israel may not live among us as a Jewish state’ captures that form of hostility to Israel that argues that Israel must give up its fundamental Jewish essence to merit legitimacy. If it were to become a binational or multicultural country that gave no primacy to Jews or Jewishness, then it could be accepted among the nations of the world. The story of the Bahshamiyya Muʿtazila and Qadariyah is as important, if not more so, as the intellectual symbiosis of Judaism and Islam in Islamic Spain.

Which leaves Israel free to entrench its own version of one state, which denies millions of Palestinians basic rights. Silencing Palestinians isn’t a particularly effective way to fight rising antisemitism, much of which comes from people who like neither Palestinians nor Jews. But, just as important, it undermines the moral basis of that fight. Among them was a new official definition of antisemitism. That definition, produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016, includes among its “contemporary examples” of antisemitism “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination”. In other words, anti-Zionism is Jew hatred. In so doing, Macron joined Germany, Britain, the United States and roughly 30 other governments. And like them, he made a tragic mistake. Saʿadya Gaon dedicated an entire treatise, written in rhyming Hebrew, to a refutation of Ḥīwī's arguments, two fragments of which, preserved in the Cairo Geniza, have been published (Davidson, 1915; Schirmann, 1965). [14] Ḥīwī's criticisms are also noted in Abraham ibn Ezra's commentary on the Pentateuch. Sa'adya Gaon denounced Hiwi as an extreme rationalist, a "Mulhidun", or atheist/deviator. Abraham Ibn Daud described HIwi as a sectarian who "denied the Torah, yet used it to formulate a new Torah of his liking". [15] Sa'adya Gaon [ edit ] A recent trend has been to reframe Jewish theology through the lens of process philosophy, more specifically process theology. Process philosophy suggests that fundamental elements of the universe are occasions of experience. According to this notion, what people commonly think of as concrete objects are actually successions of these occasions of experience. Occasions of experience can be collected into groupings; something complex such as a human being is thus a grouping of many smaller occasions of experience. In this view, everything in the universe is characterized by experience (not to be confused with consciousness); there is no mind-body duality under this system, because "mind" is simply seen as a very developed kind of experiencing entity.

In traditional Judaism, the yetzer hara is not a demonic force, but rather man's misuse of things the physical body needs to survive. Thus, the need for food becomes gluttony due to the yetzer hara. The need for procreation becomes promiscuity, and so on. These are reasonable criticisms. But are Zahalka and his colleagues – who face structural discrimination in a Jewish state – antisemites because they want to replace Zionism with a civic nationalism that promises equality to people of all ethnic and religious groups? Today, all three of these ideas about Israel exist simultaneously. And judging by how the most recent conflict in Gaza was reported in the media and discussed on social media, it looks like the first two, in particular, are becoming increasingly mainstream.

To seek to replace Israel’s ethnic nationalism with civic nationalism, however, is not inherently bigoted. Last year, three Palestinian members of the Knesset introduced a bill to turn Israel from a Jewish state into a “state for all its citizens”. As one of those Knesset members, Jamal Zahalka, explained, “We do not deny Israel or its right to exist as a home for Jews. We are simply saying that we want to base the existence of the state not on the preference of Jews, but on the basics of equality … The state should exist in the framework of equality, and not in the framework of preference and superiority.”

White nationalists’ fears

Philo attempted to fuse and harmonize Greek and Jewish philosophy through allegory, which he learned from Jewish exegesis and Stoicism. [1] Philo attempted to make his philosophy the means of defending and justifying Jewish religious truths. These truths he regarded as fixed and determinate, and philosophy was used as an aid to truth, and a means of arriving at it. To this end Philo chose from philosophical tenets of Greeks, refusing those that did not harmonize with Judaism such as Aristotle's doctrine of the eternity and indestructibility of the world. The same is true for their modern equivalents. The moral justification for eradicating Israel’s Jewish character is to save Israel from the unethical results of its supposed Jewish ethnocentrism. One of the major trends in modern Jewish philosophy was the attempt to develop a theory of Judaism through existentialism. Among the early Jewish existentialist philosophers was Lev Shestov (Jehuda Leib Schwarzmann), a Russian-Jewish philosopher. One of the most influential Jewish existentialists in the first half of the 20th century was Franz Rosenzweig. While researching his doctoral dissertation on the 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Rosenzweig reacted against Hegel's idealism and developed an existential approach. Rosenzweig, for a time, considered conversion to Christianity, but in 1913, he turned to Jewish philosophy. He became a philosopher and student of Hermann Cohen. Rosenzweig's major work, Star of Redemption, is his new philosophy in which he portrays the relationships between haShem, humanity and world as they are connected by creation, revelation and redemption. Orthodox rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, and Conservative rabbis Neil Gillman and Elliot N. Dorff have also been described as existentialists. [ citation needed] And I would phrase it thus: ‘The State of Israel may not live among us as a Jewish State; the State of Israel may not live among us; the State of Israel may not live.’

Judah's Dialoghi is regarded as the finest of Humanistic Period works. His neoplatonism is derived from the Hispanic Jewish community, especially the works of Ibn Gabirol. Platonic notions of reaching towards a nearly impossible ideal of beauty, wisdom, and perfection encompass the whole of his work. In Dialoghi d'amore, Judah defines love in philosophical terms. He structures his three dialogues as a conversation between two abstract "characters": Philo, representing love or appetite, and Sophia, representing science or wisdom, Philo+Sophia (philosophia). Fleischer, Ezra. "A Fragment from Hivi Al-Balkhi's Criticism of the Bible." Tarbiẕ 51, no. 1 (1981): 49-57. In Judaism, yetzer hara ( Hebrew: יֵצֶר הַרַע‎, romanized: yēṣer haraʿ ‍) is the congenital inclination to do evil, by violating the will of God. The term is drawn from the phrase "the imagination of the heart of man [is] evil" ( Biblical Hebrew: יֵצֶר לֵב הָאָדָם רַע, romanized: yetzer lev-ha-adam ra), which occurs twice at the beginning of the Torah (Genesis 6:5 and Genesis 8:21). All the peoples on earth? The Kurds don’t have their own state. Neither do the Basques, Catalans, Scots, Kashmiris, Tibetans, Abkhazians, Ossetians, Lombards, Igbo, Oromo, Uyghurs, Tamils and Québécois, nor dozens of other peoples who have created nationalist movements to seek self-determination but failed to achieve it. Joseph Solomon Delmedigo was a physician and teacher – Baruch Spinoza was a student of his works. [39] Baruch Spinoza [ edit ] Baruch Spinoza

More people now think Israel is evil

If antisemitism exists without anti-Zionism, anti-Zionism also clearly exists without antisemitism. Consider the Satmar, the largest Hasidic sect in the world. In 2017, 20,000 Satmar men – a larger crowd than attended that year’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference – filled the Barclays Center in Brooklyn for a rally aimed at showing, in the words of one organiser: “We feel very strongly that there should not be and could not be a State of Israel before the Messiah comes.” Originally known by his Hebrew name Nethanel Baruch ben Melech al-Balad, [22] Abu'l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī, known as Hibat Allah, was a Jewish philosopher and physicist and father-in-law of Maimonides who converted to Islam in his twilight years - once head of the Baghdad Yeshiva and considered the leading philosopher of Iraq. Ashmedai or Asmodeus was, according to Zoroastrian and also Jewish legend, the prince of the demons. He appears in the Book of Tobit (one of the ancient Jewish religious books that was not included in the Jewish Bible, but is retained in Jewish tradition) where he torments a woman named Sarah. Sarah is married to seven men in succession and Asmodeus slays each husband on their wedding night. (Sarah’s eighth husband, Tobias, manages to outwit the demon on his wedding night and enjoy a long marriage with her.) A famous legend about Asmodeus in the Talmud ( Gittin 68a-b) has it that King Solomon outwitted the prince of demons into helping him construct the first Temple. Dybbuk