Jews believe in the cruel and jealous God of the Old Testament, a near-genocidal and capricious creature who alternately massacred the Jews and helped them flourish, depending on his mood and possibly on their behavior. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. This is Jewish morality. If you look at how the state of Israel acts and why so many Christian countries find its behavior appalling, you can see that it is because Israel practices Old Testament morality while Christian countries ideally believe in New Testament morality, in other words, Mercy.
Mercy (noticed I capitalized the term because I am using it in the Christian, not the lay, sense, and hence it deserves to be capped) itself is the very contradiction of Judaism at the same time it is the very essence of Christianity.
Jews don’t believe in Mercy. Mercy came with Jesus. Jesus threw out the Law and said Jews didn’t have to abide by it anymore. He replaced the Law with Mercy. At the same time, Israel, originally bequeathed to the Jews, went over to the Christians in a sense because the Christian Church became the “New Israel” for the Christians.
In Replacement Theology, that means that the Jews and Judaism were replaced by Christians and Christianity, who brought a much more civilized and humanistic religion, which was also vastly less vicious and cruel, while being open to all of humanity other than a Chosen few “special people.”
As the Jews have been truly “passed over” (this is one way that their special Passover holiday could make sense in a Christian way, though I doubt we’d want to celebrate it) in a Christian sense, they no longer get Israel. It is in this sense that Jews say Replacement Theology is antisemitic.
I support Replacement Theology. It is very popular with Palestinian Christians. Jews scream that it is antisemitic, but Jews are silly, and they scream that everything is antisemitic, including probably the weather. One tires of hearing this grotesquely abused word being wielded about in such a Machiavellian and amoral way. After a while, it’s the like the boy who cried wolf, like racism and sexism and all the other worthless words murdered by cynical linguistic abuse.
I get called this quite a bit, though I’m not much of an antisemite. I feel like saying, “That’s Mister Antisemite to you sir!” If I’m an antisemite the Antisemitism League ought to take my card away because I do such a piss poor job of it. I had a Jewish girlfriend for 5 1/2 years, my longest relationship. But she wasn’t a super-Jew. She was a Jew but she wasn’t Jewy. The distinction is important. Though she was very unhappy with my love for Saint Henry Ford.
The truth is that Replacement Theology is simply the true Christianity. Christian Zionism is a Christian Heretical Movement that started in the UK in the 1840’s and has since spread its poison via evangelical Protestantism far and wide. So Evangelical Protestantism itself is essentially heretical.
The Catholic Church continues the practice the true “antisemitic” Christianity, and this is why Jews reserve particular hatred for Catholics. Bottom line is that if Replacement Theology is antisemitic, then all true Christianity is antisemitic and every real Christian is an antisemite. Notice I don’t include the fake Christian Evangelicals as real Christians because they’re not. They’re a bunch of heretics.
Lewis Black has a good take on this:
https://youtu.be/8XhnOVsxEJM
https://youtu.be/uKSDyXgsPS0
Really anyone who reads enough of the Old Testament without ideological blinders on will come out the other end “anti-semitic” in one way or another. And I think you are certainly right that any sane understanding of Christian teachings is a direct contradiction to OT ‘morality’ (if we can even call it that).
I believe it was the early church father Marcion of Sinope (among others) who got it right. He declared that the OT be anathema and irrelevant to Christianity; he considered it the ravings of a fallen angelic being, not the True God. Funny how he was later declared an “arch-heretic” by the consolidated/homogenized post-Nicene state church.
I’ll point out the obvious: A look at European history reveals that Christians aren’t any more merciful than anyone else. Its main use in this context is to give Christians the assumed moral authority to be appalled at other people doing what they themselves have been doing for centuries. I’d point out examples like King Leopold of Belgium in historically recent times, but that would be piling on.
I will admit that the NT valorizes mercy, etc. for those who want to practice it, and the OT basically doesn’t. If anything, the fact that Christians had a founder and a text teaching mercy and yet still failed spectacularly to practice it makes them look worse if anything.
I would also note that to the extent that mercy, etc. was an ideal in Christian societies, it mainly was practiced among members of the in-group. Jews and Muslims do the same things for each other. That’s the nature of humans as a social species.
I can’t really blame anyone for this, because the Christian ethic demands complete self-abnegation, or you’ve already failed. Turn the other cheek. If someone steals from you, give them more than they stole. Etc. and etc. I’m not putting this down like Nietzsche or other edgelords. This is very powerful in practice, and inhumanly demanding. Virtually no one can do it, certainly not all the time.
I will disappoint you in many ways: the fact is that if Judaism is very near the antithesis of mercifulness, except at a very limited and conditional degree within the fold (which in practice means the gang you mix with and you know rather than the whole of Judaism, as most Jews have always considered most other Jews to be heretics of some sort until they know them personally).
Christianity has never been that merciful neither: it just disagreed with mainstream Jews as to who was God-chosen or not, and if anything, it was more selective towards the outside world and against humanity at large than the Jewish entity it stemmed from. T
he very earliest writings of Christianity were all particularly insistent that humankind as a whole was a damned entity and to define oneself as an enemy of such was to be on friendly terms with God, which was most contrary to certain Hellenized Jews like Philo who maintained some hope about the possibility that most future humanity would be promised the ability to enter the Judaic fold at some point and also that all that all good people of all cultures would be de facto Jews.
First of all, Jesus was a Jew and never departed from the the most traditionalist wing of mainstream Judaism of His time on any point, nor had He any intention to bring about any different religion, though one may legitimately argue that like all sages and saints worthy of that name, He stood for a spirituality that could ideally dispense with religion. Yet also in his time, at first glance from an outsider’s view, mainstream Judaism looked more like some sort of Islam than it resembled today’s Judaism.
Christianity as a religion different from Judaism was founded by Paul, not Jesus. Had it been only for the Evangelists, there would have been no new religion but only some informal sub-fold of Judaism, stricter on some points, more open-hearted on others. But what Paul created was definitely even less compassionate than the dour and jihadist-like Judaism he originated from.
It must also be considered that modern Judaism as we know it is definitely posterior to Christianity and even to Islam though by little: modern Judaism is based on the Talmud, not on the OT, and the Talmud underwent its final compilation (like computer software) about the same time the Quran was also compiled – most probably in the same region of Southern Mesopotamia and Transjordania.
Judaism as such presupposes a Christian religion it defines itself against the backdrop of, not vice-versa. In other words it is an anti-Catholic (to the point of being anti-Christian) Christian heresy, not vice-versa.
It resembles a sort of kind of Calvinistic heresy that in order to stay coherent decided to get rid of Jesus too, whereas Calvin got rid only of all other saints while keeping a modified version of Jesus. Modern Judaism as derived from Talmud and Kabbalah smacks more of some sect of Hinduism than of both Christianity and Islam as well as from all older defunct versions of Judaism : it definitely believes in the inescapable law of Karma conceived of as a debt one has to pay back before a certain final delay and in reincarnation.
None of the religions I am here referring to is compassionate nor humanistic.
To sum up the matter very grossly, the Decalogue can be conceived as a declaration of war by God onto humanity and onto all flesh except those who protect themselves from his “Infinite Justice” by complying with some rules and practicing some techniques that deflect such a wrathful energy onto the rest of the world. But contrary to what modern American humanistic latitudinarian Christians say now (which includes modern Catholics), that declaration of war was not abrogated by Jesus on the Cross but on the very contrary opposite.
It was abrogated by actual Christianity that was proven and put in final victorious action by the most vivid example possible. That is that you must either choose to side with God, in which case you must be ready to be crucified by the whole of humanity forgetting all its differences so as to unite against you, or you must choose humanity, in which case you have to be part of the lynch mob.
Jesus himself reproached the Jews of his time for making too many proselytes. It was indeed the most proselytizing religion of the Mediterranean oikoumene by that time, maybe 10% of the general population in many roman provinces) and Jesus advocated a movement back to a more difficult and exceptional process of entry into the fold.
But unlike Paul, He envisioned no structure other than some of the extant Judaic ones, though He wanted to phase out some aspects of it that He considered to have been superfluous innovations, like the Salomonic concept of the temple together with its rituals, as well as the constitution of Israel as a separate state proclaiming its independence and supremacy over all other nations.
He was rather of those Jews who like the Haredim, Lev Tahor, Chabad and co. who have no real use for Israel and Zionism, since for them the Promised Land is none other the whole Earth and they fear that over-attachment to that strip of chaparral might result in them losing the bigger thing.
Christianity should be called Paulism, not Christianity, and Paul is clearly, by his writings (not by the real character he was which was extremely timid and introverted), one the most authoritarian and least merciful philosophers ever, espousing and reviving all the heaviest prejudices of his times, both Judaic and Hellenistic.
Paul downloaded from the heavens a political structure, whereas Jesus had done the very opposite, bringing back all of the original political structures and their philosophical and even concrete scientific source of inspiration. But even though Jesus was surprisingly merciful towards the particular people He met with, He was surprisingly so because His doctrine was stern and anti-humanistic and also very acquisitive in a material sense.
He never personally disapproved of racism, the death penalty, slavery, economic exploitation, or war: these were seen by Him as God-given, physical phenomena as co-existential with existence as air, water, earth, gravity, conservation of energy and momentum. Jesus repeatedly, with more insistence that the sternest and most racist Jews around him, refused to approve of any prayer for the other nations (goyim) or for humanity as such and disapproved of any giving charity to the world or leaving behind a better one.
In particular, Jesus, with a peculiar Semitic tribal animus, utterly disapproved of the influence of Hellenistic philosophies of human universalism which were then influential among the Jews of nearby Alexandria, though by all accounts He mastered Greek as well as Aramaic and Hebrew and introduced much Greek vocabulary in His own discourse.
Jesus is said to have been the guy that ordered to turn the other cheek and to love one’s enemies, as a remarkable innovation Judaism had never committed up to then and remarkably so compared even to most pagan religions.
Nope: Jesus only repeated what had been taught to Him as per the tradition he had inherited from. Jesus is synonymous with total absence of innovation in whatever He said. His only originality was His art of saying it to the point. Jesus never found useful to sign any writing (though he was well-taught in scriptures), and this can be interpreted as a sign that He didn’t think He had anything new to say and bequeath.
The turn the other cheek thing was not new in His own tradition and was for the persons within the fold only: it did not apply to the people outside the fold, and the way He defined the fold was stricter than most did. The enemies He asked to love were the inimici (unfriendly ones) not the hostes (foe) as per the Vulgate’s terminology.
Maybe He was a little less nationalistic and tribal (though He was so far more than most of his generation) as compared to modern Jews, but he was pitiless when it came to heresies and wrongful doctrines.
There was absolutely no room in his mindset for anything like tolerance and intellectual curiosity as loved by the philosophers of Renaissance and Enlightenment (he is the wrongest superior power to pray for to counteract the growing movement of censorship on Internet.
The first Christians would have resoundingly and unanimously called for one thousand times more rightful censorship of wrongful ideas on Internet in response to the censorship of rightful ideas by the GAFA, actually they would have called for the rationing of Internet to responsible persons only and its condemnation for lay persons as a guilty pleasure).
He had a particular strict cancel culture of his own : his main point of view was that crime of opinion was even more serious than crime of action, as if the mere fact of entertaining a certain opinion could result in creative or destructive visualization.
Jesus condemned free discussion and free thought as mental fornication and adultery and that was incipient Christianity’s essential and most remarkable characteristic as soon as it appeared on the world scene as far back to the masters’ very example as archeology can get in history.
Other religions, both Roman and Jewish, condemned and punished wrong actions, early Christianity condemned and punished by all means available wrong thoughts and self-expression in general, as the only valid expression of truth belonged to persons in authority, though Jesus condemned free discussion mostly in the same way as India’s Yogi Patanjali (he considered thought waves of all kinds as an impediment to contact with pure light) in opposition to Paul who rather issued disciplinary and political condemnations.
Even though the priority was given to fighting crimethink as Orwell would have said, tribalism and racism still ranked as high as it had done in Judaism in the early Christian scheme though as a criterium of now second rank only. Outside the fold defined first by opinion conformity (ideally total absence of personal opinion of any kind : that was the first thing you had to renounce to as a convert or as a good member of the tribe).
Turning the other cheek was not meant to enhance mercy as an absolute value of conduct between humans but as to enhance group solidarity against the outer world : you had to renounce to abstract justice as Hellenism conceived it for the cohesion of the concrete group which for Jesus was still Jewry but from Paul onward started to be rather called the Church, though most churches remained quite tribal in nature for some time before the Nicene creed introduced the concept of universal Church which took some time to gain traction.
You had to try to love your enemies that you met with personally from within the good cause, however unlikable they were, but that was in the way all armies of the world ask you to love your comrades and superiors you owe obedience to however unlikable they are to your taste. Jesus himself often used the military comparison in that respect.
And the army you had to sacrifice your tastes for was waging a war against humanity and humanism. The main reproach it made to what Judaism had become was the latter’s increasing compromise with Greek-inspired universalism and with Roman concepts of political consciousness: by being an early Christian you rather sided with the violent God that was about to destroy all that with fire.
The proof of what I am asserting here is that the expansion of early Christianity at the end of the Roman empire resulted in absolutely no growth of human solidarity of any kind but rather of more and more cynicism and criminal gang conduct posited as the new norm which was to become feudalism.
I must make it clear that Jesus nor anyone of his disciples never manifested any preference for the spirit of Athens against that of Jerusalem as defined by UK’s Gilad Atzmon. In all early Christian testimonies and logia Athens is considered as one the main sources of philosophical evil, as well as the most hostile of all Greek cities to the Christian message, while the Jewish world while still pro-Jerusalem was more mitigated.
Opposing Jewish-led globalism in the name of both Athenian humanism and Christian compassion, is an intellectual construction that doesn’t hold any water. We are now at a juncture where all Christian currents or nearly so are submitting back to Jewish authority for various reasons, and that is also very important, where Jews has outwitted everybody as the ultimate Athenian-style philosophers.
Another fact to consider is that ancient Judaism, from the very origins to late antiquity
1) was always open to all in theory (though in practice it practiced the nastiest form of seniority revindication against non-belongers and newcomers like many left unions do in Mexico and elsewhere): it was a people that considered itself as the most miscegenated of all in its region. “Hebrew” (“ibhriith : ” – b -th) meant etymologically both “those who have crossed over” and “those who are cross-bred”. Judaism was at all times marked by a dialectic of exaggerate, nation-denying, wacko universalism, and exaggerate, humanity-denying, criminal-minded tribalism.
2) there never was a Jewish race as such, as at no point in Jewish history an ideal canon of physical beauty was defined or traced on parchment as you can find in Greek or Hindu art for instance.
Jews are often among the champions of racism in the world, but their criteria of racism are always borrowed and liable to change with fashion. For quite a long recent time they idealized the “cheesecake” feminine type of beauty when they found their own aspect too swarthy or hairy, but now many seem to have gone full anti-white, though it can be shown that they were the chief promoters of anti-black racism at various historical periods to the non-Jewish world.
3) the very idea of mercy as extolled by Jesus and other Christians was not new for Judaism, Jesus rather presented it as an older Jewish value that was getting lost with the advent of newer practices he condemned, but it may also be argued that such a humanistic mercy was always more utilitarian (submission of individual tastes to group survival) and less idealistic than one might think in both the tradition Jesus inherited from and that that was about to claim of his teaching.