Jeremy England, author of the article:
Christianity no longer gets top billing in the Western marketplace of ideas, but its legacy is everywhere you look, no matter how secular the setting. In the formation of a religious community that embraced all of humanity as equivalent, and all souls/persons/moral agents within its ultimate dominion, the Christian project rejected the hereditary priesthood and national chosenness of the Jews. Thomas Jefferson’s deistic “all men are created equal” (by God) filtered through the centuries to a point where the preference for Jews shown by the Law of Return sounds plainly illegal to an American ear.
The image of the Crucifixion may mean many things, but part of what it means is that accepting corporeal defeat in this world can be a path to God-like virtue and spiritual victory in the world of tomorrow.
Does the Hebrew Bible Support Ethnic Cleansing?
Jeremy England implies an answers:
One particular Talmudic-era commentary comes to mind. Everyone knows that Pharaoh and his army were on horses as they chased Moses and the Israelites seaward. But it took the genius of Shimon ben Yochai, the sage, to ask where the horses came from. A plague of hail had killed off all the livestock in Egypt, other than that which belonged to upright individuals who held the Lord in awe. What this means, then, is that Pharaoh got his horses from the upright individuals. Ben Yochai concludes: [In times of war], it is correct to kill even the righteous among your enemy (Mekhilta 14:7).
This is a wince-inducingly Judaic—and very unchristian—position.
among the constraints and instructions given by the Torah is a specific one: “Choose life.” Accepting one’s own death because the other options are ugly and seem heartless is not on the menu.
Jeremy England:
The Jews do not venerate the image of a more-divine-than-usual human who achieved an abstract victory for all of humanity by dying horribly. And because we do not, we cannot accept the Western exhortation to be suicidally gentle with our enemies in order to receive a Christian burial on their “moral high ground.”
It’s doubtful Shimon Bar Yochai’s words are interpreted correctly here. It’s more like an aphorism that says that even righteous gentiles are worthy of death, with a particular eye toward Christian informers to the Roman empire. This is followed in Jerusalem Talmud by other expressions not meant to be taken literally such as the best of butchers are from Amalekites. I’m always shocked the extent to which Christians take folk sayings from the Talmud and midrash and attempt to extrapolate general laws that they think or would like to think Jews followed. Another example would be the notion that men and women weren’t allowed to speak to each other simply because Abot Says: “Engage not in too much conversation with women. They said this with regard to one’s own wife, how much more [does the rule apply] with regard to another man’s wife. “
Most Jews maintain that the Ten Commandments apply to actions against gentiles as well as Jews so ‘Don’t murder’ applied even to gentile innocents in war. Here is the Jerusalem Talmud abbreviated version of Shimon Bar Yochai’s sayings:
“A man should not teach his son a craft for women,” etc. It was stated: A man should not teach his son to be a donkey driver, a camel driver, a sailor, a potter, a teamster, a shepherd, or a grocer, since their occupations are those of robbers.
Abba Orion from Sidon says in the name of Abba Shaul: Most donkey drivers are wicked, most camel drivers are in order, most sailors are pious, most bastards are intelligent, most slaves are beautiful, most sons look like their mother’s brothers. The qualified physicians go to hell, the qualified among the butchers is an associate of Amaleq. Rebbi Simeon ben Ioḥai stated: Kill the best of Gentiles, smash the head of the best of snakes; the best qualified among women is a sorceress. Blessed is he who does the will of the Omnipresent.
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