So-called “antisemitic canards” about how the Talmud reviles Jesus and Mary are all true, Princeton professor admits; gets big promotion

“Yes, we do say Jesus is in hell, boiling forever in excrement, and that Mary was a whore. Whaddya going to do about it?”

 

A few years ago I read this outstanding work in French by Martin Peltier, a French WN and Christian. Its title obviously means “Jewish Antichristianism,” and is a reversal of charges concerning the Jewish phrase “Christian Antisemitism.”

In it, Peltier demonstrates how the Jews moved heaven and earth to defame the Christians and get the Roman authorities and the general population to hate and kill the Christians.

Schaefer’s book fully supports what Peltier wrote.

On pp118-21 we read of the Jews accusing Christians of cannibalism, incest and orgies.

This accusation can be found early on in the pagan and Christian literature, and it should not come as a surprise that R. Eliezer was charged with it by the Roman authorities. It appears already in the Christian apologist Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, written in Rome around the mid-second century C.E. There, Justin addresses his Jewish interlocutors as follows:

My friends, is there any accusation you have against us other than this, that we do not observe the law, nor circumcise the flesh as our forefathers did, nor observe the Sabbath as you do? Or do you also  condemn our customs and morals? This is what I say, lest you, too, believe that we eat human flesh and that after our banquets we extinguish the lights and indulge in unbridled sensuality? Or do you only condemn us for believing in such doctrines and holding opinions which you consider false?17

Having first referred to the obvious and well-known distinction between the Jews and the new Christian sect (they do not circumcise themselves and do not observe the Sabbath), Justin gets to talking about the slanders spread about: that the Christians celebrate orgies during which they practice cannibalism and promiscuous sex.

The Jew Trypho’s brief answer (“This last charge is what surprises us, replied Trypho. Those other charges which the rabble lodge against you are not worthy of belief, for they are too repulsive to human nature”) reveals that these horrible slanders are indeed widespread but that he does not take them very seriously: the subsequent discussion shows that he is mainly concerned about the Christian habit of not observing the Sabbath and the festivals and not practicing circumcision.

Moreover, he seems to ignore the question of who is the originator of these slanders—or else takes the answer for granted—and simply dismisses them as repulsive.  However, later in the dialogue Justin does not leave any doubt that he holds the Jews responsible for the slanders:

“And you [the Jews] accuse him [Jesus] of having taught those irreverent, riotous, and wicked things, of which you everywhere accuse all those who look up to and acknowledge him as their Christ, their teacher, and the Son of God.”18

No doubt, the “irreverent, riotous, and wicked things” refer to the orgies of cannibalism and sex mentioned earlier, and no doubt either that the Jews not only are presented here as the source of the slanders but as those who spread it about the whole civilized world, sending out “certain men chosen by vote” into every part of the empire as official representatives, “proclaiming that a godless and lawless sect has been started by a deceiver, one Jesus of Galilee.”19 But what precisely is this strange ritual of cannibalism and sex?

Tertullian, Justin’s younger colleague (second half of the second century C.E.) reports more graphic details. In his Apology,
written 197 C.E., he writes:

“We are said to be the most criminal of men (sceleratissimi), on the score of our sacramental baby-killing and the baby-eating that goes with it (sacramento infanticidii et pabulo inde) and the incest that follows the banquet, where the dogs are our pimps in the dark, forsooth, and make a sort of decency for guilty lusts by overturning the lamps.

That, at all events, is what you always say about us; and yet you take no pains to bring into the daylight what you have been saying about us all this long time. Then, I say, either bring it out, if you believe all this, or refuse to believe it after leaving it uninvestigated.”20

And even more drastic is Tertullian’s malicious parody of the alleged Christian ritual in the following chapter, ironically inviting the Jewish interlocutor to join in with the Christians:

Come, plunge the knife into the baby, nobody’s enemy, guilty of nothing, everybody’s child; or, if that is another man’s job, do you just stand by (that is all), by this human creature dying before it has lived; watch for the young soul as it escapes; catch the infant blood,  steep your bread with it; eat and enjoy it.

Meanwhile, as you recline on your couch, reckon the places where your mother, your sister, may be; make a careful note so that, when the darkness of the dogs’ contriving shall fall, you can make no mistake.

.

You will be guilty of a sin, unless you have committed incest. So initiated, so sealed, you live for ever…. 

You must have a baby, still tender, that can know nothing of death, that can smile under your knife; add a loaf to catch its juicy blood; add lampstands and lamps, a dog or two, and some sops to set the dogs tumbling the lamps over; above all, you must come with your mother and sister.21

This story, as Elias Bickerman has demonstrated in a famous article,22 is nothing but the anti-Christian adaptation of an originally anti-Jewish propaganda narrative that accuses the Jews of ritualistic cannibalism. Its most prominent anti-Jewish propagandist is Apion, the Greek scholar of Egyptian origin in first century C.E. Alexandria, who, according to Josephus, relates the “malicious slander” about the Jews, capturing, fattening, slaughtering, and finally consuming the flesh of a foreigner (Greek) in a bizarre ritual.23

In our anti-Christian version, the clandestine symposium consists of the two elements of cannibalism and sexual orgies among the participants, more precisely (in Tertullian) incestuous sexual orgies.

[JdN: “Incestuous” here would likely refer to brother-sister sex, since Christians wer well-known to address each other, then as now, as “brother” or “sister.”]

The more detailed description in the second quotation from Tertullian, with the blood of the slaughtered child collected by the bread and then shared by all the participants, is clearly a parody of the wine and bread of the Eucharist.24

And the incestuous sexual orgy seems to be an inversion of the Christian command to love one another.25 Hence, according to the early Church Fathers, the Jews take up a propaganda narrative that was originally directed against them and turn it into a powerful anti-Christian weapon with the declared goal to discredit the new sect once and forever.

Ironically, in our Eliezer b. Hyrkanos story, it is the Jewish rabbis who adopt this anti-Christian propaganda and apply (part of ) it to one of them—to mark, and eliminate, him as the arch-heretic.

Schaefer confirms that the Talmud repeatedly calls Mary a whore and Jesus “the whore’s son”: