american-holocaust

SEX, RACE AND HOLY WAR 175ideas about Christianity, based in large measure on their Ma'aseh Yeshu("Story of Jesus") or Told6t Yeshu ("History of Jesus") dating from thelate second century. Created as a defense against Christian teaching andproselytizing, this work tells the story of Jesus' illegitimate birth nine monthsafter his mother had been seduced during her menstrual period; from thereit goes on to describe the young man's life as a blasphemous sorcerer, hisexecution by hanging, and the theft of his body from its grave-followedby the dragging of the corpse through the streets of Jerusalem, therebyputting to the lie any notions that he had not died or that he had beenbodily resurrected. 81By the time of the high Middle Ages, in the Hebrew chronicles recountingthe Christians' persecutions of the Jews, Jesus was being described as"an abhorred offshoot, a bastard, a son of a menstruating woman, a sonof lechery, a trampled corpse, their [the Christians'] detestable thing, thedesecrated and detestable hanged one, the son of whoredom," and more. 82Modern Jewish historians long have been of two minds on the recountingof these invectives, some urging their suppression from the historical recordso as not to encourage anti-Semitic responses, others arguing for theirfull discussion as examples of the understandable rage Jews felt as thevictims of violent Christian persecution. 83 Recently, however, it has beenshown that the invectives' principal historical value may reside in the sensethey convey, not so much of rage, but of "the efforts of the Jews to keeptheir group together by consolidating their defenses against the forcesthreatening the continued existence of a corporate Jewish identity." 84 Forif the Jewish resistance to Christian conversion efforts was extraordinaryandit was-the lengths to which Jews were forced to go in order to holdtheir communities together is a measure of the equally extraordinary pressuresthey were under.As Raul Hilberg has noted, since the beginning of Christianity's engagementwith Judaism as a separate religion it has presented Jews successivelywith three options from which to choose: convert to Christianity,suffer expulsion, or undergo annihilation. At first, writes Hilberg, "themissionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to liveamong us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: Youhave no right to live among us. The German Nazis at last decreed: Youhave no right to live." 85 If anything, however, Hilberg's historical encapsulationis too benign, for Jews were being massacred by Christians evenbefore the dawn of the twelfth century.The first great slaughter of Europe's Jews by Christians began on May3, 1096, in the town of Speyer, Germany. There, on that date, eleven Jewswho refused to accept baptism and conversion to the despised faith ofChristianity were murdered. The number of deaths would have been muchhigher, but for the intercession of the local bishop who understood thecanon law's technical restrictions against forced conversion, and who pro-