New Book by Princeton Professor: What the Talmud Really Says About Jesus

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I take this opportunity to answer two questions that are increasingly being e-mailed to me this week concerning the quality and value of two new books.

http://www.piratenews.org/bush_with_talmud.jpgThe first is "Jesus in the Talmud" (Princeton Univ. Press, 2007) by Prof. Peter Schäfer. I have an advance copy (the official release date is March). This book is an exceedingly important and historic landmark, part of what I term, "the Making Manifest of All that is Hidden." In spite of the fact that Schäfer is writing for specialists, not laymen, and he is not a very good writer (his prose is often clumsy and jumbled), the diligent researcher will find a gold mine here that severely undercuts the legion of Judaic apologists who have been declaring these many decades that Jesus is not in the Talmud, it's an "anti-semitic" myth, or if they concede there is "some fleeting mention," they trivialize it with the notion that He and His mother are not disparaged to any unusual or troubling degree. All of that dissembling trash-talk is now destined for the dustbin, due to Schafer.

Schäfer's book does not cover everything (the Toledot Yeshu, because it is not part of canonical Judaism, is not included); I am not happy with many of Schafer's interpretations of the data, but the raw data to prove the case of the extent to which Jesus and Mary are defamed in the most filthy and vile terms, is here furnished and that is an invaluable service.

Why has Prof. Schäfer's book been published? I think perhaps it may be due to the sophisticated arguments and persistence of the researchers who oppose the Talmud and who are at work in this field today. Perhaps my book, "Judaism's Strange Gods" (now out of print) served as a goad to Schafer and his handlers. A few years ago the ADL issued a report devoted to the documentation on Jesus in the Talmud which I had excavated. Moreover, certain rabbis operate websites devoted to refuting my book (although often deliberately misspelling the title or omitting it altogether).

Schäfer's work is probably a combination of damage control--a desire to manage the revelations by having them emanate from an Establishment source--and a function of the alchemical Revelation of the Method. Elie Wiesel has allegedly approved the book and this has led some researchers to believe that it is just another whitewash. I'm not sure why the demented holohoax mystic Wiesel has offered an approbation; I only know that "Jesus in the Talmud" is a boon to my own research.

I append, below, an opinion of the book by the somewhat independent-minded Judaic David Klinghoffer, who praises it and acknowledges its veracity, only to toss in a lie, claiming that the revelation of what many of us have known along, that the Talmud is hate literature, now puts it on par with the equally hateful anti-Judaic polemic in the New Testament.

Klinghoffer's analogy fails; in fact it an absurdly transparent and desperate measure to stave off what ought to be a tidal wave of revulsion and repudiation of Judaism in the wake of Schafer's book. Klinghoffer's role in the damage control is to condede the thesis but spin the conclusion: now we have a level playing field between two pieces of hate literature, one Christian, the other Judaic.

Where, however, in the New Testament, is there any claim that Hillel's mother was a whore or that she bore him as the result of having sex with a Roman soldier nicknamed the "Panther" (Pandera)? Where in the New Testament is there anything about mother/son Pharisees approaching the pornographic vitriol which the Talmud spews at Jesus and Mary?

Mary was a chaste and humble Jewish girl. How can she merit any defamation whatsover, except for the fact that she gave birth to the Messiah of Israel? For that she is declared lewd, shameless, an adulteress and a nymphomaniac who her husband had to lock up to keep her from having sex with other men (BT Gittin 90a).

If the Talmud proceeded from fact to draw opinions about Christianity, that would be one thing. But the Father of Lies venerated by the rabbis of Orthodox Judaism does not deal in fact. Orthodox Judaism relates filthy lies about the Christian savior and His Mother purely as a vehicle for vengeance and resentment. There is no parallel in the New Testament.

Lastly, I have been asked about a rumor about a book published in Europe supposedly by an Israeli professor, alleging a large number of cases of Judaics who crucified Christian children, drank their blood and other gruesome stuff. If this is not an Internet hoax, and there really is such a book by an Israeli academic no less, I would certainly want to see it, since it would contradict the most eminent Christian Hebraists, from Eisenmenger onward, all of whom reported that psychotic crimes like these, while not unknown, were rare and comparatively few in number among religiously-motivated Judaics (apart from the serial killers and predators produced by every nation of people without regard to religion).

Not having seen this supposed new ritual murder book, I cannot assess it. But in general terms, the Cryptocracy has always wanted to keep our contest with Judaism centered around lurid themes of "Jewish Ritual Murder" and bogus tracts like "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," and by this means distract from serious and far more sophisticated exposures of Judaism, while stigmatizing us as crackpots. The Arabs have been particularly vulnerable to these planted stories and books. The truth about Judaism is horrible enough. There is no need to embellish it.