Orthodox Jewish beliefs (1)

Rabbi David Pollina (The Sunday Times, July 8) contended that the "designation" of Scripture is exclusively reserved for Tanakh (Old Testament) whereas what Christians call the "New Testament" is not Scripture.

So, according to him, revenge, vengeance, killings and destruction, for instance, exemplified in Samuel 1.27: 9, 11 and Num 31: 2, 7, 17 pass for Scripture but certainly not Luke 6: 20-26 (the Sermon on the Mount).

Again, according to the Rabbi, Jesus and Paul were not Christian because they were Jews - meaning that Jews cannot be Christians. Moreover, "the man from Nazareth", Jesus or, to give Him the Hebrew name, Y'shua, "never founded a new Church or religion".

I would not be surprised if Rabbi Pollina, after having expressed very clearly his views on Christianity, objects to my choice of very few references to the way Jesus, Christianity and the New Testament are vilified by religious fundamentalists in Israel.

According to the Talmud, the real authority for the Jewish orthodox beliefs, the rabbinical court quite properly condemned Jesus for idolatry and contempt for rabbinical authority - the Romans aren't mentioned.

Gospel accounts are detested and they are not allowed to be quoted even in modern Israeli Jewish schools. Among the orthodox, the name of Jesus, Y'shua, is an acronym-curse for "may his name and memory be wiped out". The revered Maimonides appends a similar curse to the name of Jesus in his attacks on Christianity.

Jews are instructed to burn, publicly if possible, any copy of the New Testament that comes into their hands. This is not only still in force but copies of the New Testament were publicly and ceremonially burnt in Jerusalem under the auspices of Yad Le'akhin, a Jewish religious organisation subsidised by the Israeli Ministry of Religions.

And what about Rabbi Joseph's publicly declared doctrine that Jews, when sufficiently powerful, have a religious obligation to expel all non-Jews from Israel and destroy all Christian churches?

This declaration was made before 1996 and, in spite of it, he was often courted openly during the election of that year. Rabbi Joseph thus illustrated the fierce and visible hatred of Christianity and Christians among fundamentalist religious Jews.

Finally, consider also the case that Israeli educational authorities removed the international plus sign from the textbooks of elementary arithmetic used in the first grades of Israeli schools - meaning that the Cross is anathema in Israel.

All this and much, much more can be found in Jewish History, Jewish Religion (1994) by the late Israel Shahak, an Holocaust survivor and former Professor of Organic Chemistry and a renowned human rights activist; and Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (1999) by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky (Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University).