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According to many Jews, Christianity is idolatry and Christians will go to hell.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/the-fate-of-gentiles
The Fate of the Gentiles
Why did Medieval Jews envision divine punishment of Christians at the end of days? Surprisingly, it’s not just because Christians were always trying to kill them.
BY
DAVID BERGER
OCTOBER 22, 2021
his essay was originally presented in Hebrew at an “evening of study” in Jerusalem convened on January 1, 1996 to commemorate the thousandth anniversary of the attacks on Jews by crusaders in the spring of 1096. When I began the presentation, I remarked that an Israeli historian whom I had called after arriving in Jerusalem commented on the Jewish penchant for commemorating catastrophes by saying, “You have arrived for the Festival of 1096.” I went on to say that years earlier, the American Academy for Jewish Research had held a conference commemorating the thousandth anniversary of the death of the Jewish courtier Hasdai ibn Shaprut counting from the first year when he might have died. So it is only appropriate that Jews should commemorate the terrible events of 1096 on the very first day of 1996 even though they had taken place in later months. Whatever the timing, the subject of that evening’s presentations remains tragically relevant.
The hostile attitude toward Christian society found in medieval Ashkenazic literature is quite well known and hardly needs to be demonstrated. Expressions of bitter animosity toward Christianity and its adherents are found throughout this literature, most especially in liturgical poetry, even before the catastrophe of the First Crusade in 1096. Israel Yuval has recently argued that these expressions of animosity are not merely reactions to medieval persecutions, but rather are rooted in an ancient, more comprehensive worldview, associated with apocalyptic ideas about the ultimate redemption. However, he admits that the bloody incidents in 1096 certainly made this animosity harsher, and strengthened the Jews’ desire for vengeance. The unprecedented attacks and the martyrdom of thousands of Jews became implanted in the collective, long term Ashkenazic consciousness, and they reinforced the feelings of revulsion toward the murderous enemy and his false religion.
The Hebrew chronicles that deal with these events are filled with curses and expressions of reproach toward the Christian faith and its founder. Such expressions are found not only during the emotionally charged time of the catastrophe itself; in the years following 1096, too, Ashkenazic literature contains many terms of extreme derision and degradation for all that Christianity considers sacred. This phenomenon is found most especially in polemical literature, which focuses primarily on the question of true religion.
Our point of departure here will be Ashkenazic polemical literature, as expressed in its three major representatives: Sefer Yosef ha-Meqanne, Sefer Nizzahon Yashan (Nizzahon Vetus), and the disputation of R. Yehiel of Paris. However, our analysis will broaden from time to time, and we will deal with polemical literature from other areas and later periods, and other branches of medieval Jewish literature.
There are many dimensions to the image of “the other,” but the first (often neglected in scholarly literature) is the physical dimension. An oppressed minority tends to adopt and internalize the values of the general culture to a certain extent. The Jews of the Middle Ages attempted to resist this tendency as far as religious and spiritual values were concerned— but a strange, gripping passage from Yosef ha-Meqanne, which appears in a different formulation in Sefer Nizzahon Yashan, shows that on the aesthetic/physical plane, this process did affect the Jews:
“Therefore have I also made you contemptible and base before all the people” (Malachi 2:9). A certain apostate said to R. Nathan: “You Jews are uglier than any people on the face of the earth, whereas we are very beautiful.” He responded: “What is the color of the blossom of the shveske which are called prunelles, which grow in the bushes?” The apostate replied: “White.” The rabbi asked: “And what color is the blossom of the apple tree?” The apostate replied: “Red.” The rabbi explained: “Thus, we come from clean, white seed, so our faces are black; but you are from red seed—from menstruants—and therefore your faces are yellow and ruddy.” But the real reason is that we are in exile, as it says in the Song of Songs, “Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun has gazed upon me: my mother’s children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards; but my own vineyard have I not kept” (Song of Songs 1:6). However, when I used to keep my own vineyard, I was quite beautiful indeed, as it is written, “And your renown went forth among the heathen for your beauty” (Ezekiel 16:14).
R. Nathan’s response is representative of the classic polemical approach arguing that an apparent defect is actually an asset: supposed physical inferiority is a direct result of ethical superiority. However, the author himself says that in fact, it is the exile that is truly responsible for the physical unattractiveness of the Jews. Either way, the Jewish partner in the debate is affirming the aesthetic judgment made by the gentiles. Since the criteria for attractiveness are largely subjective, the Jews’ agreement with the gentile assessment has deep psychological significance.
Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson already noted this point in connection with the parallel passage in Sefer Nizzahon Yashan. However, there is a major difference in that text:
The heretics [i.e., the Christians] ask: Why are most Gentiles fair-skinned and handsome while most Jews are dark and ugly? Answer them that this is similar to a fruit; when it begins to grow it is white but when it ripens it becomes black, as is the case with sloes and plums. On the other hand, any fruit which is red at the beginning becomes lighter as it ripens, as is the case with apples and apricots. This, then, is testimony that Jews are pure of menstrual blood so that there is no initial redness. Gentiles, however, are not careful about menstruant women and have sexual relations during menstruation; thus, there is redness at the outset, and so the fruit that comes out, i.e., the children, are light. One can respond further by noting that Gentiles are incontinent and have sexual relations during the day, at a time when they see the faces on attractive pictures; therefore, they give birth to children who look like those pictures, as it is written, “And the sheep conceived when they came to drink before the rods” [Gen. 30:38–39].
Sefer Nizzahon Yashan retains the same aesthetic judgment as Yosef ha- Meqanne; however, unlike Yosef ha-Meqanne, this author is unwilling to forego the consolation of reversing the gentile’s argument even in his second explanation. Thus, the exile disappears entirely, and the second response provides a different version of the connection between physical ugliness and ethical beauty. Sefer Nizahon Yashan is a very aggressive work; in other passages, it argues that Jews are superior even on the physical level: “This is the interpretation of the statement, ‘You have saved us from evil and faithful diseases,’ in which we thank God for saving us from being afflicted with impure issue, leprosy and skin disease, as they are.” The fact that this author, who is prepared to formulate surprisingly vigorous and aggressive arguments, sees Christian aesthetic superiority as a self-evident truth lends all the more significance to this phenomenon.
The same effort to turn a physical defect into a spiritual asset can be seen clearly in a unique passage which Marc Saperstein published from Isaac ben Yeda‘ya’s commentary to Midrash Rabbah. The author of this passage, who clearly suffered from a sexual problem, attributed this problem to all circumcised men. He writes as a general rule that circumcised men are unable to satisfy their wives’ sexual needs; consequently, Jewish women do not receive much benefit from their husbands’ presence and are willing to let them go study Torah and wisdom. This is not the case, however, with respect to the wives of the uncircumcised, whose husbands possess highly impressive sexual potency. Consequently, these men expend their time and energy in such activity and remain immersed in the vanity of the physical world.
These attempts sound pathetic to the modern reader, and they were probably not particularly convincing in the Middle Ages either. Now, from the isolated example of Isaac ben Yeda‘ya, which deals with very private matters, it is hard to argue that many Jews considered themselves inferior to gentiles in their sexual ability. However, the sources about physical beauty appear quite convincing. In the consciousness of many Jews, ethical and spiritual superiority came at a very high physical and psychological price.
A famous passage in Isaac Polgar’s ‘Ezer ha-Dat reflects the same problem and the same tendency. The topic of this passage is the cause of the suffering of exile—a major, central issue that I shall not address here. However, when Polgar writes that Jews suffer under the yoke of the gentiles because they have forgotten the art of war due to their dedication to the study of Torah and wisdom, the Temple service, and the cultivation of the quality of compassion, he is attempting to transform physical weakness into an ethical-spiritual asset.
The authors of polemical literature were primarily interested in identifying the true religion, and such identification is not necessarily dependent on the ethical behavior of the community that believes in that religion. Nevertheless, polemicists in various regions and eras felt that there was a connection between a religion of truth and people of truth. R. Joseph Kimhi pointed to the ethical superiority of the Jews, and his Christian opponent (according to the Jewish record of the debate) was forced to admit that this was correct, but he countered with the response that even such ethical behavior was useless without the proper faith. A re-working of this passage appears in an Ashkenazic manuscript from the fourteenth century, which also includes considerable material from the school of Yosef ha-Meqanne and from the traditions that were incorporated into Sefer Nizzahon Yashan.
These two polemical works, as well as Milhemet Mizvah by R. Meir of Narbonne, an Ashkenazic compilation attributed to R. Moses of Salerno, the Tosafistic commentary Da‘at Zeqenim on the Pentateuch, and Nahmanides’ Sefer ha-Ge’ullah all view the expression “a degenerate nation” in Deuteronomy 32:21 as referring to the Christians. In the words of Yosef ha-Meqanne: “If there were any nation more degenerate than you, it would be the one to subjugate us.” It is specifically in Ashkenazic polemics that special emphasis is placed on the sins of priests, monks, and nuns. As I have noted with great brevity in my introduction to the Nizzazon Yashan, it seems to me that this fierce attack flows from a feeling of Jewish discomfort in the face of religious self-sacrifice by gentiles. Of course, abstention from sexual life is problematic from the perspective of Jewish law and the Jewish worldview, but the impressive phenomenon of the ability of Christians to conquer their own natural drives in order to fulfill the will of their creator must have weakened, if only slightly, the Jewish self-image of absolute moral superiority to the degenerate gentile.
Christians think non-Christians go to hell too.
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