I am taking a break from finishing my Pesach cleaning. The kitchen floor still needs to be washed, the cat box needs to be cleaned out -- then it's time for bedikat hametz and a well-deserved rest.

And then there's matter of our weather. As I sit here in my study looking outside into the dim evening, it's snowing. And the snow has even left a little deposit on the ground. When spring will actually arrive in Ithaca this year, only God knows. So I will laugh cynically at the thought that Pesach is a springtime holiday. Before it started to snow I did see a couple of daffodils blooming...which are now covered with the white stuff.

Monday night I'm going to friends' for the first seder, and then on the second night a whole crew of people are coming to my house -- first seder I've hosted in many years. It should be fun.

So let me wish all of you, my many readers (hah!) a "hag sameach ve-kasher" -- a happy and kosher Pesach, enjoyable seders, and imagination in eating something other than matzah for the days of Pesach.

An amusing article from Ha'aretz on Mel Gibson, Lenny Bruce, and especially Aramaic -- Een, Yuudaayaa naa. (Jim Davila over at PaleoJudaica has been on the Aramaic watch, and here's another good example).

But, unlike Latin, Aramaic is a living language though surely a threatened one. I already had a dim notion that Aramaic is still spoken by Christians in isolated hamlets of Syria, Lebanon and Iraqi Kurdistan. What I did not know, until a couple of years ago, is that it is still spoken by Jews. A cousin of my wife married a delightful young woman whose family belongs to a community that hails from an area of northwestern Iran - by Lake Ormiya near the border with Turkey and Azerbeijan. She told me that her parents spoke Aramaic. I admit I was incredulous. But it is true.

Her small community, which settled in Ormiya at the time of the Babylonian Exile and never left, calls itself "Nash Didan." They speak a dialect of Aramaic they call lishan didan - "our language." As I write, I have by me three books, lent to me by our cousin. They are translations from the Bible into lishan didan; the language is recognizably Aramaic. I later learned that Kurdish Jews also speak an Aramaic dialect they call lishna yehudiyya.

I find this survival of an ancient Jewish language profoundly moving, an unbroken link with a past that stretches back to the early years of the Babylonian Exile. Sadly, the language will probably disappear within a couple of generations: The young people of the community no longer speak it. Unlike Yiddish or Ladino it has no literature to speak of and we shall not see a chair in lishan didan studies endowed at any university. Truly a great pity.

So one cheer to Mel Gibson for Aramaic. But, as for the movie, if I ever have an overwhelming desire to see a crucifixion I think I'll look again at the DVD of "Life of Brian."

I have to say I agree with that last comment -- "Look on the bright side of life" indeed.

More on Neturei Karta, from the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv -- Arafat transferred funds to Neturei Karta.

Rabbi Moshe Hirsch, known as the “Foreign Minister” of Neturei Karta, has never hidden the fact that he prefers a Palestinian state in place of Israel - the Neturei Karta sect refuses to recognize the state of Israel until the coming of the Messiah. However, now it appears, from documents disclosed by the defense establishment, that Rabbi Hirsch has also been in the pay of PA Chairman Arafat himself.

The incriminating documents were captured in the Mukata, Arafat's headquarters, two years ago during Operation Defensive Shield. While looking for PA efforts to fund terror organizations, security officials discovered that large amounts of money had been transferred to the Neturei Karta sect in Jerusalem. The captured documents show that Hirsch received from Arafat $55 thousand just two months before Operation Defensive Shield. Among the documents are receipts with Arafat’s personal signature authorizing the transfer to Rabbi Hirsch under the heading “outgoing expenses”. In the same period, Arafat allocated a much lower sum to terror operatives.

The captured documents include letters written in English by Hirsch to Arafat. The letters are addressed as to an eminent rabbi: “Dear Abu Amar (Arafat’s Arabic name), may you live a long and happy life”.

Hirsch has never hidden his relationship with Arafat. He is a regular member of the Palestinian National Council and served in the past as Minister of Jewish Affairs in a Palestinian government. Members of the sect recently demonstrated against Israel and for Palestine at the International Court of Justice at the Hague.

This article gives evidence for some of my fears about what would happen when "The Passion" started showing in other countries -- especially in the Middle East. Arab censors giving 'Passion' wide latitude / Gibson film packs Mideast movie houses

Here's another 'Passion of the Christ' a blockbuster among Arab Muslims and Christians

It seems that many viewers not only see a strong anti-Jewish message -- they think it's part of the film's appeal. A Jordanian Muslim woman says she was moved to tears when she saw the movie at an Amman theater. She says the movie "unmasked the Jews' lies." Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat saw the move over the weekend in the West Bank. He compared the pain Jesus endured during the crucifixion to the suffering he says Israel has inflicted on Palestinians.

EU "covered up" attacks on Jews by young Muslims

Via LGF -- EU 'covered up' attacks on Jews by young Muslims. This is a follow-up to the EU suppression of a German report on European anti-semitism.

Jewish leaders accused the European Union yesterday of covering up the true scale of anti-Semitic violence carried out by Muslim youths, reigniting a controversy over Europe's failure to confront Islamic extremism at home.

A study released by the EU's racism and xenophobia monitoring centre astounded experts by concluding that the wave of anti-Jewish persecution over the last two years stemmed from neo-Nazi or other racist groups.

"The largest group of the perpetrators of anti-Semitic activities appears to be young, disaffected white Europeans," said a summary released to the European Parliament . "A further source of anti-Semitism in some countries was young Muslims of North African or Asian extraction." "Traditionally, anti-Semitic groups on the extreme Right played a part in stirring opinion," it added.

The headline findings contradict the body of the report. This says most of the 193 violent attacks on synagogues, Jewish schools, kosher shops, cemeteries and rabbis in France in 2002 - up from 32 in 2001 - were "ascribed to youth from neighbourhoods sensitive to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, principally of North African descent." "The percentage attributable to the extreme Right was only nine per cent in 2002," it said.

Victor Weitzel, who wrote a large section of yesterday's far more detailed study, told The Telegraph that the latest findings had been consistently massaged by the EU watchdog to play down the role of North African youth. "The European Union seems incapable of facing up to the truth on this," he said. "Everything is being tilted to ensure nice soft conclusions.

"When I told them that we need to monitor the inflammatory language being used by the Arab press in Europe, this was changed to the 'minority press'.

"Honestly, it's incredible," he said.

Mr Weitzel's 48-page section - compiled with a Polish academic, Magadalena Sroda - is the fruit of months of interviews with Jewish leaders across Europe. While far-Right and traditional "Christian" forms of anti-Semitism still exist, the report homes in on a new form of "anti-Zionist Left" prejudice.

This demonises Israel and subtly leaks into prejudice against all Jews. The study describes Belgium as a country where anti-Semitism has become almost fashionable among the Left-leaning intelligentsia.

Andrew Sullivan reminded me today of this great article by Ron Rosenbaum -- Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee.

Another Neturei Karta connection -- on October 3, 2000, their spokesman appeared at the International Action Center (the group from which International ANSWER spawned).

I had wondered, in the last couple of years, who the obviously Orthodox Jews were who appeared at various anti-war and anti-Israel rallies -- the Neturei Karta website makes it plain that they are. Another interesting thing about their website -- they have a list of "documents in other languages" -- including Russian, Italian, Arabic, and Persian -- but not Hebrew.

Neturei Karta

Another example of Jews being our own worst enemies....

While cruising around LGF, I found a link to the amazing website of Neturei Karta. Neturei Karta is the extreme ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist group that, in this web page, condemns the assassination of Sheikh Yassin. Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss says in his statement on behalf of Neturei Karta that "we mourn together with our Palestinian cousins, the murder of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin."

He continues, "And so we are reminded of one of the exceptional attributes of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin. How he constantly drew a clear distinction between true Judaism and Zionism and between the practitioners of Judaism and Zionist perpetrators. The followers of Judaism were never considered by the Sheik to be an obstacle to true peace." Apparently Neturei Karta is not disturbed by Hamas suicide attacks that kill religious as well as non-religious Jews, Zionist as well as anti-Zionist Jews, Arabs as well as Jews.

Once again proving that Jews can be our own worst enemies -- British MP wants economic sanctions against Israel.

A British Member of Parliament from the ruling Labour party, Gerald Kaufman, has called for economic sanctions against Israel, including cutting off arms supplies, to force it back to the negotiating table with the Palestinians.

"It is not enough for the world community, including our own Government, to condemn the Israeli Government's brutal policies of repression," he said, addressing members of his Manchester constituency.

"Only widespread economic sanctions on Israel, together with cutting off arms supplies, can make any impact on this Government without a conscience".

Mr Kaufman, himself Jewish, said US President George W Bush's father, the former president Bush, had "understood the importance of forcing the Israelis to the conference table by imposing economic sanctions on a previous Likud Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir".

Mr Kaufman, once a frontbench Labour foreign affairs spokesman when the party was in opposition, criticised a decision by Mr Bush to receive Mr Sharon in Washington.

"Bush has shown whose side he is on in this grossly unequal struggle by refusing to invite the Palestinian Prime Minister, even though the ostensible purpose of the invitation to Sharon is the Middle East peace process," Mr Kaufman said.

Mr Sharon has received an invitation to meet Mr Bush on April 14.

-- AFP

Another blogger has stumbled across Carol Valentine's anti-semitic Talmud site -- Catallarchy.net: Are these the Nazis, Walter?

A good surprisingly good column from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, reprinted from the Independent, on the assassination of Sheikh Yassin. I don't know if it was the prudent or wise thing for Israel to kill Yassin now, but it's nonsense to call him the "spiritual" leader of Hamas (the spirituality of murdering Jews?), and it's equally nonsense to focus on the fact that he was in a wheelchair as if that meant that he was a mere figurehead. Yassin was the founder of a murderous organization whose goal is to destroy the state of Israel. Hamas is not interested in a two-state solution, and never pretended that it was. The Hamas Covenant mentions the Protocols of the Elders of Zion approvingly.

As Part III, article 11, states: "The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine has been an Islamic Waqf throughout the generations and until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it, or abandon it or part of it."

Part III, article 12, states: "[Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion."

Part III, article 22 details "the powers which support the enemy." These include, "the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith and the like."

Part IV, article 32 says, "For Zionist scheming has no end, and after Palestine they will covet expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates. Only when they have completed digesting the area on which they will have laid their hand, they will look forward to more expansion, etc. Their scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present [conduct] is the best proof of what is said there."

Well, this is a relief -- Arafat says Gibson's 'Passion' not anti-Semitic. I was waiting for someone authoritative to inform me....

Apparently Yasser Arafat has become a film critic (unlike the Pope). He says that "The Passion of the Christ" is "Impressive". The article from the "International Press Centre -- Palestinian National Authority State Information Service" also includes this little gem:

Nabil Abu Rudeneh, one of Arafat's closest advisors, watched the film along with the Palestinian President and a group of American and European men of cloth and Palestinian Muslim clerics.

"The Palestinians are still being daily exposed to the kind of pain Jesus was exposed to during his crucifixion," Abu Rudeneh said in a statement after he watched the movie.

Ah, so the Palestinians = Jesus, and if so, the Israelis and current-day Jews = Christkillers. Interesting theology....

(My thanks to PaleoJudaica for pointing this article out).

On a far more pleasant note, the Ithaca College theatre department is performing Yentl, the play based on Isaac Bashevis Singer's short story, "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy". This will be the culmination of the year's Yiddish culture events, sponsored by Jewish Studies, Hillel, and a number of other groups on the IC campus.

LGF has more information about one of the demonstrators at the Hollywood demonstration: "What the Associated Press doesn’t tell you about Emily Richard and her little play starring Emily, is that she is holding an Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades poster—the branch of Arafat’s Fatah group responsible for numerous acts of mass murder in Israel. The same depraved posters that are plastered across the walls of the West Bank and Gaza are now carried by Western idiots through the streets of Los Angeles."

Going through the Yahoo News Photos of protests today against the beginning of the Iraq war a year ago, it is remarkable how many of these demonstrations around the world feature anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian signs. For example, photo 133, from a London anti-war demonstration, features at least two signs that say "Free Palestine" and "Freedom for Palestine." Photo 135, from an Amman protest, features people holding up pictures of Saddam Hussein (I'm not sure why this should be labeled an "anti-war" march by Yahoo, rather than a "pro-Saddam" demonstration). People are also wearing ties that show all of historic Palestine on them with Arabic lettering across the map. Photo 154, from Rio de Janeiro, features an Israeli flag, equated with the swastika, and red paint or blood across it. Photo 158, from Paris, shows several people holding signs that say "Killers! Troops out of Iraq, Justice in Palestine." Across the top of the sign there are pictures of Bush, Sharon, Blair, and Aznar. A Spanish demonstrator holds a sign with a dove pierced through by a dollar sign and a star of David (photo 170).

Photo 177 shows a neo-Nazi anti-U.S. demonstration in Munich. Photo 206, of a Communist Party of India demonstration in New Delhi, shows two signs: one says, "Try Bush Blair as War criminals" and the other says "Release Saddam and other Iraqi leaders immediately and unconditionally." Photo 208 from London shows, among other signs, "End the Occupation of Iraq, Freedom for Palestine." A "peaceful" sign in the Sydney demonstration (Photo 229) reads "Kill Bush, Blair, Sharon and Coward, the 4 terrorists." Photo 24, from Hollywood, has signs from International ANSWER, including "Bring the troops home now, end colonial occupation -- Iraq, Palestine, Haiti & Everywhere." I wasn't aware that U.S. troops were engaged in a colonial occupation of Palestine.... Photo 40, of the San Francisco demonstration, has a big sign also from ANSWER that reads "U.S. OUT! Free Palestine!" Photo 59, from Chicago, shows a demonstrator being arrested, carrying a sign that says "Palestine will be free."

Frankly, it's a bit baffling to me why these demonstrations are necessarily labeled "anti-Iraq war" by Yahoo, because many of them, according to the signs, appear to be for a hodge-podge of causes that have been piggy-backed onto anti-Iraq war protests. And at least judging from the signs, many of the demonstrations are sponsored by far-left organizations such as ANSWER, the Socialist Workers or International Socialist Organization -- hardly an attractive band of protestors, to my taste.

More on the G.O.P.'s anti-gay crusade from Andrew Sullivan. He finishes by saying, "I have to say that I have been culpably naive about this administration on this issue. They led me to believe they weren't hostile to gay people, that they would not use anti-gay sentiment to gain votes, that they would not roll back very basic protections for gay federal employees. I was lied to. We were all lied to. But now we know."

Once again, Tom Friedman gets it right in Axis of Appeasement. He says: "The notion that Spain can separate itself from Al Qaeda's onslaught on Western civilization by pulling its troops from Iraq is a fantasy. Bin Laden has said that Spain was once Muslim and he wants it restored that way. As a friend in Cairo e-mailed me, a Spanish pullout from Iraq would only bring to mind Churchill's remark after Chamberlain returned from signing the Munich pact with Hitler: 'You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.'" This is what I fear also. Friedman is also right in this column to decry the way that the Bush Administration is rebuilding Iraq -- on the cheap, with as few American troops as possible, and without any serious attempt to work with the U.N. to create an Iraqi democracy. But at the moment I'm more afraid of how Al Qaeda will understand the results of the Spanish election.

One of the amusing things about doing this blog is noticing the Google ads at the top of the page. Right now there are two ads for cookies -- one from "Chip-N-Dough Cookies" and one to "send a bouquet of cookies". Kind of contradicts my attempts to adhere to Weight Watchers....

Another evil terrorist bombing, this time in Madrid -- Spain Struggles to Absorb Worst Terrorist Attack in Its History. It's not known yet who's responsible -- the Basque terrorist group ETA seems to be the main suspect, but there are other possibilities as well.

My friend Ben Greenberg has just started a blog, HungryBlues, to discuss his father's (Paul Greenberg) life and times -- his involvement in the civil rights movement, labor struggles, and his relationships with some of the jazz luminaries of the swing age. Ben is also a wonderful poet. Seems like an interesting blog to follow....

As Jim Davila points out, the Passion won't be eligible for a foreign-language Oscar. The film was made by an American film company -- but even if that were not a problem, which country would nominate it for the foreign-language Oscar? Iraq, Syria....or for that matter the U.S., since many of the Middle Eastern Christians who speak Aramaic have now moved to the United States? Or maybe even Italy....?

In an interesting article, Hypocrisy and anti-Semitism, Yossi Sarid (member of Knesset from the Meretz party, a left-wing, secular Zionist party in Israel), makes some telling points about the linkage between the Israel right and the fundamentalist Christian right in the U.S., which supports the state of Israel and has also extolled the wonders of "The Passion" by Mel Gibson. I think he's misled on some points in the article (for example, he seems to think that the movie is just being faithful to the gospels, when it's clearly not, since so much is taken from Emmerich's writings), but he does sound the alarm about something real (for more information on this linkage, see the recent book by Gershon Gorenberg, End of Days on Jewish, Christian, and Muslim messianism centered on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem).

An interesting article on Beliefnet gives a more thorough discussion of the scenes taken from Emmerich's book 'The Passion': What's Not in the Bible?. An article by Laura Sheahen, also on Beliefnet, Another Scriptwriter for Mel Gibson's 'Passion'?, gives information about Emmerich and quotes a selection from her book that depicts Jews as suffering from a kind of original sin as a result of the utterance recorded in Matt. 27:25:

"Whenever, during my meditations on the Passion of our Lord, I imagine I hear that frightful cry of the Jews, ‘His blood be upon us, and upon our children,’ visions of a wonderful and terrible description display before my eyes at the same moment the effect of that solemn curse. ...this curse, which they have entailed upon themselves, appears to me to penetrate even to the very marrow of their bones, even to the unborn infants. They appear to me encompassed on all sides by darkness; the words they utter take, in my eyes, the form of black flames, which recoil upon them, penetrating the bodies of some, and only playing around others."

Although Gibson does not illustrate this vision in his movie, it is frightening that he would take Emmerich's visions as a guide for his movie.

A set of good resources on the movie is to be found at Resources on the Mel Gibson Movie, the Passion, a site on the Boston College web site.

At this site is a very good article by Philip Cunningham, a Catholic scholar, both on the sources of the film and the way it deviates from current Catholic teachings on Jews. As he notes, "The film is so dependent on her [Emmerich] that it could have been aptly titled The Passion According to Emmerich."

It turns out that the entire text of the book that Mel Gibson took as his inspiration for the movie is on line -- THE DOLOROUS PASSION OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST, by Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824).

Tim Challies, in a site with the subtitle, "Putting the Fun in Fundamentalism," has catalogued many of the scenes in the film that Gibson took from Emmerich's book. From my brief glance at the book, it seems to me that a good deal of the horror film atmosphere comes from Emmerich's book (and certainly not from the Gospels).

I thought the Passion was a powerful film -- but in a very disturbed and violent way. The camera lingered lovingly on every injury that Jesus suffered. I think that this film would have a seriously negative impact upon children who viewed it -- personally, I think it should have gotten an NC-17 rating for violence. The one really positive note in the film was the love depicted between Mary and Jesus, and this demonstrated the essentially Catholic nature of the film, since devotion to Mary is a very important strain in Catholicism, but not in Protestantism. I am curious to know what the Evangelical audience made of this devotion.

The priests are dressed up in ridiculous regalia that to my eye did not resemble what Exodus describes as priestly garb (it is described in this week's Torah portion, Tezaveh). The camera lingers on their bearded faces, many with the stereotypical Jewish hooked nose.

In an early scene in the Temple (at least I think it was there -- it was pretty unclear where a lot of the initial action occurred after the arrest of Jesus), it showed Jesus being led through the crowd, with people shouting at him in hatred. This is the scene where one really sees stereotypical depictions of Jews akin to those in medieval paintings -- they look demonic, with noses larger and more hooked than would be possible in a human being, with evil faces. They look like figures out of a Hieronymous Bosch painting.

Jesus appears before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, twice (following the gospel of John). After his first appearance before Pilate he is scourged (a scene of pornographic brutality, as Andrew Sullivan has noted), and then he is led out before Pilate again. As many people have commented in reviews, the film portrays Pilate as a sympathetic figure (even more sympathetic than his appearances in the Gospels). He is shown agonizing over the decision to crucify Jesus, and it is Caiaphas, the high priest, who manipulates him into that decision by threatening a revolt against Rome -- a scene that does not exist in any of the Gospels, of course. It is ludicrous to suggest that Pilate, known for his cruelty and brutality, would have been manipulated by one of his own native appointees (the high priests were appointed by Rome from among the high priestly families).

In this scene first Caiaphas, and then the priests and crowd at large shout out "crucify him!" This line is translated from Aramaic in the subtitles. The crowd also shouts out in Aramaic, "his blood be on us and on our children!" (taken from Matthew 27:25), but the line is left untranslated. I was listening for this line and heard it among the Aramaic cries of "crucify him!" Of course, not very many people know Aramaic -- but it seems to me that this translated line could be added in again if the film is shown in other cries, or when it is released as a DVD. This is one of the scenes that I think truly could foster renewed anti-semitism.

At the end, right after the crucifixion, there is what appears to be an earthquake, and in a quick cut to the Temple we see the floor splitting in two and priests falling into the crevasse. This is a scene not found in the Gospels. In Luke 23:45, it states that "the curtain of the Temple was torn in two" (see also Mark 15:38 and Matthew 27:51).

A note on the languages -- according to the colleague I saw the film with (who teaches Latin), the Latin was distinctly Italian-accented and occasionally became pure Italian. The actors seemed to me to speak the Latin much more fluently than the Aramaic, which they spoke very slowly and sometimes haltingly (making it easier for me to understand). There was a ludicrous scene when Pilate questioned Jesus in Aramaic -- I think it very unlikely that he would have spoken Aramaic, and it's much more likely that they both would have spoken Greek, as many have commented.

A very interesting review by Charles Krauthammer of Mel Gibson's "Passion". He notes that:

In none of the Gospels does the high priest Caiaphas stand there with his cruel, impassive fellow priests witnessing the scourging. In Gibson's movie they do. When it comes to the Jews, Gibson deviates from the Gospels -- glorying in his artistic vision -- time and again. He bends, he stretches, he makes stuff up. And these deviations point overwhelmingly in a single direction -- to the villainy and culpability of the Jews.

The most subtle, and most revolting, of these has to my knowledge not been commented upon. In Gibson's movie, Satan appears four times. Not one of these appearances occurs in the four Gospels. They are pure invention. Twice, this sinister, hooded, androgynous embodiment of evil is found . . . where? Moving among the crowd of Jews. Gibson's camera follows close up, documentary style, as Satan glides among them, his face popping up among theirs -- merging with, indeed, defining the murderous Jewish crowd. After all, a perfect match: Satan's own people.

When I saw the film last week that's one of the things I noticed -- Satan moving among the Jewish crowd. It reminded me of John 8:44. This is part of a long dialogue between Jesus and "the Jews" (as they are styled in this gospel; the other gospels are more nuanced, mentioning the priests, the scribes, or the Pharisees). John 8:42-44 reads, "Jesus said to them, 'If God were your Father, you would love me, for I proceeded and came forth from God; I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. Your are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him.'" In John's gospel, unbelieving Jews (as opposed to the Johannine community) are identified with the devil by Jesus' own words. I think it could be argued that this is where Mel Gibson got the idea to have Satan mingling with the Jewish crowd.

I'll be going to see the Passion tomorrow with students from my class on Biblical Interpretation -- it will be interesting to see after all the reviews I've read. I'm curious also to hear what the students' response will be.

Another excellent, and subtle, review of "The Passion" -- The Worship of Blood by Leon Wieseltier in the New Republic.

He says:

In its representation of its Jewish characters, The Passion of the Christ is without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie, and anybody who says otherwise knows nothing, or chooses to know nothing, about the visual history of anti-Semitism, in art and in film. What is so shocking about Gibson's Jews is how unreconstructed they are in their stereotypical appearances and actions. These are not merely anti-Semitic images; these are classically anti-Semitic images. In this regard, Gibson is most certainly a traditionalist.

....it is plain that the controversy about its inclusion of Matthew 27:25, the infamous cry of the Jews that "his blood be on us and our children," the imprecation that served through the centuries as the warrant for the Christian assault on the Jews, was a fake, a cynical game. When Jewish groups objected to this passage in the script, Gibson expediently deleted the English translation of it. I say expediently, because decency would have prevented him from including it, from shooting it, at all. But he may as well have kept it in, because it is entirely of a piece with the Jews whom he has invented. The figure of Caiaphas, played with disgusting relish by an actor named Mattia Sbragia, is straight out of Oberammergau. Like his fellow priests, he has a graying rabbinical beard and speaks with a gravelly sneer and moves cunningly beneath a tallit-like shawl streaked with threads the color of money. He is gold and cold. All he does is demand an execution. He and his sinister colleagues manipulate the ethically delicate Pilate into acquiescing to the crucifixion. (You would think that Rome was a colony of Judea.) Meanwhile the Jewish mob is regularly braying for blood. It is the Romans who torture Jesus, but it is the Jews who conspire to make them do so. The Romans are brutish, but the Jews are evil.

....his portrayal of the Jews is based on nothing more than his own imagination of what they looked like and sounded like. And Gibson's imagination has offered no resistance to the iconographical inheritance of Western anti-Semitism. Again, these things are not passively received. They are willingly accepted. Gibson created this movie; it was not revealed to him. Like his picture of Jesus, his picture of the Jews is the consequence of certain religious and cinematic decisions for which he must be held accountable. He has chosen to give millions of people the impression that Jews are culpable for the death of Jesus. In making this choice, which defies not only the scruples of scholars but also the teaching of the Catholic Church, Gibson has provided a fine illustration of the cafeteria Catholicism of the right.

An amazing review of "The Passion" by Andrew Sullivan. Here's what he has to say about the film's portrayal of Jews --

PILATE, THE SAINT: Is it anti-Semitic? The question has to be placed in the context of the Gospels and it is hard to reproduce the story without risking such inferences. But in my view, Gibson goes much further than what might be forgivable. The first scene in which Caiphas appears has him relaying to Judas how much money he has agreed to hand over in return for Jesus. The Jew - fussing over money again! There are a few actors in those scenes who look like classic hook-nosed Jews of Nazi imagery, hissing and plotting and fulminating against the Christ. For good measure, Gibson has the Jewish priestly elite beat Jesus up as well, before they hand him over to the Romans; and he has Jesus telling Pilate that he is not responsible - the Jewish elite is. Pilate and his wife are portrayed as saints forced by politics and the Jewish elders to kill a man they know is innocent. Again, this reflects part of the Gospels, but Gibson goes further. He presents Pilate's wife as actually finding Mary, providing towels to wipe up Jesus' blood, arguing for Jesus' release. Yes, the Roman torturers are obviously evil; yes, a few Jews dissent; and, of course, all the disciples are Jewish. I wouldn't say that this movie is motivated by anti-Semitism. It's motivated by psychotic sadism. But Gibson does nothing to mitigate the dangerous anti-Semitic elements of the story and goes some way toward exaggerating and highlighting them. To my mind, that is categorically unforgivable. Anti-Semitism is the original sin of Christianity. Far from expiating it, this movie clearly enjoys taunting those Catholics as well as Jews who are determined to confront that legacy. In that sense alone, it is a deeply immoral work of art.

Emphasis mine. The last two days have really been a blow -- first the President's decision to place himself firmly on the side of bigots by supporting a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, and now Mel Gibson's "Passion."

There was a point last year when I actually contemplated voting for Bush for re-election, when I felt that the war in Iraq and the struggle against Islamic terrorism were the most important issues facing this country, and it seemed to me that people on the left and the majority of centrist-liberals viewed the threat of terrorism merely as a law enforcement problem. . . but now I feel completely betrayed by the President. He is not taking our economic problems seriously -- he acts like the over 2 million jobs that have been lost over the last few years are just going to magically return this year in order to re-elect him. It's clear that this administration did very little realistic planning about what to do in Afghanistan and Iraq after invasion. And the administration has refused to deal with David Kay's very courageous statements about the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Kay was willing to admit in public to the press and to congressional committees that he was mistaken -- why can't our President and Vice-President act with equal honesty?

And now the President seems to have decided that the way to re-election is to trample on the rights of gay people, to codify into law that gay people should be second-class citizens. It's scary. When was the last time a serious presidential candidate or incumbent president ran on a platform of open bigotry? Strom Thurmond?

This interesting article by Amira Hass asks What scared those who sent the bomber? -- who bombed bus #14 in Jerusalem earlier this week.

This Haaretz article, Wednesday, the Jews go on trial again, details why I've decided to organize a discussion at my college about Mel Gibson's film, "The Passion of the Christ." While it seems that he has taken out the most inflammatory line (from Matthew: "Then answered all the people, and said, 'His blood be on us, and on our children'"), it seems like the film still places the major blame upon Jews for the death of Jesus (and not the Romans, the ruling colonial authority who had the power of life and death). The film came up in my Judaism class today -- a student asked a question about it, and instead of talking about the meaning of the Sh'ma, which was scheduled for today, we spent 40 minutes talking about the movie, the events leading up to Jesus' death, and the roots of anti-semitism. I was pleased to notice that my Christian students were shocked at the idea that Christians would call Jews "Christkillers" and blame them for the death of Jesus. It seemed apparent from the movie that many students would be seeing the movie, so I think it's important to sponsor an academic discussion of it in addition to all the newspaper articles, television spots, and popular discussion that's going on.

I received a very sad e-mail today from Yedidyah, the synagogue I belonged to in Jerusalem:

Women and mothers, come together to grieve and to cry out in silence during all of the nights of the shiva of the victims of the recent pigua [terrorist attack] - until (and including) Thursday night. We will meet at the site of the pigua, opposite the Liberty Bell Park gas station, at 22:00.

A curious detail in today's New York Times article about this morning's suicide bombing in Jerusalem -- the article stated that the bombing occurred at Liberty Bell Park, close to the intersection of Bethlehem Road and a street named Valley of the Ghosts. This street is usually called by its Hebrew name in English news reports -- Emek Refaim -- but it does literally refer to ghosts. When I lived on Emek Refaim in the late 1980s my friends and I used to joke around about the name.

The street names in Jerusalem generally have some historical significance -- they name famous figures of the Jewish past, events, "friends of the Jews" like Masaryk or Emile Zola, learned rabbis, biblical figures, and wars. On my last visit to Israel I was staying on Ha-Portzim St. -- "those who break through." This was the name of one of the military units that fought in the 1948 war in Jerusalem. A nearby street was named Kovshei Katamon -- "the conquerors of Katamon." Pre-1948 the Katamon neighborhood was Arab, and the Israeli forces fought fiercely to take the area from them. Then there's Kaf-Tet be-November -- "29th of November" St., referring to the date in 1947 when the U.N. voted to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state.

Another suicide bombing this morning during the rush hour in Jerusalem -- Palestinian Suicide Bomber Kills 7 Others on Jerusalem Bus. The attack occurred at the Liberty Bell Park, just north of the German Colony.

In this New York Daily News article, Furor just before Gibson's 'The Passion' opens, Hutton Gibson, Mel's father, rants about how the evil the Jews are: "Is the Jew still actively anti-Christian? He is, for by being a Jew, he is anti-everyone else."

I've been reading a lot about the Gibson's "Passion" (there's even a special section in this week's Forward about it), and I will be curious to see the film myself -- whether the problematic lines from Matthew have been retained (in which the Jewish crowd says "His blood be on us and our children"), and how the Jews are characterized. It's not a cinematic experience I'm exactly looking forward to, since I don't enjoy gory movies and I prefer to enjoy movies rather than watch them with a close eye for anti-semitism.

Some fun news from Israel -- Snow falls in Jerusalem. Good pictures also at the Jerusalem Post. I have been in Israel many times in January and have never yet enjoyed a good snowfall there.... On the other hand, since I live in Ithaca, NY, I'm certainly not deprived of snow (especially this year).

In my search for Talmudic references to the tumtum (an intersexed person), I came across a web site, "Come and See," that published significant parts of the Soncino Press's English translation of the Talmud. When I first found it I was grateful to be able to get fairly complete quotations (rather than the brief mentions from the other articles on the web--see previous entry). Then I delved a bit deeper to find out whether the Soncino Press had given permission to put their translation on line. I discovered through reading the page on copyright issues that Come and Hear had taken the Talmudic texts from a book called The Plot Against Christianity by Elizabeth Dilling, which apparently had published hundreds of pages from the Soncino Press edition. The Plot Against Christianity appears to be an anti-semitic screed containing many classic anti-Jewish tropes.

Elizabeth Dilling's book was published by Noontide Books, which has published David Duke's autobiography, My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding. David Duke is a former Ku Klux Klan leader who has attempted to make white supremacy and anti-semitism respectable.

The Come and Hear web site, aside from its on-line Talmudic publication, has many essays written by the web site owner, Carol A. Valentine, and others, under the heading of America under the Talmud. From the examination of one essay, Holy Atrocities and Judaism, it appears that the author examines the Talmud and other Jewish writings through a hostile, anti-semitic lens designed to see the worst in anything Jewish. Her primary worry seems to be that the United States is quickly becoming a nation governed by Talmudic law.

The author, Carol A. Valentine, owns another web site called Public Action, Inc.. One of the key topics on the web site is Waco and the Branch Davidians, an issue that galvanized the extreme right in this country in the 1990s. There are also articles by her and others that claim that the September 11 attacks were carried by NORAD (North American Aerospace Defence Command), remotely controlling the planes. The site also contains a listing of Holocaust Revisionist web sites.

When I started my research on the Come and Hear site, I thought I had found something very useful -- a web site that offered search capabilities for a significant part of the English translation of the Babylonian Talmud. Upon discovering, however, that the web publication of the Soncino Talmud translation was certainly not authorized by the Soncino Press, and in addition that the web master who put up this site uses it to attack Jews and Judaism, this web publication seems to me to be very much like the free or for-sale term paper sites -- it purports to present legitimately publicly available information in an easy-to-access form, but actually perpetrates a malicious fraud.

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Internet to see if I could find talmudic references to the tumtum and the androgynos (people with indeterminate sexual organs and hermaphrodites). When I put "Talmud" and "tumtum" into Google I came up with a number of web sites. Some of these web sites provide a cautionary tale for anyone using the web for research.

A very interesting and learned essay by Rabbi Alfred Cohen of Congregation Ohaiv Yisrael of Monsey, NY, was published in the Journal of Halacha & Contemporary Society 38 (Fall 1999).

An interesting site called "Born Eunuchs" has an extensive list of sources on eunuchs, including a selection from BT Yebamoth ch. 8 that mentions the tumtum. The translation is taken from the Soncino English translation of the Talmud.

Another site mentioned the tumtum as part of an extensive discussion of circumcision on JewishGates.org.

There was also a brief discussion of the talmudic passages on the tumtum on a site for transgender people of different religions, Forge Forward.

Another was an essay on intersexuality written by a Sally Gross on a site called Free Essays. The intent of this site seems to be to provide resources for students who wish to plagiarize papers or to buy term papers from them. Interestingly enough, this same essay is present on another free term paper site, Hot Papers.

And in turn, this essay seems to have formed part of a longer essay written by Sally Gross, with the same title, on another web site. This web site is called Blackfriars Publications, which calls itself the "House Imprint of the English Dominicans." My guess is that Sally Gross has no idea that part of her essay appears on the term papers sites.

Some good news from Iraq: Fewer Attacks Since Saddam Capture.

While looking through the referrers to my blog, I came across a referral from Rua da Judiaria, a Jewish blog in Portuguese. It looks very interesting -- and would be even more interesting if I knew Portuguese!

More on Lilith (I was reminded by Jim Davila's kind reference to my recent post on Lilith). Yesterday afternoon, as I was returning home from a visit to downtown Jerusalem (where I bought some interesting books -- one a fairly new biography of Shabbetai Zevi, aimed at a popular audience, another one a book in Hebrew on the Ba'al Shem Tov, entitled "Ba'al Shem -- the Besht: Magic, Mysticism, and Leadership," by Immanuel Etkes), I went one stop too far on my bus and ended up right in front of a bookstore that I've been wanting to go into. It is a bookstore for "sifre kodesh" (holy books) and "tashmishei kedushah" (religious articles would be the best English translation I think). I found another interesting book there, and a printed amulet against Lilith. It's based on earlier amulet texts.

On top it says "Protection for the child and the mother." It includes Psalm 121, an adjuration against the evil eye, and the story of Elijah's encounter with Lilith and her promise to flee when her names are inscribed on an amulet or recited. In the middle between these two texts there is a hand inscribed with divine names. Below that is another diagram with names, and an eye. Around the diagram it says, "Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah." On the right is written under that the names of the three protective angels, "Sani, Sansani, and Semangelof inside." On the left is written, "Lilith and all her band outside." Under both of these sayings is written, "You shall not permit a sorceress to live" three times.

When I was writing my article on Lilith I wanted to include in it that it was still possible to purchase these amulets, and lo and behold, I found one. It's on laminated paper with a hole in the top so that one can hang it over the baby's crib.

I just watched an almost two-hour report on Channel One ("Mabat Sheni") on the checkpoints (called "Tarbut ha-Machsomim"), both those on the Green Line and those between various places on the West Bank. Part of the program was a first-person report by a woman reporter from the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv who volunteered to serve reserve duty at the Kalandiya checkpoint between the Kalandiya refugee camp and Ramallah. She interviewed other soldiers and observed what happened at the checkpoint itself, both when Palestinians were permitted to cross and when they were not allowed to cross because for some reason there was a "seger" -- a closure. It was horrible to watch. I felt like crying, especially when watching children not being permitted to cross or seeing their elders humiliated at the checkpoint. She also interviewed a young Israeli woman soldier who was serving her regular army duty at this checkpoint -- and this woman felt awful about what she was doing at the checkpoint, and at the same time seemed to express the feeling that it was necessary.

Another part of the program was devoted to a report on an attack on soldiers and civilians that happened at another checkpoint, where eleven people were killed by Palestinian terrorists (about two years ago). They interviewed the mother of the Israeli commander at the checkpoint, who had been killed in the attack, his friends, and also a member of Knesset who was a friend of the family and was bringing the issue before the Knesset. This report was very sympathetic to the soldiers and the untenable position they had been placed in by the location of the checkpoint -- in a valley, where they were exposed to fire from above.

There was more on the program, but let me say that one of the things that impressed me was that this was made by, and shown on, Israeli Channel One, which is owned by the Israel Broadcasting Authority, a government agency. The wide-ranging nature of the debate in Israel about the morality of the occupation, about what to do with the settlements, about how to respond to Palestinian terrorism, about the need for a Palestinian state, etc., is quite refreshing to see here.

On Shabbat afternoon, I walked to East Talpiot to visit friends for Shabbat lunch. On my way, I walked across the Haas Tayelet -- a promenade that goes across the ridge that links East Talpiot with the older Talpiot neighborhood. The Tayelet looks down on the deep valley that contains many Arab villages, including Silwan right next to the Old City. To the north one can see the Old City of Jerusalem, including the Dome of the Rock with its golden dome. As I looked across the valley towards the east, I saw a huge wall rising -- in the village of Abu Dis. This was the much discussed "separation fence," which in some places is a high concrete wall. Apparently the very next day, on Sunday, the workers continued to build the wall, which splits Abu Dis into two parts and prevents those on the outside of the wall from entering their shops, schools, and health clinics on the inside of the wall.

As James Bennet writes in today's New York times, Overnight, a Towering Divide Rises in Jerusalem.

On the slope of the Mount of Olives, Abu Dis sits partly within Jerusalem's municipal boundaries, and negotiators once saw it as the possible capital of a Palestinian state.

The idea was that Abu Dis could do politically what it had already done socially and commercially: smudge the line between Jerusalem and the West Bank.

But distinctions are getting sharper here, not blurrier. As he often does, Mr. Sharon referred to Jerusalem on Sunday as "the eternal, united, and undivided capital of the Jewish people."

The new wall will actually divide Abu Dis, keeping part of it on the Jerusalem side, separating neighbors and relatives who live just blocks or even a street apart.

Since I came to Israel the weather has been beautiful -- clear blue skies, warm days, cool nights here in Jerusalem, but today the rain blew in. I was sitting in a cafe on Palmach St. today around noon watching the hail pile up on the sidewalk. Israel always needs rain, but the warm days have been a nice interlude, especially since I'll be returning to cold, snowy, gray Ithaca next week.

I've been writing an article on Lilith for the new Historical Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, being published by Shalvi Publishers on CD-ROM. It's been fun doing the research. If you are looking for a strange and amusing (and also misogynist) work of Hebrew literature, I recommend the Alphabet of Ben Sira, usually dated to somewhere from the 8th to the 10th century C.E. The historical Ben Sira (from 2d century B.C.E. Jerusalem) has nothing to do with the Alphabet named for him, but he appears in the work in a very strange context. The Alphabet is the first place that the tale of Lilith as the first wife of Adam appears. She, like him, was created from earth, and she and Adam quarreled over who would be on top. He said that he was superior to her, and she said that they were equal. She pronounced the name of God and flew away to the Red Sea. Adam complained to God, who sent three angels to bring her back. She refused, and said that she had been created only to kill newborn babies. The angels made a deal with her that they would not bring her back to Adam, if she agreed not to attack children who were protected by an amulet with the angels' names and forms on it.

The Alphabet of Ben Sira is published in English translation in Rabbinic Fantasies,, edited by David Stern and Mark Mirsky, along with many other interesting works of Jewish literature, such as the "Tale of the Jerusalemite," about a man who ends up married to the daughter of Ashmedai, the king of the demons.

Today I went up on the Temple Mount (called by Muslims the Haram al-Sharif), which has been opened for brief visits by tourists in the last few months. It used to be possible to enter the Al-Aksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, as well as the Islamic Museum, by buying a ticket for all three sites, but the Wakf (Islamic trust) is not permitting non-Muslims into the mosques now. A fairly long line of people waited at the bottom of the ramp leading up to the Maghrebi Gate, until at 12:30 p.m. the Israeli police permitted us to go up (after going through a metal detector and opening our bags to the guards). I wandered around the vast plaza by myself -- first going over to the Al-Aksa Mosque and trying to look inside through the open door, but people were coming out after prayers and it was impossible to see anything. Then I went up the steps to the plaza that surrounds the Dome of the Rock and walked around and looked at the beautiful tiles on the outside of the building. There were not very many people around -- mostly women with children, or children playing (several boys kicking around balls). In addition to the mosques, wide stairs, and smaller buildings whose names I didn't know, there are also parklike areas with trees on the plaza, where small groups of people gathered.

I encountered a pair of girls who, as I was leaning against the wall looking at the Dome of the Rock, looked at me shyly. We started to talk, but very haltingly, since my Arabic is minimal, as was their English. One of them seemed to disapprove of our conversation, and left her friend (she pointed to the Dome of the Rock and "that's ours -- it belongs to the Arabs"). Nadine and I tried to talk for a few minutes. She said she was in 7th grade, and was studying some English. I told her I knew English and Hebrew. She wanted to know where I was staying -- I tried to say "West Jerusalem" in Arabic but I don't think she understood me (I was probably saying it wrong). She smiled a lot and seemed to be enjoying talking to me. I was too, but I was also nervous, so I eventually ended the conversation and continued wandering around the plaza. I left the Mount by a different gate (the gate of the Chain) and then made my way back to the Western Wall plaza.

I had conflicting feelings about going up to the Temple Mount. On the one hand, I felt sad that there was no sign of the Temple that had once stood there (destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E.), and that it's not possible to pray there as a Jew. It felt like a place to which Jews were not welcome. On the other hand, it felt like a place of safety for the Muslims who were there -- a place where women and children could gather without being disturbed. In some ways, it felt like the Western Wall -- people could enter and linger with the secure feeling that this holy place was theirs, and that this was the place to go to speak to God. I wish that it were not the locus of so much conflict, and that anyone who wished could go there to pray or speak with God without creating an international incident.

In Jim Davila’s blog on December 29 he quoted several sermons given by Muslim preachers employed by the Palestinian Authority over the last couple of years that denied that Solomon’s Temple had ever stood on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (quoted from a report by Memri). In one of the sermons, on September 21, 2001, Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi spoke in the Sheikh 'Ijlin Mosque in Gaza about what he considered ridiculous Jewish beliefs:

Oh beloved of Allah, who are the Jews? Regarding their belief about Allah: The Jews have said that the hand of Allah is fettered in chains; [but] it is their hand that is fettered in chains, and they are cursed for their words. According to the Jews' belief, as it is written in some of their holy books, such as the Talmud, Allah divides his time into three parts. One third of the time he weeps. Why? Because his [chosen] people are dispersed in all directions. Another third he spends playing with the whales, and the final third he spends doing nothing in particular. This is their perverted belief about Allah.

Jim found incredible the idea that these beliefs were to be found in the Talmud. In fact, however, both ideas are found in rabbinic and later Jewish literature, and were, in fact, attacked both by Karaites and by Muslims in the early middle ages as part of religious polemics between Rabbanites and Karaites and between Jews and Muslims.

What I find rather incredible is that these polemical themes have been resurrected from early medieval times and are still being used to attack Jews and Judaism. The claim that Jews believe that God’s hands are fettered is found in the Qu’ran, Sura 5:64: “The Jews say, ‘Bound are the hands of God.’ Tied be their own hands and damned may they be for saying what they say! In fact, both His hands are open wide: He spends of His bounty in any way He please.” The Qur’anic passage seems to be picking up on an idea found both in the midrashic literature and in the Hekhalot literature. Michael Fishbane has written on this idea in his article “Arm of the Lord: Biblical Myth, Rabbinic Midrash, and the Mystery of History,” pp. 271-292, in Language, Theology, and the Bible: Essays in Honour of James Barr, eds. Samuel E. Balentine and John Barton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), and my recent SBL paper dealt with this issue extensively. One place this idea is found is in 3 Enoch chapters 44 and 47, where Rabbi Ishmael sees that God’s right hand has been bound behind him since the destruction of the Temple. A similar idea is found in Lamentations Rabbah, Proem 24, where it says, “At the time that the Holy One, blessed be He, sought to destroy the Temple, He said, ‘As long as I am within it, the nations of the world will not touch it; but I will hide my eyes from it, and I swear that I will not be attached to it until the time of the End, and the enemies will enter and destroy it.’ Immediately the Holy One, blessed be He, swore by His right hand and placed it behind Him, as it is written, ‘He has drawn back His right hand from before the enemy’ (Lam. 2:3). At that time the enemies entered the Temple and set it afire.” This profound meditation on the meaning of historical defeat was attacked by both Muslims and Karaites as an unforgivable example of anthropomorphism, offending their strict monotheistic sensibility.

The idea that there are three watches in which God responds to the suffering of his people is found in b. Berakhot 3b. In one version, R. Eliezer says, “the night consists of three watches, and during each and every watch the Holy One, blessed be He, sits and roars like a lion.” Another opinion, that of Rav Isaac b. Samuel in the name of Rav, is as follows: “The night is composed of three watches, and over each watch the Holy One, blessed be He, sits and roars like a lion, and says, ‘Alas for the children, on account of whose sins I destroyed My Temple, burnt My Shrine, and exiled them among the nations.’” Salmon ben Yeruhim, a tenth century Karaite writer, quoted this Midrash and attacked it along with other anthropomorphic midrashim in his Wars of the Lord. Al-Qirqisani, a 9th century Karaite writer, also attacked this idea.

It seems to me, from reading the excerpts of the sermon translated by Memri, that there must be an ongoing Muslim polemical tradition of attacks upon Judaism that has continued since the first Islamic centuries, and that this imam has used themes taken from this polemical tradition and fitted them to our day. Perhaps his audience also knows this polemical tradition, but to the eyes of contemporary Jews, who do not know these ancient midrashim and mystical works, his charges simply seem bizarre distortions of Judaism. As a scholar of ancient Judaism, I find it distressing that these polemical charges are still being used to attack Jews and some of the most profound Jewish theological responses to evil and suffering that have emerged from the Jewish religious tradition.

And here is today's Ha'aretz editorial about the shooting of unarmed Israeli, Palestinian, and foreign demonstrators protesting the separation fence on Friday, in which one Israeli protestor, a recently demobilized soldier, was severely injured -- Harsh treatment and a light finger.

I'm now visiting Israel for a few weeks, and the view looks different from here. Suddenly what seems so clear in America now turns into shades of grey. And I allow other information in that I really didn't want to think about in the U.S. For example, this article by Danny Rubinstein in Ha'aretz today, Attack on Maher shows anger at silent Arab world, which is chiefly about the Palestinian response to the attack on the Egyptian foreign minister at the Al Aqsa Mosque last week, contains this paragraph about what is happening to Palestinians at the hands of the Israel military:

Anyone who follows daily events in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and reads the Palestinian press finds it difficult to comprehend the scenes of horror. The nearly regularly-occurring photographs of bleeding babies and children in the arms of screaming mothers and of elderly people fleeing from their bombed houses in Rafah, Khan Yunis and Balata. Parents dangling their children from balconies to enable them to flee to safety. Tall buildings that have collapsed and heaps of rubble between which people try to gather their household goods. And the flood of reports and complaints of humiliations. Every day on the front pages of the Palestinian newspapers there are pictures of mass funerals and shackled young people, standing in line with their hands up, young men being led away blindfolded, or curled up on the ground with IDF soldiers standing over them, rifles at the ready.

We largely don't hear about this in the American media, even in those sources that are regularly derided as "pro-Palestinian," like the New York Times and National Public Radio, nor do we see those scenes on our television screens.

A good Washington Post editorial yesterday on Howard Dean, Beyond the Mainstream. If only more Democratic primary voters agreed with these sentiments....

Jim Davila at PaleoJudaica.com quotes from the obituary of J.B. Segal, a noted scholar of Semitic languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies, in the University of London. He taught there from 1961-1979. J.B. Segal recently published the Catalogue of the Aramaic and Mandaic Incantation Bowls in the British Museum, together with an article by Erica C.D. Hunter. I have been using this volume in the last few days to do research for my paper at the Association for Jewish Studies, which is on pictorial and symbolic depictions in the incantation bowls, with comparisons to the Greek Magical Papyri and later Jewish magical manuscripts. My paper is entitled, "Demons, Characters, and Angelic Alphabets: Pictorial depictions in Jewish amulets and texts of ritual power." Here is the abstract:

The Aramaic incantation bowls, dating from the 4th-8th centuries C.E., are inscribed earthenware bowls whose purpose was to exorcise demons, cure illness, protect against evil spirits, and save one’s children from Lilith and other demons. They were used by Jews, Christians, Mandaeans, and polytheists in Sassanian Babylonia. Most studies of the Aramaic incantation bowls, found in archaeological excavations in present-day Iraq and Iran, have concentrated on the written texts and not on the pictorial depictions on the bowls. In fact, the ancient remains of the incantation bowls, metal amulets from Israel and Syria, incised gems from the eastern Mediterranean, and papyri texts of ritual power from Egypt are filled with images – of demons, of the person to be exorcised, and of weapons directed against evil forces. The images also include what the ancient texts call "characters" – letter-like figures that seem to belong to unknown alphabets. Pictures and characters also appear in the ritual power texts found in the Cairo Geniza, in medieval Hebrew manuscripts, and on Jewish amulets made up to the present day. In this paper, I will be examining the images found on the bowls and their relation to the texts of the same bowls, in comparison with images on Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek amulets and papyri from Israel and Egypt. This paper will examine the images and discuss what they mean, and how they relate to the accompanying texts. Why did those who made the bowls and other amulets find it necessary and meaningful to use pictures and characters in concert with words? Do the pictures and characters cross cultural and political boundaries, as the words of the spells so frequently do? Were they considered efficacious when used alone, or was it necessary to accompany them with words? This paper will argue that it is important to analyze the pictures along with the words in order to fully appreciate this aspect of ancient Jewish material culture.

I may not manage to do everything I planned to in this ambitious abstract, but I will definitely be speaking about the incantation bowls, both Aramaic and Mandaic.

Steven Weiss at Protocols asks why the organized Jewish community in the U.S. and France is not objecting to the proposed French ban on wearing articles of clothing or adornment that indicate religious affiliation in public schools (yarmulkes, large crosses, or head-scarves). I think he's right. I'm definitely against the oppression of women (if only for my own personal interest), but I also think that if women wish to wear head-scarves, they should be able to.

As he says, "If I'll be allowed to read into that, it seems they're against religious symbols as an oppression of women -- but crosses, and yarmulkes are definitely not symbols of oppression, and while you could argue that headscarves are, you could also argue that they aren't -- it seems an appropriate moderate religious position to consent to, short of a burka or a chador. "

And what about married Jewish women who cover their hair with sheytels (wigs), scarves, or hats? Or who wear modest clothing from neck to ankles? Does this mean that married Jewish women teachers will also have to uncover their hair if they are teaching at French public schools?

Jim Davila at PaleoJudaica has a very good fisking of anti-gay arguments made by David Klinghoffer about gay marriage. He exposes Klinghoffer's shoddy argumentation in a detailed way. Well worth reading.

Time Magazine Europe, in this article, Seven Days Of Hatred , recounts the many and various kinds of hate crimes committed on the European continent -- especially against Jews, Roma, gay people, and Muslims (via Andrew Sullivan).

In the last few days I have read an article about prominent feminists in France who have called for banning the veil (hijab) in French schools and universities, on the basis that it furthers the oppression of women in Islam. I wonder what they are thinking. Do they really imagine this will free Muslim women? Instead it will make it further impossible for Muslim women to contemplate being both Muslim and modern, or Muslim and feminist. If the state officially opposes women wearing hijab, it makes the state seem anti-Muslim, and it makes wearing hijab seem like an action that strikes a blow for Islam.

It seems to me that we have here a contemporary example of the 19th century French "civilizing mission," in which Jews and other colonized peoples (especially in the French North African colonies) must conform to what the metropolis considers to be "civilized" in order to attain a modicum of acceptance. When the French Assembly was debating whether to emancipate the Jews of France just after the Revolution, one formulation put forward was to give all rights to the Jews as individuals, but none to the Jews as a group -- in other words, for Jews really to receive equal treatment as French citizens, they had to lose all signs of a distinctive Jewish religious and especially ethnic identity.

And this is why I still support the U.S. war to overthrow Saddam Hussein and the Baathists in Iraq -- Survey: Saddam Killed 61,000 in Baghdad.

Larry Derfner has written a very troubling article in today's Jerusalem Post -- The wages of denial.

The problem is that the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of Israel has no effect on Jews at all.

This is not a failure of the Israeli or Jewish heart. A nation at war doesn't feel for the losses of the other side – maybe for a particular individual, a child whose face they've seen and whose story they've learned, but not for the enemy in general.

IN FACT, I credit Israelis for having much more human decency than their enemy – they may be indifferent to the news of the deaths of Palestinian innocents, but at least you won't find crowds of them dancing and cheering. But while I don't expect Palestinian suffering to touch Jewish hearts, I do expect it to at least register in Jewish minds. If we want to think wisely about Israel and the Jewish people, about where we stand and where we're going, one of the things we must keep uppermost in our minds is that Israel is inflicting mammoth suffering on 3.3 million Palestinians.

But of course we don't. Instead, Jews have developed an amazingly efficient denial mechanism that automatically prevents any word or picture that shows what we're doing to the Palestinians from ever getting into our brains. Our minds are open to receive and store information only about what the Arabs are doing to us.

We've willed ourselves into ignorance of our surroundings, so that when bombs go off and Jews get killed, in Israel and elsewhere, we can't understand it as anything other than incorrigible, eternal Jew-hatred that has no connection whatsoever to what Israel is doing in the territories – because we've blanked our minds on what Israel is doing in the territories. Therefore, when our military and intelligence leaders tell us there is a connection between what we do to the Arabs and what they do to us, it's a huge shock.

Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya'alon says we're being so harsh on the Palestinian population that they may never stop hating us, and we don't understand.

Were we being harsh?

What are these four ex-Shin Bet chiefs talking about? "Once and for all we have to admit that there is another side, and that they have feelings and they suffer, and that we are treating them in a disgraceful manner."

Yes, that's the only word I have for it. Disgraceful, says Avraham Shalom.

"To this day I don't understand why a tank that's driving on the streets of Ramallah also has to crush the cars parked on the sides," says Ya'acov Peri.

He continues with these painfully sharp remarks:

We don't see it, but everybody else in the world does, above all the Muslims. It's true that plenty of them hate all Jews no matter what we do – but why did this wave of Muslim violence against Diaspora Jews begin exactly when the intifada made its debut on the nightly news?

Just because those Muslims are anti-Semites doesn't mean that Israel isn't treating the Palestinians disgracefully, and anybody who doesn't see the connection between that disgraceful treatment and the savage actions of anti-Semites – whether in Jerusalem, Istanbul or Paris – is unconscious.

But unconscious is what we Jews have decided to become.

I think he is correct. It is so easy when one is suffering at the hands of another to be oblivious to the suffering that one is inflicting on that same other. When I first saw the photographs of the separation fence going almost entirely around Qalqilyah, on the West Bank, I was shocked.

I was once in Qalqilyah, over ten years ago, during the first intifada. Soldiers on the main road to the city wouldn't let us in, so we drove a short way from there and walked through the orchards surrounding the city until we got into it. You can't do that now. Now the only way to enter the city is to go through the checkpoint. I imagine that the farmers who live in the city are now entirely cut off from their orchards and fields.

I understand why Israelis want to build the fence/wall -- in the belief or hope that it will stop suicide bombers. But I think it will provide only the illusion of security, and make it even easier to ignore what Israelis are doing to Palestinians.

This is not to excuse anti-semitism, as I think I have made clear many times in this blog. I don't believe that anti-semitism is the Jews' "fault" -- I think, on the contrary, that anti-semitism is like a virus, and that when the body politic is weakened, it can flare up again. The conflict (let's be honest -- the war) between Israelis and Palestinians is real -- it's not a figment of the anti-semitic imagination, and real wars engender real hatreds. Let's just say that war makes it possible for many different viruses of hatred to flourish.

When I heard this morning about the bombings in Turkey, I was very disheartened. I can only imagine how the people of Istanbul feel now that their city has been devastated by two massive bombings within a week. But it did make me realize one thing. It is very easy as a Jew to fall into the illusion that we are uniquely singled out for attacks -- but it's not true. Thus I don't think there is a one-to-one relationship between Israeli actions against Palestinians and attacks upon Jews outside of Israel. On September 11, Al-Qaeda struck at power centers in the United States -- not at Israel. Jews and Israel are one target of Al-Qaeda -- but only within a complex web of associations that they make between the U.S., Europe, Israel, Arab regimes, etc.

Here is an article on a cool archaeological find in Jerusalem -- an inscription on the misnamed "Absalom's Tomb" -- Scholars Discover Parts of New Testament. Texts from the New Testament referring to figures known from the New Testament were engraved on the tomb by 4th century Christian visitors.

Another good British editorial on the Istanbul bombings and the blame-Israel response: The liberalism of fools.

What has happened to the liberal media in Europe that the slaughter of innocent worshippers and the desecration of ancient synagogues in Istanbul should evoke implicit criticism, not of the perpetrators, but of Turkey's ally Israel? Since the last attack on an Istanbul synagogue in 1986 by Palestinian terrorists led by Saddam's late protégé Abu Nidal, a great deal has changed. Then, the condemnation of the killers was universal and unconditional. Now, each new atrocity against Jews is greeted by new attempts at justification or relativisation. When Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir expounded his anti-Semitic conspiracy theory at a recent gathering of Islamic leaders, all 57 present applauded. Western responses were muted. As the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, said yesterday: "Radicals are preaching hate and nobody is protesting."

Nor is the new anti-Semitism limited to the Muslim world. On Saturday, a Jewish school near Paris was burnt down. So common have such attacks become in France that Le Monde did not even consider this incident worth reporting yesterday, but President Chirac appears to have woken up to the danger - late in the day. A poll sponsored by the European Commission finds that Israel is now considered by EU citizens to be the greatest threat to world peace. A liberal consensus is emerging that holds Israel responsible for the resurgence of anti-Semitism. To blame the victim is to exonerate the perpetrator. The carnage in Turkey should be a warning to Europe.

Even the Guardian (U.K.) is finally getting it about rising anti-semitism: Our dulled nerve. As they ask, after recounting the recent bombings in Istanbul and the arson of a Jewish school in Paris over the weekend:

Why is the liberal left not sufficiently concerned about the growth of anti-semitism? On this year's anti-war march in Paris, Jewish peace activists were beaten up by other demonstrators. There were less dramatic confrontations on London's million-strong march. It did not matter to the attackers that Jewish writers and activists have been vocal against the Iraq war. Nor did the attackers care that many criticise the current Israeli government's policies towards the Palestinians. Their victims were targets just because they are Jews.

Even the police are now being more proactive in pursuing people spreading virulent anti-semitic literature or inciting religious hatred. Could not the liberal left, which in an earlier era vigilantly sought to protect Jews from prejudice and bigotry, rediscover its old values?

Honestly, I think the liberal left doesn't want to touch this issue because they've bought into the anti-semitic myth that all Jews=Israel and that supporting Jews against anti-semites=supporting the Sharon government. I remember an incident that happened to me in 1981, right after Israel bombed the Osirak reactor in Iraq (thank God!). I was talking to a friend -- who knew that I was Jewish but who had no idea what my politics about Israel were (I'm not sure I really had formulated them very clearly at that point), who launched into an attack on me because of what the Israeli government had done. As if I were the Israeli ambassador or at least an Israeli citizen. For him, Jew=Israeli, and thus I was fair game for his criticism. In other respects his politics were quite radical and I'm sure he would have asserted that he was anti-racist. But when it came to Israel he had a big blind spot, and coupled with his large dose of ignorance about Jews, it ended up with his attacking me for Israeli policies and actions.

Well, as I suspected when hearing about the simultaneous car bombs yesterday, Al-Qaeda claims responsibility for attacks. Part of the statement from an Al-Qaeda spokesman reads: "The attacks against Jews and America will follow. Let America and Israel cry for their dead from today and the destruction that they will suffer."

It seems likely that Al-Qaida has struck again -- Car Bombs at Istanbul Synagogues Kill 17. One of the synagogues is called "Neve Shalom" -- oasis of peace. They were attacked during Shabbat services -- including a bar mitzvah at one of the synagogues.

It appears that an exhibit of anti-abortion posters that compare abortion to lynchings of black men and to the Holocaust is traveling around U.S. campuses. We had the so-called Genocide Awareness Project come to Ithaca College a couple of weeks ago, courtesy of Students for Life. Protocols noticed this trend also. Randall Terry, the head of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, also came to speak.

This event followed soon after another group's use of the Holocaust to further its own agenda on the Cornell campus -- PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) brought an exhibit called "Holocaust on Your Plate," which compared slaughterhouses and factory farms to Nazi concentration camps.

As a wise student commentary noted in the Ithacan, the Ithaca College student newspaper,

George Bush is not Adolf Hitler, meat eaters are not Nazis and aborted fetuses are not Holocaust victims. Nevertheless, activists across the political spectrum bring Third Reich rhetoric and symbolism into completely unrelated debates to evoke emotion and prove the gravity of their causes. . . .

All these Nazi analogies are undoubtedly problematic. They allow our already weak sense of historical understanding to disintegrate further until the Holocaust is reduced to a simple icon of evil. Furthermore, they muddle our collective ability to grapple with the complexities of current issues. Activists, in shoddy attempts at conveying the gravity of their causes, appropriate and exploit this historical imagery, thereby reducing the horrible and complex atrocities of events like the Holocaust to mere symbolism.

Interestingly, the “Genocide Awareness Project” advocates threw a few additional historical images into their display. Furthering the emotionality of their cause, they compared aborted fetuses to Ku Klux Klan victims and Planned Parenthood to al-Qaida. Like the Holocaust analogies, these comparisons effectively reduced complex historical events to symbols, manipulating them into support for an anti-abortion effort.

While these ridiculous analogies were effective in creating a stir, they weren’t exactly successful in sparking thoughtful discussion about abortion and reproductive rights. In fact, more people seem to be discussing the group’s approach and their free speech rights than their pro-life ideology.

Perhaps, though, thoughtful discussion wasn’t really the objective. Like the other advocates trying to push their opinions, the Students for Life resorted to Nazi imagery for its shock value. They did manage to raise eyebrows, but they failed to raise awareness of the complex issues involved in both abortion and the Holocaust.

The author is absolutely correct that such misuses of the memory of the Holocaust make it into an "icon of evil" and make us lose all sense of the historical specificity of the complex web of events that we place under the title "Holocaust."

I guess I haven't been here for quite a while -- I've been pretty busy, doing research for my Society of Biblical Literature paper (the conference is in two weeks), and reading for the course I'll be teaching with another professor next semester, on Biblical Interpretation in Judaism and Christianity.

This is the abstract of the paper I'm writing:

Divine Weeping and God’s Right Arm: A vision of eschatological sorrow in Sefer Hekhalot (3 Enoch)

In Sefer Hekhalot (3 Enoch), Metatron, the Prince of the divine Presence, reveals to Rabbi Ishmael the secrets of the heavenly world, the fate of the human soul before birth and after death, and the course of ultimate redemption and the coming of the Messiah. 3 Enoch explicitly describes how each person will be judged after his death. The souls of the righteous will fly above the Throne of Glory in the presence of God. The souls of the wicked go down to Sheol to be punished with rods of burning coal. The souls of the intermediate are purged with suffering and then join the souls of the righteous. One important task of the “fathers of the world” (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) and the other righteous souls is to intercede on behalf of the suffering people of Israel on earth. They ask God why he has not saved his people and why his right hand, by which he stretched out the heavens, is still set behind him? As part of his heavenly journey, Rabbi Ishmael is shown the vision of God’s right hand, “which has been banished behind him because of the destruction of the Temple.” In a striking image, the five fingers of God’s hand weep in sorrow and five tears fall into the Great Sea and make the whole world quake. The souls of the righteous beseech God’s hand three times a day with the prayer, “Awake! Awake! Clothe yourself in strength, arm of the Lord” (Isa. 51:9). Only when God realizes that there are no righteous on earth will he deliver his right hand and bring the final redemption.

In this paper I will explore several themes that emerge from Sefer Hekhalot: the role of the righteous dead in protesting God’s judgment, and their ritual cry to awaken God’s arm; the hypostasis of God’s strength in the figure of his right arm set behind him, and of his sorrow in the image of the weeping fingers of his right hand; and the theurgical intertwining of the fate of the people of Israel and God’s strength. This paper will explore the ways in which Sefer Hekhalot transforms theological conceptions found in earlier midrashic and talmudic literature (for example, Lamentations Rabbah proem 24, b. Hag. 5b), and proves a crucial means of transmission to the later kabbalistic and Hasidic traditions.

Today I have been enjoying a beautiful clear late fall day, raking leaves (an abundance has fallen on my lawn) and harvesting the last of the Swiss chard, which is beginning to droop. We've had a pretty hard frost the last couple of nights and it just killed the tomato plants and the dahlias.

And the lunar eclipse last night was beautiful. I didn't watch the whole thing, but I did catch the moon when most of it was in shadow -- of course, I could still see that part, but dimly. There were many stars revealed when the moon grew dark. Later on in the night, when the moon had returned, it whitened the sky so that I could see very few stars. And for once we could see it here, in usually cloudy Ithaca.