Shakespeare writes of Shylock the Jew in The Merchant Of Venice Act 3, scene 1, 58–68 circa 1596:
"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that."
Shylock's questions are profound and yet the answers to his questions remain to this day illusive. Why one Jew or why 6 million Jews killed beggars the imagination so we strive with dizzying thought to find rationality in the irrational. How does a religion whose Son of God is a Jew, whose people were Jews, and whose religious practices were Jewish become the missile of world-wide vitriolic AntiSemitic hatred throws?
The
answers incomplete as they are lie, of course, in two thousand years of
text, bounced around over history's net in the spoken word from one
generation to the next so that even utterly mendacious and insipid
untruths appear as fact and are used in some ritual or another as a
reason to torture and murder Jews at any time, at any place and for any
reason. Old canards are by the murder at Poway used to mix with even
older accusations of deicide taken from some New Testament texts to aid
in his rationale for murder. Anti-Semitism evolves. “You are not
forgotten Simon of Trent, the horror
that you and countless children have endured at the hands of the Jews
will never be forgiven,” the killer wrote using the Internet as his
servant. "His thoughts reached millions around the world. But the
hatred at
its core could have been plucked directly from the 15th century" or even
the second century to contemporary antisemitism that boasts "Jews will
not replace us" as if Jews everywhere were looking to do just that.
The
longest hatred has albeit evolved over time so that it is able to
neatly mix with the prevailing cultural milieu endeavoring to strike
fear in the hearts of white Christian men and women everywhere that
prompts them toward violence in service of it. Accusations against the
Jew by white Nationalists as the polluter of whatever the white
Christian race is serves up a fundamental ingredient of anti Semitism
and a rationale for the murdering of all Jews. But, no, that is not
enough. Anti Semitism must rest on its initial accusation some two
thousand years ago of God killer. Who could argue with killing a people
whose ancestors were guilty of committing that? I could and you should
-- all of you -- lest this Republic Franklin admonished us to keep will
not be kept and this oldest of hatreds will become unsinkable.
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