By Rabbi Dow Marmur
JERUSALEM — The late Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of Islam, has written about how Muslims have adopted Christian anti-Semitism for their own polemics against Jews, Zionism and the State of Israel. A recent illustration of a notorious, persistent and lethal lie is provided by a video posted on YouTube last February by Kuwaiti Muhanna Hamad Al-Muhanna. Jewish Website describes him as a researcher and tells that he accused the Jews of using human blood, preferably that of Christian children, “in the making of holiday pastries.” (This “researcher” obviously doesn’t know of Matzah.)
The Kuwaiti blogger is retelling one of the most common and lethal lies that Jews bake Matzah with the blood of Christian children. [Jewish humor that almost invariably laughs with one eye and cries with the other tells of a Christian asking his Jewish neighbor for some Matzah and adding: “I know that you make it with the human blood but I like it nevertheless.”)
I hope that the Jewish neighbor said yes and told the Christian that Jews abhor eating blood in any form. We even drain meat from all visible traces of blood before we prepare it for consumption. But, of course, as we’ve become painfully aware these days again, facts seem irrelevant when it comes to expressing vile opinions. And Muslims have come to thrive on Christian Jew-hatred.
The way the Christian calendar determines Easter that marks the death of Jesus is, of course, linked to Passover and thus prone to the canard. This year the dates are particularly close: the Eve of Pesach is today, Good Friday. This has prompted me to devote my monthly column in the Toronto Star, due on Monday, to the relationship between the two festivals.
The piece includes personal memories of my childhood in post-war Poland when I was kept at home during the Easter period lest, as a Jew, I’d be attacked by my Catholic pears and their parents. The blood libel was probably taken as fact by many of our Polish neighbors.
The gist of my column is to show how things have changed. Nowadays versions of the Seder is also celebrated in many churches around the world. Relations between Jews and Christians have come a long way. Christians are finding the roots of their own faith in Judaism and thus have come to respect it, not revile it.
However, though Christian anti-Semitism has ceased to dominate Christian thought and behavior, secular anti-Semitism is again on the increase around the world, often as a reaction to the existence of Israel and the Jews’ commitment to it. Many Muslims seem to have joined in.
Which makes me think that perhaps the Kuwaiti blogger was reacting adversely to the very good news that these days the relationship between many Muslim states and the Jewish state of Israel are thawing rapidly. That doesn’t mean that the populace has come to appreciate the Jewish people and our blogger may have wanted to reflect it. Reiterating the old canard was his way of expressing his disapproval. I surmise that many of his Muslim readers are on the same page as he.
The old lies that he tried to make his own should not prevent us from recognizing that, despite all the setbacks, nowadays most Jews eat their Matzah in freedom, and indeed share it with others in the knowledge that there’re enough good people in the world who refuse to be duped by malicious lies.
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Rabbi Marmur is spiritual leader emeritus of Holy Blossom Temple. Now a resident of Israel, he may be contacted via dow.marmur@sdjewishworld.com