Reckless rites

Discusses Jewish violence in word, ritual, and sometimes in deed, as a reaction to centuries of mainly Christian oppression. Shows how this tendency was rooted in the Bible (in regard to the memory of Amalek and to the book of Esther). The anti-Jewish violence of the Crusades led to Jewish revenge being projected into an apocalyptic messianic future, when Christians would be punished. Christians may have associated the killing of Jewish children by their parent martyrs with Jews desiring to kill Christian children. Jewish hostility was occasionally expressed through host or cross desecration, which Jews considered as a defense of their embattled religion. Jews' inability to take physical revenge resulted in their being stereotyped as submissive, cowardly, and effeminate. Due to antisemitic scholarship, Jewish historians have tended to remove or gloss over historical anti-Christian aspects of Jewish life, especially the annual Purim outlet for anger, directed against the dominance of external authority. All this provides a context for the Purim murder by Baruch Goldstein of Muslim worshippers in Hebron. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)