Quoted:
I recently have learned that when we say amen at the end of a prayer we are actually giving praise to the Egyptian God Amen Ra... Or Amun Ra. At any rate I find this idea fascinating. There was also a brief line in the story about Israel getting it's name from the Egyptian and Jewish God's of Isis Ra and El. Could the Christian God be the same as the Egyptian God?

Amun Ra was the God of Creation

Quoted:


No, the Christian God, is not the same as the Egyptian god.  Where did you learn this?  Even Wikipedia cites Hebrew as the source for the word.

At any rate, regardless of the origin of the word, when I say "Amen", I mean "So be it" or "It is true" or something along those lines, so I am not giving praise to any false god.

Quoted:


No, the Christian God, is not the same as the Egyptian god.  Where did you learn this?  Even Wikipedia cites Hebrew as the source for the word.

At any rate, regardless of the origin of the word, when I say "Amen", I mean "So be it" or "It is true" or something along those lines, so I am not giving praise to any false god.

Egyptians always worshipped many Gods close to 2000 different ones , except during the reign of the father King Tutankhamun, who declaared that one god aton was to be worshipped. This was the only time in Egytian history that one god was worshipped.



I have never heard that Jews always go To Egypt.

.

The Sunni branch of Islam did not come about until after the death of Muhammad in 632.  Christianity and Judiasm were well established by this time and certainly did not need the protection of Islam.





Again the Egyptian had many Gods, To say Judiasm started from that is grasping at something that is not there.

European crusaders en route to 'liberate' Jerusalem from Islam, murdered thousands of Jews at the close of the 11th century. The Church forced the remaining Jews to wear distinctive clothing (yellow badges in France, pointy hats in Germany) in order to discourage relations with Christians. Hebrew scriptures were ordered by the Popes to be destroyed in large public book-burning gatherings in local town squares throughout Europe. Passion plays were used to reinforce Jewish responsibility for the death of Christ and other anti-Jewish transmissions and were often followed by pogroms. 'Blood libel' surfaced as part of the demonology of 'the Jew', appearing first in 1144 England where Jews would be eventually expelled after a series of pogroms. The most famous blood libel accusation involved the allegation of a ritual murder of a young boy in Italy, Simon, in 1475 who was later made a Church account lasted until 1950). The Inquisition - established the notion of blood purity -anyone with an eighth Jewish blood was considered to be impure - even if they had converted L to Christianity,

Muhammad originally viewed the Jews as potential allies. However, when the Jews of Medina refused to convert to Islam, he had all the Jewish men of the city slaughtered and the women and children taken as slaves. Despite this, as Islam spread, Jews were accepted as 'people of the book' (dhimmi) along with Christians and were generally accorded better treatment than in Christian societies. However, they were usually forced to live in separate areas (mellah), and were made to wear certain garbs so that they could be easily identifiable. In 807 Caliph Harun al-Rashid ordered all Jews to wear yellow badges. Wooden devils and apes were nailed on the homes of Jews and their places of worship were destroyed under the reign of Caliph al-Mutawakkil from 850. The later period of Moorish Spain (al-Andalus), however, is seen as one of the golden ages of Judaism where persecution was rare and Jewish culture flourished.

In 1965 the Catholic Church finally repudiated the charge that the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ through a set of reforms known as Vatican II. Many Christian fundamentalists, however, rejected these reforms and their views have been most recently popularized by Met Gibson's The Passion of the Christ

In the fifth century C.E., several of the homilies of the famous "golden-tongued" orator John Chrysostom, Bishop of Antioch, were directed against the Jews: "The Jews are the most worthless of all men. They are lecherous, greedy, rapacious. They are perfidious murderers of Christ … The Jews are the odious assassins of Christ and for killing God there is no expiation possible, no indulgence or pardon. Christian may never cease vengeance, and the Jews must live in servitude forever. God always hated the Jews. It is incumbent upon all Christians to hate the Jews." ("Adversus Judæos," I)

A Calendar of Jewish Persecution
70 A.D. Destruction of Jerusalem 1,100,000 Jews were killed and 97,000 taken into slavery and captivity.
115 Rebellion of the Jews in Mesopotania, Egypt, Cyrene and Cyprus. Jews and Romans inflicted many barbaric atrocities on each other, causing the death of several hundreds of thousands of Romans and Jews.
132-35 The Bar Kochba rebellion (Bar Kochba was a false Messiah). Caused the death of 500,000 Jews; thousands were sold into slavery or taken into captivity.
135 Roman Emperor Hadrian commenced his persecution of the Jews. Jerusalem established as a pagan city. Erection of a Jupiter temple on the temple mountain (Moriah) and a temple to Venus on Golgotha. Jews were forbidden to practice circumcision, the reading of the Law, eating of unleavened bread at Passover or any Jewish festival. Infringement of this edict brought the death penalty.
315 Constantine the Great established "Christianity" as the State religion throughout the Roman Empire; issued many anti-Jewish laws.
379-95 Theodosius the Great expelled Jews from any official gate position or place of honor. Permitted the destruction of their synagogues if by so doing, it served a religious purpose.
613 Persecution of the Jews in Spain. All Jews who refused to be baptized had to leave the country. A few years later the remaining Jews were dispossessed, declared as slaves and given to pious "Christians" of position. All children 7 years or over were taken from their parents and given to receive a "Christian" education.
1096 Bloody persecutions of the Jews at the beginning of the First Crusade, in Germany. Along the cities on the Rhine River alone, 12,000 Jews were killed. The Jews were branded second only to the Moslems as the enemies of Christendom.
1121 Jews driven out of Flanders (now part of Belgium). They were not to return nor to be tolerated until they repented of the guilt of killing Jesus Christ.
1130 The Jews of London had to pay compensation of 1 million marks for allegedly killing a sick man.
1146-47 Renewed persecution of the Jews in Germany at the beginning of the Second Crusade. The French Monk, Rudolf, called for the destruction of the Jews as an introduction to the Second Crusade. It was only because of the intervention of Emperor Conrad who declared Nuerenberg and a small fortress as places of refuge for the Jews, and that of Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, that the result was not quite as devastating as at the time of the First Crusade.
1181 French King Philip banished the Jews from his domain. They were permitted to sell all movable possessions, but the immovable such as land and houses reverted to the king. Seven years later he called the Jews back.
1189 At the coronation of Richard the Lionhearted, unexpected persecution of the Jews broke out in England. Most Jewish houses in London were burned, and many Jews killed. All possessions of the Jews were claimed by the Crown. Richard's successor alone, relieved the Jews of more than 8 million marks.
1215 At the IV Lateran Church Council, restrictions against the Jews by the church of Rome were issued.
1290 Edward I banished the Jews from England. 16,000 Jews left the country.
1298 Persecution of the Jews in Franconia, Bavaria and Austria. The Nobleman Kalbfleish alleged that he had received a divine order to destroy all the Jews. 140 Jewish communities were destroyed, and more than 100,000 Jews were mercilessly killed.
1306 King Philip the Fair banished the Jews from France. 100,000 Jews left the country.
1320 In France, 40,000 shepherds dedicated themselves for the Shepherd Crusade to free Palestine from the Moslems. Under the influence of criminals and land speculators, they destroyed 120 Jewish communities.
1321 Jews were accused of having incited outlaws to poison wells and fountains in the district of Guienne, France. 5,000 Jews were burned at the stake.
1348 Jews were blamed for the plague throughout Europe, especially in Germany. In Strausberg 2,000 Jews were burned. In Maintz 6,000 were killed in most gruesome fashion, and in Erfut 3,000; and in Worms 400 Jews burned themselves in their homes.
1370 Jews were blamed for having defiled the "Host" (wafer used in the Mass) in Brabant. The accused were burned alive. Again, all Jews were banned from Flanders and until the year 1820, every 15 years a feast was kept to celebrate the event.
1391 Persecutions in Spain. In Seville and 70 other Jewish communities, the Jews were cruelly massacred and their bodies dismembered.
1394 Second banishment of Jews from France.
1453 The Franciscan monk, Capistrano, persuaded the King of Poland to withdraw all citizens' rights of the Jewish people.
1478 The Spanish inquisition directed against the Jews.
1492 The banishment of Jews from Spain. 300,000 Jews who refused to be "baptized" into the Church of Rome left Spain penniless. Many migrated to the Muslim country, Turkey, where they found tolerance and a welcome.
1497 Banishment of the Jews from Portugal. King Manuel, generally friendly to the Jews, under pressure from Spain instigated forced baptism to keep the Jews. 20,000 Jews desired to leave the country. Many were ultimately declared slaves.
1516 First Ghetto established in Venice.
1540 Banishment of Jews from Naples and 10 years later, from Genoa and Venice.
1794 Restriction of Jews in Russia, Jewish men were forced to serve 25 years in the Russian military. Many hundreds of thousands of Jews left Russia.
1846-78 All former restriction, against the Jews in the Vatican State were re-inforced by Pope Pius IX.
1903 Renewed restrictions of Jews in Russia. Frequent pogroms (massacres); general impoverishment of Russian Jewry.
1933 Commencement of persecution of Jews in Hitler Germany. Inception of the systematic destruction of 6,000,000 Jews throughout Nazi-occupied Europe

P. David Hornik's Jerusalem Post Review of "The Popes Against the J   Message List    

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In confronting modernity, the Catholic Church lashed out against the Jews

By P. David Hornik

(November 26) - 'We fight [the Jews], not out of any caste or personal hatred,
but
rather because they are the vampires of humanity, monopolizers, usurers,
speculators; they are dishonest, implacable, destroyers and slanderers,
exploiters
of Christian blood."

These words were published in 1892 in the Vatican's daily newspaper
L'Osservatore cattolico. The statement was not aberrant but in fact typical,
even
routine. Nor did things get any better; the Catholic Church continued to play
a
major role in fomenting European anti-Semitism up to the Holocaust.

The bleak story of the Church's anti-Semitism from the beginnings of Jewish
emancipation in the early 19th century up to the outbreak of World War II is
told in
this book by David I. Kertzer, an author and expert on Italian history. In the
late
1990s, Kertzer was one of the first scholars to be given access to long-sealed

Vatican archives. The result is The Popes Against the Jews, a lucid and
dispassionate account that should permanently put to rest claims that,
compared
to the racialist and other movements, the Church was not a prime mover of
modern
anti-Semitism.

The Church got off on the wrong foot, according to Kertzer, in 1814 after
Napoleon's forces were defeated and the Italian Papal States were restored.
The
then-pope, Pius VII, had an opportunity to adapt the Church to the
liberalizing
trends that were sweeping Europe, including Jewish emancipation. Instead, he
denounced modernity and, concurrently, forced the Jews of the Papal States
back
into squalid, crowded ghettoes while reinstating such traditional practices as

yellow badges, humiliating "carnivals," and harsh restrictions on Jews'
employment and contact with the larger Christian society.

By 1861, Italian nationalist forces had stripped the Vatican of all political
power
except in Rome and its vicinity. Yet the Church, instead of making amends with

modernity, continued to view itself as a beleaguered bastion of morality
surrounded by pernicious trends. And at the core of those trends stood the
newly
liberated, malignant Jews, the "synagogue of Satan" as Pope Pius IX called
them
in 1873, bent on the destruction of the Church and world domination.

In 1840 at the time of the infamous Damascus blood libel, the Vatican had
vigorously upheld the charges in the face of liberal opinion and was outraged

when the accused Jews were finally released.

But the Church did not change. Its official organs continued to focus
obsessively
and horrifically on ritual-murder accusations against Jews, up to and beyond
the
Mendel Beilis case in Kiev in 1913.

In political confrontations between liberal movements and reactionary,
anti-Semitic
ones, the Church always sided with the latter. Two examples: in the 1890s it
backed Austria's Christian Social Party led by the notorious anti-Semite Karl

Lueger. In the Dreyfus case, the Vatican journal Civiltˆ cattolica and the
Catholic
press in general were in the vanguard of opposition to the falsely accused
Dreyfus, and French Catholic organizations helped lead the 1897 anti-Semitic
riots sparked by the case.

In 1918 Achille Ratti, then the reclusive, nonpolitical prefect of the Vatican
library,
was sent by the Vatican to Poland to report on the situation of its large
Catholic
population. Considering that Ratti went on to be Pope Pius XI from 1922 to
1939,
Kertzer believes the solidification of his anti-Semitic attitudes during his
stay in
Poland had a pivotal effect on Vatican history. Jews in Poland at that time
were
subject to incitement and pogroms, including the Lvov pogrom in which 73 Jews

were murdered. But the soon-to-be pope's report blamed the Jews for their own

persecution, linking them with "loan-sharking, speculation, and contraband"
and
asserting that "Jewish hostility against the new state is on display
everywhere."

Under the new pope in the 1920s and '30s, the Church was the main disseminator

of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other anti-Semitic works; objected
to Nazi
anti-Semitism only because of its secularism, which it contrasted with its own
more
spiritual anti-Semitism; and raised no objection when the Italian Fascists
imposed
anti-Semitic racial laws that were strikingly similar to traditional Church
restrictions
against the Jews. The Catholic establishment remained anti-Semitic up to the
outbreak of the Holocaust, and the role of the subsequent Pope Pius XII during
the
war itself is a separate, bitterly controversial subject.

The story this book tells is not pretty. It is an important, definitive story,
all too
reminiscent of today's embrace of anti-Jewish hatred by another world
religion.



Q&A with David I. Kertzer
Why did you write this book? - In 1997 I published The Kidnapping of Edgardo
Mortara the story of a small Jewish boy who, in 1858, was forcibly taken from
his
parents on orders of the Inquisitor of Bologna and sent to a Catholic
institution in
Rome. The Church still had police powers in parts of Italy and the Inquisitor
had
been told that the family's Catholic maid had secretly baptized the boy.

So my interest in how the Church treated the Jews goes back a way.

But it was two events in early 1998 that led me to want to write this new
book.

A Vatican Commission, charged by the pope with determining whether the Church

bore any responsibility for the rise of modern anti-Semitism and for the
Holocaust,
reported that the Catholic Church had played no role whatsoever.

At the same time, the Vatican announced that scholars would, for the first
time, be
allowed into the archives of the central office of the Inquisition. From what
I knew
about the history of Vatican relations with the Jews, I was skeptical about
the
commission's report, and found the prospect of working in the long-sealed
Inquisition archives too exciting a possibility to pass up.

What is its main premise? - While anti-Semitism has an ancient history, the
development of modern anti-Semitism, of the sort that would make the Holocaust

possible, arose only in the late nineteenth century.

The Vatican maintains that modern anti-Semitism did not grow out of the long
history of Christian anti-Judaism, but from new nationalist movements that
arose in
Europe in the nineteenth century.

What I show in the book, based largely on documents found in the Vatican
archives, is that the Vatican was very much involved in the development of
modern
anti-Semitism.

I also show that the distinction made by the Vatican today between religious
anti-Judaism, which the Church acknowledges to have marked its past, and
social-economic-political anti-Semitism, which it claims not to have embraced,
is
not tenable.

The Vatican championed a view of the Jews as sinister enemies of the state and
of
the people, and, well into the 20th century, called for keeping them
quarantined
from healthy Christian society.

It's surprising you were given access to the archives, given your history of
writing
sometimes unflattering things about the Church. How did you obtain permission?
-
Well, there are actually several different Vatican archives, and each one is a

separate story. Perhaps of greatest interest from this point of view is the
archive of
the Inquisition.

When Cardinal Ratzinger announced that archive's opening, the New York Times
asked me to write an op ed about it, which I did. In order to get permission
to work
there, I had to send in a request directly to Cardinal Ratzinger, along with a
letter
of recommendation.

I asked my friend, historian Carlo Ginzburg, to write for me, as in announcing
the
opening of the archive to scholars, the cardinal had cited Ginzburg's request
of 19
years earlier (the Church moves slowly!).

There was tremendous interest in the scholarly community in what would be
found
in the Inquisition archives, yet only 12 places for scholars had been provided
for.

Just why my request was approved I can only guess, but again I think it is a
tribute
to the Church that it was granted.