One of the first systematic treatises on Talmudic Judaism was written in the early 18th Century by the German theologian Johann Eisenmenger. If memory serves me correctly, the title of his study was "Judaism Revealed." The book is referenced in Israel Shahak's Jewish History, Jewish Religion as a definitive early study, but Eisenmenger's book is itself virtually unobtainable, at least in English translation. Has anybody ever encountered a copy of the book in question, either in translation or in the original German? I would very much like to read the book, as it thoroughly documents the xenophobic and supremacist attitudes in the Talmud and other Jewish religious documents.

Curiously enough, Werner Cohen (a neocon who has written for Horowitz's FrontPageMagazine with the assertion that Noam Chomsky is a "Neo-Nazi" !!!!) was forced to admit that Eisenmenger did not lie about or distort the contents of the Talmud, he merely "interpretted it maliciously." In other words, not even a fanatical Zionist like Cohen could deny that the Talmud contains the hateful screeds documented by Eisenmenger.

http://www.wernercohn.com/Shahak.html

Much of Shahak's book, and all of his Chapter 5, are given to the allegation that the Talmud requires or permits Jews to commit crimes, including murder, against non-Jews. Here Shahak follows an old anti-Semitic tradition that began with the 1700 work Entdecktes Judenthum (Judaism Revealed) by Johann Eisenmenger.

There are gravely offensive passages in the Talmud. (And there are, as we know from our most recent history, some Jewish fringe groups who interpret traditional Jewish writings in a hateful, xenophobic manner.) Eisenmenger did not distort the Talmud, but he interpreted it maliciously. There are many mutually contradictory passages in the Talmud, and a great deal depends on methods of interpretation. The rabbis have never allowed the immoral Talmudic interpretations which Eisenmenger and his followers attribute to Judaism. Moreover, the Talmud is not unique in containing offensive material. As many scholars have pointed out, a hostile commentator could easily produce a Christianity Revealed to provide a basis for a (similarly unjustified) anti-Christian campaign. The problem of hostile Talmud interpretation is very thoroughly discussed in the first chapter of the scholarly work by Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction. Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933. Those sufficiently interested in this area to read Shahak should also take a look at Katz

I have Finnish book about the history of anti-Semitism in front of me, and I'll translate roughly what it says about Eisenmenger:


"... Eisenmenger visited Amsterdam in the 1680s, and - according to his own story - was shocked by the openness that Jews were perpetrating propaganda against Christianity. After returning to Germany, Eisenmenger took as his mission to expose Judaism in all its rottenness, and for this goal, he began to compose a book that grew into a two-part 2000-page volume."


So, in Eisenmenger's days, Amsterdam was the same kind of immoral, de-Christianized cosmopolitan capitalistic cesspit that New York is nowadays.


JTR's "When Victims Rule" also contains a whole lot of information about Eisenmenger:

http://www.holywar.org/jewishtr/02hos.htm


...

"Over the centuries, inflammatory Talmudic passages were "exposed" to the Christian public more and more by non-Jewish authors; in 1700, for example, the German, Johann Eisenmenger, wrote Judaism Uncovered and August Rohling, a professor of Semitic languages in Prague, penned Talmud Jew in 1871. These two works were among the most sensational charges against Jewish tradition and belief; modern Jewish scholarship (and even more so, Jewish popular opinion) generally portrays such texts as fabrication or misinterpretation -- in either case, “anti-Semitic.” "The Talmud," says George Mosse, "was said to be full of exhortations to cheat, lustfulness, usury, and hatred of Christians ... The Talmud had come to symbolize the secret of the 'perverted' religion of the Jews." Rohling decided that it was a "program for domination of the world by the chosen people." [MOSSE, p. 139]

In Eisenmenger's case, his "anti-Jewish sallies," writes Jacob Katz, "were on the whole not his own inventions. He collected anti-Jewish ornaments from the Christian tradition, systematized them, and attempted to prove their truth by reading them into the Talmudic literature with which he was well acquainted." [KATZ, Jew Dig, p. 6] Nazis and others have, of course, recognized such materials' value in enflaming anti-Jewish hostility and appropriated them for presentation for their own purposes.

Eisenmenger’s anti-Jewish work, the argumentative basis for many books critical of Jews that were written later, is particularly noteworthy and bears greater scrutiny. As a dedicated Christian, Eisenmenger's writings were framed as a polemic that impugned Jewish belief and tradition. His opus, Judaism Uncovered (Endecktes Judenthum), was a two-volume set of over 2100 pages, quoting from 200 mostly Jewish sources and was the result of twenty years of research. The author was a respected scholar and well read in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. "In short," says Jacob Katz (a well-known Jewish scholar who Israeli critic Israel Shahak singles out as being particularly apologetic when it comes to Jewish religious texts), [SHAHAK, p. 114] "Eisenmenger was acquainted with all the literature a Jewish scholar of standing would have known ... [He] surpassed his [non-Jewish] predecessors in his mastery of the sources and his ability to interpret them tendentiously. Contrary to accusations that have been made against him, he does not falsify his sources." [KATZ, From, p. 14]

Katz refers here to the likes of Bernard Lewis, another Jewish scholar, whose reaction to Eisenmenger's work is much more typical:

"Eisenmenger was a professor of Oriental languages ... By careful
selection, occasional invention, and sweeping misinterpretation, due
sometimes to ignorance and sometimes to malice, he presents the
Talmud as a corpus of anti-Christian and indeed anti-human doctrine...
Eisenmenger's book, though disproved again and again by both
Christian and Jewish scholars, became a classic of anti-Semitic
literature, and has remained a source book for anti-Semitic accusations
to the present day." [LEWIS, B., 1986, p. 105]

Influential Jews of the Royal Court in Eisenmenger's locale and era (Samson Wertheimer and Samuel Oppenheimer, among them) managed to have the book banned by the Hapsburg Emperor; Eisenmenger appealed, and "litigation continued for decades." The author never lived to see the censorship of his book about Jews lifted. [KATZ, p. 14] "The powerful supplier of the Austrian armies, Samuel Oppenheimer," notes Leon Poliakov, "actually succeeded, for a consideration, in having the work banned. Its 2,000 copies were confiscated as soon as they were printed, and the author died, apparently of grief." [POLIAKOV, p. 243]

Conceding that Eisenmenger's voluminously footnoted citations from Jewish law and religious literature do indeed exist as he says, Jacob Katz argues (as do many Jewish apologists) that just because these citations are undeniably part of Judaism's religious tradition doesn't mean the rules and laws were actually practiced (or, at least, practiced any longer). Katz asserts that such odious directives from Jewish sages must be understood in terms of the climate of their creation. "Eisenmenger," says Katz, "consciously ignored whatever later [Jewish] generations read into earlier sources ... [he was] seeking only the original meaning intended by the writers." [KATZ, p. 17]

Katz proclaims what he calls the "historical approach" (i.e., trying to understand "the original meanings intended by the writers") to be fallacious. The correct way to view Jewish seminal thinking, he argues, is by the "exegetical-homiletical method" (i.e., what Jews were supposed to believe and what they practiced were eventually two different things -- they adjusted to changes around them). This, for Katz, negates the "original meanings."

One of Eisenmenger's principal attacks was upon codified Jewish opinion for treatment of non-Jews and their religions. Eisenmenger cited textual evidence that Jewish religious tradition forbids robbery, deceit, and even murder only within their own community, non-Jews were categorically exempt from moral protection. If Jews were raised with such beliefs, argued Eisenmenger, it is not hard to believe that they would be inclined to defame Christianity at every chance, as well as rob, swindle, and even murder those not of their own community.

"The nature of the Jewish tradition," writes Katz of such Eisenmenger charges, "its earliest strata reflecting the conditions of the ancient world, enabled Eisenmenger to prove such theses. The legal and ethical systems of the ancient world were dualistic ... In the period of the Mishnah and Talmud, the question of whether the property of non-Jews was protected by law was still under dispute. Certain individuals who were considered subversive -- idol worshippers and the like -- remained outside the absolute protection of the [Jewish] law even in matters of life and death." [KATZ, From, p. 18]

Katz goes on to argue that those rabbinical opinions that asserted, for instance, "that one should actively work towards ["sectarians' and "infidels'"] deaths became merely "theoretical material." [KATZ, p. 18] Or as another apologetic Jewish scholar, Louis Jacobs, puts the Eisenmenger issue:

"There is no doubt that the Talmudic Rabbis, living among pagans,
had a poor opinion of the Gentile world around them even while
admiring some of its features. At times some of the Rabbis gave
vent to the harshest feelings, as in the notorious statement 'Kill
the best of the goyyim.' Johann Andreas Eisenmenger (1654-1704)
in his Endecktes Judenthum (Judaism Unmasked) collected such
adverse passages in order to prove to his satisfaction that the Jews
hate all Gentiles. It became an important aspect of Jewish
apologetic to demonstrate that Eisenmenger had either
misunderstood many of the passages he quotes or had taken
them out of context." [JACOBS, L., 1995, p. 184-185]

Ultimately, Eisenmenger aligned evidence from Jewish religious law to exhibit an alleged foundation which suggests that, when the Messiah comes, non-Jews would be destroyed. But not only that. Based on the citational evidence he could piece together, Eisenmenger thought "it stood to reason that [Jews] would carry out the commandment of destruction even in the present on those whom it was within their reach to injure and harm." [KATZ, p. 19] In fact, this theme of vengeful Jewish destruction of non-Jews was addressed in a volume by professor Abraham Grossman in Hebrew, in 1994, specifically investigating Ashkenazi (European Jewish) religious society. A summary of his conclusions in Religious and Theological Abstracts states that

“[The] Ashkenazi believed in the conversion of the Gentiles as part of
the redemptive era, following the stage of vengeance ... The idea that
a link exists between vengeance to be carried out against the enemies
of Israel and the redemption, and that vengeance is a forerunner to
redemption, can be found in the Bible, the Talmud, and in
apocalyptic literature, and should not be viewed as uniquely
Ashkenazi.” [REL&THEO, 38:1, 859]

As renowned sociologist Max Weber once noted:

"In the mind of the pious Jew the moralism of the law was inevitably
combined with the aforementioned hope for revenge, which suffused
practically all the exile and post-exilic sacred scriptures. Moreover,
through two and a half millennium this hope appeared in virtually every
divine service of the Jewish people, characterized by a firm grip upon
two indestructible claims -- religiously sanctified segregation from the
other peoples of the world, and divine promises relating to this world
... When one compares Judaism with other salvation religions, one
finds that in Judaism the doctrine of religious resentment has an
idiosyncratic quality and plays a unique role not found among
the disprivileged classes of any other religion." [NEWMAN, A.,
1998, p. 163])

Yet, concludes professor Katz, "To anyone who is knowledgeable of Jewish literature, Eisenmenger's interpretations [of central Jewish religious texts] read like a parody of both the legal and homiletic literature ... It is otherwise, of course, for the reader who is unfamiliar with the literature: he may fall for Eisenmenger's conclusions, not knowing that they are no more than the very assumptions that preceded the writer's examination of the material [i.e., anti-Jewish Christian prejudice]." [KATZ, J, From, p. 20]

Unfortunately, this "parody" reading of seminal Jewish religious literature, and its “theoretical theses,” as we will soon see, has many Jewish adherents even today, as it always has, and -- with renewed interest in it in the Jewish world today -- is causing moral consternation for the more universalistic, enlightened members of the Jewish politic.

"Eisenmenger neither forged his sources nor pulled his accusations out of thin air," says Katz, "There was a nucleus of truth in all of his claims: the Jews lived in a world of legendary or mythical concepts, of ethical duality -- following different standards of morality in their internal and external relationships -- and they dreamed with imaginative speculation of their future in the time of the Messiah." [KATZ, p. 21] That admitted, Katz turns to debunk Eisenmenger's volumes of evidence by claiming that the German scholar found only what he wished to find. In other words, the most relevant facts of Eisenmenger's argument, to Katz, are not to be found in the evidence of Jewish religious law and literature, but, rather, in Eisenmenger's underlying paradigm of anti-Semitism.

...


Since Talmudists managed to bury Eisenmenger's opus already at its inception in 1700 through bribery, I wouldn't be too hopeful about the possibility of getting our hands on it now either.

May his example exhilarate us in any case. He was the pioneer of Talmud-expose.


PS: Just a little nitpick. Eisenmenger is NOT referenced in Shahak's book. Only Werner Cohn talks about him.


Petr

And here's the Jewish version of the case of Eisenmenger:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/t10/ht119.htm


CHAPTER XVI.

THE PERSECUTIONS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, THE HEAD OF WHOM WAS JOHANN ANDREAS EISENMENGER.

The victory of Reuchlin, and the establishment of the Reformation by Luther, in the sixteenth century, did not stop the persecution of the Talmud. It was ever renewed by men of rank in the different countries. The most dangerous of them was Johann Andreas Eisenmenger, who spent almost all his lifetime in the destruction of the Talmud and its standard-bearers; and it seems miraculous that he did not succeed.

Eisenmenger was born in 1654, at Manheim. In 1666 he came to Heidelberg where he found grace in the eyes of Prince Carl Ludwig, who was pleased with Eisenmenger's determination to learn the Hebrew language. Prince Carl Ludwig sent him, at his own expense, to travel in different countries to become accomplished in the study of Oriental languages. But when Eisenmenger was about to visit Palestine, the prince died (1680), and he established himself in the City of Amsterdam, where he lived for some time in friendly relations with the Hebrew scholars and with Rabbi David Lida of that city.

At the end of the same year it happened that three Gentiles circumcised themselves and embraced the Jewish faith. This, according to Eisenmenger's own confession, angered him almost to death. And this occurrence made him determine to write a voluminous book on the "wickedness" of the Talmud, in order (he said) to save Christianity from danger.

He worked hard and successfully for nineteen years; translated into German from 193 different Hebrew books, and a considerable number of pages from various Tracts of the Talmud itself.

This book, which he named "Endecktes Judenthum" (Unveiled Judaism), containing two volumes of more than a thousand pages each, he gave in the year 1700 to the printers of Frankfort-on-the-Main.

The Jews of that city got wind of it, and being afraid that this book would cause a renewal of massacres of Jews, such as took place in the cities of Franken and Bamberg in 1699, where

p. 105

houses and other Jewish property were destroyed by the mob, appealed to Sampson Wertheimer, who was then the banker of Emperor Leopold, that he should point out to the emperor the dangers which such a book would lead to.

Remembering that after the destruction of Jewish property, the mob, in the above-mentioned places, turned to the palaces of the noblemen, the Emperor commanded the Governor of Frankfort to stop the printing of the book, and to conceal all that was printed of the same, until a careful examination of the book by Gentile and Jewish Hebrew scholars would be made.

In spite of the assistance of many prominent men in the German Empire, who petitioned the emperor to release the books, he retained his decision and paid no attention even to the special personal letter from the King of Prussia in behalf of Eisenmenger. When Eisenmenger died in 1704, his books had not yet been redeemed from their captivity; and only in 1711 did Frederick I, King of Prussia, republish the book at his own expense, from a copy which was in the hands of Eisenmenger's heirs, donating all the copies to them. It would take too much space to relate the proceedings of Eisenmenger himself, and those of his heirs against the Jews of Frankfort, and the various decisions of the courts from the time of Leopold to that of the Empress Maria Theresa. We do not deem it necessary to recount them, since they are in no way related to the subject of the persecution of the Talmud. 1

We have only to say that in the eleven years since the book was given to the press in Frankfort, until the circulation was permitted in Königsberg, its influence was weakened, so that it did not cause very much harm at that time.

Thereafter, however, many anti-Semites made use of the material gathered in this book, quoting it as being directly from the Talmud without mentioning Eisenmenger; probably because of his notoriety as an enemy of the Jews.

Concerning the book itself, we would refer the reader to Professor Franz Delizeh's book, "Rohling's Talmudjude," sixth edition, 1881, and many other criticisms of Eisenmenger's


p. 106

work by Gentile Hebrew scholars, such as Professor Strack of Berlin and others.

We have refrained from stating our own criticism of the misinterpretation of the quotations from the Talmud, chiefly because we do not deem it necessary to study Eisenmenger's book for criticism. As for the explanation of the Talmud, we do not need to use him as our guide; and also in order to avoid apparent partiality; since we are ourselves the bearers of the Talmud's banner. (See App., No. 16.)


----------------------------

Footnotes

105:1 The details are given in Graetz's ("History of the Jews"), Hamelitz, 1888, by David Kahan.




Petr

Petr,

Has Eisenmenger's study of Talmudic Judaism been reprinted in recent years? I would very much like to read it.

Concerning the Jewish response to Eisenmenger, I can't help but laugh at the standard line "the quotes from the Talmud are authentic, but he has taken them out of context and interpretted them maliciously." First of all, one can sense the embarassment by Jews that the hateful and bigoted screeds that form the foundations of their belief systems have finally been exposed. Second, there can be no ambiguity about what the quotes in question really mean, regardless of context, the Talmud clearly states that Jews have no moral obligations to their gentile hosts, only to co-tribalists. To say that it has been interpretted "maliciously" only underscores the fact that the Talmud is itself a malicious and depraved document.

Sorry, AntiYuppie - I have already posted about all that I myself know about Eisenmenger. They have really managed to shove him to the memory hole.


Petr