The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  Reuchlin advances his falsification by engaging in the old rabbinic game of pretending the word minim in the Birkat Haminim is not a reference to Christians. He employs similar tactics to deny the truth that as a part of the religion of Judaism, its adherents are obligated to ritually pray for disaster to befall the followers of Christ.

  The eminent halachic authority “Rambam,” (Moses Maimonides) wrote: “In the days of Rabban Gamaliel, the minim became numerous in Israel and they caused trouble for the Jews, seducing them to turn away from God. When they saw that this was more significant than any other human need, Rabban Gamaliel and his court acted and established an additional blessing that would include a petition before God to make the minim perish. He established it in the amidah so that it would be set in everyone’s mouths. Consequently, the number of blessings in the amidah is nineteen.” 15

  By way of excursus, we are explicating one of the so-called Amidah “prayers of benediction,” the Birkat Haminim, which contains the murderous, ritual curse on the Christians (the “minim”), a curse which has echoed perpetually down the corridors of time since at least the days of Rabbi Gamaliel, when it was enacted at the rabbinic academy of Yavneh (known in Greek as “Jamnia”), in the late first century A.D.16

  J. Louis Martyn in his essential text, History and Theology of the Fourth Gospel,17 sees a reference to the Birkat Haminim curse in John 9:22, “His parents said these things because they feared the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that if anyone should confess Jesus to be Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue” (also cf. John 12:42, and in particular John 16:2, for the homicidal aspect). Justin Martyr, the second century A.D. Christian Father who was raised in Samaria, in his Dialogue with Trypho, repeatedly stated that Jews ceremonially curse Christians, “For in your synagogues you curse all those who through Him are called Christians.” 18

  In the Babylonian Talmud (hereafter “BT”), we read in Berakhot 28b-29a: “Rabban Gamaliel said to the sages: ‘Is there anyone who knows how to enact the birkat haminim? Shmuel HaQaton (Samuel the Little) stood up and enacted it.” In BT Megillah 17b it is stated: “Once judgment was passed on the wicked, the minim perished…and once the minim perished, the horns of the righteous are elevated.”

  The rabbis have hotly denied that minim refers to Christians. 19 From the time of Reuchlin forward they deployed a massive p.r. corps and thought police to ensure that no respectable scholar ventured to state the truth that the Birkat Haminim is a curse on the followers of Jesus Christ, which has never been rescinded by the theological heirs of the rabbis who authored the original enabling taqqanah (legislation).

  Birkat Haminim also serves as a litmus test for heresy. Any Judaic in the synagogue who stumbles or hesitates in pronouncing the curse is suspected of being a crypto-Christian; a determination that, if confirmed, would lead to the imposition of another curse, the cherem (curse of expulsion), upon any secret Judaic-Christian. BT Berakhot 29b states concerning the “blessings” that comprise the Amidah and of the unique nature of one of them in particular: “If one errs in (reciting) any one of the blessings we do not remove him, but in the birkat haminim, we do remove him.”

  Let us consider the evidence of the Geniza texts which come from the Ben Ezra Synagogue of Old Cairo, Egypt, circa 1000 to 1300 A.D. These were obtained by Solomon Schechter who began to publish them in 1898; among these was the Birkat Haminim. Every Birkat Haminim prayer in the geniza manuscripts begins, “May there be no hope for meshummadim.” 20 The meshummadim are Jewish converts to Christianity. Among the most illustrious in the Middle Ages who assisted the Church in discovering the truth about the Talmud were Nicholas Donin, Peter Alfonsi, Peter Galatin and Paulus Cristiani. The latter debated Rabbi Nachman (Nachmanides) in Barcelona in 1263, with King James I of Aragon in attendance. 21 During the Renaissance, the former rabbi Victor von Carben, Johannes Pfefferkorn and Anthonius Margaritha, 22 were all sincere converts to Christianity.

  From Christ’s earliest apostles to all Jews who would later convert to belief in Jesus as Savior, Judaism prayed that there would be no hope for the physical or spiritual salvation of these converts. Meshummad (also called mumar) signifies those who are worthy of extermination, from the Hebrew root sh-m-d, which connoted the Old Testament capital penalty for engaging in idolatry. 23 The “idolatrous crime” of these converts is described by Dr. Ruth Langer of Hebrew Union College: “Throughout the High Middle Ages and beyond, apostates often do provide less than friendly information to Christian authorities about the inner workings of the Jewish community.”

  The legal text Sefer Ha’Eshkol was authored by Rabbi Abraham ben Yitzhak (1085-1158) who ruled the Judaics of the Provencal region of medieval France as rosh yeshiva and head of the rabbinic court. Such was his prestige that he was referred to by posterity simply as “the Rav, Av Bet Din.” In the authenticated edition of his Sefer Ha’Eshkol published by Shalom Albeck in 1910, (pp. 26-27), he defines minim as “the followers of the crucified Jesus.”

  The rabbinic texts possessed of the force of law containing the curse on the meshummadim and/or minim, were closely guarded and retained as a secret teaching far from the prying eyes of inquisitive Christian scholars. Rabbi Jacob ben Asher (1269-1340), who was known as the “Tur” after his magnum opus legal text of the same name, referred to the Birkat Haminim as qelalat haminim, “the curse of the minim.” To confuse Christian investigators, qelalat haminim was deliberately misprinted in rabbinic texts as qelalat hamalshinim; and the curse on the meshummadim was erased from printed rabbinic liturgical texts of what otherwise would have constituted a very troubling rabbinic penumbra.24 Then as now, this censorship enabled Judaism’s legion of liars (both Judaic and gentile) to repeatedly and brazenly deny that there was any such curse; many continue to deny it to this day.

  Another subterfuge is to claim that the meshummad “deny the Torah” and deserve their punishment. Two exceedingly influential halachic authorities, Rabbi Jacob ben Asher (the “Tur”) and his father, Rabbi Asher ben Yehiel (“the Rosh”), indict the meshummad for denying the “two forms of Torah,” the written and the oral; the latter being the source of the Talmud and Kabbalah.25 This was one of the supposedly “idolatrous” transgressions of converts to Christianity in the eyes of their persecutors. Actually, the meshummad uphold the written Torah and deny the ersatz oral “Torah” of rabbinic Judaism.

  In the Sefer Ha-Chinukh, the medieval work describing and explaining the rabbis’ commandments, Commandment 93 stipulates that it is a requirement to kill all Jews who participate in “idolatry,” like the Christians (minim) do, “because they trouble Israel.” Commandment 34 states that there is no restriction on killing these people because the lives of such people have no value.26

  Meshummadim are Judaic converts to Christ who Talmudicobservant Jews have an obligation to allow to “fall into a pit” (Bava Metzia 2:33; Avodah Zarah 26:B). This also applies to the minim:

  “The Hebrew and Aramaic root of the word ‘minim’ simply means ‘kind’ or ‘type.’…this usage corresponds with that of the term’s cognate in Christian Aramaic dialects, where it is a common translation of the Greek ethnos, the Septuagint’s translation of the Hebrew goyim (other nations), and the New Testament’s term for gentiles. This expansion of meaning to include gentiles creates a trajectory that enables rabbis in Christian Europe to understand the minim to be (or include) ‘the students of Jesus of Nazareth,’ i.e. gentile Christians…In the medieval European context, the birkat haminim, is fully a curse of Christians. Every single European Jewish community adopts the basic form of the birkat haminim found in the Seder Rav ‘Amram Gaon…every single medieval community continues to introduce the prayer with a curse of meshummadim…(and) by curses of minim…” 27

  Rashi (the acronym of Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhak, 1040-1105), was a renowned exegete who glossed the Bible and the Talmud. His commentary is published with the Babylonian Talmud itself. Rashi defined minim as “the students of Jesus of Nazareth” or more specifically, a
s the galahim (the “tonsured ones,” i.e. Catholic priests), as did one of the top tier Gadol haDor rabbis, the Rhinelander Rabbi Eliezer ben Yoel HaLevi (1140-1220),28 as well as many others (such as Rabbis Shmuel ben Meir and Yehuda ben Barzilai).

  The accurate definition is also found in Judaism’s bigoted, anti-Christian texts of the era, such as the Sefer Yosef HaMeqane, and the aforementioned Nizzahon Vetus. The latter argued that the New Testament was filled with absurdities and contradictions. We are aware of no establishment-approved scholar who denounces Nizzahon Vetus for having made that claim, 29 though hundreds of them denounce scholars who venture to write criticisms of the Talmud. Albert Ehrman, in his 1974 New York University dissertation, styles the hatefilled Nizzahon text a “defense of Judaism.” Any defense of Christianity that entails an attack on the Talmud is almost automatically stigmatized as “hate literature.” This tactic is a recrudescence of the rabbinic practice of classifying someone as a min just for being, in the words of Rabbi Elazar of Worms, “irreverent about the Talmud” (Perushei Siddur Ha Tefillah LaRoqe-ah, p. 342).

  As Christians in medieval Europe began to become aware of these curses, their hostility toward the rabbis in their midst understandably increased. In 826, Agobard (769-840), the Christ-like Archbishop of Lyon who opposed the worship of carved statues, wrote De Insolentia Judaeorum, an informed protest to the Carolognian monarch Louis the Pious, against rabbinic curses.

  Establishment historians omit the ritual and perpetual curses and blasphemies uttered by the adherents of the rabbis, and focus exclusively on the defensive Christian reaction to the hate speech of the synagogue, and then portray the defense as irrational Christian bigotry; just as, with regard to Catholic Spain, they minimize accounts of the Judeo-Muslim murder and enslavement of Catholics, and focus instead on demonizing the Catholic defense against the slavery and murder. When this tactic is applied to medieval Catholic Europe as a whole, Judaics are portrayed as innocent lambs victimized by monstrous Christians for no rationally valid reason. For this cartoon equation to be persuasive, the fact that the rabbis and their followers were petitioning God to destroy Christians is denied or concealed.

  Documented Christian reports on the Birkhat Haminim curse began in earnest with the converted Judaic Nicholas Donin, around the year 1230. The heroic Donin sent to Pope Gregory IX a list of thirty-five Talmud passages that constituted hatred of God and Christians. In June, 1240 in Paris, Donin single-handedly debated four eminent rabbis. The charges against the Talmudic rabbis which Donin raised were specifically targeted against the Birkat Haminim.30 Only the most rabid partisans attempt to disparage Donin’s scholarship. He had his facts in order, putting forth citations from relevant Talmudic texts, including a note that the amidah prayer of eighteen “benedictions” is really nineteen, referencing BT Berakhot 28b. Donin correctly tracked the origin of Birkat Haminim to the rabbinic academy of Yavneh and a gloss of Rashi, as well as the connection between BT Rosh Hashanah 17a and Rashi’s gloss that defines minim as “the followers of Jesus of Nazareth.” One of Donin’s debating opponents, Rabbi Yehiel, lied constantly and denied almost everything, asserting that the Jesus in the Talmud was not the same as Jesus of Nazareth, and that Jews do not pray for the downfall of Christian nations.

  Yehiel appears to have been as sophisticated and shrewd as any twenty-first century rabbi: denying everything and pledging allegiance to the French king and queen before whom the debate was held. He only “lost his cool” in the presence of Donin personally, against whom he spewed venom, terming him a traitor who would never be forgiven. While the French monarchs were gracious toward Yehiel, Donin’s welldocumented points were hugely influential and resonated among Christians for centuries, in the writings of medieval popes such as Clement IV (Damnabili Perfidia Judaeorum, July, 1267) and Honorius IV (letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, November 30, 1286); in the Provencal breviary of Matfre Ermengaud (1290); in the homilies of the Dominican preacher Giordano da Rivalto (1304), in the Dominican Bernard Gui’s Practica officii inquisitionis heretice pravitatis (1323; cf. section V:4, “About the intolerable blasphemies of the Jews against Christ, our faith and the Christian people in the birkat haminim”); and in the writings of the Judaic convert Abner of Burgo (a.k.a. Alfonso of Valladolid), in his Libro de las Batallas de Dios (1336) and Libro de las malliciones de los Judios.

  On February 25, 1336 the King of Castille, Alfonso XI, decreed that the Birkat Haminim was forbidden throughout his kingdom. Echoing Nicholas Donin’s learned indictment, the King declared to the rabbis: “You curse Christians and converts to the Christian faith, judging them to be heretics and even mortal enemies, and you entreat God to ruin and destroy them.” In 1380 King Juan I reinstated King Alfonso’s prohibition. The Judaic convert Bishop Paul de Santa Maria of Burgos (1351-1435) wrote in his Scrutinium scriptarum concerning the contents of the Birkat Haminim, that the Jews, “not only do not pray for gentiles, but they pray for the destruction of the Church of Christ and of his disciples, as is evident of a certain prayer of theirs which is said by them in their synagogues. In this prayer, they clearly say, ‘Let all heretics perish quickly,’ which words Rabbi Solomon and Rabbi Moses explain thus, ‘These heretics are the disciples of the Nazarene.” 31

  Privately, in their own clandestine writings, the rabbis acknowledged that the Birkat Haminim cursing of Christians was a contributing factor in their expulsion from Spain by Catholic Queen Isabella. 32 In 2012, Ruth Langer of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, made a monumental admission: “Most of the Christian accusations about the birkat haminim were not wrong.” 33

  Johannes Reuchlin was lying about the Birkat Haminim curse. He lied repeatedly and knowingly. Reuchlin’s Augenspiegel, for all its bluster and self-advertised remarkable scholarship is not a particularly impressive polemical work in that it is in some places preposterous34 and in many other parts demonstrably false. Nonetheless, Reuchlin succeeded because the Hermetic-Kabbalistic Cryptocracy created on his behalf a celebrity victim image, like that of Galileo, which has proved difficult to correct factually.

  Occult conspirators defended Reuchlin in their satirical book, Epistolae obscurorum vivorum,35 which excited intense avant-garde interest by successfully branding those who opposed Reuchlin as benighted laughing-stocks. The Epistolae obscurorum vivorum was written from the point of view of a reactionary Jew hater and in a kind of pidgin Latin, to mock Pfefferkorn and his allies as low-bred dolts. In large part thanks to the Epistolae obscurorum vivorum, Reuchlin emerged from the controversy as “an exemplar of Renaissance erudition and progressive, humanist ideals on the path to the advancement of humanity from darkness to light.”

  Reuchlin’s Augenspiegel is a tissue of lies and misrepresentation, but it mattered not. The Cryptocracy saw to it that an enduring image prevailed over a fleeting reality. The “reactionary” Judaic-convert Pfefferkorn, and his allies among the Dominican theologians of Cologne, were painted in the booklet Epistolae obscurorum vivorum as bigoted, block-headed louts. There matters have stood these past five centuries.

  Some truth concerning Pfefferkorn’s authentic character is beginning to come to light. Ruth I. Cape, Pfefferkorn’s English translator, who cannot be described as his admirer, nonetheless concedes that his writing contains a “vast array of images and powerful metaphors.” These are so eloquent they “contribute to a better understanding of the Early New High German language and its use at the beginning the sixteenth century.” Cape states further that the work for which Pfefferkorn is best known, Der Juden Spiegel (published in German and Latin in 1507 and 1508), “is a carefully structured pamphlet…a mirror of the struggle and obstacles faced by every person who tries to find a new identity, and symbolizes what a society in transition might experience. In that respect Der Juden Spiegel is a timeless document that speaks to readers of all centuries.” 36

  In other words it is a classic, and not as the secret society adepts portrayed it: a poorly written hack job by an ignorant scribbler. I
t was this jaundiced view that the occult Brotherhood hoped to paint—and succeeded in unfairly painting—Pfefferkorn with in the eyes of the intelligentsia of Europe, one of whom was Erasmus, who was infuriated that Pfefferkorn was obstructing the rehabilitation of rabbinic writings.

  Pfefferkorn’s numerous Catholic critics dismissed him as a “half-Jew.” 37 Erasmus amended and compounded the racial insult by terming Pfefferkorn a “Jew-and-a-half.” 38 It was perversely ironic that anti-Judaic racial prejudice was wielded by promoters of Talmudic and Kabbalistic ideology, in order to discredit a Christian convert who obstructed their campaign to persuade Christendom of the benevolence of the rabbinic texts. False witness against Pfefferkorn on the part of “enlightened” Renaissance Catholic humanists was relentless. In 1514 malicious false witness was circulated claiming that this devoutly orthodox, converted Catholic missionary had posed as the messiah, desecrated the Communion wafer and ritually murdered a Christian infant. 39

  While Pfefferkorn struggled against a deluge of libel, his adversary was rising high. Reuchlin candidly averred that the popes were behind both his Talmud project and his Kabbalah promotion:

  “That is enough said about the Talmud and why it should not be suppressed or burned. Now to the third section of the Jewish books concerning the divine secrets, utterances and words of God, called the Kabblaah. I could say a lot both for and against it, for our Holy Father Pope Innocent VIII had the Kabbalistic volumes carefully examined and evaluated twenty years ago by eminent bishops and doctors in the course of a case against that nobly born, erudite Count, Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, of blessed memory. At that time he (Pico) announced publicly that he was willing to go to Rome to dispute on themes and conclusions, among them namely the thesis: ‘There is no other science that provides us with greater certainty of Christ’s divinity than magic and the Kabbalah’. The theologians of the Holy Scriptures wrote and said many things contrary to this affirmation, in spite of the fact that they were completely ignorant as to what kind of creature the Kabbalah was. Nevertheless, the aforementioned Count refuted their assertions with conviction.