There they go again

In the middle ages, Christian Europe was a dangerous place for Jews.

In addition to blood libels, Crusades, forced conversions, and expulsions, the Church tried to co-opt Reason itself in the one-sided fight against the Jew. Philosophically, Augustine's slightly-less-malign anti-Semitism—Jews happen to be blind to the truth, obsessed with the body, materialistic, and legalistic—gave way to Aquinas' radically Franciscan understanding of Jews as purposefully evil—we purposefully reject the truth, we killed Jesus, and we purposefully misread the Law.

In some communities the Church required Jews to defend their Jewishness in mock trials or debates known as disputations. The most famous took place in Paris, Barcelona, and Tortosa, and their conclusions were forgone: the home team always won.

While browsing the Jewish Chronicle, I happened on Professor Geoffrey Alderman's weekly op-ed and, having assumed disputations were history, nearly tumbled from my barstool.

Remember that I'm a left-leaning, pro-two-state solution peacenik; that I'm all too aware of some of Zionism's mistaken excesses. But also know that like Alderman I'm always a Zionist and am horrified at repeated ahistorical attempts to tie back the existence of anti-Semitism to our existence and actions as Jews. This circular argument is as fallacious and dangerous in this late modern disputation as it was in its medieval predecessors.

Anyway, enough from me, read Alderman's It’s not Zionism that fuels hate for yourself.