E

ECK, JOHANN VON (1486-1543)

 

German Catholic theologian and one of the chief opponents of Lutheranism; vehemently attacked all secular authorities that tolerated Jews in their territories.

While Von Eck disagreed with Luther on all major ecclesiastical issues, in matters Judaica they concurred.

An epigone, the Jesuit Adam Contzen (1570-1635) of Mainz, called the Jews “poisonous animals” who should be hounded into oblivion. Contzen was Professor of Moral (sic!) Theology at the university.

 

ECUMENICAL CLIMATE

 

Pope Paul VI, cunctator of ecumenism, directed the proper Vatican secretariat to cooperate with Protestant translators of the New Testament, and we shall have another English version of the Greek text.

From the efforts of Wycliffe (whose corpse was desecrated by the clergy) and Tyndale (who was burned by the Church) to the Catholic Douai Bible and the King James Version, the differences in the Christian canon and legend are minimal.

The last few decades have burgeoned with philological attempts to interpret the New Testament, by Catholics and Protestants alike. Like their predecessors, the current translators use either the Greek editions or the Vulgata, a Latin text prepared from the Greek.

But neither Jesus, His Apostles nor His followers spoke Greek or Latin—they spoke Hebrew. When speaking of peace, the great ecumenic theme, Jesus said not “Eirene,” nor did He say “Pax.” He said “Shalom.”

And while the Catholics, true to the doctrine of the “perpetual virginity of Mary,” contrary to the Protestant theologians, refer to Christ’s brothers as “brethren,” Christ’s kin were, and because of ecumenic superficiality, still are subject to derision and hate in the very Gospels that bespeak His love.

No matter in what linguistic or doctrinal detail Catholics and Protestants differ, they all agree to retain in the coming Gospel translation the naming of “The Jews” as sons of the Devil, bloodthirsty tormenters and killers of Christ, idolators of a God-accursed religion!

This last curse against the Jews was repeated only months after the end of Vatican II by none other than Bishop Luigi Carli, the appointee of Paul VI to head the Ecumenical Curia dealing with the Jews and Judaism.

As long as the Christian theologians are unwilling to excise these ugly references to the people of Jesus from their canon, it will remain a book of death to the Jews, even if the new translators succeed in recruiting a few “Uncle Tom” Jews to participate in their “ecumenic committee.”

There can be no real ecumenism with “sons of the Devil,” and so we are described in the New Testament.

Someday, in the distant future, we hope there will arise a true concept of brotherhood even among the Christians and they will cease teaching their young that the Children of Israel are diabolical God killers.

Someday the Christians will learn that if God considered the Jews a devil’s brood, He would not have sent His only Son to be born among them, from the womb of a Jewish mother.

Such a canon is not of God; the mark on the forehead of the Jewish nation as it appears in the Gospels was placed there not by Him but by Satan.

 

EISENMENGER, JOHANN ANDREAS (1654-1704)

 

Lutheran and anti-Semitic agitator. His book, Entdeck-tes Judentum, has served as an arsenal of anti-Semitic calumny since 1700.

 

ELVIRA, COUNCIL OF

 

Banned (306 A.D.) all community contact between Spanish Christians and the evil Hebrews; prohibited marriage of Christians and Jews (cf. racial purity laws of Nazism).

 

EMANCIPATION

 

of the Jewish people in Christian countries received its great impetus with the American and French revolutions. America led by a hundred years all other nations. Here is a partial chronology of freedom:

1636, Rhode Island granted religious liberty.

1669, “Jews, heathens and dissenters,” granted liberty of conscience in the Carolinas.

1777, Constitution of New York State placed Jews on a status of complete equality with other residents.

1781, Joseph of Austria abolishes poll tax and issues “Toleranz patent.”

1786, Religious liberty granted Jews in Hungary.

1788, Poll tax abolished in Prussia.

1790, French National Assembly grants citizenship to Bordeaux Sephardim.

1791, French National Assembly grants equality to the Jews.

1796, Batavian National Assembly grants equality to Netherlands Jews.

1806, Napoleon’s Assembly of Jewish notables held.

1807, Session of Napoleon’s Sanhedrin.

1808, Jews of Westphalia and of Baden emancipated.

1811, Jews of Hamburg emancipated.

1812, Jews of Mecklenburg-Prussia emancipated.

1830, Abolition of More Judaico (Jewish oath) in France.

1831, Emancipation of Jews of Jamaica.

1833, Emancipation of Jews of Hesse.

1846, “Toleration Tax,” abolished in Hungary.

1848, Emancipation of Jews of German States.

1849, Jews of Denmark emancipated.

1858, Jewish disabilities removed in England.

1859, Equality granted in Italy.

1860, Austrian Jews emancipated.

1861. Jewish oath abolished and Jews emancipated in Württemberg.

1865, Disabilities removed in Sweden.

1865, Complete equality granted in Belgium.

1866, Emancipation of Jews in Switzerland.

1867, Emancipation of the Jews in Hungary.

1869, Jews granted political equality in Prussia.

1872, Bavarian Jews emancipated.

1904, More Judaica abolished in Rumania.

1905-6, Jews granted political rights in Russian Empire.

1908, Jews granted political rights in Turkish Empire.

1919, All citizens equalized in U.S.S.R.

1919, Jews granted equality in Rumania, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia.

1932. Equality of all citizens granted in Spain.

 

ENDLOESUNG

 

“The final solution” of the “Jewish problem,” so well known through the Nuremberg and Tel-Aviv trials, never fully materialized for the Hitler-Himmler-Eichmann group, as it did not fully materialize for King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella or the Catholic royalty of Portugal, France and England.

All expelled some Jews and murdered others who stood by Judaism.

Somehow the Jews remained, as Saint Augustinus said, “necessarii credentibus gentibus,” historical witness to Christian salvation.

Germany came closest to Endlösung under Catholicism after the Black Death era which followed the Crusade massacres, the Rindfleisch butchery, the well-poisoning killings and the ritual murder bloodbath. By 1500 Catholic Germany was judenfrei, as were France and of course England.

The Jews perished by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, men, women and children, under the ax and the sword and the torch, drowned, quartered, burned, garroted, knifed and stuck like pigs.

Israel was at the mercy of the Catholic Church and there was no mercy—this was a Christian world and, as Hitler later explained, there was no room for the “Pariahvolk.”

It was the people of Jesus, His mother’s people, Joseph’s kin, whom the Catholics murdered. From the Ebro to the Elbe, from the Tiber to the Seine and Thames, all the rivers of Europe received the blood of Israel, of Christ’s Israel, His Apostles’ Israel—the blood of the direct descendants of all those who erected in the Judean hills the great edifice of Christendom.

Israel had to die because the Romans would not tolerate a king of the Jews. What irony and what tragedy!

And it was the Teutons, Iberians, Gauls and sundry Visigoths who drew the blood of Christ’s very kin! The barbarians in bearskins who were living a savage life when the Psalms were written by David, the kingly bard, whose ancestry the evangelists claimed for Jesus—it was these barbarians who won the blessing of the Church as they ripped the holy scrolls of Judea and punished with fire and crimson swords the People of God, the People of the Book, the People of Christ.

The Catholic Church failed to obliterate the perennial seed of the Holy Land, and the Nazi Teutons failed, but Israel was left a much reduced nation.

We cannot deny that the Church and the Nazi Germans have done us grievous and permanent damage. Our children have fallen away in front of our eyes, and our women been tortured to death, even more by the Church than by the modern savages.

It may be thousands of miles away where this happened, and a thousand years ago. But my kin was thus brutalized by the pretenders to Christ, and there is no example in all history, primitive or civilized, of men doing to men for centuries what Christians have done to Jews.

And there is no end in sight since the Church refuses to change a word of its precious catechisms and codes and dogmas and scripture. To the church the word is sacrosanct, but the life of a Jew is just a Jew’s life.

 

ENGLISH LITERATURE

 

The Canterbury Tales (1386) by Chaucer is one of many classical literary pieces with a Christian anti-Semitic motif—in this case the depicting of a Jew as a vampire. With typical Christian malevolence of the time, the Jew is styled a member of that “God accursed” race. Such literary pieces, imbued with direct or indirect Jew hatred, have done much to keep anti-Semitism alive by a kind of subliminal effect.

Marlowe joined the same sad literary clique with his play, The Jew of Malta (1592). Marlowe’s villain is a monstrous Jew who revels in the killing of Christians, by well poisoning or plain murder.

Shakespeare followed the easy road to public appeal in his Merchant of Venice (1597) by switching the characters of a Venetian tale. In the Venetian tale the flesh-greedy merchant is a Christian who makes a wager with a Jew against a pound of the Jew’s flesh. Shakespeare simply reversed the roles and made the Jew an ogre.

English anti-Semitism was kept alive by a surly clergy. Chaucer, Marlowe and Shakespeare could never have come across a single Jew, since the Jews had been expelled from England in 1290. They were not permitted entry until 1659, by Oliver Cromwell, who got his edict through Parliament in spite of a venomously Jew-hating clergy. The English had forsaken Catholicism, but not its Jew hatred.

Essayists like Charles Lamb (1823) berated the Jews viciously for “killing Christ.” Even children’s literature has been poisoned by the Gospel image of the Jew as a money-changer and Judas. In Grimm’s German Fairy Tales a story, “The Jew in the Bush,” stars a cheat, thief and scoundrel, a Jew who winds up on the gallows.

Not even the “Mother Goose” verses escaped the Sunday school venom:

“Jack sold his egg to a rogue of a Jew,
Who cheated him out of half his due.”

It took the advent of the Giant Killer Hitler to remove these references from the American editions. Other Christian nations still perpetuate them, as British dictionaries still define “Jew” in the old Church manner: a cheat, a disreputable trader.

 

EPHRAEM, SAINT (306-373)

 

Highly regarded in the Eastern Church, refers in his hymns to the synagogues as whorehouses.

 

EPHRAIM OF JERUSALEM

 

This benign patriarch, passing through Bucharest (1764-66) ordered Prince Alexander Glinka to demolish the synagogue. It was done.

 

EPIPHANIUS, SAINT (310-403)

 

In his histories of heresies mentioned dishonesty and indolence as typical Jewish characteristics.

 

ERFURT

 

In this German town on June 26, 1221, a band of pilgrims from Friesland bound for the Holy Land stormed the Jewish quarter and killed twenty-six Hebrews. For hundreds of years this pious victory was commemorated. But it was made insignificant by the murder of three thousand Jews in August, 1348, as poisoners of wells. The accusations were spread by Dominican monks of the city.

 

ERWIG (680-687)

 

This Spanish King was a most pious ruler who made twenty-eight anti-Jewish regulations into law. The Twelfth Council of Toledo (681) approved all of them. In 694 the Seventeenth Council of Toledo, together with this noble King, reduced all Jews to servitude, prohibiting their religious rites, and ordained that all Jewish children above seven be taken from their parents and converted to the Cross.

 

ESTELLA

 

Through this and other Spanish towns bordering France, the Franciscan friar, Peter Olligen, wandered in 1328, preaching in churches against the God killers. Thousands of Jews were martyred.

 

ETHIOPIA

 

In the second half of the nineteenth century European missionaries appeared in Addis Ababa and began an intensive campaign against the native Jews (Falashas) who had been living there for more than a thousand years. They failed to break the spirit of the Falashas; however, some of the Ethiopian Jews attempted to flee to Palestine (1868).

 

EUGENIUS III

 

Pope (1145-1153); offered mercenary Crusaders, as an enlistment inducement, absolution from any debt owed to Jews.

 

EUSEBIUS

 

Bishop of Caesarea who flourished around 300, maintained that the Jews in every community crucified a Christian at their Purim festival as a rejection of Jesus. This kindly saint also asserted that during the Roman-Persian war the Jews purchased ninety thousand Christian prisoners merely for the pleasure of killing them. His Ecclesiastic History is standard in Catholic libraries.

 

EVIAN

 

Site of conference called in 1938 to discuss the problem of Jewish escape from Nazi Germany, attended by representatives from thirty-two countries. No help was given the Jews.

The German Protestant and Catholic Church leaders were rapidly integrating their activities with the newly formed Nazi organizations. To the Jews of Germany all doors of escape were shut, as were all doors of entry in the rest of the world.

 

EVORA

 

In this Portuguese city in 1497 the Catholic authorities under King Manuel issued the edict that all Jewish children under fourteen years be taken from their parents and distributed by parish priests among Christian parents.

In April 1506, the only synagogue in town was destroyed. A generation later the Catholic Inquisition of Portugal began its murderous work here.

 

EXCHEQUER JEWS

 

A term coined by King Frederick Barbarossa, who placed the Jews of the Rhineland in fortresses to protect them against the Crusaders of the Catholic Church, claiming that the Hebrews belonged to his “private exchequer.” Upon occasion, other rulers of Europe also tried to protect their industrious and skilled Jewish subjects from the fury of the Church.

For example, Philip Augustus of France (1181-1223) fought tooth and nail with his barons for the possession of the Jews—artisans, traders, and manufacturers alike—since, like his royal fellows, he drew great profits from the talent of the Jews.

Unfortunately, monks and priests from the bishops on down, enflamed by their own hateful liturgy and litany, constantly pushed for the death or conversion of Jews. To placate the powerful church, or whenever it suited them, the rulers would drop the Jews. The Church was ever ready to take over and lead the mob against the marked Jews, trapped in their ghettos.

 

EXISTENTIALISM, CHRISTIAN

 

has in Martin Heidegger its most influential representative. Catholic and Protestant seminaries alike have adopted the body of thought of this philosopher, making it predominant in their classrooms and manifestos. Here is what the Christian existentialist has to say:

“The Führer himself, and only he, is the current and future reality of Germany, and his word is your law.

“There exists only one single German way of life, a way whose enrichment is being shaped in the National Socialist Revolution. Heil Hitler.”