[Nundduedola]

E. Jesus and Balaam

To agitate Christian readers, anti-Talmud writers often attempt to portray the Talmud as
demeaning the figure of Jesus. In the opinion of most scholars, the Talmud only refers to
Jesus in a handful of places, and though these references may not reflect the courteous
ecumenicism of the modern world, neither are they particularly inflammatory.6 But the
Talmud bears much harsher animus towards the biblical figure of Balaam, the pagan
magician who sought to curse the Jews as they traveled through the desert after the
Exodus from Egypt.7 Rabbinic tradition ascribes other crimes to Balaam as well, and in
various places describes some of the punishments he may have suffered after his death.
In the nineteenth century, when the field of academic Jewish studies was in its infancy, a
small group of Jewish scholars suggested that in some cases the term Balaam in the
Talmud may be a codeword for Jesus. Though later scholars showed that this suggestion
could not be true (for reasons pertaining to the context of the Balaam references and the
lack of manuscript variants substituting Jesus for Balaam),8 anti-Semites have ever since
claimed that the true hatred that Judaism possesses for Christianity is expressed in these
coded expressions against Balaam found in the Talmud.9

This is not to say that historically Jews have historically borne no animus towards Jesus
and the Apostles, or to Christianity as a whole. In the two-thousand year relationship
between Judaism and Christianity, many of them marred by anti-Jewish polemic and
Christian persecution of Jews, some rabbis have fulminated against the church, and in
some places Jews developed a folk literature that demeaned Christianity. But
contemporary anti-Semitic polemicists are not interested in learning or reporting about
the historical development of Jewish-Christian relations. Their goal is to incite hatred
against Judaism and Jews by portraying them as bigoted and hateful. Their use of the
long-discredited Balaam hypothesis is another example of this phenomenon. This is the response by the ADL to the reference of Jesus/Balaam in the Talmud. There are a total of 5 charges that the ADL "attempts" to clear up in regards to the Talmud. Their explanations are convoluted and obfuscate the issue because the text is so damning.


http://www.adl.org/presrele/asus_12/the_talmud.pdf