Do They Know All that the Term 'Jewish' Can Mean?

I come from a Jewish minority. No I don't mean by that that I am just 'Jewish.' I come from a minority within the minority that is Judaism. I am a descendant of Frankist Jews.

My parents were atheists so in a sense this distinction is meaningingless. But 'being Jewish' doesn't necessarily imply a belief in God. It is a signal of cultural identity.

The point is that my mother always told me for as long as I can remember that we were different. Most 'other Jews' were written off as 'khazerim' (a term she didn't really understand but signified 'low class' Jews - i.e. the rabbanites).

My point here isn't to exacerbate divisions within the Jewish community. It is rather to say that 'Judaism' wasn't a monolithic term. At one point in the history of the religion Shabbatean traditions were dominant. Now, thanks to Adolf Hitler and a number of cultural factors our enemies the Lubivitchers have effectively taken over Jewish identity at least in America.

You always hear these discussions about 'Judaisms' in the early Common Era. But what scholars fail to recognize is that it extends beyond groups that we normally associate with 'Judaism.'

To this end I will spend the rest of the month demonstrating why Marcionites were the actual beating heart of that invented and unfortunate term 'Jewish-Christianity.' The problem is that scholars have always infused the 'Jewish' part of that term with rabbanite traditions so they imagine Christians with yamakas and tzizits believing in Jesus Christ.

Lord, what makes these people so stupid.

Jews couldn't believe that Jesus was the Christ. This is a non-starter. Jesus wasn't the messiah in the same way as someone without a pilot's licence can't be a pilot.

As I have noted over and over again in this blog the term mashiach is always understood to mean secular monarch. Any Jewish king was held to be a mashiach by those who accepted his authority and vice versa. As Jesus wasn't a king, he wouldn't have been recognized as the messiah by anyone, least of all by himself (maybe that's why he avoided applying the term to himself).

In any event the Marcionites stressed the idea that (a) Jesus came to hail someone else as the messiah (b) the restoration of Jerusalem and (c) a new, more perfect covenant of Israel.

They were Jewish. There can be no doubt about this. They just weren't rabbanites. The problem is that the rabbanites want to take over the terms 'Jewish' and 'Israel' for themselves and exclude my ancestors and other surviving sectarian groups like the Samaritans.

So far they have been successful but of course ... I have only gotten started.