Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com podcast

September 11, 2024 Hebrew Voices #197 – Nehemia on “Grotto in the Tar Pit”: Part 1

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #197 - Nehemia on "Grotto in the Tar Pit": Part 1, Nehemia appears on the Grotto in the Tar Pit podcast to discuss the questioning of one’s beliefs, the historical struggle for free speech, and the Spanish Inquisition.

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Hebrew Voices #197 – Nehemia on “Grotto in the Tar Pit”: Part 1

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Sergio: Even if you believe completely one way, you should know the other perspective. You should know the flip side of the coin and everything they’re going to argue.

Nehemia: Absolutely. Well, that’s how people get surprised. They don’t know what the other argument is going to be. That’s how people end up losing their faith.

Sergio: Welcome to another episode of Grotto in the Tar Pit. I’d like to thank you all for being here, and to say we have a great guest for you today is a total understatement, because the person we have today is someone that I’ve been watching for years, a true treasure trove. If you’ve ever found a treasure map, this would be the X on the spot! So, Mr. Nehemia Gordon, how are you doing today?

Nehemia: I’m doing good, how are you doing?

Sergio: Dr. Nehemia Gordon I should say! I’m doing good, man.

Nehemia: You know, the joke is… somebody gave me a mug when I got my PhD, and it says on the mug, “Don’t show me that! I’m not that kind of doctor!”

Sergio: Oh, yeah!

Nehemia: Yeah. Tell me about the name of your program – Grotto in the Tar Pit. Maybe the audience knows, but I don’t.

Sergio: Okay. They’re not really going to know either. The reason I did it is because, first of all, you’ve got Elijah’s grotto out there on Mount Sinai, and I came back out here with Dr. Hovind in Alabama, so since he’s all about the dinosaurs I figured there’s got to be a tar pit somewhere, you know what I mean?

Nehemia: Okay! I thought maybe you’re in California. Isn’t that where the tar pits are?

Sergio: Yeah, I’ve actually passed by those; the La Brea Tar Pits.

Nehemia: Have you? Okay. I’ve never seen them; it sounds pretty cool.

Sergio: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Now, I’m going to have to wing it. The reason being I just totally deleted all my questions I had for you. So, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing!

Nehemia: That’s the best way to do it. It’ll be completely spontaneous.

Sergio: Okay. So, one question I was going to ask you… you found out that you were Jesus’ cousin 20 times removed or something like that…

Nehemia: Well, I found out he was my cousin. Let me back up. My great-grandfather was a rabbi who lived in Lithuania. He was actually born in what today is Latvia. Actually, at the time it was the Russian Empire. And he came to the US in 1923. I’m named after him, his name was Nehemia. And one of the things I was told about him is that his claim to fame was that he was a descendant of this famous rabbi who lived in the 1700’s. Well, as I got more inquisitive and more into research, I’m like, “Well, let me research that.” And I spent a period of time digging up old death certificates and birth records, and I actually found the direct link back to this rabbi who died in the late 1700’s. Once I got to that rabbi, I saw, “Oh! He’s a descendant of this other rabbi. And that rabbi is a descendant of this other rabbi.”

So, I saw that there’s this chain of rabbis… and this was a thing that rabbis did. I’m sure I had some street sweepers back in my ancestry; there are no records of that. What there are records of is, when a rabbi would write a book, he would say, “You know, I’m the great-great-great-grandson of so and so through such and such a line.” So, I was able to trace it back to at least someone who claimed he was a descendant of King David, and there was a claim that they could go father to son all the way back to David. Now that’s through my mother’s line, just bear that in mind.

But once I got back to a certain name, they were then tracing it back to King David. And then there was this website, geni.com, where somebody had taken the genealogy of Jesus from the Gospels and put it in just like a human genealogy. And then it would show you how you are related to other people. And on that website, I put in “Jesus.” I found him, Yeshua of Nazareth, and it said, “You’re related to him.” And I don’t remember the exact thing.

Sergio: Wow.

Nehemia: I think he was something like a 33rd cousin… I could look it up somewhere, I still have it. But yeah, he was a very, very, very distant cousin. Now, like I said, I’m sure in the time of Jesus there was also someone who was a mason, meaning like a rock mason, or probably like a farmer who plowed fields, but I don’t know that guy’s name because nobody wrote it down. So, I can only tell you the famous people I’m descended from, but that’s kind of cool. And look, I’m Jewish, I’m not Christian. And so, I’ll talk to Christians, and they’ll be talking about Jesus, and they have a relationship with Jesus, and I’m like, “Look, I have a relationship with Jesus too, it’s just through lineage.”

Sergio: I remember you telling some stories about how people come in and tell you how you helped them find their way to Jesus and find their way to the Lord, just to find out that you’re a Karaite.

Nehemia: Yeah. Well look, I did a podcast about this. I’ve got my podcast, Hebrew Voices.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: People can look it up on NehemiasWall.com.

Sergio: It’s a great podcast, by the way.

Nehemia: Thank you. I interviewed a friend of mine who had come to me during a time of crisis. I interviewed him years later about this. He was going through… I’m trying to remember the exact thing. People wouldn’t find it in the podcast, but basically, he was going through a crisis of faith. And he asked me a question, something to the effect of, “Okay, I know you don’t believe in Jesus, you’re Jewish. You’re not a Christian, you’re not a Messianic Jew, but what would be the best argument in favor of belief in Jesus?”

And my background is academia… actually, my background before that is studying the Talmud; my father was an Orthodox rabbi. And the way they study things in the Talmud is, you can ask any question and analyze it from different perspectives. It’s not always what the answer is, it’s sometimes more important what the question is and how you ask it. And there’s pros and cons for every argument. So, I’m like, “Alright, as an intellectual exercise, I can say if I wanted to argue in favor of Jesus, and if I was a believer, here’s how I would argue.”

And look, there’s something called confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is when somebody already kind of believes something, and then they cherry pick evidence to support that. And people who are believers… I’m a believer in Judaism, you’re a believer of Christianity, I suppose. I don’t know you that well… the non-believers will say, “Okay, you guys just believe that because you have confirmation bias.” Well, maybe, but the non-believers have confirmation bias too. When they find something that doesn’t fit logically, they’ll say, “Okay, well, there’s an infinite number of universes.” Why did they come up with the multiverse theory? And there’s a whole bunch of reasons that I don’t know enough to get into, and what I do know I don’t have time to get into. But basically, they say there’s a bunch of things in physics that don’t make sense, and the only way to explain this is to say there’s an infinite number of universes, and we just happen to be in the universe where it does make sense.

Okay, so, that’s actually kind of a convoluted explanation. It might be correct or not, but they’re looking for a naturalistic explanation. And if you have to have a naturalistic explanation you might have to posit the existence of an infinite number of universes.

So, the point is, do we, as believers, do that in our own faiths? Perhaps in a way we do. Does that make any sense what I’m saying?

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: Let’s put it this way. There’s this famous… and I’ll bring this Talmudic story. And I’m not a Talmudic Jew, I’m what’s called a Karaite Jew, which means I’m strictly a believer in the Old Testament.

Sergio: And I was going there, I was going to ask you about that. But I’ll let you tell your story first.

Nehemia: Well, I was raised as an Orthodox Jew. My father was a rabbi, like I said, also a lawyer. So, he knew to argue things from different perspectives. That was what a lawyer needs to do, that’s what a rabbi needs to do, is, “There’s truth. I don’t know what that truth is, but I can try to approach the truth by asking different questions and making different arguments. And maybe it’s a good argument, maybe it’s not; maybe it’s convincing, maybe it’s not. But what are all the possibilities?”

It’s something that I think a lot of young people are afraid of. They’ve been sheltered and then they hear an opposing view for the first time, and they’re horrified. They need puppies and crayons.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: Because they’ve never heard somebody who has a different view from them. They live in little bubbles. Well, that’s completely contrary to my upbringing.

I grew up in Chicago, and I remember when the Nazis marched in Skokie… they wanted to march in Skokie actually, and there was a lawsuit. At the time, it was considered this wonderful thing that the Nazis were being represented by a Jew. And my father was a lawyer so I’m like, “Okay, what’s going on here? Why would some Jew represent the Nazis in court?” And the explanation my father gave me, and I think it was common at the time, was, “We’re fighting for their freedom of speech, not because we care about them. It’s because if they take away their freedom of speech, our freedom of speech will be taken away.” And the irony is that having this very conversation is probably going to get this podcast shadow banned! That’s the irony of it!

Sergio: Yeah, I don’t mind! I’m going to tell you right now, Nehemia, I was going to go there anyways! I was already planning on having this conversation with you.

Nehemia: So, I want to talk about confirmation bias. There’s this wonderful discussion in the Talmud about King David, and some of the rabbis are trying to explain away all the bad things that David did. And they’ll say, “You know, he didn’t actually commit adultery with Bathsheba,” and they have a convoluted explanation. I don’t even need to go into it. They’ll say, “Well, technically she was divorced.” It’s not what it says in the Bible, but they’ll come up with these convoluted explanations.

And there’s a response to that in the Talmud which is really beautiful. Another rabbi comes along and says, “You’ve come up with these convoluted explanations because you’re a descendant of King David. And so, you’re just trying to justify your ancestor to make yourself look better.” There’s this whole obsession with lineage that they talk about in the New Testament. And look, that goes on in Judaism for sure.

Sergio: If it didn’t, you wouldn’t know that you’re Jesus’ cousin.

Nehemia: Right. But at the same time, I don’t know the name of the farmer who spent his days with his back hunched over, harvesting wheat, because that guy’s name wasn’t recorded. So, the point was, they’re accusing these other rabbis, “You’re just justifying your ancestor because you’re descended from King David.”

And what’s really interesting is, this debate from around 1,800 years ago from these different rabbis, one a descendant of King David and the other not, was repeated in the Knesset, in Israel’s parliament, in the 1990’s, where one of the secular members of the Knesset called King David a bully and a womanizer. Which… okay, fair enough. But one of the things that’s interesting about Jewish history, the Bible and Jewish history in general, is that we expose all of our flaws. We don’t pretend that King David was a perfect person, because as Solomon said when he dedicated the Temple, “There is no man who does not sin.” It’s part of our human condition. So, in the Knesset they said, “Why are we idolizing him? He was a bully and a womanizer.” Okay, but he also repented. So, he had his flaws, and he was imperfect, and he did his best. And no one’s perfect.

There’s this post-modernist idea, I think it is, where you want to take whoever the hero is of the past… they call it in Hebrew “shattering myths”, and you want to find everything that’s wrong with that person. Well, show me somebody who’s not perfect, and maybe you could point to Jesus, I don’t know, and show me someone who’s human and only human who is perfect. There is nobody like that. So, everybody has their flaws is the point.

So, when this friend of mine asked me, “If you were a Christian, what would be the best argument in defense of believing in Jesus?” I’m able to answer him. I’m not threatened by that question. And he later said he was on his way out of believing in Jesus, and that allowed him to believe again.

Sergio: So, on the flip side, why believe in Satan? You would have told them the same thing. Well, not the same thing, but…

Nehemia: That’s a good question. I love that question. You know what I love about that question? It shows you the intellectual openness to say… and I’ve had this conversation with some Christians, and they cannot hear it. In the same vein that I can say “why I believe in Jesus” if I was a believer, I can say, “why I believe in Satan.” And I actually don’t know the answer to that. “Why I believe in Satan,” right?

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: But in theory I can have that conversation.

Sergio: If someone asked you, you could argue their point.

Nehemia: I can also tell you the reasons not to believe in Satan. I could probably come up with reasons to believe in Mohammed or not believe in Mohammed. I could certainly come up with reasons not to believe in Mohammed. I don’t know exactly off the top of my head what the reasons to believe in Mohammed would be because that’s not my field of expertise.

But yeah, it’s an intellectual exercise which is really important. And I think this is a very Jewish approach, what I’m saying here. And you can say it’s not biblical if you want. I don’t know, we could have that conversation. But it’s certainly part of the Jewish culture as it evolved over the centuries, which is, like I said, to ask questions. I’ve been told by Christians that if they even question certain doctrines in their heart, they are afraid they are going to go to hell.

Sergio: I personally think that’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to question the world. And even if you believe completely one way, you should know the other perspective. You should know the flip side of the coin and everything they’re going to argue.

Nehemia: Absolutely, right. Well, that’s how people get surprised; they don’t know what the other argument is going to be. That’s how people end up losing their faith in Christianity. I’m not saying always, but I’ve seen it happen, where they’ve never heard the other argument and they’re presented with the most simple argument from the Jewish side or from the Muslim side, and they end up converting to Islam or leaving Christianity because they’ve just never heard the other argument.

So, the Jewish approach is to say, you don’t really believe unless you’ve questioned. And you don’t have to agree with this, but this is the Jewish attitude, to, say… let’s say about believing in God. If you’ve never questioned if God exists, whether He exists or not, then you don’t really believe in God, you’re just repeating what somebody told you. That’s the Jewish approach. And you don’t have to accept that or agree with that. I believe there’s a lot of value in that…

Sergio: Well, not in offense, I know you’ve heard the joke of what happens when you get two Jews in a room.

Nehemia: Yeah, you get three opinions.

Sergio: You get three opinions.

Nehemia: And my joke is when you get two Karaites in a room, you get five opinions, so…

Sergio: That’s a great thing! That’s a great thing! You should be able to explore everything. The guys that I told you that you might be able to get onto their podcast, that’s the reason they started their podcast. They actually wrote up a list of things that couldn’t be talked about in church.

Nehemia: Okay.

Sergio: And sat there and talked about them.

Nehemia: Yeah. Look, I understand that people have emotional commitments to certain ideas. I’m trying to play Nehemia’s advocate here. In other words, if you came to me and you say you’re open about everything, let’s talk about Holocaust denial and why you don’t believe it. Alright, don’t waste my time. I’ve met people who survived the Holocaust. I’ve been to the death camps.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: I think in American discourse they call this the Overton window. The Overton window are the things that are legitimate to discuss. But I think anything is legitimate to discuss. There was this Holocaust denier named David something or another, and he sued this Holocaust researcher named Deborah Lipstadt. And he sued her in British court because she called him a liar. She basically said like this… something which I don’t think scholars will generally say. David Irving, that was his name.

So, David Irving was a famous historian of World War II, a serious historian, and then he started to deny the Holocaust. And Deborah Lipstadt, who was a Jewish researcher of the Holocaust said, “David Irving is too good of an historian to deny the Holocaust unless he’s being intellectually dishonest.” I hope I’m getting this right. If not, please don’t sue me.

So, she was saying that he knows that he’s misrepresenting… this is my understanding of it, at least, she accused him of deliberately misrepresenting the sources. She said, “He’s too good of an historian. It couldn’t be by accident. He knows he’s mistranslating the German texts,” and all that. I don’t remember the exact details. This ended up in a court case, and I think it was a really important court case because Deborah Lipstadt had to prove certain elements of the Holocaust in court. And she won.

Well yeah, but here’s my point of bringing up the Deborah Lipstadt–David Irving case. I actually read some of the transcripts. They brought out a lot of the evidence, and you can find it online. And I’m like, “How come I’ve never heard of this?” I’ve been to Auschwitz, I’ve been to Majdanek, I’ve been to Treblinka, and nobody ever told me about these elements of the evidence. So, I believe in the Holocaust because I’ve met Holocaust survivors, and I don’t believe they’re lying to me. And I’ve been to those places, and I’ve seen some of the things that I’ve seen. I’ve seen bones in the ovens in Majdanek.

A hundred years from now, two hundred years from now, no one’s going to be able to say, “I’ve met a Holocaust survivor,” so bringing this into the public record was really important. Imagine if somebody came along 200 years later and they started to have the kind of conversations I’m hearing the postmodernists have today about the Holocaust. That’s all holocaust denial is; it’s postmodernism applied to the Holocaust. It’s really what it is.

Sergio: Mm-hmm.

Nehemia: Holocaust denial is a form of anti-Semitism, and so is anti-Zionism, to me.

Sergio: Well, what…

Nehemia: It’s very clear to me. And those are forms of postmodernism. So, I think these are important questions to have. Here’s my point of all of this, and then I’ll let you ask your question. I’ve talked to Christians, and they’ll say, “Here’s the reasons we believe in Jesus.” And I’ll ask what, to me, is a really basic question. “Have you taken that same thought pattern for proving Jesus and applied it to other figures in history?” And they get deeply offended, “How dare you compare the belief in Jesus to the belief in whoever.” It’s an intellectual exercise that I think is very useful and important. And you might be asked two or three questions by an atheist, or a Jew, or a Muslim, and if you’ve never thought about these things you’re going to get blindsided.

Sergio: So, one of the things I was going to say is that I enjoy about your podcast, is like when you went to that speaker’s square over there in England.

Nehemia: Oh, that was fun.

Sergio: Yeah!

Nehemia: The Speakers’ Corner, yeah.

Sergio: Yeah, the Speakers’ Corner. And people were there, and you were able to talk to the Muslims and just hear them out for what they had to say.

Nehemia: I don’t think I even broadcast all the things that I recorded there because I had three or four hours of recording. I don’t remember if we’d ever published it. Somebody can fact check me here, but I had a conversation with… I’m trying to remember; I feel like he was a Shiite, and he was wearing a mask. Maybe he wasn’t a Shiite, maybe he was something else.

Sergio: Yeah, I’ve seen that.

Nehemia: He was some kind of Muslim, I don’t remember, who wasn’t allowed to show his face or was afraid to show his face because he thought the other group of Muslims was going to come and find his house and kill him. And I was like, “This is crazy!” I talked to this one guy who believed there was a certain man from somewhere in West Africa, Nigeria or someplace like that, and I first thought it was a joke, but they believe this guy was actually God who came down to Earth.

Sergio: What?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Sergio: There? That was there?

Nehemia: That was at the Speakers’ Corner, yeah. And in a hundred percent seriousness and devotion he believed this.

Sergio: That he was God? Come down in the flesh?

Nehemia: That this guy was like the second coming of Jesus, or something like that. I don’t remember exactly. But no Christian is going to hunt down this guy and kill him. But if you said the same thing within an Islamic context… not even the same thing. If you said something much more mild from my perspective, they’ll literally try to hunt you down and kill you. Something’s wrong with the discourse. If you’re so afraid to hear other ideas that you’re going to murder somebody over those ideas, something’s wrong there.

Sergio: Yeah. Which was what I wanted to bring up to you, like, what’s going on in the colleges right now? Man!

Nehemia: Oh my, it’s insane.

Sergio: Yeah, it’s crazy. When I was out there in North Carolina, when I’d go on the train, just about every day I’d see people with Palestinian flags and banners that said, “Free Palestine”, and they were always headed to the colleges. It’s crazy!

Nehemia: Well, here’s what’s crazy about it. There’s this cartoon going around that… I think it’s Naama Levy, who is the young lady who was kidnapped by Hamas. And you can see the blood coming on her pants.

Sergio: Yeah, I think you showed that picture on your podcast.

Nehemia: So, there’s this cartoon of her standing before the United Nations. And it’s not what actually happened; she’s still, as far as I know… I don’t remember. Is she still a prisoner in Gaza? I don’t remember… or she might be dead, I’m not sure. I think she’s still a prisoner, as far as I know… as we’re recording this. But in the cartoon, they said, “We don’t believe you. But if it happened, you deserved it.” That’s what we’re hearing from the college campuses. It’s “believe all women, unless they’re Jewish, and then, we don’t believe it but they deserved it”. Well, wait a minute. How can you be saying the same thing? Look, I was never advocating “believe all women.” Some people tell the truth, some people lie, just like in any kind of situation.

And look, this is one of the things that Holocaust deniers love to bring, “Oh, there’s this person who claimed they were in Auschwitz and really they weren’t, and they’re lying for attention.” Okay, that happens. There are people who lie. But there’s this overwhelming evidence. It’s not from one particular person that we base this on.

So, the point is, they were saying believe all women, and now all of a sudden, it’s, “Unless they’re Jews and they’re in Israel. Then we don’t believe that because they deserved it”.

Sergio: Yeah. If it was anywhere other than Israel, then nobody would be thinking twice about what Israel is doing to Gaza.

Nehemia: I heard this one military expert, he says that in the entire history of discussions about modern warfare he’s never heard a debate about what the ratio was of civilians… a public debate, to combatants. That’s a new thing that’s been introduced into Israel’s war of survival in Gaza. This obsession with how many civilians died. Well, if Hamas didn’t use them as human shields, probably very few civilians would have died. And even with Hamas using them as human shields, relatively few civilians are dying. But nobody ever talked about ISIS in Raqqa, in Syria, and how many civilians were dying in Raqqa or Mosul.

Sergio: Because it’s not Israel.

Nehemia: Well, it’s not Jews. When hundreds of thousands of Muslims, including thousands of Palestinians, were killed in Syria, nobody in the Muslim world cared. Certainly, nobody had mass public protests because it wasn’t being done by Jews. So, let’s be honest here; what they care about is that Jews are involved, and they hate Jews. And if you hear what they say online, certainly, you’ll hear things like, “Well, the Jews,” and I’ve literally had people say this to me, “Well, you Jews were kicked out of over 100 countries so you must be doing something wrong.” That’s literally victim-blaming.

And the other thing is, “Well, you killed all the prophets and you’re killing our people in Gaza.” Okay, so you’re upset that somebody 1,400 years ago fought a war against Mohammed, and Mohammed killed all the men, raped the women, at least according to their sources. They take it as wives, against their will. And then one of those women poisoned Mohammed with a sheep or something like that. This is what they’re complaining about 1,400 years later. You’re going to murder a baby today because of that? That doesn’t make any sense. That’s insane. That’s literally an ancestral hatred. It’s literally what it is, which is a type of anti-Semitism.

Sergio: Well, I’m going to be straight out. When I started listening to you and Michael Rood, I did exactly what you said everybody does; I went and shook the family tree and tried to see if a Jew would fall out! So, I checked, and I think it might be there. I checked everybody, my grandparents and my parents. I checked their last names. And I’m not sure if you know about this, but during the Inquisition in Spain they told all the Jews to leave. Well, apparently if you were a family that was asked to leave, you can now claim Spanish citizenship!

Nehemia: Really?

Sergio: Yeah. And I was looking at the paper, and all my family names were on there.

Nehemia: Okay. I want to talk about the Inquisition for a minute, because I’ve had people say, “Oh, the Inquisition, that was 500 years ago.” I literally read this somewhere online once, that there was a Jew that was Sephardic and they were saying, “How could he be Sephardic?” And Sephardic could be translated as “Spanish”, meaning from Sepharad.

Sergio: From Spain, yeah.

Nehemia: And more specifically, from Iberia. Meaning not Spanish from Latin America. “How could he be Sephardic? It was 500 years ago. His grandmother must be 500 years old.” And that’s not what Sephardic means. Sephardic today… well, it has a number of definitions. But the main definition is, Jews whose ancestors were in the Iberian Peninsula, which could be Spain or Portugal, or what today is Spain and Portugal. And they either fled… and it was over a long period of time.

One of the early persecutions was in… I want to say it was 1397. And the big one that everyone knows about was 1492. Here’s what people don’t know. In 1860, in Barcelona, there was somebody who was born into the Catholic church, baptized in the Catholic church and secretly practicing Judaism. And they were hauled out into the public square, had what’s called an auto-de-fé, which is basically like a church trial, and they were burned at the stake.

Sergio: Wow.

Nehemia: Not in 1460, not in 1560. That happened then, too. But in 1860 it was the last documented auto-de-fé, where they burned a Jew who was living openly as a Catholic but secretly as a Jew, was still being burned at the stake in 1860. Think about that. Now, what year were your grandparents born in? I don’t know if you know from the top of your head. I’m trying to think if I even… oh yeah, my grandparents…

Sergio: Oh, I don’t know…

Nehemia: My grandmother was born in 1913, if I remember correctly. 1860 would have been her grandmother. That’s not that long ago. So, go back five, six generations, and you had people who were secretly practicing Judaism, and there were life and death consequences if they were caught. Well, that’s mind-boggling. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more recent incidents. There was someone about 100 years ago who went through these archives in Spain, and that’s what he found. I bet if somebody went through the archives today, they would find more recent incidents. That’s not my expertise. But they kept really good records, and a lot of those records are still around in Spain, over in the Spanish Empire. And you had people who were being burned at the stake in the Philippines…

Sergio: In the Philippines! Wow.

Nehemia: Yeah, because it’s part of the Spanish Empire.

Sergio: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: So, imagine this. Here’s what happened: in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but the thing that happened in Jewish history…

Sergio: He was a Jew, right?

Nehemia: I don’t know if he was a Jew.

Sergio: Was he a secret Jew?

Nehemia: I don’t know of any evidence that really supports that. But they say his navigator was definitely a secret Jew, or what they called a New Christian. A New Christian was somebody whose ancestors or himself was forced to convert to Christianity.

Sergio: Like conversos?

Nehemia: Yeah, conversos. But they still continued to practice some form of Judaism in secret. So, for example, I believe it’s in the logbook of Christopher Columbus’ navigator; he uses Hebrew letters. Why is he using the Hebrew letters? Because he’s more familiar with that alphabet. He probably learned math, or mathematics, using Hebrew characters.

So, in 1492 they said to the Jews in Spain… and just to put this into perspective, at the time Spain had the center of Judaism in the entire world. It was the intellectual and population center of Judaism in the entire world, was in the Iberian Peninsula. So, Spain is reunited after conquering Granada, and they say, “We got rid of the Muslims, now let’s get rid of the Jews!” That’s really what happened. And they issued an edict which said, “Either convert or leave.” And some people said, “They want me to be sprinkled with some water. Who cares? I’m going to continue practicing Judaism in my house, but I’m not going to give up everything I’ve had with my family. I’m in a home where my family has lived for 500 years.” Maybe since Roman times the family had lived in that house, and they had that business they were passing on from father to son. They said, “I’m going to say here. People kind of do what they want in Spain anyway.” Well, they didn’t know the Inquisition was coming. I guess they should have known. Or maybe they did know, I don’t know. There were some people who said, “I’m going to convert to Catholicism openly, but I’ll continue to secretly practice Judaism.” What people don’t realize… some people don’t realize, is that the Inquisition wasn’t against Jews. It was against Christians, or more precisely, people they considered Christians.

Sergio: Protestants.

Nehemia: People they considered to be under the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, that’s who was under the threat of the Inquisition. So, it was the Jews who said, “Alright, I’ll just go through the motions, and I’ll formally convert to Catholicism. It’s just a sprinkling with water, it doesn’t mean anything.” And then years later they or their descendants are burned at the stake because they’re continuing to secretly practice Judaism.

So, a lot of the Jews said, “No, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to leave.” So, where did they go? They went to Portugal, which had their doors open. They said, “Hey, we’d love to have you.” That was in 1492. Well, in 1497 the Portuguese monarch comes under pressure from the Catholic Church, and he said, “Look, this is kind of awkward. I’ve got hundreds of thousands of Jews,” and he puts a different ultimatum. He says, “Convert or die.”

Sergio: Whoa.

Nehemia: And in some instances, it’s not even convert or die. He gathers the Jews into the public square in Lisbon and he has these monks sprinkle water on them, and he says, “Now you’re Christians. You’ve now entered into the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. If you go and don’t work this Saturday, you’re going to be burned at the stake.”

Sergio: Ohh!

Nehemia: So, it wasn’t anything they even consciously said. “Okay, I’ll pretend to be Christian and really be Jewish.” They were literally sprinkled with water…

Sergio: So, he forcefully put them under the authority of the Catholic Church so that he would have the authority to do this. Wow, I didn’t know that.

Nehemia: In Spain it was convert or leave, and in Portugal was convert or die. Now, why did they go to Portugal? Well, the languages are very similar, from what I understand, and they’re also geographically right next to each other. I don’t even need to get on a boat, I can just walk to Portugal. So, it was a good option for a lot of Jews. Now, some left, and then you end up having Sephardic Jews living in Constantinople, what today is Istanbul. Imagine this; you have people in what today is the west coast of Turkey who are speaking Ladino, which is sometimes described as a dialect of Spanish.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: You could also argue that Spanish is a dialect of Ladino. They’re both Romance languages. They’re very similar languages.

Sergio: It’s Hebrew and Spanish mixed together, right?

Nehemia: Well, it was the dialect of Spanish spoken by the Jews, which included a lot of Hebrew words, and Aramaic words, and then probably words from other languages that Jews had brought with them from other places. So, it was kind of this thing where, at home they would speak Ladino, but when they went into the market and they were buying something in the market or trading, then they would speak Spanish. And by the way, they weren’t exactly speaking Spanish, either. Each region of Spain had their own dialect.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: You had Castilian, and you had Aragonese, and even today you have Catalonian, or Catalan. Today we’ll talk about Italian, and Spanish and French, but go back to any time before radio, and every 100 miles someone had a different dialect that was barely intelligible to the other people. Certainly, if you’re not speaking in a public format, you’re speaking at home, you might be speaking your local dialect. I mean, it’s still kind of that way in some places.

Sergio: I speak Spanish, and if I listen very closely when someone’s speaking Portuguese, I can understand it.

Nehemia: What about if somebody’s from Argentina; can you understand them as well? Or do you have to listen closely?

Sergio: Yes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Sergio: Where the big difference is, is if somebody’s speaking Portuguese from Brazil. There’s so much slang and native words in the Brazilian form of Portuguese that I can’t understand it for anything.

Nehemia: So, this is an age-old question in linguistics; what is the definition of a dialect? And so, for example, I’m told that people from Sweden can understand people from Norway, and Norwegians can understand Swedes, but they speak two different languages, and they can both understand Danes, I guess, I don’t know.

There’s an old joke that was coined by a Jewish scholar who was the great scholar of Yiddish. Because what’s Yiddish? Yiddish is a dialect of German.

Sergio: German and Hebrew, right?

Nehemia: And he said, “Why is Yiddish a dialect of German? Why isn’t German a dialect of Yiddish?” And in reality, they both come from a common ancestor, which is Old High German or something like that. I’m not an expert. But they both come from an earlier language. It’s not that there was a Jew who immigrated to modern Germany and started speaking Yiddish and that was his dialect of German. It was that you had Jews who were living in the Roman Empire in an area that was conquered by Germanic tribes, and they started speaking whatever that Germanic tribe spoke. And the Germans of today have a language that descended from Old High Germanic, and Yiddish is also descended from Old High Germanic, and I guess there’s Low German, whatever that is.

Sergio: So, in other words, Ladino and Spanish, they both came from Latin, right?

Nehemia: They both came from an earlier language which you can call Proto-Spanish or Medieval Castilian. I don’t know, I’m not an expert. But they both came from an earlier language, that’s the point. So, here it’s different from… like, there might be a dialect of English spoken by Jews on the Lower East Side of New York 100 years ago. Well, those were immigrants who came to New York and maybe they didn’t speak fluent English. That’s different from Ladino, which was… there were Jews who were living in the Roman Empire before… they were living in Spain, and Iberia, before it was the Roman Empire. They probably came there with Phoenician traders in the time of King Solomon and Hyram of Tyre, because the Tyrians, the people from Tyre, had trading colonies in what today is Spain. And there were Jews who came along with them who were traders, so they were there before the Romans. And they were probably first speaking Phoenician… well, Hebrew and then Phoenician, and other languages over time. And the language they’re speaking when they’re kicked out of Spain, or were forced to convert, is a descendant of a series of different dialects and languages that evolved over time.

So, the point is that you have people who were forcibly converted. In some cases, they didn’t even do anything; they were sprinkled with water, and they were told, “Now you’re a Catholic.”

Sergio: Wow. That’s messed up, man.

Nehemia: And generations later, their descendants would say, “You know, in my house we don’t eat pork, and for some reason we light candles on Friday night. We don’t actually know why. And for some reason we do certain things.”

And there’s actually a really interesting example of this. There was a saint among the descendants of the Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism, a saint that is pretty much unknown otherwise in the Catholic world, called Saint Esther. And it was a way that they would teach their descendants about certain Jewish values. They had to wrap it in a Catholic veneer, like this Catholic cloak, so it’s not Esther the queen… I mean, it is; she’s from the Book of Esther. But they said, “Okay, we’ll call her a saint, Saint Esther,” and they would convey certain Jewish ideas.

Well, the Catholic Church wasn’t entirely stupid. They could see there were people who were doing things different, and they were persecuting those people for centuries. When you were caught, you were burned at the stake, and I’ve seen the documents.

Sergio: Wow.

Nehemia: I’ve held them in my hands.

Sergio: Wow.

Nehemia: And what do I mean by documents? The Catholic Church was proud of this. What they would do is, they would publish a document that said, “This person is being burned at the stake on Tuesday March 5th,” whatever, “1849,” I don’t know the exact date. But they would give an exact date and the exact crime, and one of the crimes was Judaismo, which is Judaizing. I’m probably mispronouncing that. But I’ve actually seen the Portuguese version of this, it basically meant Judaizing. What’s Judaizing? Your neighbor had a dispute with you, and they went to the local Catholic priest, and said, “You know my neighbor over there who owes me money, he doesn’t work on Friday night after sunset.”

Sergio: Right.

Nehemia: “And he won’t eat pork on Christmas,” or whatever it is. And they’re like, “Wait, why isn’t he eating pork on Christmas? What’s going on here?” And they go and interrogate the people, and they find out they’re secretly practicing some remnant of Judaism, and they burn them at the stake. And meanwhile the neighbor now steals his sheep and everything.

Sergio: Even if they didn’t know about it? Because I’m sure a lot of it was handed down. Things were handed down and you don’t even know what you’re doing.

Nehemia: Oh, a hundred percent. In some cases, they did know what they’re doing. In some cases, they didn’t. In some cases, you have Jews showing up… really, you have people who are nominally Catholic, showing up in Holland in 1750 and 1650, and saying, “My ancestor was one of those Jews from 1497 in Portugal.” And one of the earliest synagogues, if not the earliest synagogue in New York City, was founded by Portuguese Jews who were descendants of these conversos. So, they end up going to Holland, because Holland had freedom of religion. It had been a Spanish colony, a Spanish province. They rebelled, and one of the things they said is, “You know, we’re rebelling because we want to be Protestants. We should give freedom of religion to everybody.” And so, actually, one of the first places in Europe to give freedom of religion to Jews is the Netherlands, Holland.

And then some of them end up going to New Amsterdam. They weren’t liked in New Amsterdam, because people were anti-Semitic, but they’re like, “Okay, we can’t do anything about it. You’re free to practice your Jewish faith.” Now, these were people whose great-great grandfather was baptized into the Catholic Church because he had no choice.

Sergio: So, is this right after the Mayflower and all that?

Nehemia: I can’t tell you; I think it’s in the 1600’s… I’m bad with the American history dates. But people can fact check me and Google this. It’s sometime in the 1600’s if memory serves me, where you have…

Sergio: As soon as the Christians came, so did the Jews.

Nehemia: What’s that?

Sergio: So, right after the Christians came over here to colonize, here came some Jews seeking religious freedom as well.

Nehemia: Well, I think the Christians were here a little bit before that. In other words, the Spanish came much earlier. The Spanish are coming in the beginning of the 1500’s. I don’t know when the first colony was in North America. I know that when the first British colony… this is crazy. I read this and I couldn’t believe it. When the first British colony was established in North America, there was already a hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sergio: What?

Nehemia: Think about that! That’s crazy! But that’s how long the Spanish were in North America.

Sergio: Wow.

Nehemia: But there are Jews, or people who were descendants of Jews, who are coming and thinking, “You know, I’m persecuted here in my little village because everybody knows my great-great-great grandfather was Jewish. If I could go to Nuevo Leon,” in New Spain, which today is Mexico, “people won’t know who I am, and they’ll leave me alone.” And they did! That’s how they ended up burning people at the stake in Manila, in the Philippines, in the 1800’s, because they’re like, “Wait a minute. You’re not allowed to do that! That’s not what a good Catholic does.” And the Inquisition ends up following these Jews into what’s today is Mexico, and Spain, and Colombia, and various other places.

Sergio: So, it was the church keeping track of people? Like, “This guy’s descended from a Jew,” and the church was just keeping records of all this?

Nehemia: How did you find out your ancestor was possibly Jewish? From your name. So, they did the same thing. The Catholic Church kept really good records, and they’d say, “Oh! Your name is Cortez. Well, we know that some people who are named Cortez who are descended from converts from Judaism to Catholicism,” and they’d keep an eye on you.

Sergio: Apparently a lot of people who were trying to evade being known as Jews changed their names by adding an “E-Z” at the end to signify “Eretz Zion”.

Nehemia: Well, I don’t know about that, that’s not my expertise. That’s very possible. I know the Catholic Church was able to figure it out, and often it was some neighbor who didn’t like you who would rat you out. And sometimes maybe they were lying and said you didn’t work on Saturday, but you really did. The burden of proof is on you; it’s not like you’re having a fair trial from the Catholic Church. And here’s the crazy thing; why does the Catholic church have the authority to burn people at the stake?

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