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Jews, Christians, and Muslims all conveniently ignore some of the uglier stuff in their holy books that if taken literally would oblige and/or excuse them from behavior considered repellent in the modern age. And all three love to point at the ugly stuff in the other religions' scriptures as some kind of gotcha: either they are not "really" following their own religion, or they secretly practice and defend this stuff and hide it from outsiders.
I don't have time (or maybe inclination) to dispute this but for calibration purposes could you offer some examples? Or don't, if that seems too onerous a request.
The Jewish examples from the Talmud have been given above - lots of rules about how you can treat gentiles (badly). The Bible has Leviticus and Deuteronomy, with the various laws about what you can and cannot eat, and also that you should put to death adulterers or disobedient children, and exhortations to slaughter enemy tribes. There are also some ugly stories in Judges. The Quran and the hadiths, likewise have verses about taking women as sex slaves, slaughtering the Jews, and everyone's favorite story about Mohammad and Aisha.
All three religions have a large body of jurisprudence explaining how these laws or parables were very specific and contextual, or were superseded by later precedents, or by the New Testament, and so on. So no, you don't need to explain to me that the Bible does not actually require you to stone your disobedient son or prohibit you from eating shrimp. I know that. But all these apologetics require accepting that these prescriptions were, in fact, contextual and open to interpretation, and just taking one snippet all by itself and its literal meaning is basically scriptural nutpicking.
People like @coffee_enjoyer who enjoy those long lists of horrible Talmudic prescriptions as evidence of all the secret evil things Jews believe are doing exactly this (and will likewise happily take at face value the less savory Quranic verses and hadiths). But of course Deuteronomy 21 and Leviticus 20 and all the stories in Judges about enslavement, rape, and genocide, those are nuanced.
The nuance is that for Christians, what Jesus says on a topic supercedes everything to the contrary in the Old Testament. The “law” of the Old Testament is very specifically abrogated (though the word “fulfilled” is insisted). For instance,
This supersedes Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:19-20, Deuteronomy 19:21. The abrogated / fulfilled Old Testament Law is kept by Christians for reasons of historical and symbolic reference, because Christ is held to have satisfied and completed the Law. This is an important nuance to make and not at all an evasion; the “1st primary” text of Christianity is the New Testament, which specifies how parts of the Old Testament have been deprecated; the “2nd primary” text is the OT, understood only in relation to the 1st. But what Christianity lacks is the rich orthopraxic secondary literature like you find in Judaism and Islam. I say “secondary”, but really these works are orthopraxically primary.
If an Islamic “Sahih Hadith” in a given jurisprudential tradition specifies something, then it simply must be held by all adherents of that school of jurisprudence. It’s just how Islam works; the “sunnah” as clarified by the authentic transmissions of secondary literature have authority. It’s what Muslims spend most of their time reading. The Muslims who do not believe in the secondary literature are called Quranists and they are as insignificant as the “Kairites” of Judaism who only believe in the Old Testament. The only real case of orthopraxic literature in Christianity akin to Hadith or the Talmud is if you’re a priest engaging in a mass, or if you’re being advised on when to do something at a mass or which sins must be confessed.
Yes, buddy, I know about the New Covenant. And I'm also quite familiar with Islamic jurisprudence and interpretation (and disputes) over hadiths.
The problem is, the vast majority of religious practitioners of all faiths are not theologians or lawyers. This is why some Christians actually quote those Old Testament verses when it's convenient, and then fall back on "But Jesus" when the ones they'd rather not follow are quoted back at them. I don't think Christians are particularly hypocritical or unlearned about this, relative to anyone else. But by the same token, some Muslims and Jews are aware of the bad stuff in their holy books and handwave it away, and some don't. Most Muslims don't approve of marrying 9-year-olds, most Jews don't approve of taking gentile slave girls, most Christians don't approve of stoning children to death.
There is no difference, except the artificial one you create in an attempt to gotcha Jews.
Now, you can claim that means most Muslims and Jews aren't really following their orthodox doctrines (though I don't know why we should consider a hostile outsider more qualified to interpret their scriptural fidelity). Maybe you can even make a theological argument that under the letter of their respective laws, Christians are correct to ignore their bronze age genocidal covenants while Muslims and Jews are incorrect to ignore their bronze age genocidal covenants. But that would presumably be between them and their gods. If you want to convince us that Jews don't really follow the Talmud, go argue with a rabbi. If you want to convince us that Jews are actually that evil and slimy because they secretly follow all your uncharitable Talmudic interpretations, your case is entirely scriptural nutpicking, and it's fair to ask if you've stoned any children or damned yourself with polyester lately.
Maimonides is not obscure esoterica, he is considered a top 5 important Rabbi to be consulted in Rabbinical rulings, and the passage I quoted comes from a renowned book still taught to this day, not from the Bronze Age but from the 13th century. If the Jews don’t believe it, they don’t have to teach it. The medieval Catholics made them expunge the verse on killing Christians and cursing Christ, but they reinserted it. And today it is taught in most Orthodox schools. I can find you more quotes from the Talmud regarding the ban on showing mercy to idol-worshippers (a category in which they universally and firmly place Trinitarian Christians). But I don’t think you would be able to find me a counterfactual verse in the Talmud or Mishneh or major redactions. I would be very surprised if you could find me a verse that said “be compassionate to idol-worshippers”, as I cannot find such a verse in the Talmudic literature.
There’s an interesting rabbinical controversy that will give a good idea of how important Maimonides is. Are Muslims idol-worshippers? The Rabbis debate this. They debate this because, while dozens of important rabbis and most councils have ruled that Muslims are idol-worshippers, there is one Rabbi who singularly disagreed with them all: Maimonides.
And there is one more way for us to discern the importance of Maimonides. Chabad’s Daily Torah Study website includes only five sections of study. One of them is dedicated exclusively to Maimonides (Rambam). And if you happened to read this daily study on March 15th of this year — as tens of thousands of Jews likely had — you would read a Chabad-summarized lesson from Rambam:
It would be nice to believe that this is just one “nut”, or just one “nutty passage”, but it’s a bit more serious than that.
I’m not judging a collective of individuals here, but rather the lessons they receive as part of their religious indoctrination. The lessons of Orthodox Judaism are kind of antisocial, and this could carry over into other spheres of life. As an example from this week, Ben Shapiro was criticized for asking his viewers to donate to the infamous Kars4Kids charity over the years. This is an Orthodox Jewish charity that rakes in hundreds of millions in revenue under the pretense that a donated car goes to “kids”. In fact, the money mostly goes to Orthodox Jews, and a small amount goes to Orthodox Jewish kids. The donation page (code: Ben) doesn’t tell you this, only slime-ly tells you that it’s a Jewish charity. Ben Shapiro very likely knows this given how confroversial this charity is, but doesn’t care, just like he didn’t care when the orthodox schools in New York misappropriated 1 billion in educational funds (Shapiro called the NYTimes exposé “a war on Hasidic Jews”). Certainly in this case, there’s a lot of slimy evilness afoot.
The category of shituf in Jewish thought is more complex and contested than that.
That said, I think Amadan has the correct approach here. Let me ask a question, though I'm really just echoing him. Why should I believe that your cherry-picking of nasty-sounding passages from the Talmud is somehow more constitutive of modern Judaism, more accurate as a description of what actually-existing Jews are like, than what I learn from actually talking to Jews? Why is your interpretation of Jewish tradition more trustworthy than that of the rabbis that I have spoken to and who have explained their point of view to me?
I'm both a Christian and a veteran of the New Atheist flame wars of the 2000s, so I am extremely familiar with the genre of hostile outsiders cherry-picking nasty quotes and then condescending to explain my own tradition to me. This inclines me to sympathy when Jews (or for that matter Muslims, who are also frequently exposed to this) face malicious outsiders chucking a bunch of quotes at them, and wearily explain that, no, those quotes are not an accurate or proportional representation of either their faith or their way of life, and that if I'd like to know more about what they really do, I am welcome to come to synagogue or Torah study or other social events and learn more.
It is not so complex for Maimonides, although interestingly, he considered Islam purely monotheistic. There may be other rabbis who have said differently, but what matters is what is being taught as authoritative to the community, not what a less-significant or insignificant rabbi has published.
What is “modern Judaism”? Reform Jews have reformed the tradition. Conservative Jews might have never studied these works. I’ve specified that I am talking about Orthodox Jews, the ones who take the Talmud seriously. There is no “modernization” of Orthodox Judaism. If you believe that it has been modernized since the time of Maimonides, you should be able to find a statement from an important council of Rabbis to that effect, or a book that they consider to be more authoritative than Maimonides. In fact, the most important Rabbi of orthodoxy of our age, Schneerson, who some even believe to be the messiah (really), held up the work I quoted as required reading for all Jews. Did his work have a commentary attached, which described how these rules are no longer in effect? No.
One of the issues here is that Jews aren’t supposed to teach gentiles the Talmud. As, per Maimonides again, if they study the Talmud they deserve to die (Melachim uMilchamot - 10:9) by the hand of God. So the Orthodox are probably not going to share with you everything in their books. But as an experiment, you can write a convincing email to an orthodox authority about these questions, writing in Yiddish as if a yeshiva student, and then see what they reply with, as then they would reply honestly.
I doubt an Orthodox authority would tell you that you’re allowed to attend Torah study unless you are maternally Jewish.
Declaring Maimonides the only Jewish authority who counts is no less arbitrary than the rest of this cherry-picking. Maimonides is a very influential figure historically, yes, but this is the rough equivalent of pointing out that Thomas Aquinas is a Doctor of the Church and therefore declaring that the only thing you need to read to understand Catholicism is the Summa Theologiae. Much of what Maimonides taught was disputed even in his own time - for instance, his thirteen principles were immediately contested by other rabbis and do not enjoy consensus support today.
Moreover, to what extent are Maimonides' teachings even active, living forces in the lives of contemporary Jews? Even a very strict Orthodox Jew does not apply everything ever penned by Maimonides, no less than the most devout tradcath applies everything in Aquinas. Insofar as you are trying to make generalisations about Orthodox Jews today, I think it is necessary to look at what Orthodox Jews actually believe, and how Orthodox Jews actually behave.
Looking at actual behaviour is where I come to when it comes to study. Do Orthodox Jews actually try to prevent non-Jews from studying the Talmud? Really? That does not seem to actually be the case in practice, and I think it is telling that your case otherwise is conspiratorial - you assert that Orthodox Jews are just lying to people all the time. What's more likely? That the entire tradition is engaged in a universal deceit that you've seen through just by reading a book that your own argument would imply should be concealed from you? Or that you're talking nonsense?
Last of all, I am deeply skeptical of you drawing a distinction that excludes Conservative and Reform Jews here, for two reasons. Firstly, in my experience Conservative and to an extent Reform Jews absolutely study Torah, Talmud, and the entirety of their tradition. Secondly, I think that in actual practice yourself and the Motte's other anti-semites (pardon my language, but I do believe it's accurate) do not restrict your criticism of Jews to Orthodox Jews. I think Orthodox Jews are the motte, and you're probably going to go back to the bailey of opposing all Jews.
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