Yesterday I saw one of those "the Talmud is horrible" antisemitic propaganda images. I started to do a whole thread debunking every claim one by one, but then I decided it wasn't worth my time and gave the image too much air. I do want to touch on one of the claims though:

The very first one was a claim that the Talmud says to kill every gentile. First off, this is a lie. It's a lie for the following reasons:
1) It cites an apocryphal tractate, not included in either the Babylonian or the Jerusalem Talmud. I had to search a lot to find it

2) As is typical of anti-Talmud propaganda, it cites something one Rabbi said, not something that was agreed upon as universal consensus of a halachically binding principle.

3) The actual thing that is said is that every gentile should be killed *in times of war*. In context, it's very clearly talking about fighting adversaries, not just general murderousness.

So, there's that. But the thing I *really* want to talk about is even broader context.

The Rabbi who says this is none other than old laser-eyes himself, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, aka Rashbi. This matters because the sages in the Talmud are actual people - they aren't interchangeable. They have personalities, they're shaped by their individual experiences.

So what does it mean that it was Rashbi who said this? Well, first off, Rashbi is not a person who goes by half measures. This is the guy who came out of a cave after 12 years and started shooting *other Jews* with eye-lasers for not appearing sufficiently focused on being Jewish

God didn't like that, btw, so he had to go back to his cave to calm down. He was in the cave in the first place because he refused to moderate his speech. In the face of praise of the Roman occupiers, while his friend stayed silent, Rashbi spoke out against the oppressors.

The Roman Governor didn't like that, so he put a hit out on Rashbi which led to the hiding in a cave thing. He was being persecuted for speaking truth to power. And the power he was speaking against matters too - Rashbi lived post-destruction of the 2nd Temple.

It was not a good time to be a Jew under Roman occupation. The Jews were suffering. Rashbi was a student of Rabbi Akiva, who was famously in favor of active rebellion. He wasn't a proponent of waiting out the oppression, he wanted to *do* something about it.

So when Rashbi says "fuck those goyim", he's doing so from the position of someone who has been actively persecuted by them his whole life, someone who has seen his Temple destroyed, someone who has been personally marked for death by them.

He's speaking against his *own oppressors*. And this is why I find the accusations of the Talmud as being bigoted or hateful towards gentiles to be not just a misrepresentation, but active, ugly antisemitism.

It's victim blaming and tone policing of the worst kind. It's decontextualizing the anti-imperialist, anti-oppression rhetoric of a persecuted people and trying to reframe it as xenophobia and bigotry. It's insisting that self-defense and resistance is the real violence.

It's true that the Talmud and other Jewish sources sometimes say mean things about non-Jews. But they are saying it from the position of people whose only interactions with non-Jews have been experiences of violence. They're punching Nazis.