This section is based on a further interview (with relevant notes) which was conducted with Rabbi Cohen on Wednesday, 14th October 1992. This was necessary to cover further questions thrown up by our previous interview. Also, as some of the “quotes” I was chasing up were not from the Talmud but (allegedly) from other books, I had reached an impasse. Some of these works are so abstruse that they are not available even in the British Library. (47)
Note: The Rabbi began by showing me around the synagogue’s small library which contained, among other things, The Talmud and numerous prayer and other religious books. One work he showed me was the Aruch Shulhan, a later work than the Shulhan Aruch with the name reversed! This consisted of eight thick volumes. The Pentateuch in five volumes, naturally, seemed a lot thicker than the Christian version. He also showed me Jalquit Simeoni.
Rabbi Cohen: Jalquit Simeoni is a compendium of Midrashic works. The Midrashim were written at the same time as the Talmud. This compendium was done in the Middle Ages but it’s essentially quoting extracts from the Midrash.
A Baron: Have you got Zohar here?
Rabbi Cohen: I can’t see it, I wouldn’t have thought it would be here; it’s not meant to be used by any Tom, Dick and Harry, [or David, Moishe and Simon?]. It’s meant to be reserved for seasoned scholars who are ready for it. It’s said that if you are not ready for the Zohar it can drive you mad. (48) It’s all very mystical and very deep.
A Baron: You haven’t got the Protocols of Zion here?
Rabbi Cohen: They seem to have missed that, strangely; I must point that out to the Rabbi.
[Laughter.]
A Baron: What are Shemoth, Toldoth Noah and Lekh-Lekha? (49)
Rabbi Cohen: Shemoth could be the name of the weekly portion of the book of Shemoth or the entire book[s] of Exodus, Toldoth Noah and Lekh-Lekha.
A Baron: Last time we spoke I mentioned the quote, “He who sheds the blood of the Goyim is offering a sacrifice to God.” Jalquit Simeoni
[Rabbi Cohen opened Jalquit Simeoni and we examined the book together.]
Rabbi Cohen: With no other reference, just Jalquit Simeoni, it could be anywhere in these two volumes.
A Baron: There are two volumes which altogether encompass over a thousand pages.
Rabbi Cohen: For what it’s worth, if someone is claiming to be quoting from a work which is as relatively obscure as this, and he goes to all that trouble, does all that research, and then conveniently forgets all but the name of the actual book, it would appear to indicate that he was not overly keen on anyone confirming his findings.
Note: It is extremely doubtful if either William Grimstad or the pseudonymous Edward First can in fact read Hebrew. More likely these “quotes” were copied from another book which was given to the author by the wife of the man who lives next door to the woman in the drug store’s cousin three times removed, in typical urban legend fashion, with a bucketful of anti-Semitism thrown in.
Rabbi Cohen: Jalquit means a bag; Simeoni is named after the rabbi who compiled the book. Midrashim were mostly written in sermon form; they were written round about the same time as the Talmud. The usefulness to Midrash scholars is it is handy to cross-reference and check passages, and also there may be passages which are lost or unavailable in the original.
A Baron: I couldn’t find any reference to Jalquit Simeoni in The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia so I was inclined to doubt its existence. Clearly if it is not included in such a comprehensive Jewish-oriented reference book it is not obviously not for general consumption. (50)
Rabbi Cohen: It’s for scholars or for advanced students of Judaica.
A Baron: But not for the average Torah Jew?
Rabbi Cohen: No. He will have heard of it, maybe, but it’s unlikely that he will have got round to using it.
A Baron: Choschen Ha’mischpat is part of the Shulhan Aruch?
Rabbi Cohen: Yes. Unfortunately, we don’t have a copy in this synagogue. As you can see, there is quite a large selection of books. That should tell you that these books are for scholars and rabbinical figures and not for the average lay congregant. [As noted.] The Shulhan Aruch was actually considered a little too specialist to include in the synagogue library.
A Baron: What does the word goyim actually mean? How would you translate it literally? (51)
Rabbi Cohen: The literal translation of goyim is “nations” (in the plural). Used in this context it’s to imply non-Jews. Whatever certain people may wish to deduce or imply from the term, it is not essentially a derogatory term; as you can see from this translation it is a non-offensive way of referring to non-Jews.
A Baron: It’s not like kike or nigger?
Rabbi Cohen: Certainly not, no.
Note: In Rabbinic literature, the word goy is a simple designation, and does not carry in itself either favourable or unfavourable connotations, unlike akum, (see next question).
In Poland, goy came to mean “ignorant peasant”, while in Biblical usage it is applied also to Israel! (52) The same reference tells us that Jews’ anti-Gentile remarks date almost invariably from periods when the Jewish people were subjected to severe and cruel persecution.
The fact that Jews including Jewish scholars and holy men may have or even still do make derogatory remarks about people of other races, religions, other Jews or even each other, hardly singles them out as being uniquely wicked, and, once again, we can cite Northern Ireland as a contemporary and most uncomfortable example. Not that we have to go that far afield, how many of us have gone through a day without hearing or making an uncharitable remark about someone or other? As to the Jews suffering persecution, as we have seen with the state of Israel over the past forty and more years, they can certainly give as good as they get. But so what? A people without sin is a people without history, and if the Jews as a race, religion or ethnic group are any more wicked than the rest of us, they will have to go some. Northern Ireland, with a population of a mere 1.5 million, had nearly a hundred sectarian murders in 1991 alone; in the United States, there are some 25,000 murders a year (many of them firearms related), while it has been estimated that one out of every twenty-one black American men will be murdered, most by other blacks.
A Baron: What is an akum?
Rabbi Cohen: Akum is an accrostic, basically it means an idolater or a server of idols. It’s mainly a term that crops up in the Talmud, and as you are aware, there was no shortage of idolaters, in fact, probably the majority of people who were not committed to Judaism in the pre-Christian era were more likely to be idolaters than anything else.
Note: Akkum = obed kochabim umazzaloth = worshippers of stars and planets. (53)
A Baron: Speaking hypothetically of course, if you wanted to insult a Gentile, and didn’t call him a goy, what would you call him?
Rabbi Cohen: There is a Yiddish term – I’m not actually sure what it means – it is used to imply a goy but its main derogatory usage is when a Jew behaves in a way which shows no reflection of him being Jewish, eg by profaning the Sabbath. You might use this term against him, and that would be yok.
A Baron: The quote “All non-Jewesses are whores” is allegedly taken from Eben Haezar.
Rabbi Cohen: This is another section of the Shulhan Aruch.
A Baron: Zohar, you said, is for the mystics, but what is a Shemoth?
Rabbi Cohen: Shemoth is the Hebrew for Exodus, and as with the Midrash the Zohar is also written on the Bible so that when you want to quote a reference in the Zohar, you would quote according to which part of the Zohar and so on, this will tell you where in the Bible the given passage of Zohar corresponds to.
A Baron: This quote I mentioned at our last interview, “All Israelites will have a part in the future world...The Goyim, at the end of the world will be handed over to the angel Duma and sent down to hell.” Zohar, Shemoth, Toldoth Noah and Lekh-Lekha
Is there an angel Duma?
Rabbi Cohen: I’ve not come across that term; I don’t like to say there definitely isn’t until I’ve actually seen it, but I can say that I’ve not come across an angel of that name.
Note: Of course, Rabbi, if there is no angel Duma, then you will never come across him/her or it! Again, if this quote has a simulacrum of truth to it, the fact that a Talmudic scholar of Rabbi Cohen’s breadth hasn’t heard of it shows to what depths Talmud-baiters have gone in order to manufacture their poison. Mr Kahn had not heard of this angel either, and I could find no reference to him/her/it in either of the standard Jewish encyclopaedias, either under Angels or Duma.
A Baron: Toldoth Noah. Does this mean Toledoth?
Rabbi Cohen: There is a weekly reading Toledot [spelt here as pronounced] and there is a weekly reading Noah; again, these are references within the Bible. If we were talking about the Zohar, that passage of Zohar would be that passage which was written as a commentary on that passage of the Bible.
A Baron: Lekh-Lekha?
Rabbi Cohen: That’s another weekly reading and it’s quoted here as a reference in the same way.
A Baron: Vaikra Rabba?
Rabbi Cohen: The most comprehensive and voluminous Midrash ever written was the Midrash Rabba. This is actually written on the different books of the Bible. Not every single area of the Bible is covered by the Midrash Rabba but a fair bit of it is. The different parts of the Midrash Rabba which correspond to different parts of the Bible were not necessarily written or compiled at the same time and don’t necessarily have the same style. The book of Leviticus is sometimes known as Vaikra Rabba, so that’s where that reference in taken from.
A Baron: Is Sefer in the Talmud?
[This refers to the ‘quote’ “Take the life of the Klifoth and kill them; then you will please the Queen of Heaven, who will be kind to you as though you had burned a sacrifice.” Sefer 177b]
Rabbi Cohen: Sefer means “book”, so on its own it’s a bit meaningless.
Another possibility here is Sofer, which is an abbreviation of Soferim.
[This completed the odds and ends concerning Talmudic “quotes”; next we covered various aspects of anti-Semitic propaganda.]
A Baron: What is the Orthodox Jewish position on usury, lending money for interest?
[The relevance of this is the alleged Jewish control of the financial system and the canard that usury is Jewish.] (54)
Rabbi Cohen: We interpret certain passages of the scriptures to say “A Jew is forbidden to lend money to another Jew on interest.”
Where you have someone who is working as a banker, he can go to a a Jewish court of law and get a Heter Iskah – a special permit to charge interest for commercial purposes, otherwise, if it’s just a casual loan, a Jew is not supposed to charge interest; there is a prohibition for doing so.
A Baron: Why is that, some sort of conspiracy?
Rabbi Cohen: The only reason for that is that if the Bible hadn’t said anything, people would have assumed that if you lend money to someone else, you could charge them, and if you think about it, there’s nothing wrong with that because if [say] I lend someone else money, I’m putting myself out, I could have been using that money for something.
The Bible is telling us that if you’re doing something for family, you don’t expect to make money out of it, even if you are putting yourself out. This was because we are all one family...[in the eyes of the Bible]. If however you lend without interest to anyone who comes along and asks to borrow some money, you’ll soon go bankrupt.
Something else which might be of interest is that we interpreted this as, “You must not charge interest to your brother,” ie to another Jew, whereas the Christian clerics interpreted this as “You must not charge interest to other Christians but you may to Jews.”
Note: Tractate Baba Mezia, page 408, 70b states “He that by usury and unjust gain increaseth his substance, he shall gather it for him that pitieth the poor.”
A Baron: Another thing: intermarriage. This is strictly forbidden?
Rabbi Cohen: Yes. The Bible says that we are strictly forbidden to marry the daughter of our non-Jewish neighbour. Apart from the obvious that it may not be a particularly easy marriage especially as we’ve got so many rules to keep, unless the Gentile partner has shown his or her commitment, it is not only easy for the Gentile to be inactive in the fulfilment of the Commandments, but for the Jewish partner to slip into a lapse state. That seems to be the basis of the reason why the Bible is against it. In Talmudic times, the sages instituted various rules which were intended to minimise the chances of intermarriage taking place.
A Baron: Do Jews [ie Orthodox Jews] encourage intermarriage among Gentiles? This is a belief that is widely held among anti-Semites; it has in fact become part and parcel of the Jewish world conspiracy.
Rabbi Cohen: I find that very bizarre. The only thing we try to do is to discourage our people from intermarrying. As far as what the other nations of the world do, that really isn’t any of our business and not something we involve ourselves in one way or the other.
A Baron: And is Judaism the Siamese twin of communism? (55)
Rabbi Cohen: It’s interesting you should say that because as anyone who knows a little bit about Jewish history will know, every time a new movement comes about, when that movement is fighting to become established, the opponents of the movement blame its coming about on the Jews. When it becomes established, it becomes purged of any Jews that were involved in it one way or the other, and then when it becomes unfashionable and eventually falls, it’s blamed on the Jews. This has very clearly happened with communism and it’s happened with everything else.
A Baron: Can you be a bit more specific? There are a lot of “Jews” quote unquote, involved in communism. Are they, in your opinion, Jews?
[This refers to people of Jewish origin, many of whom exploit their Jewishness for their own base, political ends, ie to further the cause of world communism, to promote racial strife and the mass subversion of individual rights.]
Rabbi Cohen: In the very, very early days of Tsarism, there was a lot of suffering, there was a lot of oppression, the majority of the population were poor, oppressed peasants, and they were treated quite badly. There was a need for someone to try to do something for the people. At that point in time, to their credit, there were some Jews who became involved in a search for a more ideal way of running their society. It has been proven that they were far from controlling the communist movement, and they were certainly a minority involved in any parties. In fact, those that there were, tended to be involved more in the Menshevik Party than in the Bolshevik Party. The Mensheviks were more of a socialist than a communist party.
Anyone who wants to bother to look into this with an open mind will see that the idea that the Bolshevik Party [or world communism] was or is under Jewish control, is a myth. After communism established itself and people like Stalin came along, Jews were purged from the party. Jews were degraded and run down within communist society. Unless they were prepared to denounce their Judaism, which was outlawed anyway, they wouldn’t even have been able to hold a regular job. Jews were treated quite badly, as were many minority faiths, and certainly suffered their fair share under communist rule.
A Baron: Can any quote “communist Jew” unquote or Zionist Jew speak for Orthodox Jews?
Rabbi Cohen: No. According to traditional Orthodox Judaism, we don’t see our place as involving ourselves too much in the internal affairs of the nations around us. We have our own code of life, our own community; all we are supposed to do is to get on with the job that the Almighty has commanded us to do, namely to devote ourselves to an upright, pious, Jewish way of life. Anyone who has had any experience of this will realise that it’s more than a full time occupation.
A Baron: Do Orthodox Jews support organisations such as the Anti-Nazi League?
Rabbi Cohen: I doubt very much they’ve even heard about such organisations.
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