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‘Haaretz’ says many Orthodox are taught to see non-Jews as ‘not quite human’

Stark
Stark

Here’s a fascinating piece in Haaretz on Satmar Jewish attitudes, stemming from the recent murder of a Brooklyn landlord named Menachem Stark, 39, who is said to have been generous inside the Satmar community but ruthless outside it, treating tenants and others with contempt. (The New York Post angered many in the Satmar community by headlining a piece on Stark, “Who wouldn’t want this man dead?”) The Haaretz reporter is Debra Nussbaum Cohen:

Sources say that in fact there is no contradiction between the role Stark played in his Satmar community of Williamsburg, and how some tenants and legal documents say he behaved outside it.

“What you do to the goyim is not the same as what you do to Jews,” said Samuel Heilman, an expert on Hasidic communities like Satmar. Heilman, author of “Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry” and a distinguished professor of sociology at Queens College, is currently at work on a book about succession battles in Hasidic courts.

That attitude stems from days when Jews were actively persecuted, he said. “Part of the collective mind-set in the crucible of history when this part of Jewry was formed, the outside world was filled with anti-Semitism and persecutors. The whole understanding of that was that you need to keep a distance from them, that they are a different level of human being,” Heilman told Haaretz.

According to Samuel Katz, who was brought up as a Satmar but later became secular, boys in the community are taught that non-Jews aren’t quite human. Speaking from Berlin, where he is doing biomedical research on a Fulbright fellowship, Katz explained that growing up in such a community, “you don’t see commonality with people who aren’t Jewish. There is a completely different taxonomy of people. There are Jews and then there are non-Jews, who don’t have souls.”

When the messiah comes, “every boy is taught that the bad goyim will be killed and the good gentiles will have the privilege of serving us, of being our slaves,” he told Haaretz. “The way Stark dealt with tenants is part of that world view… It’s not taking advantage of them, [rather] that is the world order you’re taught to expect.”

“It informs your moral compass. Like all good people Stark was benevolent and generous to the people who he saw were like himself,” but not to other people, added Katz. “There’s an empathy ‘blind spot’ that imbues the Haredi outlook.”

P.S. I generally avoid pieces about nutty Orthodox teachings because I think all religious fundamentalists are crazy; but as Tolstoy said, every family is unhappy in its own way, and one Jewish issue I struggle with here is exceptionalism, superiority. Also note that one of Max Blumenthal’s alleged sins in his landmark investigation, Goliath, was the chapter title, “How to Kill Goyim and Influence People” describing an Orthodox tract in Israel laying out the circumstances under which it is permissible to kill non-Jews.

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1.’non-Jews aren’t quite human’.
2. ‘non-Jews, who don’t have souls.”
3. ‘good gentiles will have the privilege
of serving us, of being our slaves’

wow… Imagine if a waspy american said this about a Jew.
The Weisenthal center and the ADL would be on them in an instant.

I dont know enough about the various sects of Judaism and the differences in all of them —but from what I have seen on the ultra Orthodox and or Hasidic groups you can only label them extreme religious cults.
However ‘if’ they are teaching the same things we have seen from Rabbis in Israel about killing gentiles, etc then they should be treated as any other hate group in the US.
I found the sexual abuse stories in Brookyln very distrubing—-the idea that there is a religious or ethnic group that law enforcement basically keeps their hands off and leaves it to that community to deal with is outrageous.
Look at how the gov treated the Waco group just on hearsay of abuse and how the gov looks the other way when it comes to actual evidence of such by these groups. The DA had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing anything at all about it.

I think that anyone who teaches that large blocks of humanity are “not quite human” is INCITING to HATE. (Just saying. Could be wrong, here.)

Now, don’t some Israeli-Jews accuse the Palestinians of inciting to hate (of Israelis or of Jews)? Goose and Gander, anybody?

BTW, and speaking of incitement, what exactly are the instructions given to Israeli army recruits (and Border Police recruits, and etc.) as to the proper treatment of those human beings (if any) who are not Jews?

this is interesting, slip of the tongue?

“It informs your moral compass. Like all good people Stark was benevolent and generous to the people who he saw were like himself,” but not to other people, added Katz.

not all good people limit their generosity and benevolence to people like themselves and not to other people. which reminds me of the iranian family who donated their young 27 year old daughter’s organs to 7 americans last week. http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/01/22138477-woman-dies-in-michigan-as-iran-family-weeps-while-watching-over-internet?lite

I wonder if it’s important that Satmars are virulent anti Zionists.