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Essay on Judaism

Decent Essays

I learned a lot of facts about Judaism that I had previously been ignorant to. I had no idea that we (Christians & Jews) maintained the same bible (The Old Testament) but that we interpreted certain events differently, such as Adam and Eve. “In Judaism, each and every human being is free to choose good or evil because each person stands before God in the same relationship that Adam and Eve did” (Esposito 77). I was unaware that Judaism did not believe in “original sin.” I had no knowledge of the fact that Jews did not believe that Christ was resurrected from the dead. I found it interesting how Jews have split into separate groups – Reform Jews, who believe that Judaism is a cultural inheritance and that neither the laws nor beliefs are …show more content…

As if that were not enough, “Between 1648 and 1658, in organized massacres called pogroms, over 700 Jewish communities were destroyed. Jewish deaths numbered in the hundreds of thousands” (Esposito 107). Finally I learned of the Spanish Inquisition where Jews were once again treated as something separate from humanity. “Many were tortured and burned at the stake. The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492” (Esposito 108). They endured this suffering for no crime they committed. They endured this suffering because of their faith. It is unfathomable to me. The Jews have a long history of violence against them and of others trying to eradicate them, a history that I was not fully aware of until this class.
I learned a lot of important things about Christianity in this class that I had not previously known. I was unaware that Christians were the only ones who believed in the idea of original sin. “Christians differ from Jews and Muslims in their view of sin and how it is to be overcome” (Esposito 149). I found it odd that Christians would just take the Jewish bible and claim it as their own while making their own interpretations. I found it even more perplexing that Christians would not embrace their Jewish brother seeing as how the two are so closely related and God does call them “His

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