Judaism is a Religion - Not a Race

During the Middle Ages, the Jewish people suffered many a time from fanatically religious governments who expelled or killed whoever refused to adhere to their religious belief. In the modern era, the Jewish people suffer due to the world’s misunderstanding of the distinction between Judaism and Zionism.

Judaism is a religion, not a race. Throughout history, whoever joined the Jewish religion was called a Jew, no matter what his race, and whoever abandoned the Holy Torah was not considered a Jew. In fact, the biggest names in Jewish history were converts or descendants of converts: King David, Zipporah, Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Meir, Shmaya and Avtalyon.

The proponents of Zionism, for their own political and financial advantage, have transformed the Jewish religion into a race. Similarly, they have taken the Torah, a book of Divine law which teaches fairness, peace and piety, and transformed it into a vehicle for their political goals, a source for their claims to a piece of land. These claims took their latest form this week, when, to our sorrow, the Zionist falsification was brought to the world’s eyes by the media.

President Bush is visiting the State of Israel, and several rabbis of the extremist Zionist settler community have penned a letter to the President, asking him to stop putting pressure on the Israeli leadership to make land concessions to the Palestinian Authority.

The letter read in part:

"It is totally presumptuous that while the US fights terror, it pressures Israel to make concessions to terrorists! In the name of the people of Israel, the Land of Israel, the Torah of Israel and the G-d of Israel, we demand that his honor the president cease the pressure on the State to hand lands to the Arabs… Honorable President, you must not be remembered in history as Nebuchadnezzar and Titus who destroyed Jerusalem. You must surely remember that American does not benefit from causing damage, Heaven forbid, to the Jewish people and its land. If you help the wholeness of our holy land, we promise you and your country endless blessings."

Signed: Dov Lior, David Druckman, Yaakov Yosef, Shmuel Eliyahu and Shalom Dov Wolpe.

The writers of this letter call themselves rabbis and speak in the name of the Jewish religion, but the world must not allow itself to be fooled. They are radical politicians and militants advancing their own agenda, for which they are distorting the Holy Torah and by doing so they are jeopardizing the Jewish people in the entire world as the Zionists did in the Second World War.

We look forward to the Messianic Era, when Jerusalem will be "a house of prayer for all nations" (Isaiah 56:7)