Introductory Note: For past posts on the Jewish Talmud, look under the Talmud category of my blog here. I would highly suggest this post also. There you can begin to go through the Talmud yourself. You can also see interesting commentary that was written on the Talmud. For more articles about Judaism see here.
(See screenshots of the Talmud passages at the end of this article!)
(See screenshots of the Talmud passages at the end of this article!)
For nearly a century, the Jewish-dominated Hollywood film industry and big media have conspicuously influenced America.
What kind of moral foundations do Jews of the media rest upon, that they could consciously ignite and fan the flames of a sexual inferno that continues to ravage our society?
Virtually all the media moguls who founded Hollywood and the big three TV networks were immigrants, or their children, from predominantly orthodox Jewish communities in Eastern Europe.
The Talmud is the holiest book in Judaism.
In the late 19th century, most European Jews were a people of the book. But their book wasn’t the Bible. It was the Babylonian Talmud. To this day, the Talmud remains Judaism’s highest moral, ethical and legal authority.
Three Year Old Brides
When Christ accused the Pharisees of his day of being Satan’s spiritual children, he fully realized what they were capable of. Second century Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, one of Judaism’s very greatest rabbis and a creator of Kabbalah, sanctioned pedophilia. He proclaimed, “A proselyte who is under the age of three years and a day is permitted to marry a priest.” 1 Subsequent rabbis refer to ben Yohai’s endorsement of pedophilia as “halakah,” or binding Jewish law. 2 Has ben Yohai been disowned by modern Jews? Hardly. Today, in ben Yohai’s hometown of Meron, Israel, tens of thousands of orthodox and ultra-orthodox Jews gather annually for days and nights of singing and dancing in his memory.
References to pedophilia abound in the Talmud. They occupy considerable sections of Treatises Kethuboth and Yebamoth and are enthusiastically endorsed by the Talmud’s definitive legal work, Treatise Sanhedrin.
The Pharisees Endorsed Pedophilia
The rabbis of the Talmud are notorious for their legal hairsplitting, and quibbling debates. But they share rare agreement about their right to molest three-year-old girls. In contrast to many hotly debated issues, hardly a hint of dissent rises against the prevailing opinion (expressed in many clear passages) that pedophilia is not only normal but scriptural as well! It’s as if the rabbis have found an exalted truth whose majesty silences debate.
Because the Talmudic authorities who sanction pedophilia are so renowned, and because pedophilia as “halakah” is so explicitly emphasized, not even the translators of the Soncino edition of the Talmud (1936) dared insert a footnote suggesting the slightest criticism. They only comment: “Marriage, of course, was then at a far earlier age than now.” 3
In fact, footnote 5 to Sanhedrin 60b rejects the right of a Talmudic rabbi to disagree with ben Yohai’s endorsement of pedophilia: “How could they [the rabbis], contrary to the opinion of R. Simeon ben Yohai, which has scriptural support, forbid the marriage of the young proselyte?” 4
Out of Babylon
It was in Babylon after the exile under Nebuchadnezzar in 597 BC that Judaism’s leading sages probably began to indulge in pedophilia. Babylon was the staggeringly immoral capitol of the ancient world. For 1600 years, the world’s largest population of Jews flourished within it.
But with the expulsion of the Jews in the 11th century AD, mostly to western Christian lands, Gentile tolerance of Jewish pedophilia abruptly ended.
Still, a shocking contradiction lingers: If Jews want to revere the transcendent wisdom and moral guidance of the Pharisees and their Talmud, they must accept the right of their greatest ancient sages to violate children. To this hour, no synod of Judaism has repudiated their vile practice.
Sex with a “Minor” Permitted
What exactly did these sages say?
The Pharisees justified child rape by explaining that a boy of nine years was not a “man.” Thus they exempted him from God’s Mosaic Law: “You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination” (Lev. 18:22) One passage in the Talmud gives permission for a woman who molested her young son to marry a high priest. It concludes, “All agree that the connection of a boy aged nine years and a day is a real connection; whilst that of one less than eight years is not.” 5 Because a boy under 9 is sexually immature, he can’t “throw guilt” on the active offender, morally or legally. 6
A woman could molest a young boy without questions of morality even being raised: “…the intercourse of a small boy is not regarded as a sexual act.” 7 The Talmud also says, “A male aged nine years and a day who cohabits with his deceased brother’s wife acquires her (as wife).” 8 Clearly, the Talmud teaches that a woman is permitted to marry and have sex with a nine year old boy.
Sex at Three Years and One Day
In contrast to Simeon ben Yohai’s dictum that sex with a little girl is permitted under the age of three years, the general teaching of the Talmud is that the rabbi must wait until a day after her third birthday. She could be taken in marriage simply by the act of rape.
R. Joseph said: Come and hear! A maiden aged three years and a day may be acquired in marriage by coition and if her deceased husband’s brother cohabits with her, she becomes his. (Sanh. 55b)A girl who is three years of age and one day may be betrothed by cohabitation. . . .(Yeb. 57b)A maiden aged three years and a day may be acquired in marriage by coition, and if her deceased husband’s brother cohabited with her she becomes his. (Sanh. 69a, 69b, also discussed in Yeb. 60b)It was taught: R. Simeon b. Yohai stated: A proselyte who is under the age of three years and one day is permitted to marry a priest, for it is said, But all the women children that have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves, and Phineas (who was priest, the footnote says) surely was with them. (Yeb. 60b)[The Talmud says such three year and a day old girls are] . . . fit for cohabitation. . . But all women children, that have not known man by lying with him, it must be concluded that Scripture speaks of one who is fit for cohabitation. (Footnote to Yeb. 60b)
The example of Phineas, a priest, himself marrying an underage virgin of three years is considered by the Talmud as proof that such infants are “fit for cohabitation.”
The Talmud teaches that an adult woman’s molestation of a nine-year-old boy is “not a sexual act” and cannot “throw guilt” upon her because the little boy is not truly a “man.” 9 But they use opposite logic to sanction rape of little girls aged three years and one day: Such infants they count as “women,” sexually mature and fully responsible to comply with the requirements of marriage.
The Talmud footnotes 3 and 4 to Sanhedrin 55a clearly tell us when the rabbis considered a boy and girl sexually mature and thus ready for marriage. “At nine years a male attains sexual matureness… The sexual matureness of woman is reached at the age of three.”
No Rights for Child Victims
The Pharisees were hardly ignorant of the trauma felt by molested children. To complicate redress, the Talmud says a rape victim must wait until she was of age before there would be any possibility of restitution. She must prove that she lived and would live as a devoted Jewess, and she must protest the loss of her virginity on the very hour she comes of age. “As soon as she was of age one hour and did not protest she cannot protest any more.” 10
The Talmud defends these strict measures as necessary to forestall the possibility of a Gentile child bride rebelling against Judaism and spending the damages awarded to her as a heathen – an unthinkable blasphemy! But the rights of the little girl were really of no great consequence, for, “When a grown-up man has intercourse with a little girl it is nothing, for when the girl is less than this (three years and a day) it is as if one put the finger into the eye.” The footnote says that as “tears come to the eye again and again, so does virginity come back to the little girl under three years.” 11
In most cases, the Talmud affirms the innocence of male and female victims of pedophilia. Defenders of the Talmud claim this proves the Talmud’s amazing moral advancement and benevolence toward children; they say it contrasts favorably with “primitive” societies where the child would have been stoned along with the adult perpetrator.
Actually, the rabbis, from self-protection, were intent on proving the innocence of both parties involved in pedophilia: the child, but more importantly, the pedophile. They stripped a little boy of his right to “throw guilt” on his assailant and demanded complicity in sex from a little girl. By thus providing no significant moral or legal recourse for the child, the Talmud clearly reveals whose side it is on: the raping rabbi.
Pedophilia Widespread
Child rape was practiced in the highest circles of Judaism. This is illustrated from Yeb. 60b:
There was a certain town in the land of Israel the legitimacy of whose inhabitants was disputed, and Rabbi sent R. Romanos who conducted an inquiry and found in it the daughter of a proselyte who was under the age of three years and one day, and Rabbi declared her eligible to live with a priest.
The footnote says that she was “married to a priest” and the rabbi simply permitted her to live with her husband, thus upholding “halakah” as well as the dictum of Simeon ben Yohai, “A proselyte who is under the age of three years and one day is permitted to marry a priest.” 12
These child brides were expected to submit willingly to sex. Yeb. 12b confirms that under eleven years and one day a little girl is not permitted to use a contraceptive but “must carry on her marital intercourse in the usual manner.”
In Sanhedrin 76b a blessing is given to the man who marries off his children before they reach the age of puberty, with a contrasting curse on anyone who waits longer. In fact, failure to have married off one’s daughter by the time she is 12-1/2, the Talmud says, is as bad as one who “returns a lost article to a Cuthean” (Gentile) – a deed for which “the Lord will not spare him.” 13 This passage says: “… it is meritorious to marry off one’s children whilst minors.”
The mind reels at the damage to the untold numbers of girls who were sexually abused within Judaism during the heyday of pedophilia. Such child abuse, definitely practiced in the second century, continued, at least in Babylon, for another 900 years.
A Fascination with Sex
Perusing the Talmud, one is overwhelmed with the recurrent preoccupation with sex, especially by the most eminent rabbis. Dozens of illustrations could be presented to illustrate the delight of the Pharisees to discuss sex and quibble over its minutest details.
The rabbis endorsing child sex undoubtedly practiced what they preached. Yet to this hour, their words are revered. Simeon ben Yohai is honored by Orthodox Jews as one of the very greatest sages and spiritual lights the world has ever known. A member of the earliest “Tannaim,” rabbis most influential in creating the Talmud, he carries more authority to observant Jews than Moses.
Today, the Talmud’s outspoken pedophiles and child-rape advocates would doubtlessly spend hard time in prison for child molestation. Yet here is what the eminent Jewish scholar, Dagobert Runes (who is fully aware of all these passages), says about such “dirty old men” and their perverted teachings:
There is no truth whatever in Christian and other strictures against the Pharisees, who represented the finest traditions of their people and of human morals. 14
Aren’t Christ’s words more appropriate?
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity. (Matthew 23:27, 28.)
Endnotes:
1 Yebamoth 60b, p. 402.
2 Yebamoth 60b, p. 403.
3 Sanhedrin 76a.
4 In Yebamoth 60b, p. 404, Rabbi Zera disagrees that sex with girls under three years and one day should be endorsed as halakah.
5 Sanhedrin 69b.
6 Sanhedrin 55a.
7 Footnote 1 to Kethuboth 11b.
8 Sanhedrin 55b.
9 Sanhedrin 55a.
10 Kethuboth 11a.
11 Kethuboth 11b.
12 Yebamoth 60b.
13 Sanhedrin 76b.
14 Dagobert Runes, A Concise Dictionary of Judaism, New York, 1959.
2 Yebamoth 60b, p. 403.
3 Sanhedrin 76a.
4 In Yebamoth 60b, p. 404, Rabbi Zera disagrees that sex with girls under three years and one day should be endorsed as halakah.
5 Sanhedrin 69b.
6 Sanhedrin 55a.
7 Footnote 1 to Kethuboth 11b.
8 Sanhedrin 55b.
9 Sanhedrin 55a.
10 Kethuboth 11a.
11 Kethuboth 11b.
12 Yebamoth 60b.
13 Sanhedrin 76b.
14 Dagobert Runes, A Concise Dictionary of Judaism, New York, 1959.