Dr. Dilznick said:
I kind of hit on this in my post. It all has to do with perspective, history, and interpretation. Pretty much any religion can be twisted around to serve the perverse desires of the power-hungry, bigoted or hypocritical who count themselves as followers of that religion. Whether any of them do or not is partially just a matter of circumstance.
Christianity does borrow most of its fire and brimstone from the Torah, this is true. But the two religions, after breaking apart following the crucifixion of Jesus, have very different histories. Scattered and homeless for years, Judaism became as much a means of holding together a dispersed and derelict people as it was a religion. Over time, as Jews became integrated into many other cultures, without any national borders or common language of their own anymore their faith became the one thing that bound them together as a people. Until today, when if you say Jew it is not clear if you are referring to someone who is Hebrew by ancestry or who follows the Jewish faith, and even then the faith itself is very fragmented much like Christianity. Though I think for Jews, given the hardships they've had to endure over the years, a sense of community usually came first and so they were spared some of the problems that faced Catholics and Protestants or Sunnis and Shii'ites. Now that Israel has been restored, and their language has been revived, Jews have a place to call home. But this was a relatively recent development in the timeline of religious history. Most of the Israelis are secular Jews or only nominally religious.
As a result of these different histories, I think that, while there is potential for anyone to twist faith or anything else to support what was described in the OP, Jews are less likely to do this than Christians. While Jews were scattered and persecuted, Christians were ruling over most of the world. If your people are the ones being pushed around and marginalized it becomes a little difficult to argue that their faith is the one true faith and that this gives you the right to persecute others. I think that partially as a result of this persecution toward Jewish people over the course of centuries, many Jews do fit the stereotype of the self-hating Jew, or at least have some kind of inferiority complex. and then there's the fact that, as a result of their unique history, the Jewish faith has come to represent cultural and ethnic identity as much or more than it represents dogmatic religious beliefs, and adherents to the faith typically do not believe the word of the Torah as literal truth as much as most Christians or Muslims do.
Granted, racial/ethnic identity can be used just as sinisterly as religion can be. (see: Holocaust, Slavery, Cambodia, Native American vs. European history, India, etc.) But, that's a different subject. My simple point was that, though Judaism does share scriptures with both Christianity and Islam, there are many reasons why we have much less to fear from fundamentalist Jews. at least for the time being.
