ABSTRACT
Religious tolerance is wonderful. As a Jew, I am all for it. Over the long haul of history, we Jews have suffered from religious persecution and intolerance more than any other religion on earth. For many centuries, starting from the Church Fathers, Christianity taught that ‘the’ Jews (not just that, maybe, ‘some’ Jews) were responsible for the death of Jesus. Carrying this to the extreme, the Book of the Mormon declares that the reason Jesus had to be born a Jew was because Jesus was destined to die on the Cross, and the Jews were the only nation on earth sufficiently depraved to bring about that result. Such beliefs contributed to countless murders, torture and persecution of the Jews for almost two millennia. On the other hand, over the same long haul Jews, politically weak and a tiny minority in our countries of dispersal, have not been in a position to do much harm to other religious groups. And today, when Jews are a majority in Israel, it is a good idea for us to be tolerant of other religions there. That way we can hope that others will return the favour to the Jews outside of Israel, still a tiny minority in their other countries of residence. So here is a good argument for religious tolerance: it is good for the Jews.
