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Killing for God: The anthropology of violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam A five-session mini-course Instructor: E-mail: Website: Times: Place: Dr. Gerald Murray, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Florida [email protected] http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/murray/bnei.israel Wednesdays from 7:30 to 9:00, Nov. 1 to Nov. 29, 2006 Congregation Bnei- Israel, Gainesville, Florida Background and rationale for the course This will be a series of five lecture / discussion sessions focusing on religiously motivated violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The three major Abrahamic religions are predicated on belief in a Supreme Being who issues commandments and who rewards and punishes followers. In Judaism of the Biblical period, the rewards (longevity, prosperity, fertility, abundant rain and abundant harvests and livestock) and punishments (war, famine, drought, early or violent death) were worldly rather than in the afterlife. But today traditions in all three religions teach about a differentiated afterlife where the good will be rewarded and sinners punished after death, either eternally or temporarily. At different periods of their history, religious authorities have told practitioners in each of the three traditions that, as a condition of reward or punishment, God commands or approves of their killing and / or enslaving of others for his sake. At this period of history the violent elements in Islam are at the forefront of international attention, with suicide bombings and televised beheadings in the name of the Islamic deity. Statements about Christian violence almost inevitably bring up the Crusades and, later, the Inquisition of the past. Christianity has left that phase behind, with contemporary Popes and most other Christian leaders now condemning war, including the current war in Iraq. The Baptist White-House Warriors, in control of powerful weaponry, represent nonetheless a minority view in the Christian world. Of the three religions Judaism would seem to be the religion with least “blood on its hands”. The non-violent character of most contemporary rabbinic Judaism, however, was heavily shaped by nearly two millennia of experience as a threatened minority religion with no State or army. But the divinely mandated violence found in several parts of the Hebrew scriptures, and the genocidal commands to exterminate all living beings, both human and animal, in certain Canaanite kingdoms, exceeds in intensity any exhortations to violence found in either the New Testament or the Qur’an. In short, if divinely mandated massacres are now considered aberrant, then all three Abrahamic religions have theological skeletons in their historical closets. Objectives A major objective of this five-session mini-course is to submit these skeletons to dispassionate forensic identification and analysis, in hopes that this comparative grasp of the religiously violent past will help us to contextualize the religious violence of the present. Participants will receive a comparative anthropological overview of divinely mandated killing and enslavement in the three Abrahamic traditions. The course will identify and discuss texts from the Tenach, the New Testament, and the Qur’an which endow violence with divine legitimization. But we will avoid attributing exaggerated importance to the written word. One of the core anthropological premises of the course is that religious violence is less a product of sacred texts than of evolving access by religious leaders to armies and state-of-the-art weaponry. Religious texts are cited or manipulated by religious leaders to justify violent behaviors that may have other wellsprings. Hatred and rage, generated by social, material, or even intrapsychic factors, may be guided by religious leaders, citing religious texts, into violent expressions that will presumably win the favor of God. The course will recognize the power of texts, but emphasize the stronger causal power of religious leaders to manipulate the minds of large masses. A Mid-East leader is currently threatening to develop nuclear technology and is simultaneously advocating, in the name of his deity, that Israel be wiped off the map, even if it means losing most of his own population. This impending apocalyptic scenario, where killing for God could occur on an unprecedented scale, endows the subject matter of this mini-course with a certain contemporary relevance. Format: Each session will begin with 45 minutes to an hour of a presentation of some theme by the instructor. But because the topic is controversial, a half-hour or more of each 90minute session will ideally be dedicated to discussion and debate. Relevant readings will either be posted on the instructor’s website or handed out in class. Sequence of Topics: The following sequence of topics is subject to modification on the basis of topics that emerge during discussions as worthy of more intensive analysis. The points raised under each general topic are guidelines for exposition and discussion. Time constraints may prevent extended coverage of any particular point. Nov. 1. Setting the analytic stage: Religion and violence in broad anthropological perspective. Rapid overview of the Tenach, the New Testament, and the Qur'an. Human sacrifice and animal sacrifice. Nov. 8 Judaism and divinely legitimized violence. The warrior God of the Hebrews. Lethal and direct divine interventions: killing of firstborn, drowning of Pharaoh’s army. Divine commands to exterminate certain populations. Mitigating passages in the Tenach, and later regulatory prohibitions against wanton killing in Philo, Josephus, the Mishna, the Gemara, Maimonides and later Jewish writers. Nov. 15 Christianity and religious violence. From liberating Messiah to Prince of Peace. Turn-the-other-cheek: Pacifist character of early Christian texts. Constantine, the sword, and the cross. Debunking the Da Vinci code: warrior monks of the Knights Templar. Demystifying the Crusades and the Inquisition. The popes and the Jews. The tense alliance: Contemporary Christian pacifism and militancy. Pacifist popes and Baptist White-House warriors. Christian Zionists in Israel: keeping Armageddon on schedule. Nov. 22 Islam and religious violence. Prophet-and-Warrior. The concept of jihad: what does the Qur’an actually say about “killing infidels”? Internal divisions in Islam: Sunni and Shi’a. Arab armies and the westward and northward spread of Islam. Arab merchants and the southward and eastward spread of Islam. Jews in the Arab world: pre-1948. Suicide belts and the embrace of celestial virgins. Wahabi and Al Qaeda: rejected extremist minority or mainstream popular heroes in the Muslim world? Nov. 29 The State of Israel and religiously motivated violence. Theology and weaponry reunited after two millennia: the birth of “Uzi Judaism”? The two major religious streams in Israel: Datiim Leumim who serve in the army and Charedim who prefer the Gemara to the gun., letting others do the fighting. Jews in Gaza and the West Bank: Fundamentalist fanatics or defenders of the outer perimeter? Secular (Al Fatah) and religious (Hamas) Palestinian movements. Hizbollah: Altar Boys of the Iranian Ayatollahs? Three scenarios for the Israel of 2050: ethnic Jewish secular State, Torah State, Islamic State. Background of the Instructor Prof. Gerald Murray, on the faculty of the Anthropology Department of UF, has his B.A. from Harvard and Ph.D. from Columbia. Author of three books and over fifty articles and contract research reports, he has done fieldwork in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Central and South America, East and West Africa, the Indian Ocean, and, more recently, in an Israeli religious moshav in the Gaza Strip before its forced evacuation and destruction. He has studied fifteen languages, including Hebrew, Aramaic, Koine (New Testament) Greek, and Latin. He is currently studying Arabic.