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(A Seven Arts Feature)
The Hanuka week, which
Jews all over the world are
now celebrating for eight
days by the lighting of can
dles, by special prayers and
by the giving of gifts, once
again serves to remind us that
Jews were the first nation
known to history who put up
a fight for religious freedom—
and won it.
Hanuka celebrates the re
volt led by Judas Maccabeus
and his four brothers in the
year 165 B.C.E., more than two
thousand years ago, against
the tyrannical Greek-Syrian
king, Antiochus Epiphanes,
who was then ruling Palestine
and wanted to impose Greek
pagan rites upon the Jews and
destroy their own monotheis
tic religion. One of the means
for accomplishing this which
Antiochus adopted was to or-
"der some of his soldiers sta
tioned in Jerusalem to defile
the Jewish Temple there, since
the Jerusalem Temple was the
very center of Jewish religious
life in the country. After a
short but bitter struggle, the
Maccabeans won the fight
against the hordes of Anti
ochus, cleansed the Temple
and re-lighted there the can
dles, which by a miracle, so
tradition has it, burned for
eight days instead of the one
day they would normally
burn. That is why we call
Hanuka the Festival of Lights.
The story of the Maccabean
revolt is told in the Book of
Maccabees, one of the Apo
cryphal books which did not
get into the authorized Bible
at the time it was decided
which of the writings—his
torical, legalistic, prophetic-
poetic—which had been ac
cumulating in the Jewish re
ligious ' tradition over many
centuries should be canonized
as part of the Jewish Sacred
Scriptures, the Hebrew Bible,
which Christians later called
the Old Testament. Apparent
ly the Book of the Maccabees
was considered too recent, too
new, to be included in the He
brew Bible. But it is a curious
fact that the Roman Catholic
Church does include the Book
of the Maccabees and other
Apocryphal writings in its
Bible. Though the Jews did
not take in the Book of the
Maccabees in their Bible, they
did decide to commemorate
the Maccabean revolt and the
re-dedication of the Jerusalem
Temple by celebrating an eight
day semi-holiday _£very year,
beginning with the 25th day
of the Hebrew month of Kis-
lev. Usually that date comes
early in December, but this
year, because the previous
Jewish lunar year was a leap
year of thirteen, instead of
twelve months, the Hanuka
Hantika’s Message
STRUGGLE
FOR
RELIGIOUS
FREEDOM
by PHILIP RUBIN
week will start at the end of
December, a couple of days
after Christmas.
The struggle for religious
freedom, for the right to
worship according to the dic
tates of one’s conscience, has
been going on for the past two
thousand years at various
times in various parts of the
world. The early Christians
were persecuted by the pagan
authorities of the Roman Em
pire because they wouldn’t
regard the Roman Emperor as
a sort of god and wouldn’t bow
down to his image. In later
ages Orthodox Christians
themselves began persecuting
all who dissented from the of
ficially endorsed Christian
creed, and that included not
only Jews and Moslems but
also Christians who interpret
ed the teachings of Jesus dif
ferently from the Orthodox
Catholic Church. The Inquisi
tion was set up in Spain and
Jews and others were burned
at the stake; in France there
was the St. Batholomew Day
massacre of thousands of Prot
estants (called Huguenots) by
Roman Catholics in the six
teenth century, Jews were
forced to live in ghettoes, and
a century after Luther in Ger
many had led the Protestant
revolt against Catholicism,
there was a Thirty-Year War
in the German-speaking coun
tries in which for three de
cades ’Catholics and Protest
ants kept murdering each
other because of their differ
ing religions.
It was only toward the end
of the 18th Century, with the
coming of the American and
French Revolutions, that the
idea of religious toleration be
gan to dawn upon the popula
tions of the Western world.
But this toleration, this revolt
against religious fanaticism,
which denied freedom of ex
pression to any sect but its
own, started, we have to ad
mit, with a revolt against all
the historic religions— Chris
tianity, both Catholic and
Protestant, and Judaism out of
which Christianity had sprung.
In the newly-formed United
States of America, which be
came an independent republic
after overthrowing British
rule, Thomas Paine, a very in
fluential revolutionary writer
and propagandist, in his pam
phlet “The Age of Reason” at
tacked all the historic re
ligions, attempted to show
that the stories told in the
Bible, both Jewish and Chris
tian, both Old and New Testa
ments, were false. Paine took
these stories literally, and re
fused to see them as mere
symbols of an idea.
In France the revolutionists
of 1789, or rather the intellec
tual leaders of the Revolution,
went ey£n further than some
of the intellectual leaders of
the American Revolution.
While the intellectual leaders
of the American Revolution
called themselves Deists, that
is, believers in One God, but
disbelievers in the authority
of any Church, the French in*
tellectual rebels were really
atheists who, when they took
over the power from the
French monarchy and nobil
ity, tried to enthrone a “God
dess of Reason,” abolished
Christian holidays and even
the Christian calendar, sub
stituting for it a new calendar
of their own. After the turmoil'
The Southern Israelite
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