I am delighted to post this contribution from Dr. Simon Mayers,a researcher and historian with research interests in Anglo-Jewish history, the history of religious anti-Judaism, and the development and transmission of religious ideas and discourses. His blog is here .

Watercolor by Josef Kriehuber
(1800-1876) from 1860
Repro Wikipedia and JW Nagl – J. Zeidler, Deutsch-Österreichische Literaturgeschichte: ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung in Österreich-Ungarn, Dritter Band, Von 1848 bis 1890 (1930) p. 255

Johann Veith was one of the most popular and best known Jewish converts to Catholicism in the 19th century. The Jewish Chronicle mentions him as a particular example of Jews who become Christians, and calls for a history to be written about them. This post provides something of an answer:

How a Jew Found Truth? – Johann Emanuel Veith and the Accusation of Jewish Scriptural Tampering

On 23 March 1894, a short article entitled “How a Jew Found Truth” in the Catholic Herald, a popular English Catholic newspaper, suggested that there was some merit to the claim that the Jews deliberately remove and obliterate passages from their own Hebrew scriptures in order to hide the truth of Christianity. According to the article, Johann Emanuel Veith (1787-1876; a Jewish convert to Catholicism, director of the school of veterinary medicine at the University of Vienna, and a prominent and popular priest and preacher), used to have passages read to him as a youth from the Old Testament by his father.

The Catholic Herald explained that from a young age he had studied his father’s sacred books assiduously, and by the time he was sent to Prague to study philosophy, he already “knew the Scriptures of the Old Testament thoroughly.” According to the article, though Jewish, the young Johann Veith decided to attend some Catholic religious classes, and he was astounded to discover passages from the Old Testament “concerning the Messiah which he had never read or heard of at home.” The Catholic Herald explained that when he next visited his father, he examined “his father’s old Bible” to check the passages he had discovered at the Catholic religious classes that discussed the messiah, and found that “the pages containing these quotations had been destroyed or glued together or obliterated.”

According to the Catholic Herald, when he asked his father for an explanation, the only answer he received was “a severe blow on the side of the face.” It was that blow, the paper explained, that steeled him to study Christian theology, leading him to “the truth of Christianity and of the Catholic Church.” See “How a Jew Found Truth,” Catholic Herald, 23 March 1894.

This story in the Catholic Herald was a modern example of an oft-repeated claim dating back to antiquity and frequently repeated during the Middle Ages. As Joshua Trachtenberg’s important study of the religious diabolisation of Jews notes, there have been Christians, from antiquity to the modern day, who have believed that the Jews were wilfully malicious and insincere rather than merely ignorant in their rejection of Christ. For example, some of the early Church Fathers, such as Jerome and Justinian, complained that the rabbis “consciously and deliberately perverted the meaning of the original text.” Medieval scholars even accused Jews of “tampering with the text of the Bible in an effort to destroy its Christological meaning.” See Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern Antisemitism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1943), 15, 153.

One may ask, did Veith really make the claims suggested by the Catholic Herald about his father’s alleged tampering with the Bible? It is difficult to conclusively answer this question. There is anecdotal evidence upon which one may speculate, but this may lead the interpreter to either conclusion. In his favour, it seems likely that Veith did publicly refute another malicious anti-Jewish myth, the blood libel. According to Hermann Stack’s classic study of the ritual murder accusation, there are at least three written testimonies to the effect that Veith had publicly stated, at the end of a sermon delivered in Vienna in May 1840 (i.e. shortly after the infamous Damascus blood libel), that there was not a single word of truth in the ritual murder accusation against the Jews. These testimonies were provided by Professor Franz Joseph Molitor (a German Christian Cabalist, and scholar of Hebrew, the Talmud and the Zohar), Dr Eduard Kafka (an Austrian author), and Veith’s brother, Joseph Veith.

According to Strack, the concluding words of the sermon were later printed in a Viennese newspaper, the Illustriertes Wiener Extrablatt (on 5 June 1882), though as this was four decades after the event in question, their veracity is difficult to check: “I swear here, in the name of the triune God, whom we all acknowledge, before you and all the world, that the falsehood which has been disseminated by cruel cunning, to the effect that the Jews use the blood of a Christian in the celebration of their [Pesach] festival, is a malicious, blasphemous slander, and is contained neither in the books of the Old Testament, nor in the writings of the Talmud, which I know thoroughly and have zealously examined.” Veith’s rejection of the blood libel accusation was also mentioned, albeit in passing, in the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia. See Hermann L. Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice, 8th edition (New York: Bloch Publishing, [1909]), 245-248. See also “Blood Accusation,” The Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 3 (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1902), 266.

Whilst the explicit and public rejection of one anti-Jewish myth might seem to suggest that it was unlikely that he would endorse another, its evidential basis is at best anecdotal. Furthermore, it seems that there is similar, perhaps stronger, anecdotal evidence for the contrary position. Significantly, it seems to be true that Veith held little love for his father, and spoke of Judaism with bitterness. According to a biography of Veith written by Johann Heinrich Löwe (Veith’s nephew), Veith’s father had the habit of setting him tests every few weeks, and when he failed those tests, he was locked in a small room without food.

Veith rejected his father’s wish that he study to become a rabbi, and later wrote (in 1866) that he hated his home Czech town of Klattau, as it was there that he lived a “neglected, mishandled, and joyless childhood, troubled by atrocious examples.” He complained that he “did not even learn Czech, which would have been a thousand times better than the rotten Talmud.” On another occasion, Veith stated that he had been called “from the dung heap to Christianity.” See Johann Heinrich Löwe, Eine Biographie (Vienna, 1879), cited by Adam Bunnell, Before Infallibility: Liberal Catholicism in Biedermeier Vienna (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990), 60-65.

There are also grounds for believing that if Veith did protest against the blood libel in 1840, he later came to regret it. In 1854 and again in 1856, a Catholic newspaper, the Wiener Kirchenzeitung, published a declaration, allegedly at Veith’s instigation, to the effect that he regarded the whole story of his having declared that the blood libel was a myth as a “contemptible slander.” Strack rejected this, noting that the language of the article in the Wiener Kirchenzeitung was that of Sebastian Brunner. An Austrian priest, author and newspaper editor, Brunner was obsessed with the so-called Jewish threat to Christian civilisation. Strack is probably right that the language was Brunner’s, but as Brunner was both the editor of the Wiener Kirchenzeitung and a close friend and associate of Veith’s, this would only seem to suggest that Brunner wrote the piece on his friend’s behalf, or influenced his language. As far as I am aware, there is nothing to indicate that Veith ever rejected the statements in the Wiener Kirchenzeitung. See Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice, 245-246.

The account of Veith discovering that his father destroyed, glued together and obliterated pages from the sacred text to hide passages alluding to Jesus is highly implausible. Jews read the Tanakh, and Christians read the Old Testament, in very different ways, and as such, non-Christian Jews do not tend to recognise passages in the Tanakh/Old Testament as referring to Jesus. Those Jews who believe that the arrival of Jesus was prophesied in the Old Testament are likely to embrace Christianity. By depicting the Jews as recognising passages in the Tanakh as prophetic references to Jesus, and wilfully responding by desecrating the relevant scriptural passages by obliteration or gluing together of pages, is to construct an image of highly malignant creatures. (Besides which, it seems unlikely that Veith, having studied his father’s books assiduously as a youth, would not have noticed that some pages had been glued together or destroyed if that had been the case).

However, Veith was capable of speaking with acerbic sarcasm when it came to his political and religious opponents, and when it came to his father, it may well be that he had fair reason to be bitter. Certainly it seems that his experiences of being instructed in Judaism were not happy ones. It is thus plausible (though it has proven impossible to verify) that Veith did narrate the story depicted in the Catholic Herald – though I have not encountered an original source for it – perhaps as an instance of fantastic and angry hyperbole. Certainly Veith often spoke badly of his Jewish heritage, and quite probably criticised and challenged his father’s readings of the Tanakh.

Richard’s reflection and prayer: Thanks to Simon Mayers for this fascinating piece of research. The aim of “On this day in Messianic Jewish history” is to track the contexts and challenges faced by Jewish believers in Yeshua, caught in the interface betweeen Judaism and Christianity, speaking the language of both communities whilst attempting to construct their own coherent and authentic theological discourse. But perhaps, as here, the ideological currents are so strong it is difficult to hold one’s own and popular prejudice continues to stereotype and caricature the reality of ‘the other’.

Lord, you alone discern the thoughts and motives of our hearts, and the truth of the past is often wrapped in the editorialising of those whose agenda is so easily imposed on others. Help us to walk in the simplicity and sincerity of faith, and make us men and women of integrity and truth. In Yeshua’s name we pray. Amen.

http://simonmayers.com/2016/02/02/la-croix-and-the-jews/ focuses on questions of Catholic perceptions of Jews

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Emanuel_Veith

http://www.kohoutikriz.org/priloha/veitj.php