The Parricidal Faiths: How Christianity and Islam Betrayed Their Jewish Father

The greatest and most persistent enemies of Judaism are its own children—Christianity and Islam—not the Buddhists, Hindus, Shintoists, or Confucians. The reason is civilizational as much as theological. The Eastern religions never claimed descent from Judaism; they never proclaimed that the Jewish God was theirs. They neither sought to erase Judaism nor replace it. But Christianity and Islam were born from its womb, claimed its scriptures, and then turned against it with the fanaticism of betrayed offspring. They are not foreign conquerors of Judaism—they are its parricidal heirs.

Christianity began as a Jewish reform movement. Jesus was a Jew preaching to Jews, quoting the Hebrew prophets, claiming the kingdom of the Jewish God. His earliest disciples were not Gentiles but Jews who believed the Messiah had come. Yet within a century, the movement had shifted its center from Jerusalem to Rome, its language from Hebrew to Greek, and its soul from Judaism to universalist evangelism. It inherited the Jewish scriptures but reinterpreted them to condemn the Jews. The Old Testament became a prelude, the Jews became villains, and the new covenant replaced the old. What began as Judaism’s child became its prosecutor. For two thousand years, the Church that preached “love thy neighbor” treated Jews as eternal enemies of Christ.

Islam followed the same genetic logic with even greater ruthlessness. It proclaimed itself the final revelation of the same God—Allah, the God of Abraham and Moses—and called Jews “People of the Book.” But the Qur’an’s early admiration quickly hardened into contempt. When the Jews of Medina rejected Muhammad’s claim to prophethood, the revelation turned to retribution. The same God who had once favored Israel now commanded His new prophet to subdue them. Judaism, in the Islamic imagination, was not only outdated but disobedient. And once again, the child religion declared the parent corrupt and claimed the inheritance of divine truth for itself.

No Buddhist, Hindu, or Confucian ever made such a claim. The Eastern traditions did not grow out of Judaism; they arose from an entirely different metaphysical soil. They did not believe in revelation as a one-time divine command but in realization as an ongoing human journey. They saw truth not as monopoly but as discovery. Therefore, they had no reason to persecute Jews, to convert them, or to destroy their identity. Judaism was simply another path of human meaning—irrelevant, perhaps, but not intolerable.

It is the monotheistic family that breeds intolerance. The logic of One God is also the logic of One Truth and therefore One Error. The father who demands absolute loyalty divides his children into the faithful and the apostate. The Hebrew Bible’s monotheism, which began as a moral revolution against idolatry and tyranny, gave birth to two offspring that turned that revolution into imperialism. Christianity universalized Yahweh by making Him the Father of all and Jesus His only son. Islam globalized Him as the single ruler of mankind and Muhammad His final messenger. The result was the globalization of Jewish monotheism without Jewish ethics. The God of justice became the God of conquest.

The Jews, ironically, became the theological fossils of their own creation. Christianity kept the Hebrew Bible but stripped the Hebrews of history. Islam retained the prophets but replaced Israel with Arabia. Both built empires upon Jewish foundations while banishing Jews from the edifice. The Jewish God was enthroned in cathedrals and mosques—but His chosen people were condemned as infidels. In Europe, the Church called them Christ-killers; in Arabia, the Ummah called them corrupters of scripture. From the Crusades to the Inquisition, from medieval ghettos to Nazi Germany, the blood of the Jews was shed under banners bearing their own God’s name.

The Eastern religions, by contrast, never invaded Jewish memory. They never translated the Torah into the language of conquest. When Jews reached India after centuries of exile, they were not burned as heretics but accepted as traders and neighbors. In Cochin, Bene Israel Jews built synagogues beside Hindu temples and lived for centuries without persecution. The Hindus saw them as worshippers of another god, not enemies of their own. The Buddhist and Confucian worlds never even had an anti-Jewish vocabulary. The Abrahamic world did—and still does—because its children could not coexist with the father’s memory.

The tragedy of Judaism is that its moral universalism birthed universal religions that abolished it. The prophets of Israel dreamed of justice for all nations; Christianity and Islam claimed that dream as their license to rule those nations. What began as an ethical covenant between a people and their God became a global empire between a deity and His agents. The intimate became imperial. The God of conscience became the god of conquest. And the people who gave the world monotheism became its first victims.

This is not merely a historical irony—it is a psychological inevitability. The child who inherits the father’s property must also kill the father to own it. Christianity and Islam inherited Judaism’s monotheism, its moral code, and its prophetic language, but to assert their legitimacy, they had to delegitimize their parent. A grateful heir would have acknowledged continuity; a power-hungry heir proclaimed rupture. Thus, both faiths declared themselves “new covenants” and denounced the old as obsolete. The Jew was left with his scriptures but denied his significance.

The theological crime of the West was not atheism but parricide. The European Church destroyed the very Israel whose prophets it canonized. The Islamic caliphates persecuted the very people whose patriarchs they revered. And both accused the Jews of rejecting the truth they themselves had stolen. That is why the Jew became the eternal Other in the West—because he was not foreign enough to be forgotten nor obedient enough to be forgiven.

The Buddhists and Hindus never faced such contradictions. They did not need to erase the past to assert the present. They could revere the Buddha without erasing the Vedas, or honor Krishna without condemning others to hell. Their spiritual evolution was additive, not annihilative. The Abrahamic evolution was revolutionary in the most violent sense—it could only create by destroying. And Judaism, the firstborn, paid the price for that theological DNA.

So yes—the greatest enemies of Judaism are not pagans, not polytheists, not the East. They are its own children. Christianity and Islam turned the Jewish God into the conqueror of His own people. They universalized His name and privatized His mercy. They claimed to complete the revelation but completed only its corruption. The rest of the world merely ignored the Jews; their own heirs crucified them through history.

That is the final paradox of the Abrahamic saga: the religion that taught mankind to worship one God gave birth to two faiths that declared there could be only one way to worship Him. The parent dreamed of righteousness; the children built empires. And the Jewish God, trapped between his own commandments and his children’s crimes, became the silent witness to history’s most intimate betrayal.

Citations

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