116 • CHAPTER 3
Jesus. the article reports on a public lecture Drews delivered in Berlin
the previous month to an audience of “tens of thousands,” in which he
contended that the Christian idea of a “half man, half God” was simply
“impossible.”^89 Great scholars in the audience, writes ha-Ḥerut’s cor-
respondent, A.B.G. Triwaks, attempted to counter Drews’s argument,
but he “stood and showed, with historical evidence, that ‘Jesus never
existed’ and that all faith in him was as meaningless as the dust of
the earth.” the author explains Drews’s position in terms with which
ha-Ḥerut’s readers would comfortably relate: “professor Drew[s] is
one of those Christians in Germany who believes only in the verse:
‘Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one’ ” (Deuteronomy
6:4).^90 One readily detects the glee in ha-Ḥerut’s account of the women
who fainted “upon hearing professor Drews’s heresy.” even after one
woman reached toward the heavens and called on her Lord to send a
plague upon Drews’s head, “a plague,” the author notes wryly, “did
not fall on his head and so he continued on with wisdom.” the article’s
author felt heartened by this “excellent lecture,” seeing how “great,
learned men are finding within themselves sufficient strength to come
out against Christianity and the so- called ‘Son of God’ based on his-
torical research.” the news was not unambiguously rosy, however; it
was not clear, the author acknowledged, whether Drews was motivated
by opposition to Christian orthodoxy— an apparently praiseworthy im-
pulse— or by an antisemitism that could not stomach the notion of a
Jew at Christianity’s core.^91
this article, ostensibly concerning events nearly three thousand
kilometers from Palestine, must be understood within the context in
which it was meant to be read: palestine, 1910. It is one small piece
of evidence of Jewish hostility toward Christianity in Late Ottoman
palestine. Just a few months after the Drews article appeared, ha-Ḥerut
opened with an editorial titled “heresy or Incitement?”^92 the edito-
rial describes “a new danger.” Whereas previously Christian mission-
aries had preached to Jews by pointing to concepts within the he-
brew Bible— such as the lamb, Adam’s sin, or an atoning sacrifice— as
proof of Christianity, they have, ha-Ḥerutasserts, recognized that such
methods have failed. Now the missionaries are engaging in a new tac-
tic: using Jews, former yeshiva students, to perform their mission. as
proof, ha-Ḥerut’s editorial cites an article published in the newspaper
(^89) these lectures were published in Drews and Loofs, HatJesusgelebt? See also Drews,
DieChristusmythe; Drews and Burns, TheChristMyth.
(^90) the suggestion here would seem to be that the notion of the trinity violates true
monotheism.
(^91) In other words, it would be better to have no Jesus than a Jewish Jesus.
(^92) ha-Ḥerut 3:18 (December 2, 1910), 1.