LETTER: Falsehoods exposed

Editor,

Several weeks ago, I wrote an open letter to The Statesman and its advisers that was published in these pages.

I criticized a repugnant column by Yasir Kaheil, a USU graduate student, and I criticized The Statesman for publishing his false and hateful claims about the Talmud.

I did not go into the details of Mr. Kaheil’s misrepresentations at that time, because I did not want to get sidetracked from even larger issues. However, because Mr. Kaheil has once again made false claims about the Talmud in a public forum (the Herald Journal) and blatantly asserts that he wouldn’t change anything if he had it to do over, it is important to expose how absurd his claims are.

As I noted in my original column, Kaheil’s four supposed quotations appear on anti-Semitic Web sites in the same wording and sequence. According to the Herald Journal article, Kaheil denies that he found the quotations on an Internet site and claims that he “researched the passages in a hardcover copy of the Talmud.”

Mr. Kaheil’s research skills must be prodigious because the Talmud is a multi-volume work (2.5 million words on 6,000 folio pages, according to one count), idiosyncratic in its organization and language, and extremely difficult to navigate for one who is untrained.

I would like to see Mr. Kaheil’s copy, because his Talmud is unique in all the world. One of his four “Talmudic” quotations is cited as being in the Zohar (ca. 1300 AD) – a work written almost a thousand years after the completion of the Talmud (ca. 400 AD).

It is as if Mr. Kaheil cited a passage from the Magna Carta (1215 AD) and in parentheses gave the U.S. Constitution (1789 AD) as its source.

Mr. Kaheil’s special Talmud also contains, if one pays attention to his citations, Midrash Talpiot (1736 AD), which is actually a separate exegetical work, not part of any known edition of the Talmud. This time it is as if he is saying, “This passage is from Shakespeare. You can find it in his movie, “Some Like it Hot‚” (1959 AD).

It is obvious that Mr. Kaheil was simply copying something and that he did not even know enough to know what he was copying, nor was he interested in knowing. His only interest, it appears, was in discrediting Judaism. It goes without saying that his supposed quotations are mistranslated distortions removed from their historical and literary context, and that they have a long lineage in anti-Semitic propaganda.

Steve Siporin