Zohar-kabbalah is heresy of the most pernicious kind. Yet it is a fact that this kind of mystic pantheism exercises a curious appeal to very clever p… - Paul Johnson

The more one examines the teachings and activities of Jesus, the more obvious it appears that they struck at Judaism in a number of fatal respects, which made his arrest and trial by the Jewish authorities inevitable. His hostility to the Temple was unacceptable even to liberal Pharisees, who accorded Temple worship some kind of centrality. His rejection of the Law was fundamental. Mark relates that, having ‘called all the people unto him’, Jesus stated solemnly: ‘There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.’89 This was to deny the relevance and instrumentality of the Law in the process of salvation and justification. He was asserting that man could have a direct relationship with God, even if he were poor, ignorant and sinful; and, conversely, it was not man’s obedience to the Torah which creates God’s response, but the grace of God to men, at any rate those who have faith in him, which makes them keep his commandments.

Christians commit crimes with their hands, the Jews use their reason.’ A typical Jewish big-time criminal was Jacob ‘Greasy Thumb’ Guzik (1887-1956), who was Al Capone’s bookkeeper and treasurer. Another was Arnold Rothstein (1882-1928), the pioneer of big business crime, who is portrayed as ‘The Brain’ in Damon Runyon’s stories, and by Scott Fitzgerald as Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. Then there was Meyer Lansky, who created and lost a gambling empire and had his application for Israeli citizenship turned down in 1971.

In 1947 he had allowed himself to be persuaded to abolish capital punishment in Russia. This did not mean he stopped killing people: