Testimony of Rabbi Isaac Lichtenstein The Messianic Jewish Expositor

Rabbi Isaac Lichtenstein
OCTOBER 4, 2012 BY HENRY EINSPRUCH D.D.
From Rabbis meet Jesus the Messiah – a collection of 24 biographies and testimonies of Rabbis encounters with Jesus the Messiah
© Messianic Good News.
He was not yet twenty when he became a Rabbi, and after officiating for several years in different communities in northern Hungary, Isaac Lichtenstein finally settled as District Rabbi in Tapio Szele, where he remained for nearly forty years, labouring ceaselessly and unselfishly for the good of his people.
Early in his ministry a Jewish teacher in the communal school of his district casually showed him a German Bible. Turning the leaves, his eye fell on the name “Jesu Christi.” He became furiously angry and sharply reproved the teacher for having such a thing in his possession. Taking the book, he flung it across the room in a rage; it fell behind others on a shelf where, dusty and forgotten, it lay some thirty odd years.
About that time a fierce wave of anti Semitism broke out in Hungary, culminating in the now historic “Tisza Eslar affair”. In that picturesque little Hungarian town, situated on the Theiss, 12 Jews and a Jewess were thrown into prison, accused of having killed a Christian girl in order to use her blood for ritual purposes the most tragic part of the case being that a little Jewish boy, who had been kept some time from his parents by the police commissary, was prevailed on by threats and cruelties to appear as the chief witness against his own father (the synagogue sexton) and recite a concocted circumstantial tale of the supposed murdered girl.
As in every other case in which this diabolical charge was ever brought against the Jews, the blood accusation in Tisza Eslar was ultimately demonstrated to be false and baseless. It remains to the glory of true religion that a number of prominent Christian men, notably Dr. Franz Delitzsch, of the Leipzig University, rose to the occasion not only to defend the Jews, but also to tear the mask from all who by their acts scandalized Christ in the eyes of Jewry.
The mental state of Rabbi Lichtenstein at this time is best revealed in his Judenspiegel (Jewish Mirror):
“Often have they oppressed me from my youth, may Israel say” (Psalm 129:1). No long explanation is needed to show that in these few words the Psalmist sums up the bitter experiences and sorrows which we, at least of the older generation, have suffered from our youth up at the hands of the Christian populations surrounding us.
“Mockery, scorn, blows, and all manner of humiliation, have been our portion even at the hands of Christian children. I remember still the stones which were thrown at us as we left the synagogue, and how, when bathing in the river, and powerless, we saw them cast our clothing, with laughter and insult, into the water.
“Once with sorrow and weeping,, I saw my father felled to the ground without the least hesitation by a nobleman, so called, because he had not quickly enough made room for him on a narrow path. But these sad experiences are known well enough to need no dwelling on; and would to God that such persecution of the Jews by the Christians were altogether a thing of the forgotten past!
“As impressions of early life take a deep hold, and as in my riper years I still had no cause to modify these impressions, it is no wonder that I came to think that Christ Himself was the plague and curse of the Jews the origin and promoter of our sorrows and persecutions.
“In this conviction I grew to years of manhood, and still cherishing it I became old. I knew no difference between true and merely nominal Christianity; of the fountainhead of Christianity itself I knew nothing. Strangely enough it was the horrible Tisza Eslar blood accusation which first drew me to read the New Testament. This trial brought from their lurking places all our enemies, and once again, as in olden times, the cry re echoed, ‘Death to the Jew!’ The frenzy was excessive, and