An Act against Atheism and Blasphemy, Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1697.
Over the next few days we will be studying the laws surrounding the trial and execution of a blasphemer (with a lengthy discursus into the Seven Noachide Laws). Here are some examples:
סנהדרין נ׳ה, א
בְּכל יוֹם דָּנִין אֶת הָעֵדִים בְּכִינּוּי, ״יַכֶּה יוֹסִי אֶת יוֹסִי״
On every day of a blasphemer’s trial, when the judges judge the witnesses, i.e., interrogate the witnesses, they ask the witnesses to use an appellation for the name of God, so that they do not utter a curse of God’s name. Specifically, the witnesses would say: Let Yosi smite Yosi, as the name Yosi has four letters in Hebrew, as does the Tetragrammaton…
סנהדרין ס, א
אָמַר רַב אַחָא בַּר יַעֲקֹב: אֵינוֹ חַיָּיב עַד שֶׁיְּבָרֵךְ שֵׁם בֶּן אַרְבַּע אוֹתִיּוֹת, לְאַפּוֹקֵי בֶּן שְׁתֵּי אוֹתִיּוֹת דְּלָא
Rav Aḥa bar Ya’akov says: The blasphemer is not liable unless he blesses, i.e., curses, the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God, which is to the exclusion of one who curses the two-letter name of God, spelled yod heh, who is not liable…
תָּנוּ רַבָּנַן: אֶחָד הַשּׁוֹמֵעַ, וְאֶחָד שׁוֹמֵעַ מִפִּי שׁוֹמֵעַ – חַיָּיב לִקְרוֹעַ. וְהָעֵדִים אֵין חַיָּיבִין לִקְרוֹעַ, שֶׁכְּבָר קָרְעוּ בְּשָׁעָה שֶׁשָּׁמְעוּ
The Sages taught: Both one who hears the curse himself and one who hears it from the one who heard it are obligated to make a tear in their garments. But the witnesses are not obligated to make a tear when they testify, as they already made a tear when they heard it from the blasphemer himself.
The sentence for blasphemy was death by stoning. Which of course reminds us of this famous scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian:
But in reality, blasphemy is hardly something to laugh about, and to this day it has very real life and death consequences in more countries than you would think. So today, on Talmudology, we are going to take a look at contemporary blasphemy laws and their consequences.
How Many Countries Have Blasphemy Laws?
An astonishing four in ten countries across the world have blasphemy laws in place. According to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center, “79 countries and territories out of the 198 studied around the world (40%) had laws or policies in 2019 banning blasphemy, which is defined as speech or actions considered to be contemptuous of God or of people or objects considered sacred (and another twenty-two countries (11%) had laws against apostasy, the act of abandoning one’s faith).”
Blasphemy laws worldwide. From here.
Blasphemy Laws in Western Countries
Many western (Christian) countries have repealed their laws against blasphemy, though perhaps not as long ago as you might have thought.
Australia (last blasphemy prosecution, 1919) abolished and repealed all blasphemy laws at the federal level with the Australia Criminal Code Act 1995, but blasphemy laws remain in some states and territories. For example, blasphemy is an offence in some jurisdictions, including New South Wales (section 49 of the Defamation Act 1974 (NSW)), Victoria, Tasmania, and South Australia, but is not in others.
Germany still has a blasphemy law (sort of):
§ 166 Defamation of religious denominations, religious societies and World view associations
(1) Whoever publicly or by dissemination of writings (§ 11 par. 3) defames, in a manner suitable to disturb the public peace, the substance of the religious or world view conviction of others, shall be fined or imprisoned for up to three years.
Ireland repealed its blasphemy law in January 2020. But before this, in 2017, the Irish Police opened an inquiry against the English comedian Stephen Fry. Two years earlier Fry had been asked during an RTÉ program what he might say to God at the gates of heaven. Here is how he responded, without specifying any religion,
I'd say: "Bone cancer in children, what's that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault? It's not right. It's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?" That's what I'd say ... the god who created this universe, if it was created by a god, is quite clearly a maniac, an utter maniac, totally selfish ...
Italy still has a blasphemy law on the books, which punishes blasphemy against the "Deity." Be especially careful what you say about God in the northern town of Saonara; a law passed there in 2019 punishes blasphemers with a fine of €400.
The Netherlands introduced a law against blasphemy in 1886, and it remained in force until it was repealed in 2014. It was invoked back in 1966, when the Public Prosecution Service charged writer Gerard Reve under Article 147. In his novel Nader tot U ("Nearer to Thee"), Reve had described the narrator's sexual intercourse with God, who is incarnated in a donkey. The court convicted Reve, but he appealed, and in April 1968, an appeals court quashed the conviction.
Norway had a law against blasphemy until 2015. And here is a fun fact: In early 1980, Monty Python's Life of Brian (see above) was briefly banned in there because it 'was believed to commit the crime of blasphemy by violating people's religious feelings'. However, the ban was lifted after a group of theologians who had seen the film produced a statement saying that there was no good reason for a total ban. Life of Brian was then allowed on the big screen, provided with a poster at the beginning which stated that Brian was not Jesus. It was then marketed in Sweden as "The film so funny that it was banned in Norway."
Thomas Aikenhead was last person hanged for blasphemy in the United Kingdom on January 8, 1697. According to witnesses, Aikenhead had said that:
"divinity or the doctrine of theology was a rhapsody of feigned and ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the moral doctrine of philosophers, and partly of poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras…the "Old Testament [were] Ezra's Fables... which were an allusion of Aesop's Fables, and that Ezra was... a cunning man who convinced a number of Babylonian slaves to follow him, for whom he made up a feined genealogy as if they had been descended of kings and princes in the land of Canaan, and thereby imposed upon Cyrus who was a Persian and stranger, persuading him by the device of a pretend prophecy concerning himself…
The "New Testament the History of the Imposter Christ, and affirming him to have learned magic in Egypt, and that coming from Egypt into Judea, he picked up a few ignorant blockish fellows, whom he knew by his skill and physiognomy, had strong imaginations, and that by the help of exalted imagination, he played his pranks as you blasphemously termed the working of his miracles”
Of Moses [he] said if there ever was such as man, "to have also learned magic in Egypt, but that he was both the better artist and better politician than Jesus; [he] also you have cursed Ezra, Moses, and Jesus, and all men of that sort, affirming the holy Scriptures are so stuffed with madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that you admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them".
For good measure, Aikenhead also apparently denied spirits, and maintained that God, the world, and nature, “are but one thing, and that the world was from eternity.” (Sounds very Spinoza-ish, but then, remember what happened to him). In March 2008, an amendment was passed to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 which abolished the common law offense of blasphemy and blasphemous libel in England and Wales.
And here is another fun fact: Visions of Ecstasy is the only film ever banned in the UK for blasphemy. It showed the 16th Century Spanish nun St. Teresa of Avila caresses the body of Jesus on the cross.
Blasphemy Laws in Muslim Countries
In contrast to Western countries, most Muslim countries still have blasphemy laws in place, and in some, the punishment is death.
Pakistan is perhaps the most notorious of the countries in which blasphemy is a capital crime. As Asma Uddin noted in a her 2011 paper published in The Review of Faith & International Affairs, the bulk of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are contained within Sections 295–298 of the Pakistani Penal Code, titled “Of Offenses Related to Religions:
“Every infringement under these sections is punishable by imprisonment, either in place of or in addition to a fine. For example, Section 295 relates to the defilement of a place of worship with the “intent to insult the religion of any class” and punishes this crime with a fine and/or up to two years of imprisonment. Section 295A relates to the “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.” The statute states that such infringements include spoken and written words, as well as visible representations. The punishment for such insults is a fine and/or imprisonment for up to 10 years.
Section 295C14 punishes derogatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad with the death penalty or life imprisonment, in addition to a fine. The offender can commit such defamation through spoken or written words—by “visible representation or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation” which “directly or indirectly” defames the Prophet.
And now for a not-fun-at-all-fact. In 2010 On November 8, 2010, the Sheikhupura District Court found Aasia Bibi, (who also used the family name Noreen) a Christian woman, guilty of blasphemy. The court ruled that there were “no mitigating circumstances,” and sentenced her to death by hanging. Her “crime”? She had got into an altercation with fellow farm workers who refused to drink water she had touched, contending it was "unclean" because she was Christian. It was alleged that she had said “The Quran is fake and your prophet remained in bed for one month before his death because he had worms in his ears and mouth. He married Khadija just for money and, after looting her, kicked her out of the house.” The Pakistani Supreme Court later acquitted her, and in 2019 she was finally allowed to leave for Canada, where she now lives. In 2011, the Governor of Punjab Salman Taseer was assassinated by a member of his own security team, because of his defense of Aaisa and his opposition to the blasphemy law.
Indonesia’s Blasphemy Act makes it unlawful to “intentionally, in public, communicate, counsel, or solicit public support for an interpretation of a religion ... that is similar to the interpretations or activities of an Indonesian religion, but deviates from the tenets of that religion.” Uddin helpfully explained that “one of the purposes of the Act is to help the government protect Indonesia’s six recognized religions—Islam, Protestant Christianity, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism—by punishing those who encourage conversion away from one of these religions or preach “deviant” interpretations of the recognized religions. The six official religions each have government-funded religious bodies that decide what is an acceptable belief for that religion and what is not.” There are countless examples of prosecutions under the Blasphemy Act. Most recently, a Muslim cleric named Panji Gumilang, 77, who runs the Al-Zaytun boarding school in the district of Indramayu in West Java, Indonesia, was arrested on charges of blasphemy and hate speech. His “blasphemy:” a decision to allow women to preach and pray beside men.
Blasphemy under the Palestinian Authority. Waleed Al-Husseini, from the West Bank town of Qalqilya had left Islam to become an atheist, and had openly challenged and ridiculed religion online. In 2010, Al-Husseini was charged with three counts of incitement according to the Palestine Military Code of Justice, namely: "inciting religious hatred" (Article 177), "insulting religious leaders" (Article 225 and 226/B), and "offending religious views" (Article 230/A). As The New York Times reported,
“in his hometown, the reaction seems to be one of uniform fury. Many here say that if he does not repent, he should spend the rest of his life in jail. “Everyone is a Muslim here, so everyone is against what he did,” said Alaa Jarar, 20, who described himself as not particularly pious. “People are mad at him and will not respect the Palestinian Authority if he is released. Maybe he is a Mossad agent working for Israel.”
I’m getting tired, but you can find the same sorts of laws in Saudi Arabia (where in 2008 “at least 102 men and women, 39 of them foreign nationals, were executed. Many were executed for non-violent offenses, including drug offenses, "sodomy", blasphemy and apostasy. Most executions were held in public); Sudan (home of the infamous 2007 teddy bear blasphemy case) and the United Arab Emirates (here’s a suggestion: please don’t have a Pesach program there).
Blasphemy Laws and Terrorism
In 2017 Nilay Saiya, then from the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the State University of New York, published an intriguing paper titled Blasphemy and terrorism in the Muslim world. In it he argued that “blasphemy laws encourage terrorism by creating a culture of vigilantism in which terrorists, claiming to be the defenders of Islam, attack those they believe are guilty of heresy.” To test his thesis, he performed a “time-series, cross-national negative binomial analysis of 51 Muslim-majority states from1991–2013.” He found that “that states that enforce blasphemy laws are indeed more likely to experience Islamist terrorist attacks than countries where such laws do not exist,” and claimed not just an association, but causation:
In summary, the empirical analysis finds that the enforcement of blasphemy laws is significantly related to the number of Islamist terrorist attacks across all four models, as are a country’s level of wealth, size of population, presence of civil war, and level of fragility. The alternative hypotheses tested here do not receive support. To be sure, none of this suggests that the existence of blasphemy laws is the sole or most important state-level variable behind Islamist terrorism, only that the existence of such laws tends to fuel terrorism more often than not.
Negative binomial regressions of blasphemy enforcement and Islamist terrorism. Model 1 presents the results for the main hypothesis of the study without the inclusion of either alternative hypothesis. Model 2 runs the same analysis, this time including the variable for number of religious minorities as a proxy for the clash of civilizations hypothesis that religiously heterogeneous countries are more conflict-prone than homogenous ones. In Model 3, the second alternative hypothesis is considered; it tests whether countries under foreign occupation are subject to more terrorist attacks than unoccupied countries. Finally, Model 4 considers all of the explanatory variables together, including the two alternative hypotheses. From N. Saiya. Blasphemy and terrorism in the Muslim world. Terrorism and Political Violence 2017; 29 (6); 1087-1105.
Let Yosi smite Yosi
Let’s end with the words of the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 56a) with which we opened:
בְּכל יוֹם דָּנִין אֶת הָעֵדִים בְּכִינּוּי, ״יַכֶּה יוֹסִי אֶת יוֹסִי״
On every day of a blasphemer’s trial, when the judges judge the witnesses, i.e., interrogate the witnesses, they ask the witnesses to use an appellation for the name of God, so that they do not utter a curse of God’s name. Specifically, the witnesses would say: “Let Yosi smite Yosi”
Rabbi Alexander Kohut (1842-1894), who, among other accolades began to write a German dictionary of Talmudic phrases, (but gave up after the third letter of the alphabet when he found that the work would never be finished) was intrigued by the use of the word יוֹסִי - Yosi. In a brief paper published in 1891in The Jewish Quarterly Review he wrote that he didn’t like the suggestion that Yosi had a double meaning as both a Greek and Hebrew word. “The first Yosi sounds a bit like υἱός, pronounced huiós, meaning a son or child in ancient Greek, while the second Yosi is “יוסף, i.e., Joseph, the father of Jesus, so that " Yosi smote Yosi" imparts the idea: The son smote the father, implying that the son is mightier than the father.” Instead, he thought it all had something to do with Zeus.
In my opinion יוסה is certainly a foreign god, used as a substitute for the Tetragrammaton. The choice is suggestive, as the four letters recall the mystic number, four, of י–ק–ו–ק, three of which being identical, as Rabbi Nathan explains. The choice was furthermore a happy one, as Zeus (יוסה), the chief deity of the Greeks, was well-known all over Asia, and the witnesses, in order not to repeat the blasphemy, could with impunity cast their contempt at him. The verb יכה, conveying the idea of blasphemy, is also appropriate and in accordance with the Biblical expression, "And he smites the earth with the rod of his mouth.''
The meaning of “Yosi smote Yosi”-that is, Zeus smote Zeus -is therefore that he blasphemed the highest deity with the highest deity, whereby the highest Jewish deity being expressed by the highest Greek deity, and י–ק–ו–ק substituted by Jose (Zeus), the blasphemy was made a fitting subject of discussion during the examination of the witnesses. That יוכה is not chosen by a mere chance, but for a substitute of י–ק–ו–ק', is expressly remarked by R. Acha b. Jacob in the Talmud, and that blasphemy was only punishable when י–ק–ו–ק by י–ק–ו–ק was blasphemed, or, speaking our formaula, Zeus with Seuz (Yosi with Yosi) has already been mentioned…
Benjamin Mussafia goes so far as to maintain that the name of the small coin זוז was called thus for bearing the profile of Zeus, and therefore R. Menachem bar Simai never looked at this coin [seee Avodah Zara 50b]" Zeus' name being so widely spread, we can easily understand why it served as a typical substitute in the case we have been considering.
What Rabbi Kohut didn’t mention was the irony of the ineffable Jewish deity being substituted by the Greek one, as the court listened to the blasphemy uttered against the Jewish God. Perhaps the rabbis didn’t really care if, while pursuing a case of blasphemy against the God, they blasphemed Zeus. Which only demonstrates how one religion’s blasphemy is another religion’s praise, and how fortunate we are to live at a time and in a place where blasphemy has been replaced by a better societal norm: the right to free speech.
