#11/12 Roo, you have it wrong, the rabbis have nothing to do with it. Judaism from the start had a lot of rules and restrictions. When 10% of the Roman Empire was Jewish, Judaism and the concept of one deity became very popular, but many potential converts were put off by all the rules (i.e. kashrut, many holidays, etc.). Christianity became an offshoot loosely based on Judaic values, but modified to make it more palatable to the masses. So I don`t think anything the rabbis could do would`ve change this. Islam is likely a similar offshoot, but probably more of a cultural modification, since it obviously has a lot of rules and restrictions too, perhaps in some ways more so than Judaism.
Another complication not brought up here is would something like the Holocaust have happened anyway, just in a later decade? Remember, that Hitler was ELECTED to his role initially and there was a lot of latent anti-Semitism seething in that part of the world. |
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