[week 71]

I've heard their are about 14 million Jews in the world, and about 1% are Christian; making that around about 144,000. 10,000 from each tribe. Just kidding :-) Interesting read.

[crystalk]

e. In his fifth paragraph, he says there are some 5000 Christians in Israel who are converts from Judaism. Surely that is vastly understated: maybe that is the membership of the Action Committee he mentions. My information is that there are about 40,000 Messianic Jews in Israel, not all openly engaging in public worship as such, and another 20,000 ethnic Jews who are (often discreetly) members of existing and established denominations as Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, etc. and even a few in Catholic and Orthodox churches there...

f. While he says these people, whatever their number, "worship THEIR god," he fails to say that is YHWH, Ha-Shem, the same god as Israel has. As to whether they proselytize, I am sure some do quite actively, but most don't, and that is their own individual activity. Nobody out here somewhere is paying them to do it!

[crystalk]

I believe there are some 16 million Jews halakhically, in the world...some 5.5 million each in USA and Israel, with another 2 million each in eastern and western Europe incl FSU...and a million elsewhere, especially Australia, Latin America, until recently South Africa, etc...

[crystalk]

Actually, to be 144,000 there would have to be 12,000, not ten thousand, from each tribe...if there were 12 tribes...

Halakha is a body of Jewish law, and it is usually referred to in connection with the rules as to who is a Jew, or as to how a non-Jew may lawfully and thus acceptedly, ever convert into that faith.

If a person is a Jew halakhically, he/she either was born to a Jewish mother, or underwent a full conversion process at the hands of an Orthodox rabbi qualified to perform such conversions, and this involves circumcision for a male, and immersion in a mikvah bath (origin of Christian custom of baptizing converts)...for either sex, as I understand it. Besides studying the mitzvahs and promising to try to keep them, although I think about 30 of the 613 are observed even by the so-called modern orthodox. So it looks to me...

Besides that, circumcizing young adult males is so onerous, I think that they just draw a tiny droplet of blood from the penis instead, the tiniest amount that can be seen on a white Kleenex...of course come to think of it, most Christians in the USA were already circumcized anyway, so go figure.