Birkat haMinim

The Birkat haMinim (Hebrew: ברכת המינים "Blessing on the heretics") is a traditional blessing on Jewish apostates, Christians and Christianity itself. which forms part of the Jewish rabbinical liturgy. It is the twelfth in the series of eighteen benedictions (Shemoneh Esreh) that constitute the core of prayer service in the statutory daily 'standing prayer' of religious Jews. There has been a general consensus that the eighteen benedictions generally go back to some form in the Second Temple period but the origins of this particular prayer and its earliest wording are disputed in modern scholarship, between those who argue for a very early date, either sometime prior to, or roughly contemporary with the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in 70 CE, and those who hold that the formulation crystallized several decades or centuries later. Pinning down its date figures prominently since it is widely taken to indicate the moment when a definitive rupture arose between Judaism and Christianity. In its premodern form in Europe, the curse was applied to the enemies of Jews generally and specifically to those who apostasized to Christianity, to Christians and to the governing authorities of the Christian world. From the 13th century, the terminology used in the prayer and rabbinical explications of their referent, Christians, began to undergo a process of censorship, imposed from outside or regulated internally, once Christian authorities learnt of them through information supplied by Jewish converts and from scholars who began to access the texts in the original language. There is no single, uniform Ashkenazi or Sephardic liturgy, and marked differences may exist between prayer books issued by the rabbinates in, for example, England, Israel, or the United States. In modern times, Jews who regularly attend the synagogue only on the Sabbath rarely hear it, if ever since on the Sabbath and holidays...