Birkat haMinim

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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 AD, 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...

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