A Muslim friend recently told me that “middah k’neged middah,” which means measure for measure, was proof that Judaism is evil. He had translated it as “an eye for an eye” and presented it as the ethical core of Jewish law. He was confident. He was wrong on every level. “Middah k’neged middah” is not “ayin tachat ayin.” They are different phrases doing different work. The first is a rabbinic principle of divine proportionate justice. The Mishnah teaches that “in the measure a person measures, they are measured” (Sotah 1:7). It runs through the stories of Samson, Miriam, and Absalom. It is a theology of consequence, not a code of revenge. “Ayin tachat ayin,” the eye-for-an-eye verse, does appear in the Torah, but the Talmud (Bava Kamma 83b–84a) explicitly rules out literal retaliation and reads it as monetary compensation. Jewish law has not endorsed taking out anyone’s eye in two thousand years. The friend who declared Jews evil on the basis of this argument was citing two phrases he didn’t understand, in a language he couldn’t read, on the basis of an interpretation his own tradition had handed him. This is not a one-off encounter. It is structural. And the structure is worth understanding, because it explains a great deal about how Judaism gets talked about by people who have never opened a page of it.

Judaism does not proselytize. It does not produce missionary literature. It does not stand on street corners or knock on doors. It does not run satellite networks aimed at conversion. Its educational structures are interior: yeshivas, day schools, family transmission, study within the community. There is no Jewish equivalent to evangelical Protestantism’s outreach apparatus or to the global infrastructure of Islamic dawah. This produces an information asymmetry with predictable consequences. The loudest public interpreters of Jewish texts in Christian and Muslim societies have been, for two thousand years, Christians and Muslims. Their interpretations were not produced by access to Jewish learning. They were produced by religions that needed to replace or correct Judaism in order to justify their own existence. Christianity required the claim that the Jews were chosen and then forfeited that status through corruption or the rejection of Jesus. Islam required the claim that the Jews and Christians had distorted the original revelation, which the Quran restored. Both of those narratives have a structural interest in misreading Judaism, and both of them have nearly two thousand years of momentum behind that misreading. What fills the vacuum is confident projection. Millions of Christians and Muslims grow up believing they understand Judaism, not as a foreign tradition that has to be approached carefully, but as a known quantity that their own religion has already explained to them. They do not know what they do not know.

The Language They Cannot Read

Hebrew is not a language Christians and Muslims usually learn. The Torah is a layered text. The rabbinic framework called PaRDeS identifies four........

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