1. For example, “be it remembered,” 13; “forsakes and eschews,” 65.

2. Compare repetitions on pages 2 and 85 as well as 72 and 116.

3. “The great issue described by Nephi is not translation, but transmission” (6). Do we know that the written testimony was by John the Baptist (7)? Did “the Jews of Jesus’ day” all know “that all true servants of the Lord come baptizing” (12)? Is it true that “as with the individual, so also with persons and nations” (15)? The authors even dubiously put words into the Lord’s mouth (26).

4. For example, “one mighty and strong” (136). The authors also make frequent use of passages from the Joseph Smith Translation without explaining their context or significance.

5. These ad metum arguments are instances of “fallacies of substantive distraction,” whose purpose is to shift “attention from a reasoned argument to other things which are irrelevant” to the case at hand. David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 282–306.

6. For example, what does the word organized mean when Abraham saw “the intelligences that were organized before the world was” (Abr. 3:22) or when Father in Heaven “organized” the human family? It may or may not mean the kind of stratification that Millet and McConkie mention (16). Also in this connection, they speak absolutely of everyone’s “foreordination to lineage and family” (17), but President Harold B. Lee was more tentative: “These rewards were seemingly promised” (18, italics added).

7. “Hyksos,” in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, 4 vols. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1962), 2:667.

8. “Asenath,” Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible 1:247–48. See also “Asenath,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 1:476. The alien status of Asenath is underlined in a text from around the time of Christ that depicts Joseph as saying, “It is not meet that a God-fearing man . . . should kiss a woman of a strange people, who blesses dead and unprofitable idols, and eats the putrid bread of idolatry, which chokes the soul of man, who drinks the libations of deceit, and anoints herself with the oil of destruction.” Quoted in Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1910), 2:172.

9. See James D. G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance for the Character of Christianity (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991); John Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); David P. Efroymson, “The Patristic Connection,” in Antisemitism and the Foundations of Christianity, ed. Alan Davies (New York: Paulist, 1979), 98–117; Paul M. van Buren, “A Christian Theology of the People Israel,” pt. 2 of A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality (New York: Seabury, 1983), 1–42; Charlotte Klein, Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology, trans. Edward Quinn (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978); James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Antisemitism (New York: Atheneum, 1979); and Gavin I. Langmuir, History, Religion and Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

10. James Parkes, Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue; Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); Heiko A. Oberman, The Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Age of the Renaissance and the Reformation, trans. James I. Porter (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984); Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Schocken, 1974); Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews, 1933–1945 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1975); and Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1961; New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985). For two works that demonstrate that Christians did not have to acquiesce to or participate in political, economic, or theological discrimination against Jewish people, see Philip Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers (New York: Holocaust Library, 1978); and Philip P. Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).

11. Lloyd Gaston, “Paul and the Torah,” in Antisemitism and the Foundations of Christianity, 48–71; van Buren, “Christian Theology of the People Israel,” 277–83. The supersessionist theology of Millet and McConkie leads them into tendentious readings of many scriptures; for example, Acts 17:24–26; Romans 9:6–7; 3 Nephi 21:14–22.

12. Steven Epperson, Mormons and Jews: Early Mormon Theologies of Israel (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992), 139–72.

13. Deseret News, September 10, 1879, 502.

14. Robert M. Seltzer, Jewish People, Jewish Thought: The Jewish Experience in History (New York: Macmillan, 1980), dispels the severely limited and inaccurate picture of the Jewish people and Judaism offered in Our Destiny.

15. Times and Seasons 3 (June 1, 1842): 810.

16. Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (Liverpool: F. D. Richards, 1855–86), 16:103–7, 220–21; hereafter cited as JD.

17. JD 11:275; 2:316–17; see also 12:274.

18. While Brigham Young based this view on John 14:2, “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” allowing in that house “different classes of mankind . . . requiring a classification and an arrangement into societies and communities” (JD 11:275), he did not explain the differences that may exist amidst that variety of people in God’s mansions. He did, however, insist upon their difference, distinction, and duration “to all eternity.”

19. Raphael Patai and Jennifer Patai, The Myth of the Jewish Race, rev. ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 16.

20. Guy Murchie, quoted in Alex Shoumatoff, “The Mountain of Names,” New Yorker, May 13, 1985, 60.

21. Shoumatoff, “The Mountain of Names,” 60.

22. Ernest Volkman, A Legacy of Hate: Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Franklin Watts, 1982), 33.

23. Harold E. Quinley and Charles Y. Glock, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Free Press, 1979), 168.

24. Albert Lee, Henry Ford and the Jews (New York: Stein and Day, 1980), 19.

25. Edwin Black, “The Anti-Ford Boycott,” Midstream: A Monthly Jewish Review 32 (January 1986): 39–41. Robert Wistrich noted that The International Jew was “highly praised by Adolf Hitler and widely distributed in German translation by the Nazi Party.” Ford’s paper (written and edited by Cameron) had depicted the Jews as “a universally corrupting influence . . . from liberalism, unionism, and Bolshevism to Negro jazz music. One can see why Hitler once told an American reporter: ‘I regard Heinrich [sic] Ford as my inspiration.’” Standing behind and supplying Ford with his public anti-Semitic discourse was William Cameron. Robert S. Wistrich, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (New York: Pantheon, 1991), 118–19.

26. Lee, Henry Ford and the Jews, 88; see also James H. Anderson, God’s Covenant Race: From Patriarchal Times to the Present (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1944), 288, 304, 307.

27. For more information on the racial fallacy and the historic relationship of racism and anti-Semitism in America, see Robert Singerman, “The Jew as Racial Alien: The Genetic Component of American Anti-Semitism,” in Anti-Semitism in American History, ed. David A. Gerber (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 103–28.

28. For a bracing antidote for religious chauvinism, see Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, ed. Eliezer Goldman, trans. Eliezer Goldman and others (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 106–22, 209–13.

Steven Epperson

BYU Studies Publications