“Part of the Jewish people recognized Jesus as the Messiah, others, especially the proud Pharisees, would not recognize Him, they persecuted His followers and began to enact many laws that required Jews to persecute Christians.
These laws, as well as some stories from earlier rabbis, were collected in the year AD80 by Rabbi Johanan ben Sakai and were finally completed around the year 200 by Rabbi Jehuda Hannasi, and thus was born the ‘Mishnah’. The rabbis later added many other things to ‘Mishnah’, so around 500AD Rabbi Huna ben Achai could now collect these appendages to form a separate volume, called ‘Gemara’. The ‘Mishnah’ and ‘Gemara’ together constitute the ‘Talmud’.
In the ‘Talmud’, these rabbis call Christians idolaters, murderers, whoremongers, feces, animals in human form, less than animals, sons of the devil, etc. Priests are called ‘kamarim’, ie diviners, and ‘galachim’, bald-headed, and in particular they do not like the souls consecrated to God in the religious life. Instead of ‘bejs tefillah’, house of prayer, they call the church ‘bejs tifla’, house of idiocy. They call images, medals, rosaries, etc., ‘elylym’, that is to say idols. In the ‘Talmud’, Sundays and holidays are called ‘jom ejd’, or days of perdition. They teach, furthermore, that a Jew is permitted to deceive, to steal from a Christian, since ‘all property of the disbelievers’, i.e. Christians, ‘is like the desert: the first to take it becomes its owner.’
This book, consisting of twelve volumes that inspire hatred against Christ and against Christians, is learnt by heart by the rabbis and is used as the basis for teaching the people, who are instructed that this is a sacred book, more important than Scripture, so much so that even God consults the expertise of the rabbis contained in the Talmud. It is not therefore surprising that neither the ordinary Jew nor Rabbi have any understanding of the religion of Christ, nourished as they are only by hatred towards their Redeemer, buried in the affairs of the temporal order, greedy for gold and power, they can not even imagine what peace and happiness on this earth, is offered by the faithful, ardent and generous love of Him Crucified! How it exceeds all the ‘joys’ of sense or intelligence offered by this miserable world!”
(The Writings of Fr. Kolbe – Ed. Citta di vita, 1978, vol. 3 p.253)