“The learned men say, moreover, that in remembrance of those days when hundreds and thousands of Maranos (secret Jews) were dragged out of the cellars and were tortured with all kinds of torment, the Jews in all parts of the world have adopted the Kol Nidre as a token of faithfulness to the faith and as self-sacrifice for the faith.
“These assertions are not correct. The fact is that the formula of Kol Nidre was composed and said on the night of Yom Kippur quite a time earlier than the period of the Spanish Inquisition. We find, for instance, a formula to invalidate vows on Yom Kippur in the prayer book of the Rabbi Amram Goun who lived in the ninth century, about five hundred years before the Spanish Inquisition; although Rabbi Amram’s formula is not ‘Kol Nidre’ but ‘Kol Nidrim’ (‘All vows and oaths which we shall swear from Yom Kippurim to Yom Kippurim will return to us void.’)....”
The form of the prayer in the matter of its age may be in dispute; but back in the ancient and modern Talmud is the authorization of the practice: “He who wishes that his vows and oaths shall have no value, stand up at the beginning of the year and say: ‘All vows which I shall make during the year shall be of no value.’”
That answers our reader’s question. This article does not say that all Jews thus deliberately assassinate their pledged word. It does say that both the Talmud and the prayer book permit them to do so, and tell them how it may be accomplished.
Now, as to the Jewish religious hymn which is being sung “by request” throughout the country: the story of it is soon told.
The name of the hymn is “Eli, Eli”; its base is the first verse of the Twenty-second Psalm, known best in Christian countries as the Cry of Christ on the Cross.
It is being used by Jewish vaudeville managers as their contribution to the pro-Jewish campaign which the Jew-controlled theater is flinging