Jewish heretics (eg atheists, Reform Jews,
apostates) are despised by religious Jews
They celebrated their deaths, even of
their own family members. As late as the
19th century they treated the corpses to
severe beatings & bizarre rituals:
Jewish professor Israel Shahak writes about
"Ass Burials":
"In the small towns of eastern Europe in the nineteenth
century, Jews devised another custom of humiliating
burial of heretics and other Jewish sinners. This
custom, often mentioned in the contemporary Hebrew and
Yiddish literature, was called "ass burial." It was
derived from the biblical verse, Jeremiah 22: 19, where
the prophet predicts that King Yohoiakim of Judah "will
be buried as an ass."
This custom had three general components. First, members
of the Jewish burial society, called the Holy Society
and consisting of the fiercest zealots of the town,
would first beat the heretic's corpse. Then the corpse
would thereafter be put on a cart filled with dung and
was in that condition paraded through the town. Finally,
the corpse would be buried beyond the fence of the
graveyard without religious rites. The two
expressions, "ass burial" and "beyond the fence" became
proverbial terms in Hebrew and Yiddish and are still
used to denote social ostracism.
The famous Jewish writer, Peretz Smolenskin (1840-85),
wrote a Hebrew novel, titled Ass Burial, which is still
read. In his novel Smolenskin told the story of a young
Jew in a Russian small town who, because of a petty
quarrel with the chief of the Jewish burial society, was
declared a heretic. The Jewish congregation hired an
assassin who murdered the heretic. The heretic was
buried in an ass burial. Smolenskin was the father of
the naturalistic style in Hebrew literature. His novels
were based upon a close observation of Jewish life as it
was in his time."
