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chemical family were synthesized by the great organic chemists of the German pharmaceutical industry in the early 1930’s.

The sequence of parallel streets in the neighborhood of my home and first grammar school in Kansas City, Missouri were my street, Virginia, then Tracy, Forrest and Troost. My school, Bancroft Elementary, was on Tracy and one block down that street was the Lutheran Day School established by German immigrants under the aegis of the Missouri Synod. Starting in the third grade in 1943, I was intermittently and unpredictably chased by rock throwing, “damn Jew” and “Christ killer” shouting boys from the Lutheran Day School. I had my choice of running for safety directly from Tracy to my family’s half duplex at 4232 Virginia Street, or moving away from school via Troost and then down several blocks and around to sneak back to my home on Virginia without being spotted. One run-for-it afternoon, my parents took me to the emergency room of the Menorah Hospital to have my scalp sewed up where a sharp rock had landed.

When I asked my synagogue’s young people’s spiritual counselor, Rabbi Kleigfeld, to explain the feelings and actions of these children of Martin Luther’s Post-Reformation Christian Church, he answered that I already knew about similarly difficult places and times of our Twelve Tribes’ like Rome, Medieval Europe, the Spanish Inquisition, Persia (Iran) and, it was rumored, in Germany as we spoke. “Conversion or death” was its most benign form, in places like Spain and Iran, many Jews faked it, staying alive and practicing Judaism secretly. Kleigfeld told me that the causes of this historical theme of persecution of Jews were complex.

Among the frequently unmentioned events recorded in the later part of the worldly life of Mohammed, who lived from 570 to 632 AD was, ”…in the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful…” his participation in the crushing of the Jewish tribe of al-Nadhir in 626 A.D., the beheading of 800 Jewish men of the tribe of Qurayza who refused to accept Allah as their God in 627 A.D. and putting to the sword the Jews of Khaybar in 629 A.D. As in the section of the Koran called The Cow, Mohammed proposed to “…fight against them (the infidels) until idolatry is no more and Allah’s religions reigns supreme…” In contrast, the more entheogenic spiritual orientation of the ecstatic followers of Mohammed in his earlier years

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