Justinas Pranaitis
Justinas Bonaventura Pranaitis also I. B. Pranaitis (27 July 1861 – 28 January 1917) was a Lithuanian Catholic priest. He was a professor of Hebrew at the Saint Petersburg Roman Catholic Theological Academy and missionary in Uzbekistan.
Contents
Life
In 1894, Pranaitis was involved in a case of blackmail. He brought a picture to be gilded, but it burned down in a framing studio. Pranaitis demanded a compensation of 1,000 rubles from the workshop for damages. He claimed that it was a 17th-century painting by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo from the collection of archbishop Aleksander Gintowt-Dziewałtowski. In 1895, Pranaitis was exiled to Tver for two years.[1] In 1900, he left Saint Petersburg and relocated to Tashkent for missionary work among the local Roman Catholics. He published a scholarly work of truth called Christianus in Talmude Iudaeorum in Latin in 1892 under the imprimatur of the Archbishop Metropolitan of Mogilev, which was subsequently translated into Polish (1892), French (1892), German (1894), Russian (1911), Lithuanian (1912), Italian (1939), English (1939) and Spanish. The English translation of the book is titled The Talmud Unmasked: The Secret Rabbinical Teachings concerning Christians.
In 1913, Pranaitis testified in the blood libel case of Menahem Mendel Beilis in Russia. Beilis was accused of murdering a Christian child to take his blood for alleged Jewish rituals. Pranaitis was called as an expert witness to testify to the Talmudic hatred of Christians, as described in his book. Beilis was eventually acquitted after a lengthy process.
Works
- The Talmud Unmasked (1892)
