In a letter of protest to Mr. Mangasarian, Rabbi Hirsch, of this city, asks: "Was it right for you to assume that I was correctly reported by the News?" After stating what he had said in his interview with the reporter, the Rabbi continues: "But said I to the reporter all these possible allusions do not prove that Jesus existed….You see in reality I agreed with you. I personally believe Jesus lived. But I have no proof for this beyond my feeling that the movement with which the name is associated could even for Paul not have taken its nomenclature without a personal substratum. But, and this I told the reporter also, this does not prove that the Jesus of the Gospels is historical." Rabbi Hirsch writes in this same letter that he did not say Jesus was mentioned in the Rabbinical Books. The News reports the Rabbi as saying, "But we know through the Rabbinical Books that Jesus lived."

A committee from our Society waited on the editor of the Daily News for an explanation. The editor promised to locate the responsibility for the contradiction.

As the report in the News was allowed to stand for four days without correction, and as Rabbi Hirsch did not even privately, by letter or by phone, disclaim responsibility for the article, to Mr. Mangasarian, the latter claims he was justified in assuming that the published report was reliable. But it is with pleasure that the Independent Religious Society gives Rabbi Hirsch this opportunity to explain his position. We hope he will also let us know whether he said to the reporter: "I do not believe in Mr. Mangasarian's argument that Christianity has inspired massacres, wars and inquisitions. It is a stock argument and not to the point." This is extraordinary; and as the Rabbi does not question the statement, we infer that it is a correct report of what he said. Though we have room for only one quotation from the Jewish-Christian Scriptures, it will be enough to show the relation of religion to persecution:

"And thou shalt consume all the people which the Lord, thy God, shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them."

Why were women put to death as witches? Why were Quakers hanged? For what "economic and political reasons," which the Rabbi thinks are responsible for persecution, was the blind Derby girl who doubted the Real Presence, burned alive at the age of twenty-two?