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Justinas Bonaventūra Pranaitis was a Lithuanian Catholic priest and writer. His most famous work is one in which he warns about the deeply Christianophobic character of the Talmud.
The son of farmers, Pranaitis studied at the Marijampolė Gymnasium. In 1878 he entered the Sejny Seminary, transferring to the Imperial Academy of Catholic Theology in Saint Petersburg in 1883. In 1886 he was ordained a priest.
Interested in the religious aspects of the Jewish Question - he had learned the Hebrew language thanks to the lessons of Daniel Chwolson - the year after his priestly consecration he obtained his Doctorate in Theology w
Justinas Bonaventūra Pranaitis was a Lithuanian Catholic priest and writer. His most famous work is one in which he warns about the deeply Christianophobic character of the Talmud.
The son of farmers, Pranaitis studied at the Marijampolė Gymnasium. In 1878 he entered the Sejny Seminary, transferring to the Imperial Academy of Catholic Theology in Saint Petersburg in 1883. In 1886 he was ordained a priest.
Interested in the religious aspects of the Jewish Question - he had learned the Hebrew language thanks to the lessons of Daniel Chwolson - the year after his priestly consecration he obtained his Doctorate in Theology with his thesis Christianus in Talmud Iudaeorum: sive, Rabbinicae doctrinae Christiani secreta .
He worked as a teacher at the Imperial Academy of Catholic Theology in Saint Petersburg, where he taught Hebrew, liturgy and ecclesiastical chant. He also founded an orphanage on Vasilyevsky Island.
In 1895 he was banished for a year to Tver because of his links with the Lithuanian nationalists who opposed the Tsar. Once his sentence was completed, he returned to Saint Petersburg where he began giving courses on Judaism to Russian soldiers, which caused Nicholas II of Russia to recognize his services by awarding him the Order of Saint Stanislaus.
Interested in the evangelization of the peoples who inhabited the center of the Russian Empire, in 1902 he left for Tashkent to work as a Catholic missionary. He campaigned to build temples in several cities of Turkestan and visited Siberia several times. He also spent time touring Manchuria, Japan and the Island of Sakhalin.
In 1913, Pranaitis participated in the famous trial in kyiv against Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Jew accused of having committed a ritual murder of a 13-year-old boy. When he gave his expert testimony to prove that the crime analyzed had all the characteristics of being guided by religious motivations, the lawyers set up a strategy to discredit him that consisted of asking him about Talmudic concepts but pronouncing them with a strange Hebrew accent. This confused the priest, who with each clarification that the lawyers made of the words they used received a laugh from the Jewish public attending the trial. In any case, the jury ignored the farce and agreed with Pranaitis by stating that there was plenty of evidence to confirm that it was a ritual murder - despite this, Beilis was acquitted due to lack of evidence confirming that he and no other had actually been the perpetrator of the homicide.
In 1915 he created the Turkestan Catholic Benevolent Society to spread the Social Doctrine of the Church in the region.
He returned to Petrograd at the end of 1916 due to illness. He died at the beginning of 1917. His remains were transferred to one of the chapels he had created in Tashkent.
In 1923 Pranaitis's grave was desecrated by Bolshevik Jews, who stole his corpse to use as part of his rituals.
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