Men in a male dominated society tend to overlook that which is offensive to women. So you will find men telling sexist jokes with the proviso, “I was only joking” when the realization dawns that hurt may have been caused to the women present (most often there is not even that basic sensitivity). Likewise, in the white dominated South African Apartheid society the many offenses caused by using, for example, diminutive terms like ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ to describe adult Africans in their employ were overlooked or ignored.
Question: Are we sensitive to Jewish living memory?
A Jewish Rabbi, Eliezer Berkovits, said that Jews still mourn the Holocaust tragedy, the anti-Semitism which preceded it, and the centuries of Christian ‘teaching of contempt’ that made it possible. And Jews who want any dialogue with Christians are “Jews without memories.” An obstacle to a credible witness to Jewish people therefore is the long dark history of Christian anti-Semitism, which we rarely acknowledge. (Perhaps it is embedded so deeply in our past that we suffer from a form of oversight typical of dominance dynamics.)
In light of the whole scope of church history, R. de Corneille (1966) writes, “As each succeeding chapter of history was written, Christians added, like bricks, new layers of persecution, false charges and degradations to the wall of separation. The bricks were cemented by the mortar of Jewish suffering. It took Hitler’s atrocities to tear the veil that had sanctified hostility towards Jews and blinded Christian and agnostic historians alike to the reality of Jews; and the great price for that liberation was paid by Jews, not Christians.”
These layers of history form part of the landscape of Jewish living memory. It provides the basis for a strong suspicion of Christian motives and actions. Furthermore our continued negative stereotyping of Judaism as the antithesis of Christianity does us no favors: where we describe “Judaism as a religion of law, Christianity a religion of grace; Judaism teaches a God of wrath, Christianity a God of love; Judaism a religion of slavish obedience, Christianity the conviction of free men; Judaism is particularism, Christianity is universalism; Judaism seeks work-righteousness, Christianity preaches faith-righteousness; The teaching of the old covenant a religion of fear, the gospel of the new covenant a religion of love. The Hebrew Bible is preparation; the gospel fulfillment; In the first is immaturity, in the second perfection; in the one you find narrow tribalism, in the other all-embracing charity.” (Abraham H.J., 1972)
If you, like me, grew up uncritically accepting the Christian stereotype Heschel describes, then we need to become aware of the context of Jewish living memory and the darkside of church history.
But before proceeding further I need to clarify two similar but different terms: anti-Judaism/anti-Jewish and anti-Semitism/anti-Semitic. Being anti-Judaism is a religious viewpoint towards Jews and Judaism. Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, is a term that originated in the later half of the nineteenth century and described anti-Jewish campaigns in Europe. It has negative racial and social connotations. It has come to describe retrospectively the hostility and hatred directed towards Jews since before the Christian era but especially in the history of the church. Anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism are twin phenomena that feed on each other; Christian hostility to Judaism interacts with societal hostility towards Jews.
This anti-Judaism/anti-Semitic interaction throughout the story of Christianity is dynamic. An anti-Judaism polemic was used in the New Testament by Messianic Jews (Jews who believed Jesus was their Messiah and the savior of the world) such as Peter and Paul to win other Jews to the new religious movement. It was impossible for a religious movement coming out of Judaism to expound Christianity without reference to and comparison with Judaism. This required an encounter with Judaism on doctrinal grounds as well as from the standpoint of history and contemporary relations. However when the anti-Judaism polemic moved into the hands of a dominant Gentile church it became increasingly anti-Semitic, which became the negation of all things Jewish and a condemnation of all Jews.
Early Church
The relatively early division between Christianity and Judaism and a split between Jewish and Gentile Christianity brought with it the depreciation and eventual extinction of Jewish Christianity. Judaism and Jewish Christianity were consigned to the scrapheap of church history, behind Christianity’s advancement. The abrogation of the Jewish faith became conviction within the first few hundred years of the birth of the Christian Gentile church and would result in later centuries in tragic consequences.
A central strand to the early church’s anti-Jewish theology the “argument from history”, which was its trump card. Judaism and Jews served several important functions for the Church Fathers as they re-interpreted history with respect to the existence of the church. The failures of Judaism were utilized to supply Christianity with an unimpeachable history and with a prestige the new church otherwise would not have possessed. Some writers employed the words of the Christian scriptures against the Jews announcing that the Jews are, have always been, and will always be evil. It also provided a way for the church to explain away the contrary negative evidence in the emerging history of the church by making the Jews a scapegoat for the continued evil at work.
Examples of the anti-Judaism sentiment of the Church Fathers are present in the writings or sermons of Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea, Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Hilary of Poitiers, Pseudo-Cyprian, Tertullian, Eusebius of Alexandria, Jerome and John Chrysostom, to name some of the more well known early Christian figures. The anti-Jewish sentiment was not limited to written works alone, where the intellect of the Fathers and their influence may have been limited to other Christian intellectuals. It was preached from the pulpit to ordinary people. The anti-Jewish triumphalism developed further still, so much so that it went beyond the bounds of religion to influence legislation. The anti-Jewish trend of the Byzantine legislation was an echo of the anti-Jewish teaching of the church.
John Chrysostom is a notable example. He delivered eight homilies between the autumn of CE 386 and 387 entitled Eight Orations against the Jews, addressed at Christians who were participating in Jewish ceremonies. His sermons did not have the desired effect, but instead had the reverse effect by sparking interest in the practices of the Jews. He was, however, responsible for a change in the political attitude of the emperor at the time, who had conferred certain privileges to the Jews in CE 396 and 397 but with the arrival of Chrysostom began issuing anti-Jewish edicts. At the close of the third century, the Jew was no more than a special type of unbeliever; by the end of the fourth, the Jew was a semi-satanic figure, cursed by God, marked off by the State (Chesler, P., 2003). The Jews increasingly became paragons of evil and satanic adversaries.
From then on, throughout the ebb and flow of history (but especially in the Medieval period), and in the name of Christ, synagogues, Torah scrolls, and Jews were burned. Great centres of Jewish learning were destroyed. Jews were falsely accused of crimes such as murdering Christian children to incorporate their blood into unleavened bread for Passover. Jews were even blamed for causing the Black Plague that swept Europe. The stereotype of Jews as Christ-killers and as a despised, subservient, sub-human people beyond hope of atonement took root in ordinary people in no large measure aided and abetted by the teaching of the church. Jews throughout Western Europe and the Middle East had close encounters with the Christian crusading armies off to fight a Holy War to free Jerusalem.
Reformation
It would be convenient for Protestant theology (and later Evangelicalism) if anti-Semitic attitudes could only be linked to the teaching and doctrine of the Papacy and Church of Rome. However, the great Reformation that showed a renewed interest in the text of Scripture (sola Scriptura), including the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), did little to improve the situation of anti-Jewish polemic and anti-Semitic attitudes in society.
The diatribes of Martin Luther are notorious. When news came to Luther from Moravia that Christians were being induced to Judaize, he came out with a vulgar polemic against the Jews. His position was not motivated by racial hatred as much as his theological belief that the persistent rejection of God’s revelation of Himself in Christ was the supreme sin and consequently, the centuries of Jewish suffering were a mark of divine displeasure (Bainton, R, 1978). Luther viewed it a pastor’s duty to warn his flock against the Jews and to urge the secular rulers to burn synagogues to the ground and if anything survived that it was to buried so that no trace remained; that the houses of Jews be destroyed, because of the significance of the home in their religion; that Jewish prayer books and Talmud be confiscated; that Jews be denied the right to travel on the highways of the Empire; and finally, that all able-bodied Jews be required to undertake hard manual labour (Cohn-Sherbok, D., 1992).
Luther was not alone in his Reformation thinking towards the Jews. He had a notable parallel in the slightly more moderate Martin Bucer. John Calvin was by comparison far more sympathetic towards the Jews, although it did not translate into political change. Calvin insisted that when Scripture talked of the Jews and their sins, it mirrored the sins of all humankind. Reformed teachers therefore insisted on the total depravity of humankind and that all humans, both Jews and Gentiles stood guilty before God and without excuse (Keith, G., 1997).
Luther and Calvin were both products of their time as much as they were the great Reformers of their age. The Reformation fell in a period of intense anti-Semitic activity; from the latter part of the fifteenth century a series of expulsions had been enacted against the Jews in Western Europe. Although some anti-Semitic measures did result from Luther’s activity, it was not on the scale that his polemic called for. That would have to wait until the Nazis rose to power in the twentieth century, whereupon the Nazis promoted a particular image of Luther to rationalize a stance they had taken up on other grounds (Keith, G., 1997). Nevertheless the ground was prepared for complicity and passivity during the Holocaust.
Holocaust
Sadly, Christian devotion to Jesus Christ as the one who taught about loving thy Neighbor failed to prevent Christians from becoming planners, implementers, or passive bystanders to the “Final Solution” of the Jewish question. Very few viewed themselves as their brother’s keeper. There are notable examples of some individuals and the Confessional churches taking a stand. But for the most part the judgment of history is of complicity or general passivity (and silence).
Rev Franklin H. Littell, father of Holocaust Studies, who passed away in 2009, asserted that, more than anything else that had happened since the fourth century, the Holocaust called into question the integrity of Christian people. Littell spent a life-time trying to sensitize Christians to the problem of anti-Semitism. A Jewish academic, Abraham J. Peck, said of Littell, “I have often wondered what if one, a hundred or a thousand Franklin Littells could have stood on the pulpits of churches in Europe and America in the 19th and 20 centuries. Would we have then had an end to the teaching of contempt? Would Jewish identity and memory not have to be predicated to such a degree on the politics of victimization? Would my fourteen murdered uncles and aunts, and their spouses and children, who died in the Holocaust, been a part of something only others know as an extended family? But I quickly interrupt my daydream to bring myself back to reality. You are the only Franklin Littell and if I have to dream it is that your ministry will help to secure the future of my Jewish children and grandchildren.”
So it is that we need to be sensitive to Jewish living memory and the long shadow of anti-Semitism.
Anglicanism
It is easy to make Nazi Germany and the Holocaust the example for the failures of Christianity. However, my own denomination is not excluded from this charge of being anti-Jewish, even anti-Semitic, at some key junctures in history. Jews first settled in England in the eleventh century at the time of the Norman Conquest, but were always considered as foreigners and were eventually expelled by King Edward 1 in the thirteenth century (1290). It was not until the mid-seventeenth century (1656) that Oliver Cromwell was able to reopen England to them (V. d’Uzer, 1992). Yet even then, Jews were not viewed as equal citizens. A Naturalization Bill was submitted to parliament in 1753 to enable Jews to acquire land. It was initially adopted in both the House of Lords and the Commons but six months later was repealed. Jews were prevented from being admitted to the English Parliament until the mid-nineteenth century. Between 1830 and 1858 fourteen separate attempts were made to remove this legal disability against Jewish people (Knight, F., 1992). The House of Lords dismissed twelve of the proposed Jewish relief bills, the most important influence on the voting being Episcopal opposition and the debate being dominated by speeches from bishops and archbishops (Cohn-Sherbok, D., 1992).
William Howley, Archbishop of Canterbury, opposed the bill because his thinking was shaped by the doctrine of the indissolubility of the relationship between Church and State (Knight, F, 1992). Howley’s successor, J.B. Sumner opposed the bill on the basis that England was a particular beneficiary of divine blessing and that admitting Jews to parliament would incur the wrath of God because the Jews were under God’s judgment. Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, and son of William Wilberforce (who championed the emancipation of slaves), asserted that it was only because the law of England was based on the law of God as revealed in Jesus Christ that Parliament was commissioned to make the laws that governed half the globe. Samuel Wilberforce believed that the Jews were devoid of genuine religious feeling and were solely motivated by the making of money, “a race immersed in the pursuit of gain.”.
At the beginning of the twentieth century British hostility was again aggravated, this time by an influx of Jews from Eastern Europe into London. The Bishop of Stepney in 1902 compared them to a conquering army that would eat the Christians out of house and home (Cohn-Sherbok, D., 1992). More could be said. Anti-Semitic sentiments have not been limited to the Anglican church nor to England (but for the sake of brevity, enough is enough).
Conclusion
Anti-Jewish stereotyping is still alive and well within many of our churches. It is further complicated by strong feelings for and against the state of Israel and whether one can be anti-Zionist (and criticize injustices perpetuated by Israel) without being anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic?
We can glimpse the problematic attitude towards people of the Jewish faith throughout the history of the church from the Early Church, through the rise of Christendom, the Medieval age and the Reformation, to the Holocaust in the twentieth century. There is a darkside to the story of Christianity, which lives on in Jewish memory.
The image of the institutional church as oppressor is a formidable one in Jewish history books but is somewhat balanced by a conscientious effort to acknowledge a few righteous Christians, both clergy and lay persons, who defended and protected Jews (Banki, J.H. 1987). Conversely, recognition of the church’s dark legacy to Jews is almost non-existent in traditional treatments of church history. At most, the parting of ways in the early church and, as an aside, the killing of Jews in the crusades is mentioned. Combined with a general ignorance of most Christians about how we came to be what we are today (that’s a topic for another conversation), Jewish living memory and the darkside to church history remains an obstacle to Christian-Jewish interactions.
We demonstrate our lack of sensitivity to this dark dynamic when we use the term Crusade to describe evangelistic outreaches, when we use symbols in churches reminiscent of crusader eras, when we use visual images in our sermon presentations and in our Sunday Schools that promote the stereotype of Jesus being Anglo-Saxon (and Judas being the hook-nosed, money-grabbing Jew) or even when we use anti-Jewish language, without clarification, at times like Easter.
The relationship between these two world faiths has become more not less pressing because of the issues raised by the religiously pluralistic society of the twenty-first century. Michael Ramsden in Bearing Witness to the Love of Christ with People of Other Faiths (2010) writes “we must also give much thought to our credibility as witnesses. Someone may be an excellent eye-witness to an event, but if they are a known drunk their witness to any event will be questioned.” And so it is with our credibility as a Christian witness to our Jewish Neighbour. Let us make it known that we are in rehab.
(Note: Full references available upon request)