Thanks to Kanye West (aka Ye), Nick Fuentes, and Donald Trump, antisemitism is prominently featured in national media reports and editorials. This coverage reminds those who get out-of-town news about the attacks on Jewish synagogues east and west: The Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA, in October 2018, and Congregation Chabad in Poway, CA, in April 2019. One writer calls the outbreak of antisemitic disparagement and disrespect as well as antisemitic violence a crisis for America as well as Jews.
The response by Very Important People in Washington is predictable. Some respond immediately; others wait, with fingers in the wind to tell which way the wind is blowing. All know that antisemitism must be publicly renounced, not countenanced. All declare that “antisemitism has no place in America.” The declaration is absurd. Antisemitism has a place in America, in fact, in many places in America—everywhere, anywhere, even here—because most Americans are Christians and most Christians are antisemitic. They are antisemitic because they have been raised in a faith rooted in anti-Judaism.
Update: Today’s White House roundtable discussion to be led by Doug Emhoff, Jewish husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, will be a bust because it will not address anti-Judaism, the precondition and precursor of Christian antisemitism.
The distinction between anti-Judaism and antisemitism is that between disagreement with and opposition to Judaic beliefs, principles, and values; and hatred of or action against Jews, who accept Judaism as their religious culture—respectively. (The same distinction exists in today’s politics, in which differences of policies between Democrats and Republicans have morphed into personalities, with insults and hostilities.)
Anti-Judaism originates in Christian doctrines. The radical difference between Christians and Jews are their beliefs about Jesus as the Messiah. His Jewish Apostles at the time and Christians ever since have preached that Jesus fulfills the messianic expectations of the Prophets and fully realizes Judaism. Christians preach that Judaism without Jesus is incomplete or imperfect. They preach that Christianity has superseded Judaism and is superior to it. They have failed to persuade most Jews, but they have not ceased to seek Jewish converts by force of arms if not by force of arguments. Ascribing their failure to the nature of Jews as a proud and stiff-necked, also an ignorant and evil, people—evil specified by imputed flaws of character (e.g., greed) or conduct (e.g., loud, pushy)—, they initiate antisemitism. They regard or resent the survival of Judaism (15 million Jews) as a reproach to the success of Christianity (2.2 billion Christians). Anti-Judaic doctrines arising then and reinforced since enable Christian antisemitism.
Anti-Judaism is acquired by Christian education and reinforced by religious observance. At home, Christians learn about Jesus’ miraculous birth at Christmas, and his miserable death at Easter—both the sum and substance of the Nicene and Apostles creeds. In Sunday school, they learn the more detailed story of Passion Week, during which Jews allegedly instigated the crucifixion. In church, they learn about the Day of Judgment, when Jews either accept Jesus as Christ or are damned forever. If they read the New Testament or listen to sermons, they know the antisemitism built into the holiest books of the faith—sharply in the Gospel of Matthew; virulently in the Gospel of John. These stories and services, acquired in childhood, reinforced thereafter, linger in memory and cannot easily or entirely be erased. Anti-Judaism bides its time.
Whether from respect for religious freedom or regard for social respectability, the antisemitism of most Christian Americans is quiescent most of the time. But quiescence does not imply non-existence or a latency from which antisemitism cannot be aroused. For, in some Christian venues, antisemitism continues in sermons and in proselytizing. Proselytizing efforts—Jews for Jesus is a notably offensive effort—reflect the Christian view of a competitive relationship between Christianity and Judaism. Christians compete alone; Jews neither proselytize nor encourage converts. In this context, pro-ecumenical talk, and talk about a Judeo-Christian tradition, are falsified by persistent anti-Judaic positions and antisemitic proselytizing efforts.
Ecumenical pretense is strongest in the Catholic Church, the tormentor of Jews for nearly two millennia. Catholics cite the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra aetate (1965) as if it acknowledged Judaism as a legitimate faith. But it does not respect Judaism or esteem Jews. It merely commends them for their contributions to Christianity and, in doing so, demotes them to the status of useful subordinates.
One passage perpetuates anti-Judaic messages in its niggardly proscriptions.
Although the Church is the new People of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the Word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.
There is nothing positive in this statement. “The new People of God” demotes Jews and nudges them aside as the old people of God; proscribing their presentation as “rejected or accursed” in the “Holy Scriptures”—tacitly admitting prevailing abuses in the clergy—does not proscribe their presentation as such by other means; and the condemnations of Matthew and John are the “truth of the Gospel.”
Another passage points to omissions with antisemitic implications.
Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.
Omitted is a similar statement about Christians and Jews. Not one word acknowledges, much less apologizes for, centuries of Christian abuse of Jews. The omission is especially notable only two decades after the Holocaust, in which the Catholic Church played no saving and possibly an assisting role. Also omitted is one word urging Christians and Jews to work for “mutual understanding” or “social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.” Implied by these omissions: complacency about the horrific results of recent history and reluctance to associate with Jews in joint efforts to worthy ends.
Nostra aetate attempts to foist off on the world a pretense of reconciliation with Jews. Some Jews have accepted this albeit dishonest attempt in the hope of better to follow. But it cannot reconcile Christians and Jews. Even so, some Catholics have believed that no such statement even pretending to reconciliation is desirable. That was then.
This is now. In a Vatican Radio broadcast at Santa Marta 50 years later (10/13/14), when one Catholic spoke only to other Catholics, Pope Francis remarked, as reported:
“Why were these Doctors of the Law unable to understand the signs of the times?…First of all, because they…had perfectly systemized the law…”.
“They failed to understand that the law they guarded and loved” was a pedagogy towards Jesus Christ. “If the law does not lead to Jesus Christ,…if it does not bring us closer to Jesus Christ, it is dead…”.
There is no respect in the Pope’s snide phrase “Doctors of the Law,” as if Jewish religious leaders—at the time, Sadducees and Pharisees; today, rabbis—are lawyers. His second paragraph perpetuates the Christian doctrine of supersessionism, derogates Jewish law, and thus disparages the integrity of Judaism. A shorter, clearer rejection of an essential feature of Judaism there probably is not. A counter-parallel would be a rabbi declaring the Trinity hocus-pocus designed as a come-on to pagans, whose pantheon consisted of many gods. And a clearer example of Christian competitiveness or defensiveness would be hard to find. Otherwise, the Pope, leader of over 1.3 billion Catholics, would not find it necessary to inveigh against the faith of 15 million Jews and use insulting language to provide some measure of relief from continuing theological insecurity.
The New Testament is the basis for the anti-Judaism and antisemitism of the diverse array of Christians and the range of churches of a fissiparous Christianity. Little help against anti-Judaism or antisemitism can come from either Christians or their churches until they ignore motes in others’ eyes and attend to the logs in theirs.
I toss out this tentative idea for addressing antisemitism by addressing anti-Judaism: If Christians believe that Jesus is the Messiah, I suggest that they believe in him as the Messiah who redeems the world and saves those who believe in him, and abandon the polemical enterprise of trying to prove by doctrine-driven interpretations of Jewish Holy Scriptures and stories of his life that he is the Messiah mistreated by his fellow Jews.
I render a harsh judgment on antisemitism in Christianity and Christians. I respect both up to, but not beyond, the point at which they articulate antisemitism and act in ways which derogate, disrespect, and abuse Jews. I publish this harsh judgment because I want Christians to avoid behaving as many did in Nazi Germany. From the earliest years of its regime, many Christians, latently antisemitic, ignored the little antisemitic events which, in aggregate, incrementally led to the acceptance of and prepared for the Final Solution. I want them not to demean themselves afterwards as many Germans did with shabby excuses for tolerating or supporting the Holocaust. Later, shocked and guilt-ridden by horrendous consequences of their antisemitism, many Germans, trying to exonerate themselves by pretending to innocence, claimed that they knew nothing. I have heard this dishonest, cowardly defense of family relatives. Its tacit claim is that ignorance denied them the opportunity which they would otherwise have courageously taken to resist. There is no absolution for this lie.
In Las Cruces, senior officials in government—council, administration, law office, police department—were complicit in or tolerant of antisemitism in my minor case, with the tacit approval of informed Christian citizens. I remind the latter of Dr. Martin Luther King’s words in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” I doubt that such silent people are good people.
My concerns: indifference or inaction before a major episode of antisemitism here and the sequel of conventional, hypocritical official pronouncements expressing shock and dismay when evasion or cover-up cannot serve, and of conventional, hypocritical personal statements of pious regrets by Protestants and Catholics alike.
For more of my blogs mainly on economics, education, politics, and religion go to firstimpressionssecondthoughts.blogspot.com/.
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