Anti-Semitism

 

This a series of posts explores anti-Semitism, its origins, the motivations behind it, its various manifestations, its consequences, and its possible future. The series also proposes a method for determining when an act or statement is anti-Semitic and concludes with some suggestions for remedying the consequences of anti-Semitism. A series of discussion questions is also included.

 

Review of the previous post.

The previous post, post number 13 of 33 was the second post in a series of eight posts discussing other causes of anti-Semitism and focused on the Jews being in positions of influence.

 

Preview of this post.

This post, number 14 of 33, is the third post in a series of eight posts discussing other causes of anti-Semitism and focuses on Christian teaching.

Other Causes

 

1. Religious basis and teaching

 

• Christian teaching

The five-hundred pound gorilla in the room of study where the basis of anti-Semitism is being studied is Christianity and its contribution to this horrendous view of Jews[1]. This “contribution” will be briefly discussed here followed by a discussion of how this view of Jews affected the view of Jews by other religions, in particular the Muslim religion^[2].

The Christian Bible contains many passages that give much grist to the anti-Semites of the world. To name just a few:

The Gospel of Mark – According to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus’s crucifixion was authorized by Roman authorities at the insistence of leading Jews from the Sanhedrin (Mark 15:1-15).

The Gospel of Matthew – This Gospel contains so many instances that it is difficult to single out particular passages, but for the sake of completeness, it is noted that chapters 23, 24, 27 and others all contain passages that could be used to support anti-Semitic feelings. This includes the Sermon on the Mount.

The Gospel of John – This Gospel is particularly fraught with such passages. The Gospel of John has long provided anti-Semites with grist for their mill. There are 31 instances where the gospel uses the word Ἰουδαῖοι, the Jews in a hostile sense, among the 63 uses of the word in this gospel, and all Jewish groups are lumped together, with no distinctions made between them. The Sadducees, prominent elsewhere, disappear. The enemies of Jesus are described collectively as “the Jews”, in contradistinction to the other evangelists, who do not generally ascribe to “the Jews” en masse calls for the death of Jesus. In the other 3 texts, the plot to put him to death is always presented as coming from a small group of priests and rulers, the Sadducees. John’s gospel is thus the primary source of the image of “the Jews” acting collectively as the enemy of Jesus, which later became fixed in Christian minds. See also, chapters 7, 8, 10, 12, 20.

The Gospel of Paul – This will be discussed in another post

The First Epistle to the Thessalonians – see 2:14-16.

Epistle to the Hebrews – Argued the superiority of Christianity to Judaism and twisted Hebrew Bible passages in a way that transmitted an anti-Torah anti-Semitism.

Book of Revelation – See 2:9 and 3:9.

In 1965, as part of the Vatican II council, the Catholic Church published a long-anticipated declaration entitled Nostra Aetate proposed a new approach to the question of Jewish responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus.

While this document argued that modern-day Jews could not be held accountable for Jesus’ crucifixion and that not all Jews alive at the time of the crucifixion were guilty of the crime, it fell short of actually stating that Jews of today were not responsible for Jesus’ crucifixion, or even worse, stating that holding Jews responsible for this act is, itself, in error.

Predictably, many Jews were disappointed. They had hoped that the Church might say that the Jews had in fact played no role in Jesus’ death.

This position is well founded in historical findings. According to most historians, it would be more logical to blame the Romans for Jesus’ death. Crucifixion was a customary punishment among Romans, not Jews. At the time of Jesus’ death, the Romans were imposing a harsh and brutal occupation on the Land of Israel, and the Jews were occasionally unruly. The Romans would have had reason to want to silence Jesus, who had been called by some of his followers “King of the Jews,” and was known as a Jewish upstart miracle-worker.

Jews, on the other hand, lacked a motive for killing Jesus. An act without a motive is not a crime. Certainly, it is not a crime of such magnitude that all members of a particular class are held responsible for eternity. The different factions of the Jewish community at the time – Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes and others had many disagreements with each other, but that did not lead any of the groups to arrange the execution of the other allegedly heretical groups’ leaders. It is therefore unlikely they would have targeted Jesus.

But the belief that Jews killed Jesus has been found by those interpreting and teaching this literature in Christian foundational literature^[3] from the earliest days of the Jesus movement, and would not be easily abandoned just because of historians’ arguments. This belief has been indoctrinated into Christians and their children by the Church, its leaders, its texts^[4] and its teachings^[5] for far too long^[6].

Preview of the next post.

 

The next post, post number 15 of 33, is the fourth third post in a series of eight posts discussing other causes of anti-Semitism and focuses on the New Testament.

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[1] See, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Melkhim, 11:4 for Maimonides’s view of Christianity and Jesus:

 

Also Jesus of Nazareth, who imagined himself to be the Messiah and was killed by a bet din, had already been forshadowed in one of Daniel’s prophecies, as it said, And the lawless sons of your people will assert themselves to confirm the vision, but they will fail. Could there possibly be any greater failure than this? All of the prophets predicted that the Messiah would save and redeem Israel and strengthen observance of the mitzvot; then this man came along and caused Israel to be put to the sword, and the remnant of the Jewish People to be scattered and humiliated, and he supplanted the Torah and deceived most of the world into worshipping a God who is not God.

 

[2]  Anti-Semitism is often intertwined with racial bigotry (in which a particular class of people is hated because of certain inherited, hereditary traits), and is also known as “racial anti-Semitism.”. A full discussion of the association of racial bigotry and anti-Semitism is beyond the scope of this essay.

[3] See, The Gospel of John which quotes Jesus as telling the Pharisees, “You are from your father, the devil, and you choose to carry out your father’s desires, Gospel of John 8:39-47. John goes on to claim that the Jews crucified Jesus under Jewish law, thereby establishing the basis for the charge that the Jews killed Jesus.

[4] St. Augustine depicted the Jews as a wretched, wandering, rejected people spiritually deformed, faithless and obsessively carnal. He likened the Jewish people to Cain, the first murderer who was condemned to ceaseless wandering.

 

[5] For example, St. John Chrysostom, justified the burning of synagogues on the grounds that a Jewish religious establishment is “a temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults, a criminal assembly of Jews, a place of meeting of the assassins of Christ….” Further teaching from St. John took this further, when he taught that “If then, the Jews fail to know the Father, if they crucified the Son, if they thrust off the help of the Spirit, who should not make bold to declare plainly that the synagogue is the dwelling of demons?”

 

[6]  See Origen, an early church father, who wrote: “We may thus assert that the Jews will not return to their earlier situation, for they have committed the most abominable of crimes, in forming the conspiracy against the Saviour of the human race….another people was called by Gold to the blessed election.” From the twelfth century onward, Christian theologians opposed Jewry with arguments that has a strong racial overtone. Jews were characterized as being subhuman because they did not accept “the rational proof of Christianity”.

 

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