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This blog is focused on “cultural drift.” However, today, I want to write about “cultural stasis,” an element of our culture –antisemitism –that has been with us since Christ was crucified, and remains a unsettling part of the world, including the United States, today. American Jews are less members of a particular religion, than members of a tribe, a group with common traditions, language and history. Tribes are often exclusionary, dividing the world between members of the tribe and others. In his short story, The Conversion of the Jews, Philip Roth writes:
“… there was the plane crash. Fifty-eight people had been killed in a plane crash at La Guardia. In studying a casualty list in the newspaper his mother had discovered among the list of those dead, eight Jewish names (his grandmother had nine, but she counted Miller as a Jewish name); because of the eight she said the plane crash was ‘a tragedy.’”
Jews have always seen themselves as a separate people, and their four- thousand-year history seemed to confirm their separatism. The Passover Seder, which recounts the story of the Exodus and has been observed in its present form for 1600 years, includes this sentence: “In every generation some have risen against us to annihilate us, but the Most Holy, blessed be He, always delivered us out of their hands.” And that is historically true.
Antisemitism in the Church of Jesus Christ. Where did antisemitism come from? I grew up a Jew and I remember wondering why Jews were called Christ-killers, since it was obvious that Jesus was killed by Pontius Pilate and the Romans. However, Mathew’s Gospel (25:11-26) says, that when Pilate argued with the Jews about releasing Jesus, they said “Crucify him (Jesus),” and release Barabbas, and when Pilate washed his hands of Jesus’ blood, the crowd says, “His blood is on us and on our children!” That verse has been used to validate the idea that Jews killed Christ which became the slogan of countless generations of anti-Semites.
Despite the writings of Paul, particularly Romans 10-11, which states that God has a particular plan for the Jews, the early church Fathers began to resent the Jews for their resistance to the gospel. Although St. Augustine’s (above, left) attitude toward the Jews is being rehabilitated, he did write things like:
“The Jews who slew Him, and would not believe in Him,” were punished by God, their temple destroyed, Jerusalem leveled. God has allowed them to survive as a continuing punishment because they “bear the guilt for the death of the Savior, for through their fathers they have killed Christ.”
Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews were persecuted by the Church and its adherents. They were exiled from every major kingdom in Western Europe and were slaughtered by the thousands during the Crusades. Nor was the emerging Protestant Church any better. Martin Luther (above right), disappointed in his efforts to convert Jews, developed a virulent hatred toward them. In his 1543 Pamphlet, On the Jews and Their Lies, he roundly condemning Jews as prideful, deceitful, indolent blasphemers, “possessed by all devils.” Then he set forth a program of action calling for the burning of synagogues; forbidding rabbis from teaching; banning Jews from owning homes; denying them legal protection; confiscating their texts and money; and setting them to manual labor, policies enacted by the Nazis four hundred years later.
In fact, the safest place for Jews in the Medieval Period was in Spain, where for three hundred years they flourished in the Islamic Caliphate of Cordoba (700-1000 AD). It was here, in 1135 AD. that Moses Maimonides, the famous Jewish scholar, was born and flourished. It is said of him that from Moses (the Biblical Moses) to Moses (Maimonides) there was no one like Moses.
Antisemitism did not end with the coming of the enlightenment and modern science. We will turn to the modern history of antisemitism in the next post.