Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation

8 thoughts on “Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation”

1. It would be erroneous to assume that anti-Semitism has never or does not still exist and thrive within Christianity.

   a) 1930s: Some American clergy used their their radio programs to attack Jews. Father Charles E Coughlin was one of the best known. “In the 1930’s, radio audiences heard him rail against the threat of Jews to America’s economy and defend Hitler’s treatment of Jews as justified in the fight against communism.” 3
   b) 1936: Cardinal Hloud of Poland urged Catholics to boycott Jewish businesses.
   c) St. Alphonsus Liguori writes:
   Poor Jews! You invoked a dreadful curse upon your own heads; and that curse miserable race, you carry upon you to this day, and to the End of Time you shall endure the chastisement of that innocent blood! (The Passion and Death of Jesus Christ, p.444).
   d) St. Basil the Great writes:
   And such are the prayers of the Jews, for when they stretch forth their hands in prayer, they only remind God the Father of their sin against His Son. And at every stretching forth of their hands, they only make it obvious that they are stained with the blood of Christ. For they who persevere in their blindness inherit the blood-guilt of their fathers; for they cried out: “His blood be on us and on our children”

   (from this site which attacks the most recent Catholic Catechism from JPII on several fronts)

   Judaism and Christianity indeed share many moral values. Nevertheless, it seems that many Christian groups have latched onto various Jewish organizations for political expediency and gain while maintaining the same outdated beliefs of corporate Jewish guilt for the death of Christ.

2. JamesK,

   Don’t project backwards through the prism of WWII and the Holocaust. At the time of the early church, there was a substantial Jewish population throughout the world, especially in major cities such as Alexandria. In fact, an equivelent population today (adjusting for difference in global population) would be 120 millions Jews.

   The Church of the period of Basil and Cyril was up against stiff competition from both evangelistic minded Jews, and Judaizers within Christianity who were attempting to re-introduce mosaic law. Many of the texts, such as those of St. John Chrysostom, which have traditionally been translated as being anti-Jewish would be more accurately translated as ‘against the Judaizers.’ The Judaizers he was referring to were practicing a syncrestic blend of Judaism, not the traditional variety, and were actively billing themselves as an alternative to the Orthodox Catholic Church.

   The Jews of that day were not victims in concentration camps. They were a large bloc of people, who even engaged in street battles with the Christian and pagan populations. A Jewish riot in 415 in Alexandria provided the pretext under which St. Cyril drove the Jews out of the city.

   In addition, the Jews up through the 10th Century did engage in evangelism. The Khazar empire, for example, was converted to Judaism through missionary activity. There are verifiable Mediterranean populations that also converted to Judaism, those most subsequently became either Christian or Muslim, or both in turn. In fact, genetic testing has shown that many Jewish populations today did not have an origin in the Middle East, and are, in fact, the fruit of evangelistic efforts.

   What does that mean? It means that the Christian nations and local Christian communities forming in the aftermath of the Western Empire’s collapse had competition from a rival monotheistic faith. The Jews were in the game and were fighting for market share, so to speak. Some of the hostility directed at Jews by early church fathers is a direct result of this competition for souls.

   At the same time, after the consolidation of Christianity in the East and West, we enter a period in which the only minority of any sort anywhere in the Christian world were the Jews. Mono-religious and mono-ethnic communities often engage in scapegoating and persecution of the ‘other.’ That is a common trait in fallen humanity. Simply because some people who bore the title Christian were prone to it does not mean that the Orthodox faith is indicted by this fact. This sense of difference was exacerbated by the perceived loyalty of Jews to the, at the time non-existant, Jewish state that conflicted with national loyalties. “Next year in Jerusalem” at Passover was often interpreted by the neighbors of Jews to mean that the Jews did not really consider themselves Germans, Poles, etc.

   Finally, while there are valid historical reasons for it, the fact remains that many Jews were highly active, beginning in the middle of the 19th Century in socialist and communist movements. One historian summed up the situation thusly, “The exclusivist position of the political Right gave politically active Jews little choice but to move to the Left. The limited political options available to Jews were noted by Benjamin Disraeli as early as 1852 who argued that the “tyranny of Christendom” had driven Jews into the camp of revolution. Similarly, the famous German political sociologist Robert Michels argued that even wealthy Jews were driven by social and political discrimination into an alliance with working-class parties.”

   Jews living in a Christian state sought to develop a new consciousness through socialism to replace religion as a defining characteristic. (Class versus religion.) Christian socialists living in Muslim nations (the Ba’ath Party in Syria and Iraq most notably) have tried the same strategy.

   What does that mean? Well, it means that the rantings of Henry Ford about global Jewish socialist conspiracies had some validity, though for reasons other than he believed.

   “The leaders of Austro-Marxism, both before 1914 and in the inter-war period, were predominantly Jewish — including the founder of the Social Democratic Party, Victor Adler. Jews, including Moses Hess, Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle, were among the leaders of the early German socialist movement, and continued to play a prominent role in the Social Democratic Party until the Nazi takeover. Jews including Hugo Haase, Kurt Eisner and Eugen Levine played particularly prominent roles in the 1918 German Revolution. In addition, a number of the early leaders of the German Communist Party such as Rosa Luxemburg, Paul Levi and Ruth Fischer were Jewish.

   Jews were not as prominent in the socialist intelligentsia in France as elsewhere. However, many Jews were active in the Saint-Simonist movement of the early-mid nineteenth century, and later in the Popular Front Government of the late 1930s. Many Jews including Charles Rappoport and Boris Souvarine were also active in the French Communist Party.

   Not surprisingly, Jews were particularly prominent in the pro-Republican International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, contributing approximately 25 per cent of the total number of volunteers. Interestingly, Jews were not prominent as radicals in Spain, Yugoslavia, Albania or Bulgaria, a phenomenon which Richard Voyles Burks attributes to the “small size and restricted influence” of the Jewish populations in these countries.(49) Probably for the same reasons, there is no evidence of significant Jewish contributions to the Left in East or West Africa or Asia. Jews were, however, also prominent in the socialist and communist movements of the USA and Canada, Great Britain, South Africa, Australia, Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East, reflecting the spread and influence of European Jewish immigration and ideas.

   In the USA, Jews have played a key role in socialist movements and organisations since the turn of the century. Jews provided considerable support to the Socialist Labor Party and the Socialist Party. Following World War One, Jews also provided a large minority, and at certain times a majority of the American Communist Party’s activists, cadres and leaders.

   Whilst Marxists defended Jewish civil and political fights, they also tended to reject any manifestations of distinctive Jewish national or group identity. Jewish nationalism was viewed as a reactionary idea designed to divert the Jewish masses from the class struggle. Influenced by the legacy of the enlightenment, Marxists argued that a progressive solution to the “Jewish question” lay in the complete assimilation of the Jews in the future classless society in which all racial, religious and ethnic differences would become irrelevant.

   Marxists argued that Jews were a religious group lacking a common history, language or culture (rather than a nation) whose distinctiveness and persecution would disappear with the triumph of socialism. For scientific socialists, it was difficult to conceive of any intrinsic connection between pale ultra-orthodox Ashkenazi Jews speaking Yiddish in the Pale of Settlement, the modern assimilated German Jew praying in German in a reform synagogue, and the dark-skinned Sephardi Jew speaking Arabic or even Ladino in the casbahs of Morocco and Cairo. The concept of a Jewish nation (they believed) was merely the construction of anti-Semites. Under socialism, Jews would inevitably and desirably dissolve into the surrounding societies.”

   —- Philip Mendes, “The New Left, The Jews and the Vietnam War”, 1965-1972

   Does any of this justify murdering Jews, hurting Jews, or bombing Israeli pizzarias? No, that’s not my point. My point is reducing history to an interplay between the ‘good, victimized and saintly Jewish people’ being oppressed by the evil Christians is a charicature that belies the complexity of 2,000 years of history.

3. “The Judaizers he was referring to were … actively billing themselves as an alternative to the Orthodox Catholic Church.”

   I personally don’t find that the shrewd marketing of one’s faith is necessarily a bad thing. After all, Christians in the U.S. seem to have been quite successful in using lavish production numbers and high definition television standards to bring in Love Offerings, Seeds of Faith and Tithes from various Medicaid-dependent widows and other faithful. No religion has flourished without promotional acumen attuned to the whims of the market, after all.

   Can Christians rightly criticize “Jewish” activities? Sure.

   However, any just criticism is lost on my ears once they intermix it with the old canard of ancestral and genetic responsibility for killing Christ.

4. Anti-Semitism, racism or any other prejudice has no place in the heart or mind of any Christian for any reason. Obviously, such sentiments and beliefs do occur, historically, anti-Semitism has been massive. When I first began to approach Christianity back in the 1970’s, I had an aunt who was a Holocaust survivor. She hated Christ and all Christians because of the collaboration with the Nazi’s so many Christians had shown. She was not aware, neither was I at the time, of the many individual Christians who had confronted the Nazi evil. All she saw was not only the institutional cowardice of the various Christian denominations, but the willing participation in the killing of her family and her people.

   Regardless of the complex historical reality, we all need to acknowledge the reality of the horror that the Orthodox Church in particular shares in. If we do not, perhaps the blood of those Christ wept for and Paul was willing to give up his salvation for will be on our hands and the hands of our children.

5. Michael – How does the Orthodox Church share in the horror of the NAZIs? The Greeks fought Hitler against overwhelming odds. The Soviet Army, officially atheistic but having a significant number of Orthodox Christians, brought Hitler’s legions to their knees. The Serbs suffered genocide at the hands of Hitler’s allies the Ustazi in Croatia. How exactly could the Orthodox Church be culpable in the crimes of a paganistic regime that came to power in Germany – a protestant/Catholic nation whose people had a history of persecuting Orthodox Christians?

   Again, I think that you are projecting back into history the spectre of WWII and this is leading to erroneous conclusions. In the days of the Church Fathers, bombastic rhetoric was the order of the day. If you read the homilies of St. Cyril concerning the teachings of Nestorius, he refers to them as a ‘pile of dung.’ This was the style of polite discourse in that day. Manners change over the course of 2 millenia. It was the style of speech and the language of the day. To take quotations from the Fathers concerning Jews and Judaizers and somehow look upon them as NAZI SS is simply unfounded.

   I don’t believe that they harbored hate in their hearts. I don’t believe that the Orthodox Church harbored hatred for the Jews. The facts aren’t there. The largest Jewish population in Europe was found in the East in Orthodox lands. Despite a troubling period in the 19th Century, these communities grew and thrived. The Orthodox did not organize the mass extermination of Jews, the pagans did that all by themselves.

   I don’t judge the rhetoric of the 3rd and 4th Centuries by modern standards, as speaking conventions are different today than 1,600 years ago. I also understand that when reading quotations of the Church Fathers that they were writing and speaking in Greek, and that the nuances of the language are lost in translation. Word choice can also make a big difference, and can shade a translation.

   Have Christians, on a variety of topics, failed to live up to the teachings of Christ? Yes, of course that is the case, and these shortcomings should be dealt with honestly. However, these discussons of ‘anti-Semitism’ in Church history come dangerously close to wholesale indictments of the Church. In fact, that is exactly how charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ have been used by anti-Christians in the past – as a club to beat the church with. In addition, such charges of ant-Semitism come dangerously close to condemnations of some of the most important Church Fathers, such as John Chrysostom, whose contributions are vital to the Christian Church.

   One last thing I would add. I don’t believe that the co-existance of Jews and Christians in Christian lands is nearly the bleak picture as we have been led to believe. For starters, much of the anti-Christian propaganda dates from the 19th Century, at a time when leftist writers were attempting to use charges of anti-Semitism to undermine the power of the Church. It is also from this timeframe that the ‘Islamic Golden Age’ makes its appearance in literature. Writers contrasted Christian anti-Semitism with the fabulous tolerance of Jews in the ‘Islamic Golden Age.’

   This was pure fiction, of course, as life under the Muslims was never that wonderful for the Jews. In Christian lands, there have been local outburts of anti-Jewish fervor with a lot of proximate causes. However, neither the Orthodox Church nor the Roman Catholic Church ever pursued a policy of extermination of the Jews. The biggest massacres in Jewish history (the sack of Jerusalem and the Holocaust) were perpetrated by non-Christians.

   My wife’s grandparents both survived concentration camps. Neither are Jews, just Poles who resisted Hitler and got caught doing it. My wife’s great uncle, after whom my son is named, died in the original batch of internees at Auschwitz. He was sent to the camp as part of Hitler’s desire to eliminate all Polish intellectuals. The ‘sub-human’ Slavs existed only to serve the master race, you see. Since my kids are 50% Slavic, I suppose they are only 50% human. Of course, they are also 25% Cherokee Indian, so may be they are only 25% human according to NAZIs.

   My point in this – not just the Jews suffered under Hitler. His regime had plenty of hate to go around, and Catholics died by the millions along with the Jews. I am sorry for what your aunt went through in the camps, it is absolutely horrible. But we also need to remember that Gypsies, Slavs of all nations, and many Catholic and Protestant resisters also went to the camps and were killed the same. In fact, unbiased scholarship shows that the Roman Catholic Church did much to resist Hitler and his Nazism.

6. Glen, I cannot reference Orthodoxy, but in regards to Catholicism, you need to know a few things:

   a) Before Vatican II, the Good Friday liturgy included a prayer that “called upon God to convert the ‘perfidious Jews’ and ‘that our Lord may take the veil from their hearts, and that they may also acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ.'”
   (perfidious:Guilty of perfidy; violating good faith or vows; false to trust or confidence reposed; teacherous; faithless; as, a perfidious friend.)

   This passage was later removed by order of Pope John XXIII.

   b) “The ‘Radio Priest,’ Charles Coughlin began his career in the mainstream of Catholic social welfare teachings but became increasingly anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi,” said Charles R. Morris in his book American Catholic. “By 1932, (Coughlin’s radio program) commanded up to twice the number of listeners as today’s immensely popular Rush Limbaugh show.” ((Morris 147.).)

   c) Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate explicitly denied collective Jewish guilt for the death of the Messiah. I’m uncertain as to why such an overt statement would be necessary were it not to refute previously held assumptions.

   d) From the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 issued by the ironically-titled “Innocent III”:
   Canons 78, 79: Jews and Moslems shall wear a special dress to enable them to be distinguished from Christians. Christian princes must take measures to prevent blasphemies against Jesus Christ.

   I’m not saying that Catholics were responsible for the Holocaust. There is nevertheless a level of anti-Semitism at the individual AND institutional level within the Church that must be acknowledged and repudiated.

7. Glen, sorry for my lack of clarity, we don’t share in the horror of the Nazis, many Orthodox died with the Jews, you are quite correct. We do share in the pogroms against the Jews in Russia and in the terrorism of the Palestinians where we have not stood up and condemned the murder of innocents, as we have not for the most part. There was not even much of a response to the desecration of the Church of the Nativity by the Palestinians.

   The very real problem of Orthodox ethnicity is not limited to parishes that won’t accept folks who are not of the correct ethnic background. Unfortunately, many of our clerics and layity participate in the racism and anti-Semitism to this day. At a conference I attended recently I had to confront a convert priest who gave a horribly slanted presentation on peacemaking in the Holy Land which bordered on the anti-Semitic.

   Also just because various saints perhaps lapsed into a sin does not in anyway invalidate their overall sanctity or the importance of their contribution to Christian life. They recognized they were sinners in many ways. We have a responsibility to confront the sin where ever it resides, especially in our own hearts.

   I am quite aware that the Jews are not saints with regard to their treatment of Christians in Israel and elsewhere they have held power. Nevertheless, the Jews such as those who began the organization that leads off this thread, have been more forthright about the persecution of Christians around the world than many Christians.

8. Well, as Mona Charen who is part of this new organizaton wrote, “Abhorrent as it was, Christian anti-Semitism was never genocidal. As Professor Ascheim of Hebrew University in Jerusalem put it: “The aim of the Christian was to convert the Jew. This was the worst nightmare of the Nazi.” Nazism, with its specious racial theories and pagan worship of nation and blood, was something new, transgressive and different. Nazism loathed the Jews but also disdained Christianity with its “effeminate pity-ethics.”

   What then, should Catholics and other Christians acknowledge about the crimes committed by baptized Christians who became something else? Is it fair to say that among ordinary Christians there were too few heroes willing to risk their own lives and those of their families to save strangers? No.

   It is important only that Christians recognize this: That when the Nazis went searching for a class of victims, there was a ready-made category available. Centuries of anti-Jewish teaching had numbed too many Europeans to Jewish suffering, and a terrible literature of Jew-hatred was available for the Nazis to exploit.”

   It is perfectly okay to pray for the conversion of Jews. Christ said the he is the only way. To pray for the conversion of Jews is a pious act, just as it is to pray for anyone’s conversion. Not to seek the conversion of the Jews is an act of hatred. It means that they are unworthy of salvation.

   Father Coughlin was speaking at a time, as I have said earlier, in which many of the leading communists in the world were of a Jewish extraction. That gave him a color of legitimacy. I don’t like him, or his politics for that matter, but I can understand why they struck a chord at that time. I don’t see tarring everyone because of it.

   The 4th Lateran Council’s requirements for Jews was unevenly applied, and eventually simply dropped off the radar screen. Since it is post-schism, it doesn’t even enter into an Orthodox context at all.

   I can only atone for my own sins, those which occurred before my birth are not my responsibility. All of this atoning and wailing about past sins does no one any good. It is important to understand mistakes made in the past, as Mona Charen makes clear, but that process can easily spin out of control, especially when modern experiences and sensibilities are projected into the remote past.

   As for Jews owning up to any misdeeds on their part in Israel today concerning the Christian population, that isn’t happening to any extent. There are leftists in Israel who are doing so, but the Likud Bloc is mired in a vision of perpetual Jewish victimhood.

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