The title of this post comes from the theme of a book by David Nirenberg which explores the relationship between Western civilisation and what Nirenberg calls anti-Judaism. He deliberately avoids the usual terminology of anti-Semitism, because he is dealing with a cultural phenomenon which is characteristic of Western culture: not a racism, per se, but a culturally embedded idea of Jews which has nothing really to do with real Jews themselves. It is an intellectual anti-Judaism and not (as such) a racial anti-Semitism, and, according to Nirenberg, anti-Judaism “has been at the very center of Western civilisation since the beginning.”
The quotation comes from a critical notice of Nirenberg’s book in The Tablet, which summarises the theme of Nirenberg’s book as follows:
From Ptolemaic Egypt to early Christianity, from the Catholic Middle Ages to the Protestant Reformation, from the Enlightenment to fascism, whenever the West has wanted to define everything it is not — when it wants to put a name to its deepest fears and aversions — Judaism has been the name that came most easily to hand.
According to Nirenberg, anti-Judaism
should not be understood as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifice of Western thought. It was rather one of the basic tools with which that edifice was constructed.
This is obviously a startlingly new way of understanding, not only Western culture itself, but the complex historical role that the Jews have been forced to play in its development.
Of course, the central concern of Nirenberg’s book is taken up with the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, in which Judaism (or, rather, a conception of Judaism which has little to do with Judaism as this has been understood and lived by the Jews themselves) plays the role of “the Other,” the negation in terms of which Western civilisation has sought to understand itself.
While I have not read the book, simply reading the short review in The Tablet seemed to bring me into familiar territory. It happened to me, suddenly, without warning, one Sunday morning, as I was giving my homily for the day. In fact, so startling did it seem to me that I was caught in mid-sentence, and spent the remainder of the time speaking about what had just occurred to me, that Christianity explicitly defined itself in opposition to an imagined Judaism. Anyone who has spent much time attending Christian worship will be familiar with the theme. It is an indelible part of the imaginative picture that Christians have of the Jews, and it is written deeply into New Testament texts. It has to do, basically, with a fundamental dualism in terms of which Christians understand their faith. There is, on the one hand, Jesus, the messenger of love, gentleness and compassion; and then, on the other hand, there are the so-called Scribes and Pharisees, the people of the law, whose world is composed of dead rules and regulations, stultifyingly moribund and judgemental, which thinks of religious faithfulness entirely in terms of externals which do not touch the sensitive inner life of true spirituality.
As I say, I was caught up in this contrast, as I spoke about Jesus and contrasted him with the Scribes and the Pharisees. At the time I had been spending much of my time studying the Holocaust. I had said to Elizabeth, who was then seriously disabled by MS, and was suffering greatly, that I wanted to know where God was to be found in all our suffering. The Holocaust commended itself to me as the place where, if anywhere, we would be able to see (or not), the presence of God in the midst of suffering. Of course, at the centre of the Holocaust are the respects in which Jews had been held in contempt in European society for centuries, of which the Holocaust was the latest exemplification, and the more one reads about the Holocaust, the more one realises that it cannot be understood apart from Christianity. The Nazis may not have been Christians, being, as Dawkins has often said, sub-Wagnerian pagans, but Christians played a vital role in the Holocaust, from the Vatican’s silence, to the complicity of many communicating Catholics in the Endlösung der Judenfrage.
Even people like the theologian Dietrich Bonhöffer, who opposed the Nazis’ racial hatred, largely confined his efforts to the saving of converted and baptised Jews. And Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran theologian who after the war would become President of the World Council of Churches, had this to say in 1937:
We speak of the ‘eternal Jew’ and conjure up the picture of a restless wanderer who has no home and who cannot find peace. We see a highly gifted people which produces idea after idea for the benefit of the world, but whatever it takes up becomes poisoned, and all that it ever reaps is contempt and hatred because ever and anon the world notices the deception and avenges itself in its own way. [quoted in Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, 112]
Elsewhere, condemning the Nazis, Niemöller compares the to the Jews! This shows how deeply anti-Judaism is embedded in Christian understanding.
This is something that I began to notice amongst people whom I lived and worked. When Fred Hiltz became diocesan Bishop of Nova Scotia, he used to make his progress around the parishes, and repeated, many times, a sermon in which he wanted us to take to heart the words of the first letter of St. Peter (or Pseudo-Peter), where Christians are told that they
also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
6 For in Scripture it says:
“See, I lay a stone in Zion,
a chosen and precious cornerstone,
and the one who trusts in him
will never be put to shame.”Now to you who believe, this stone is precious. But to those who do not believe,
“The stone the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone,”and,
“A stone that causes people to stumble
and a rock that makes them fall.”They stumble because they disobey the message — which is also what they were destined for.
Fred never noticed, however, or at least he never acknowledged, that this is a deeply anti-Jewish passage. The idea of the blood guilt of the Jews for the death of Jesus is told, and the replacement of the Jews by Christians as the people of the new covenant (in Jesus blood, not, as the anonymous letter to the Hebrews — often attributed to St. Paul — the blood of bulls and goats), is explained in plain language. The Jews were destined to stumble and fall and be rejected. And the more I read about the Holocaust, and the relationships between Christianity and Judaism, the more clear it became that Christianity was so deeply implicated in the Holocaust, simply by the intrinsic anti-Judaism of its message, that it could not escape blame. The silence of the pope was deafening, and illustrates, as nothing else can, the highly conflicted relationship of Christianity and Judaism.
This implicit ideal of a world without Jews, an ideal which runs through both Christianity and Islam, is illustrated strikingly by the increasing anti-Israeli rhetoric of Christian churches, where resolution after resolution is passed by church judicatures condemning Israel. This does not mean that there is nothing about Israel that cannot legitimately be criticised. Even many Jews have harsh words to say about Israeli policies. However, the centrality that is vested in Israel as, in some sense, at the heart of world problems, is characteristically anti-Judaic in Nirenberg’s sense of the word. The Jews are always “the Other” in terms of which the self-understanding of the West, as well as the Muslim world, is stated. As Nirenberg says:
We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of ‘Israel.’ [quoted in The Tablet review linked above]
Clearly, I have not read the book, but it seems to me that it may be a very important one. Religious categories still largely determine how we understand the world, and something so close to the heart of the world’s dominant religious traditions is clearly something that we all need to understand if we are going to deal with the world as it is, and not as we simply imagine it to be. I commend it to your consideration.
A world without Jews would have given us a world without Christianity.
Can we conceive how Europe and the world would have developed without Christianity. If the Greco-Roman civilization would have been allowed to follow its own course, and the philosophies, the schools, the science, the arts, the architecture, the temples and sanctuaries, the Olympic Games, would have survived and another world emerge than the sad, dreary world of the Middle Ages?
No historian has yet given freedom to his imagination to depict such a Europe and such a world, without Jews and without Christianity.
But one has to be cloistered in the Christian brainwashing to blame the Jews for the ills of our modern world. That would be just too simple. 300 million guns in American hands, for only 3 million in the US military and 1 million in the police force. Hard to blame the Jews for the mass killings. All manufacturing transplanted to China, and young graduates not finding jobs. Hard to blame the Jews or Israel.
The list is endless of modern problems that have nothing to do with the Jews or Israel. Our only real concern is the potential nuclear conflict that could arise in the Middle East.
But when it comes to cultural and religious anti-Judaism and anti-Israel, it’s a totally different thing. We have to go back to the source.
THE OLD PROPHETS OF THE TANAKH AND THE ORIGINS OF ANTI-JUDAISM
In the Old Testament, there is relatively little devoted to the feelings and thoughts of those Jews who were happy with their lives, and the state of the Israel nation. Some contentment is expressed in Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes), Proverbs, some Psalms, the Song of Solomon, the Wisdom of Sirach, and ambiguous expressions in the Wisdom of Solomon.
But the Prophets were professional malcontents. They were purists, idealists, who never liked the state of affairs in Israel, and were threatening the worst disasters brought about by the Wrath of Yahweh.
This is an important point. The Hebrew prophets were, without exception, systematic malcontents in the Israel nation. They spent their time criticizing “the Jews”, blaming them all the time of all kinds of misbehavior, but usually blaming Israelites for neglecting the worship of Yahweh and the obedience to Moses’s Law).
So it is worth remembering that “blaming the Jews” is an old game, created by the prophets of the Old Testament who spent all their time doing just that, threatening the Jews of the worst disasters. Nobody could beat old Isaiah at this game.
One reasonable assumption has been that the prophets were the mouthpieces, real or invented, of the priests of Jahweh, who were competing against the other gods that the Jews liked to worship as well. Hebraic monotheism was always a work in progress, a work in battle.
In the same vein, scapegoating as well was developed in the Hebrew Bible.
The New Testament picked up on that established tradition. Jesus thought of himself as a prophet, or a high priest (according to the author of the letter to the Hebrews), or a Messiah, the anointed savior, or he was made to think so by his followers.
The whole gang was a group of Jews, mostly illiterate, supporting a new prophet and attacking the other Jews who would not recognize the new worship. So Jesus too lived the life of another malcontent. And Paul was a constantly angry malcontent too, with good reasons to blame the Jews of Jerusalem.
If the New testament keeps denouncing and blaming “the Jews”, still one can argue that it does it no more ferociously than the Old Testament prophets who kept threatening the whole ruin of Israel.
So far, at the time of Jesus, all this was fair game. In the Gospels, the Romans sided with the old established Jews against the new upstart Jewish sect of followers of Christ.
Things took a turn for the worse only when the new sect of Jewish Christians spread among the Gentiles, who inherited this distrust of “the Jews” from their Jewish founders Jesus, Paul, Peter, and could read about it in the “holy scriptures”, in the Gospels and their commenters.
And the real drama happened only when the Roman Emperors first endorsed with Constantine, and then annexed Christianity, 350 years later, especially Theodosius as recounted in “A.D. 381″, the famous book by Charles Freeman. This was the turning point for the establishment of anti-Judaism as an irresistible cultural obsession.
Then, gradually, but very slowly, the Bible became book #1 all over Europe, at least first for the priests and the bishops, fuelling the denunciations and blaming of the Jews. The hatred became institutionalized among all the new Gentile converts. Chrysostom produced the epitome of the art in eight magnificent homilies, “Adversus Judaeos”, “Against the Jews”, that became the models for all the Sunday sermons to come.
Even if most Christians were still illiterate, they were subjected from infancy to the repeated denunciations of the Jews by the priests in their sermons and, once they could read and books became available in the 15th century, they could read all the virulent prose of the Hebrew prophets in the text itself, and the virulent prose of the founders of Christianity..
It was all a bizarre and accidental development of history. The Jews could have disappeared in the dustbin of history, the Christian sect might have vanished like so many other sects of antiquity. The Roman Emperors may not have been inclined to patronize the cult. What could have happened if Constantine’s mother (the famous “Helena”) had not been a Christian? Or if Constantine had never become Emperor?
As it turned out, blaming the Jews became a universal sport and a cultural cliché in Europe.
But it is worth remembering that the game itself, blaming the Jews and scapegoating, were invented and perfected at the origin by the ancient Jews themselves, the great prophets of the Old Testament.
The ancient Greeks never had religious wars. Never had any philosopher or religious fanatic prophesying the destruction of Athens, Corinth, or the entire country of Greece.
A world without Jews, and without Christianity would have been completely different, and probably much more exciting.
And the game still goes on, even among Jews! Modern Israel supporters harbor a deep hatred of the so-called “Self-hating and Israel-threatening” Jews — Chomsky, Soros, etc..and other famous Jews or assumed Jews who harbor no sympathy for Israeli policies.
So the tradition of Jews hating, denouncing, and blaming other Jews for fanatical reasons, is very much alive, and can be traced back to the vociferous malcontents who became the prophets in Hebrew times.
Anti-Judaism owes its roots to the old anti-Hebraic tirades of the old prophets of the Tanakh.
Another good book is Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll.
He points out that Emperor whoever (I lent the book and it didn’t come back) made the convert or die edict to every other religion but made a special exception for the Jews. They were kept alive mostly to have someone to hate.
It is like the creationists who claim that if humans came from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys. If Christianity came from Judaism, then why are there still Jews. The fact that they persist is a threat to many Christians – even those who lived at the time of Jesus were not convinced of his divinity.
Kevin,
Carroll deals with this in several places, but on page 365, after describing how pope after pope reissued the “Sicut Judaeis” document, he provides the “theological dialectic” for this. The Jews were there as witness to the truth of the Christian faith. “After Augustine, their witness was tied to the state of their degradation. which was itself taken as proof of the truth of the Christian claims . . .In order for the dialectic to be sustained, three things were necessary. First, Jews could not be allowed to thrive. Their perpetual punishment was a sine qua non. Second, though, their punishment could not be excessive, leading to their disappearance. Therefore violence was ruled out. Third, their place within the Christian community had to be protected so that each new generation of Christians could benefit from their witness. The impulse to kill Jews, or, now, to expel them, violated this system, which is why the popes opposed it.”
Hal,
Thanks for reminding me. It’s been years since I read it and if I ever get my copy back I’ll read it again.
My understanding of pre-Judaic religions is that they were essentially local — the god of the Sumerians looked after the Sumerians, the god of the Chaldees looked after the Chaldees, and so on. When the Jews, for whatever reason, decided to claim their god was universal, I don’t suppose they foresaw the consequences; but they made it possible for the first time to claim that a believer could be seriously wrong about the most important facts in their life. Monotheism, with all its wars and persecutions, follows more or less directly from there. When they bequeathed it to Christianity and later to Islam, major bloodshed and misery was almost inevitable.
This is what Austen Cline, a commenter on Constantine’s Sword, says:
“Through much of Christian history, people have imagined that Jesus and his disciplines were in conflict with “the Jews” – but this ignores two important points.
First, it should be obvious to everyone that Jesus and his disciples were themselves Jews, making any conflict not a struggle between “us” and “them,” but an internal disagreement among Jews. But second, and perhaps more importantly, there was no single social or religious entity known as “the Jews.” There were a wide variety of groups and perspectives among the Jewish poeple and no monolithic force for any one dissident to oppose.
Thus, instead of a sectarian conflict among Jews, the gospels portray “the Jews” as a single group, wholly blameworthy, in an apparent attempt to gain favor among the Romans, the most likely group to have had any great interest in getting rid of Jesus. This allowed later Christians to continue scapegoating “the Jews” over and over:
The role of Constantine in shaping the Christian church and church history should not be underestimated, and that is why Carroll named his book after him. What is most important to remember about Constantine is that he ascended the throne of an empire which was fragmented and in disarray, thus his chief goal was always creating and maintaining unity, be it political, economic or, eventually, religious. For Constantine, one of the greatest threats to Roman domination and peace was disunity.
Christianity filled the need for a basis of religious unity quite well. Christians may have been a minority through the empire, but they were a well-organized minority. In addition, no one had already tried to claim their political allegiance, leaving Constantine no competitors and giving him a group of people who would be supremely grateful and loyal for finally finding a political patron.”
Boo Bookaroo. You say,
Well, yes, in a sense. But there is a big difference whether, in fact, the blaming is an inside job or an outside one. And when it is perpetuated long past the time when there was any identity between the Jewish community and the church, it becomes a completely different and more damaging thing, especially when you consider the difference in the messages of the prophets, on the one hand, and the followers of Jesus, on the other. For the prophets condemned their fellow Israelites for injustice and unfaithfulness in an effort to understand the historical trials which were impending upon them from the rising empires of Mesopotamia. It was an “inner religious criticism”. Christian condemnation of the Jews concerned the refusal to accept beliefs of a group of believers, originally Jews, perhaps, but eventually increasingly gentile, who not only blamed the Jews for their failure to recognise a (supposedly) prophesied redeemer, but for having murdered him, and not only for having murdered him, but eventually, as Christian belief crystallised, for having perfidiously murdered a god. This is the more significant in that it is clear that rabbinic Judaism and Christianity are in their origins closely related, which is why Rosemary Radford-Ruether entitled her book on the theological origins of anti-Semitism Faith and Fratricide, but it was Christianity which was prepared, on the basis of its limited success in convincing fellow Jews that the awaited messiah had arrived, and his name was Jesus, to compromise its purity by becoming syncretised with pagan mystery religions, and thus, in time, becoming the dominant religion in a region where Jews had been a despised (yet privileged) minority, and were thus subject to Christian oversight and control. And this oversight and control did consist, as Augustine said, in keeping the lives of Jews poor, miserable and uncertain, so that the judgement of God on such killers of Christ should be living catechism from which Christians could learn the importance of faithfulness. But Augustine never suggested that the Jews should never be subjected to violence, but only that, if there were any violence, it should be sporadic and unsanctioned by authority, even though it would remain largely unpunished. Indeed, Ambrose, Augustine’s mentor, made sure of this by making the emperor back down on his decision that Christians should indemnify the Jews of Callinicum for the destruction of their Synagogue. Christian anti-Semitism and the prophetic warnings are very very different, and had very different outcomes for the Jews.