The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit
Introduction
On September 12, 2006, Joseph Ratzinger made a triumphal return to his native Bavaria. Having chosen the name of Benedict XVI when he was elected pope, His Holiness returned not only to Germany but to the German university of Regensburg to express his gratitude for the time he spent there as a professor and to renew the Church’s commitment to the university. But more than that, Pope Benedict wanted to re-affirm the Church’s position on the relationship between faith and reason. In order to do that he had to refer to a tradition where that relationship has not been so complementary, a tradition which stands outside of Europe, namely, Islam.
That’s where the trouble began, specifically when Benedict quoted the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologos, who felt that the Islamic world and the Christian world shared two fundamentally different views of the relationship between God and reason. The issue was religiously inspired violence: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” After an initially favorable response, the world press, including the Arab press, appeared to use the quote to inflame Islamic opinion against the Church. The inflammation was a replay, at least in some ways, of the Danish cartoon crisis of a few months before. In that incident, a Danish magazine editor, with ties to American neoconservatives like Daniel Pipes, ran a series of cartoons that were calculated to outrage Muslims and provoke them to attack Denmark and, by extension, Europe. The purpose of the provocation was to drive Europe, by way of reaction to the Muslim outrage, into the arms of the Americans, who were desperately in need of support for their failing war in Iraq.
In the instance of the Regensburg speech, the outrage surrounding the Manuel II Paleologos quote achieved two ends: first, it strengthened the neoconservative hold over the Catholic mind by giving the impression that Muslims were fanatics determined to wage jihad against both the pope and the Church (the Muslim/ Catholic alliance against abortion, which I personally witnessed at the World Population Conference in Cairo in 1994, gave the opposite impression), and secondly, it obscured the real topic of the talk, which was Logos and the central role it plays in both Europe and the Church.
Unlike Christianity, Islam is not docile to Logos, nor for that matter is Islam’s God; God’s will is arbitrary, inscrutable. According to Benedict’s reading of Manuel II Paleologos, “the decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.” This idea is not intrinsic to Islam. The “noted French Islamicist R. Arnaldez,” Pope Benedict continues, “points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.
Christianity is different from Islam in this regard: The Christian God acts with Logos. In using the term Logos, the Pope situates Christianity and, by extension, the European culture which grew up under its influence, in the tradition of Greek philosophy. Greek philosophy is part of God’s plan for humanity, something that became clear when St Paul had to change his plans and travel to Macedonia. Greek philosophy is, in other words, not just Greek; it is universal:
Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts Gods nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding offaith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of
Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: 'In the beginning was the logos.” This is the very word used by the Emperor: God acts with logos.
“In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God,” says the Evangelist. The marriage of Hebrew scripture and Greek philosophy that begat Christianity and subsequently Europe is not mere coincidence, nor is Greek philosophy some adulteration of an otherwise pure Gospel. Europe means Biblical faith plus Greek thought: Europe is based on Logos. “The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought,” the pope continues, ...
“did not happen by chance.... Biblical faith... encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident in the later wisdom literature.... A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place there [in the Septuagint], an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith, and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: ”Not to act 'with logos' is contrary to God’s nature.
This means that Logos, far from being some cultural accretion, is part of the nature of God and, therefore, part of creation. The European, and by that term I include both North and South America and Australia, is traditionally born into a world that is radically reasonable, radically logical, because that world mirrors the mind of God, who behaves in ways that sometimes go beyond what human reason can comprehend but never in ways that contradict that reason.”
So far so good. We agree wholeheartedly with what the Pope said about Logos, and we can see without too much effort that Islam has a radically different attitude toward the relationship between faith and reason. Europe has dealt with the threat for centuries, but from an historical perspective, the Islamic threat to Europe is only half the story.
At this point we come to the attack on Logos which is not mentioned in the Pope’s speech, the Jewish attack on Logos, which manifests itself not by the threat of invasion from without, as is the case with Islam, which has sought to spread its faith by military conquest, but by the threat of subversion from within, otherwise known as revolution. If Muslims are alogos, because of Mohammed’s imperfect understanding of the monotheistic traditions he absorbed from his position be yond the borders of a collapsing Greco-Roman civilization, then Jews are anti-Logos, in the sense that they reject Christ altogether. Islam did not reject Christ; Islam failed to understand Christ, as manifested in its rejection of both the Trinity and the Incarnation, and ended up trying to mask that misunderstanding by honoring Jesus as a prophet.
The situation with Jews is completely different. The Jews were God’s chosen people. When Jesus arrived on earth as their long-awaited Messiah, the Jews, who, like all men, were given free will by their God, had to make a decision. They had to either accept or reject the Christ, who was, so Christians believe, the physical embodiment of Logos.
As we will see, the Jews began by wanting to have the Messiah save them on their terms, which were suffused with racial pride. When the Jews tell Jesus in John 8 that they are the ‘seed of Abraham,’ in Greek “sperma Abraam.” He changes the term of the argument by replying, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would do as Abraham did,” which is to say follow God’s will and accept Jesus as the son of God and Messiah. Since the Jews, or those to whom Jesus is speaking, reject Jesus, they reject their father Abraham as well, and show that “the devil is [their] father.”
Once Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, the term Jew in the Gospel of St. John is no longer a purely racial term. Jew has come to mean a rejecter of Christ. Race is no longer the focus. The Jews who accept Jesus will henceforth be known as Christians. The Jews who reject him are known hence forth as
“Jews.” As St. John reports in the Apocalypse, “Those who call themselves “Jews” are really liars and members of the “synagogue of Satan” (Rev 2.9, 3.9).
By the middle of John’s Gospel, the term Jew no longer has the clear racial meaning it had at the beginning when the Samaritan woman was told that “salvation is from the Jews.” The other, more negative redefinition of the word Jew is also not essentially racial and becomes apparent in the story of the man born blind in John 9. That man’s parents, we are told, refused to answer any questions about Jesus healing their son because they feared the “Jews.” They “said this because they feared the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that if any one should confess him to be Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue.” Clearly the split between “Jews” and followers of Christ had already begun.
The Jews rejected Christ because he was crucified. They wanted a powerful leader, not a suffering servant. Annas and Caiaphas mockingly told Christ that if he came down from the cross, they would accept him as the Messiah. When the Jews rejected Christ, they rejected Logos, and when they rejected Logos, which includes within itself the principles of social order, they became revolutionaries.
Jews may have become revolutionaries at the foot of the cross, but the full implications of their decision didn’t become apparent until 30 years later, when the Jews rebelled against Rome, and Rome retaliated by destroying the Temple. At this point, the Jews had no temple, no priesthood, and no sacrifice, and as a result they had no way of fulfilling their covenant. Seeing which way the battle for Jerusalem was going, a rabbi, and deputy head of the Sanhedrin, by the name of Jochanan ben Zakkai had himself smuggled out of Jerusalem in a shroud, and, after being recognized by Roman authorities as a friend of Rome, was granted the privilege of founding a rabbinical school at Jabneh.
It is at this moment, some 30 years after the founding of the Church, that modern Judaism, Judaism as we know it, was born as essentially a debating society, because in the absence of a Temple, that was all that Jews could do. The results or these interminable debates became known as the Talmud, which got written down over the next six centuries. The debating did nothing to eradicate the spirit of revolution from the Jewish mind, but in many ways intensified it by teaching the Jews to look for a military messiah.
The Jews got their military messiah roughly 60 years after the destruction of the Temple, when Simon bar Kokhba rose up against Rome in 131. The rabbis in Jerusalem, with a few exceptions, recognized bar Kokhba as the messiah, and so as if to prove that racial Judaism had become incoherent, the Christian Jews were expelled for not recognizing him as the messiah. It didn’t matter whether your mother was Jewish; the ultimate determinant of Jewishness had become rejection of Christ, and that rejection led inexorably to revolution.
II. Who and What is a Jew? Debate Over the Term
Debate over who the Jews are never ceases. Such debate comes up against a basic philosophical issue, something akin to the nominalism of William of Ockham. The issue revolves around the use of the word “Jew.” Just what does the word refer to? Does it refer to anything at all, or is it like the word “tree,” a word which, ac cording to the nominalists, has no clear meaning, since in the real world the only thing which exists are individual birches, maples, etc? According to this unwritten rule of discourse, the term “Jew” refers to no category of beings in reality. Use of the term “Jew” as a category is, as a result, ipso facto evidence of anti-Semitism.
This reasoning is not a new phenomenon. Hilaire Belloc noticed it in England in the 1920s, when he wrote that if anyone “exposed a Financial swindler who happened to be a Jew, he was an anti-Semite. If he exposed a group of Parliamentarians taking money from the Jews, he was an anti-Semite. If he did no more than call a Jew a Jew, he was an anti-Semite.”
Things have gotten worse since Belloc’s time. Now it is impossible to write about Jews without opening oneself to the charge of anti-Semitism, as Belloc’s current place in the literary firmament shows. It is impossible to refer to Belloc in polite circles without the mandatory disclaimer that he was an anti-Semite, partly because he wrote one book about the Jews. His views on Islam are much more censorious than his views on Jews, but that fact never gets mentioned. Nor is it obligatory to refer to Belloc as anti-Muslim.
If anything, what Belloc said then is afortiori true today. Calling a Jew a Jew may or may not be primafacie evidence of anti-Semitism, but criticizing a group of people as Jews is regularly taken as such evidence. This is because it indicates that the group exists, that it has definable beliefs (at least in many contexts) and that it can, therefore, act in a certain way, and can even be criticized for so acting. All of this does not change the fact that the main task confronting anyone who decides to write about the Jews is to define precisely what he means by that term. It is precisely in the manipulation of the term “Jew” that its political benefits lie.
Since the term Jew actually gets used with some frequency, its use is determined by the political advantage of those who use it. Thus, it is permissible in some circles to use the group designation when Jews are victims of some attack, but any reference to Jews as the perpetrators of some attack is, again, ipso facto evidence of anti-Semitism and also a sign of conspiracy mania as well. It’s heads I win, tails you lose. So, again, according to another variation of the canons of contemporary discourse, it is permissible to say that Jews played a large role in the civil rights movement, but it would be anti-Semitic to say that they played a large role in the abortion rights movement.
Christians, however, must believe that there is a definite Jewish people who will perdure till the end of time.
St Paul, addressing the Romans, says: “If the root is holy so are the branches” (Romans 11.16). St John Chrysostom, commenting on St Paul’s speech, explains that the root refers to Abraham and the patriarchs, from whom all the Jewish nation proceeded, as branches from that root: and ... these branches are to be esteemed holy, not only because of the root they proceeded from, but also because they worshipped the true God. And if some, or a great many of these branches, have been broken, they may, as it is said (v.23) be ingrafted again. And you, Gentiles, ought to remember that, you were of your selves a wild-olive tree: and it is only by the merciful call of God, that you have the happiness to be ingrafted upon the same root as the patriarchs; and so by imitating the faith of Abraham are become his spiritual children, and heirs of the promises, and by that means have been made partakers of the root.... And let me tell you, as to the Jews, if they abide not still in unbelief, God is able to ingraft them again into their own olive-tree: and it seems more easy, that they, who are naturally branches of the sweet olive-tree, should bring forth good fruit, when they shall be ingrafted in their own olive-tree, being of the race of Abraham, to whom the promises were made.
Ill The Term Jew Defined
The Christian then holds that the Jewish people have a perduring role and are at least in part defined by their refusal of the New Covenant and by their relation ship to Abraham and his “seed.” In order to discuss who counts as a Jew, it might be helpful to offer a working definition. We might say that there is a disjunctive positive component: A person who is related by birth or conversion to those
similarly related by birth or conversion to Abrahamó—and a negative component: A person who has not renounced Judaism by embracing another faith (especially Christianity).
The renowned Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner makes clear a distinction between Judaists and Jews, when he says: “The ethnic group does not define the religious system.... All Judaists—those who practice the religion, Judaism—are Jews, but not all Jews are Judaists. That is to say, all those who practice the religion, Judaism, by definition fall into the ethnic group, the Jews, but not all members of the ethnic group practice Judaism.”
However, Neusner adds, tellingly, that Christianity plays a special role in defining who counts as a Jew either ethnically or religiously: “The ethnic community opens its doors not by reason of outsiders’ adopting the markers of ethnicity... but by reason of adopting what is not ethnic but religious.... While not all Jews practice Judaism, in the iron-clad consensus among contemporary Jews, Jews who practice Christianity cease to be part of the ethnic Jewish community, while those who practice Buddhism remain within.”
Without knowing it, Neusner is simply restating the thesis of this book: when Judaism rejected Christ it rejected Logos as well. In rejecting Christ, Judaism took on a negative identity, something that many Jews have realized at one time or another. The recent Jewish convert to Catholicism, Roy Schoeman, writes: “I remember praying, ‘Let me know your name—I don’t mind if you are Buddha, and I have to become a Buddhist; I don’t mind if you are Apollo, and I have to become a Roman pagan; I don’t mind if you are Krishna, and I have to become a Hindu; as long as you are not Christ and I have to become a Christian!'” Schoeman presumably recognizes this perverse and deep-seated enmity to Logos as having come from a perversion of what was handed down by Moses.
Such enmity to Logos as represented in the person of Jesus Christ is present in the Talmud. Princeton Jewish scholar Peter Schaefer notes that Talmudic stories mock claims of Jesus’ birth from the Virgin Mary, challenge His claim to be the Messiah, and state that He was rightly executed for blasphemy and idolatry, and that He resides in Hell, where His followers will go. Schaefer makes the startling claim that, rather than being ill-informed and ephemeral, parts of the Babylonian Talmud betray a remarkably high level of familiarity with the Gospels—especially Matthew and John—and represent a deliberate and sophisticated anti-Christian polemic.
And while many Jews may never read such passages there can be little doubt that they arose from the defining rejection of Christ by many Jews of His time, a rejection that finds echoes in present day attitudes to Christian converts from Judaism.
Ironically, the very Talmud that vilifies Christ appears to provide some evidence that He is the Messiah. The Talmud admits the central role of Jesus in salvation history in a number of significant, if indirect, ways. Roy Schoeman points out that in order to ensure that the Temple sacrifice had been successful in expiating the sins of the Jews, the priests and rabbis would watch to make sure that a scarlet thread had turned white. He cites the Talmudic verse from Rosh Hashanah 31b, “For forty years before the destruction of the Temple the thread of scarlet never turned white but it remained red.” According to Schoeman, the Talmud itself “unwittingly confirms” that the Temple sacrifices failed 40 years before the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD (i.e., at the time when Christ died and the veil covering the Holy of Holies was rent in two) when it “recounts that from that time on... the scarlet thread never again turned white.” According to the Talmud, the Temple was destroyed because therein prevailed “hatred without a cause.” The Talmud might be said to be referring in some mysterious way to Christ’s own words in John 15:18-25: “They hated me without a cause.” The
Talmud, in other words, “is exhibiting a gift of prophecy, stating a profound truth that unknowingly confirms Jesus’ identity as the Messiah, although unaware of that fact.”
While the Talmud refers to the justice of Christ’s execution, the Christian must believe that Christ died for our sins. According to the Catholic Church: “‘Sinners were the authors and the ministers of all the sufferings that the divine Redeemer endured.” Taking into account the fact that our sins affect Christ him self, the Church does not hesitate to impute to Christians the gravest responsibility for the torments inflicted upon Jesus, a responsibility with which they have all too often burdened the Jews alone.” Moreover, the Catholic Catechism goes on to quote from an earlier Catechism: “We, however, profess to know him. And when we deny him by our deeds, we in some way seem to lay violent hands on him.”
It is all too easy to minimize this profound teaching, but in maximizing it we fall into another grave error by claiming that Jews were not primarily responsible at the time and place for bringing about the actual event in history that is known as the Crucifixion. Such a position directly contradicts the Gospel accounts and makes any understanding of the nature of the Jewish split impossible. After all, that famous Jewish convert St Peter (Acts 3.14-15) refers directly to those who killed Christ in addressing and appealing to the very people he saw as having done this. This rejection of Logos, rooted in an historical event, continues to play a part in what it means to be a Jew.
IV The Church's Teaching on the Jews
In dealing with such complex and highly controversial matters it is important to be clear on what is not being said, as well as, what is. Clearly the Christian must hold certain views regarding the Jewish people, if only regarding their existence and continuance to the Second Coming as a people. Any individual Jew, like anyone else, can choose to follow Logos. He may follow the “lower logos" of the natural moral law—i.e., the law that St Paul tells us is written in the hearts of men. That law, fully understood, leads ultimately to Christ and the Church He founded. We might call the latter the Higher Logos. Deliberate rejection of Logos is deliberate rejection of salvation. A spirit founded on rejection of Logos can only lead to disaster. True, people may be more or less ignorant—for all sorts of reason - of Logos. But there is a special tragedy if a member of the chosen people reject what he or she was chosen for—as we see in the Gospels.
Anyone can choose to reject Logos—all of us do this or are tempted to reject the lower logos every day. But to have the rejection of the Higher Logos at the avoidable core of ones religion, or even as a determining factor of who is to count as a member of ones community, means that a revolutionary spirit is entwined with that community.
By revolution we mean revolution against Logos - the deepest kind of revolution. This Jewish revolutionary spirit is, as we have said, an internal (understood as above) enemy of Christianity. But so too are the Christian heresies that have, in one way or another attacked Christ, His Church, or the natural moral law. Part of the history to be recounted in this book is the story of the relationship between the history of the Jews and the attacks on the Universal Church by Christian heretics linked to Jews or heavily influenced by Jews.
One example of such an alliance, typical of the history this volume is concerned with, is the Arian/Jewish alliance in the 4th century. John Henry Newman, in his work, The Arians of the Fourth Century, makes the following observations.
It is ... a ąuestion, whether the mere performance of the rites of the Law, of which Christ came as anti-type and repealer, has not a tendency to withdraw the mind from the contemplation of the more glorious and real images of the Gospel; so that the Christians ofAntioch would diminish their reverence towards the true Savior of man, inproportion as they trusted to the media of worshipprovided for a time by the Mosaic ritual.... In the Epistle addressed to them, the Judaizers are described as men laboring under an irrational fascination, fallen from grace, and self-excluded from the Christian privileges; when in appearance they were but using, what on the one hand might he called mere external forms, and on the other, had actually been delivered to the Jews on Divine authority.... If we turn to the history of the Church, we seem to see the evils in actual existence, which the Apostle anticipated in prophecy; that is, we see, that in the obsolete furniture of the Jewish ceremonial, there was in fact retained the pestilence of Jewish unbelief, tending (whether directly or not, at least eventually) to introduce fundamental error respecting the Person of Christ.
Ultimately, the doctrinal issues are not the main issue. During the 4th century, the Jews sided with the Arians because they had become habituated to promoting revolution. In practical terms, John Henry Newman notes, “in the popular risings which took place in Antioch and Alexandria in favor of Arianism, the Jews sided with the heretical party, evincing thereby, not indeed any definite interest in the subject of dispute, but a sort of spontaneous feeling, that the side of heresy was their natural position; and further, that its spirit, and the character which it created, were congenial to their own.
This book records how such a “spontaneous feeling” has played itself out in history, in a conflict between Judaism, Jewish movements, heresies and the Catholic Church.
Rabbi Louis Israel Newman points out how Jews have consistently supported revolutionary movements throughout history. Jews joined forces with heretics during the Albigensian crisis, the Hussite revolution, the Reformation, and at the birth of modern England. They joined forces with revolutionaries during The Enlightenment, the Russian Revolution and the Civil Rights movement. We also see the conflict between the Church and Judaism working itself out at the birth of the Spanish Inquisition, the spread of the Polish empire and the Chmielnicki rebellion that began the break-up of that empire. Finally, we see a Jewish presence in the rise of the American Empire.
As always, movements are led by the few—a few often unrepresentative of the many.
The evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald, in examining Jewish movements, has suggested the following approach to the issue—that a Jewish movement is a movement dominated by Jews “with no implication that all or most Jews are involved in these movements and restrictions on what the movements are,” and that one must “determine whether the Jewish participants in those movements identified as Jews and thought of their involvement in the movement as advancing specific Jewish interests.” He adds that involvement may be unconscious or involve self-deception, but in many of the cases he examines, it is more straightforward. A revolutionary movement may be led by religious or non-religious Jews and still count as a Jewish revolutionary movement. The Catholic response to the revolutionary Jewish rejection of Logos came to be known as “Sicut Judaeis non ... ” a doctrine codified by Pope Gregory the Great and reiterated by virtually every pope after him.
According to “Sicut Judaeis non ... ” no one has the right to harm Jews or disrupt their worship services, but the Jews have, likewise, no right to corrupt the faith or morals of Christians or subvert Christian societies.
Since the time of Gregory the Great, the church has applied “Sicut Judaeis non ...” even at the risk of appearing “anti-Semitic,” a charge which has become more frequent in modern times. One of the classic instances which we are given of “modern” anti-Semitism is the pastoral letter on morals which was issued by Augustine Cardinal Hlond, the primate of Poland, on February 29,1936. The
part beginning “It is true that Jews... have a corruptive influence on morals, and that their publishing houses are spreading pornography. . .” is invariably quoted as proof of Hlond’s anti-Semitism, but no mention is made of what follows. Hlond’s pastoral letter is a classic instance of the two part teaching on the Jews that goes by the name “Sicut Judaeis non ...” I will now quote passage on the Jews in full.
So long as Jews remain Jews, a Jewish problem exists and will continue to exist. This question varies in intensity and degree from country to country. It is especially difficult in our country, and ought to be the object of serious consideration. I shall touch briefly here on its moral aspects in connection with the situation today.
It is a fact that Jews are waging war against the Catholic Church, that they are steeped in free thinking and constitute the vanguard of atheism, the Bolshevik movement and revolutionary activity. It is a fact that Jews have a corruptive influence on morals and that their publishing houses are spreading pornography. It is true that Jews are perpetrating fraud, practicing usury, and dealing in prostitution. It is true that, from a religious and ethical point of view, Jewish youth are having a negative influence on the Catholic youth in our schools. But let us be fair. Not all Jews are this way. There are very many Jews who are believers, honest, just, kind, and philanthropic. There is a healthy, edifying sense of family in many Jewish homes. We know Jews who are ethically outstanding, noble and upright.
I warn against that moral stance, imported from abroad [he is clearly thinking of Germany] that is basically and ruthlessly anti-Jewish. It is contrary to Catholic ethics. One may love ones own nation more but one may not hate anyone. Not even Jews. It is good to prefer your own kind when shopping, to avoid Jewish stores and Jewish stalls in the marketplace, but it is forbidden to demolish a Jewish store, damage their merchandise, break windows or throw things at their homes. On should stay away from the harmful moral influence of Jews. Keep away from their anti-Christian culture, and especially boycott the Jewish press and demoralizing Jewish publications. But it is forbidden to assault, beat up, maim or slander Jews. One should honor Jews as human beings and neighbors, even though we do not honor the indescribable tragedy of that nation, which was the guardian of the idea of Messiah and from which was born the Savior. When divine mercy enlightens a Jew to sincerely accept his or her Messiah, let us greet him into our Christian ranks with joy.
Beware of those who are inciting anti-Jewish violence. They are serving a bad cause. Do you know who is giving the orders? Do you know who is intent on these riots? No good comes from these rash actions. And it is Polish blood that is sometimes being shed at them.
Cardinal Hlond was not expressing racial hatred here; he was warning his Polish flock about the dangers of Bolshevism, which, as all of Europe had learned during the 1920’s, was an essentially Jewish movement. Cardinal Hlond was opposing Jewish revolutionary activity on the one hand, but he was also opposing the vicious reaction to Jewish revolutionary activity that was known as Nazism, which had taken over Germany at that time. The Church was consistent in its opposition to revolution on the one hand, and in defending the Jews against genuine persecution on the other. Both parts of this teaching are necessary. If either one is ignored, trouble follows.
This, of course, is precisely what happened in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Nostra Aetate the council document on other religions, was suppose to usher in a new era of interfaith dialogue, with Jews in particular. What followed can best be seen from a sampling of statements issued both around the time of, or as a part of, what claimed to be a celebration of the document’s 40th
anniversary. In his book, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its UnfulfilledDuty of Repair, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen wrote, “For centuries the Catholic Church... harbored anti-Semitism at its core, as an integral part of its doctrine, its theology and its liturgy.” As his contribution to a “celebration of 40 years of Nostra Aetate,” Yona Metzger, Israel’s chief rabbi, wrote in the Jesuit magazine America that in Nostra Aetate, the Church rejected “the normative view of Jews that had been held throughout Christendom for many centuries, namely that “the Jews rejected Christ and were guilty of the crime of deicide; consequently, they had been rejected by the Creator in favor of the Christians” who were “the new Israel.” Rabbi Metzger went on to say that this attitude of “supercessionism, and “the teaching of contempt,” “laid the groundwork for centuries of discrimination, persecution and violence against Jews, culminating in the Shoah, in which one-third of Jewry was murdered.”
This book then is the story of those movements that embody a spirit of rebellion (conscious or unconscious) against Logos, which more often than not meant an attack on Christ and His Church through history. This spirit is embodied not just in Judaism but in numerous Christian heresies and secular movements.
The Good Friday prayers of the Catholic Church reach out to those affected with such a spirit. The 1962 Good Friday prayer for the Jews reads:
Let us pray also for the Jews that the Lord our God may take the veil from their hearts and that they also may acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ. Let us pray: Almighty and everlasting God, you do not refuse your mercy even to the Jews; hear the prayers which we offer for the blindness of that people so that they may acknowledge the light of your truth, which is Christ, and be delivered from their darkness.
The Church had amended the prayer from an earlier version referring to ‘perfidious” or “faithless” Jews. Since that time it has been further amended even to the point of ambiguity. However, with Pope Benedict XVI s recent Summorum Pontificum motuproprio, the 1962 prayer will be more commonly heard. The prayer now reads as follows: Let us pray for the Jew’s. That our God and Lord may enlighten their hearts, so that they may recognize Jesus Christ the Savior of all men. Let us pray. Let us bend our knees. Rise. Almighty and eternal God who wants all of mankind to be saved and gain knowledge of the truth, grant that when the fullness of peoples enters your Church all of Israel may be saved Through Christ, our Lord.’ Far from being “anti-Semitic” it is, as the Jewish atheist Israel Shahak noted, “a prayer which asked the Lord to have mercy on Jews.”
The rewriting of the 1962 prayer in a way that retains the original, explicit call for conversion is a sign that the post-Vatican II era is drawing to a close. No where is the need for closure and re- evaluation more urgent than in the teaching on the Jews. Nostra Aetate, the council’s document on non-Christian religions, was supposed to inaugurate a new era of interfaith dialogue. What it led to instead was a condemnation of the heart of the Gospel’s call for conversion as “supercessionism,” and confusion in the face of an increasingly, imperious foreign policy under the leadership of what is now called the “Israel Lobby.”
By the time Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s attack on Pius XII appeared, it had become apparent that the 40 years of interfaith dialogue inaugurated by Nostra Aetate had resulted in apparent heresy on the part of leading Church authorities, diatribes on the part of Jews, and political disaster for the entire world. When the Church acquiesced to the Jewish interpretation of Nostra Aetate, she opened the door to the rise of neoconservative foreign policy in the United States, which led to the disastrous war in Iraq. Dialogue in this context has reached a dead end on both theological and political levels. It is
my hope that this book will promote a rethinking of these issues and a return to the wisdom of tradition.
No book of this size can come into existence without help. At this point I would like to acknowledge James G. Bruen, Anthony S. McCarthy, Jeffrey J. Langan and John Beaumont for the assistance they provided in bringing this book out.
E. Michael Jones South Bend, Indiana December 2007
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