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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (34634)	4/13/1999 4:41:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

No real quarrel with most of your points, but... On the question of whether anti-Judaism/antisemitism is central or peripheral to the Christian tradition-- Let me quote from the introduction to Christian Antisemitism, a History of Hate, by William Nicholls. I've added the bold: "Christian hostility toward Jews possessed a uniquely powerful feature. Christians believed that the Jews had killed Christ, their divine Savior. The myth of the Jews as the Christ-killers has powered anti-Judaism and antisemitism all through the Christian centuries. It is present even in the New Testament, and it has not yet died under the impact of modern critical history. Like all religions, Christianity is powered by a myth, its charter story that tells believers who they are and where they fit into the divine plan. It is important to this particular myth that it be based in real history. In it, the Jews are cast as the enemies of Christ and God: the Jews that are meant are actual historical people, not just mythic abstractions. We know from modern scholarship that many features of the myth are historically untrue and are therefore myths in the popular sense as well. Nevertheless, until modern times the myth that tells the Christian story has been firmly believed, and most Christians still do believe it to be literally and historically true. According to this story, because the Jews rejected and killed Christ, they in turn have been rejected as God's chosen people. The Jews have broken their ancient covenant with God, and he has made a new covenant, sealed in the blood of Christ, gathering to himself a new people, drawn from the Gentiles. This new people has now superseded the old Israel. The Jews have lost their status as the covenant people, and the new Israel is now the true Israel. As a punishment for this cosmic crime, the Jews have lost their Temple and been exiled from their land. Until the return of Christ they will remain homeless wanderers upon the earth. What theologians are beginning to call the theology of supersession joins hands with the myth of the deicide, Christ-killing people to make the Jews a permanent target for Christian hostility and contempt. In the Christian state of the Constantinian era, theological hostility led to social and legal measures, discriminating against Jews and relegating them to a subordinate status in a Christian world. Raul Hilberg has shown in a famous comparative table how many of the Nazi measures against the Jews, short of the Final Solution itself, were not novelties, but reenactments of older measures of the Christian world, laws of state and church that kept the Jews in their place. Nevertheless, the Christian world did stop short of a final solution. Christian legislation was governed by a principle apparently first formulated by Augustine in the fifth century: The Jews should be preserved, but in misery. They are to remain in the world as a permanent witness to their own crimes, bearing the mark of Cain, but, like Cain, not to be killed by others." [Of course as we know, episodes of actual killing of Jews, pogroms, did later take place, eg the festive pogroms that accompanied the start of each of the great Crusades, and so on into the night. Just for completeness: It is, of course, true that some Jews, some members of the Temple establishment, apparently collaborated with the Romans who put Jesus to death; but the Gospels tendentiously conflate this narrow class, a handful of people, with the entire body of Jewry, which contained numerous currents deeply opposed to the Temple authorities, in some cases to the point of armed opposition to them.] Thanks, E, for typing the long quote for me. N.