ANTISEMITISM: A PERSONAL JOURNEY copyright 2003 Kenneth W. Phifer sermon delivered 4/27/03 I first became aware of antisemitism when my mother tried to persuade me to spend less time with two of my friends because, she said, they are Jews. When I asked why that meant I should not continue my friendship with David and Barton, she said only that Jews are different. They are not like us. I was 15 at the time. I pondered what she said, remembering in earlier years how she had tried to lead me away from a friendship with a girl named Jane Goldberg, saying at the time that boys and girls should not be close at young ages Jane and I went through the first five grades together. I began to wonder if it was Jane's Jewishness that had bothered my mother, and not the threat of a full blown romance between two very young children. My next encounter with discrimination against Jews was learning that Jews were not allowed to be members of a dance club to which every other classmate was invited. This excluded the editor of our school newspaper who was also the president of our student council, a star athlete on two of our sports teams, and the class president. The purported reason given was that the country club where the dances were held did not allow Jewish members that was true and therefore our group could not accept Jewish members either which was not true. Over our mothers' objections, several of us resigned from the dance club. One day, home from college, I sat in my father's study at the church talking with a long-time friend of the family who had been active in the church for many years. He had been one of my favorite teachers in Sunday School. I do not remember what prompted his statement, but I vividly recall his saying how much he hated Jews, how they had betrayed Our Lord, how they had been mischievous and dangerous throughout the centuries, and how they were now threatening to move into his neighborhood. That would not happen, if he had anything to say about it. For one of the few times in my life, I was shocked into speechlessness. I had never heard in that personal a situation such an outpouring of hate, and from someone I respected and loved. Not long after I graduated from college, a close friend of mine from those years shared with me his sense of profound fear for himself and his family and all who were Jewish. He spoke of what had happened in Germany and other European countries during the Second World War. He talked of the disabilities from which he suffered because he was Jewish, disabilities in education, in employment, in housing, in social life. He said that even in the best society that Jews had ever lived in, America, antisemitism was for him a daily reality, and history was a reminder of what could happen to Jews even in the best of societies. He did not think Israel would survive. He did not know if he could bear that loss. In graduate school, I took a course in modern Jewish history, during which I read Elie Wiesel's NIGHT. I read it at one sitting, afraid that if I stopped reading I would never again have the courage to pick it up. This book made horrifying clear what the end result of antisemitism is:extermination. Why? Why would people do the things that were done to Jews in the Holocaust? Why would people do to Jewish people the lesser moral evils of which I was personally aware? Why do some people hate Jews and Judaism? Trying to answer these questions became the focus of my doctoral studies and of continued reading in the 33 years since then. This morning I want to share some of what I have learned from this study. Let's begin with one of the most common sentiments found among antisemites, that antisemitism is the fault of the Jews. In ancient times, there were those who said that Jews have a deity who demands loyalty to the Torah and thus separation from others. That separation, grounded in a sense of chosenness, leads to mistrust and hostility. In more recent centuries, Jews have been forced into ghettoes or excluded from the usual societal institutions and then blamed for being exclusive and separatist. To blame Jews for antisemitism is both an inadequate and an immoral explanation. It fails, for example, to account for the peaceful and harmonious existence of Jews in places and in times like ancient Babylonia and Persia, the China of several thousand years ago, Spain in the medieval period, and the Islamic world for much of Muslim history. Even if antisemitism were found in every age and in every place where there are Jews, to say this evil is the fault of the Jews would explain only the victims not the perpetrators. Even if all Jews wished to remain apart, how could that justify societal discrimination up to and including murder? Jews have not been a perfect people. No group has been, ever. That does not explain much less excuse some of the horrible burdens Jews have been forced to bear because of prejudice against them. A second explanation is that antisemitism is traceable to pagan elements still part of western culture. The evidence for this is found largely in the pre- Christian writings quoted favorably by various Enlightenment thinkers. Voltaire and others like him were virulently anti-Jewish. They held that position before they read the ancients, whom they cited only when the sentiments expressed were unfavorable to Jews and Judaism, such as in the work of Cicero, Tacitus, and Seneca. Ernest Abel, in his study of pagan influences on modern antisemitism, concluded that it was minimal and of little consequence beside other factors. Abel and others point out that the antagonism against Jews in the six centuries before Christianity gained political power was mainly of a political nature. It was never widespread, and it was always mixed with great appreciation and respect for Jewish ideas, customs, and people. Early Christianity, then a Jewish sect, benefited from this friendliness towards Jews and converted many people on the basis of their joining what they perceived was a form of Judaism. Pagan expressions of antisemitism have been mild and of little consequence in the development of the modern forms of this virulent prejudice. Another line of argument suggests that antisemitism is related only to particular historical circumstances rather than there being some underlying theme that poisons many different societies, many different centuries. Antisemitism, that is, appears because of certain economic or social factors and disappears when these factors are no longer of importance. Hannah Arendt is most notable for her presentation of this notion. She argued that conditions in the 19th century were responsible for the antisemitism that erupted into Nazism. The economic role of the Jew in several of the nation states of Europe at that time accounts for the hatred that developed against them. Like Jews in medieval Europe, forced by kings and princes into the hated role of money lender, Jews in the 19th century found themselves forced into a similar position of managing money. Those whose fortunes sank with the changes in the economy blamed Jews for their involvement in these misfortunes. The main thing wrong with this analysis is that Jews were simply not that involved in financial affairs. A small minority in every European country, in none did Jews hold controlling economic power or anything close to it. Something other than Jewish involvement in money management must account for Jews being blamed and eventually targeted by the Nazis for destruction. Furthermore, Arendt and others of like mind do not take adequately into account the return to Europe in the 19th century of ancient religious libels against Jews. Once again there were heard the scurrilous charges that Jews hated God and hated Christians and plotted against them, all based on misquoted statements from the Talmud. Once again the blood libel charge, first heard in the 12th century, was brought against Jews, saying that Jews needed the blood of a Christian child for their Passover rituals. 1905 saw the publication in Russia of THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION, which purports to tell the tale of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy to suppress Christians and other Gentiles. Later Henry Ford was to assist in the publication of this antisemitic book. In recent decades it has appeared in various Arab countries and in western Europe, Russia, and America. These libels, which have expressed and enflamed passionate hatred have surfaced even where Jews were few in number and clearly not in a position of economic or political power. Some reason deeper than the particular historical circumstances of a given era must be involved in understanding why antisemitism continues to be such a strong force for hate in our world. There are those who argue that Jews are hated because humanity has a psychological need to blame someone for the ills that are part of living. Usually this will be a distant people or a minority people within our own society. Because Jews have for two thousand years been a small minority in every nation in which they have lived, they are a good candidate for the role of scapegoat. (Recent figures that appeared in the Christian Century magazine show that there are now 2,076,629,000 Christians and 1,265,230,000 Muslims and 14,789,000 Jews in the world. Except in Israel, Jews are a small minority everywhere.) There is certainly some measure of truth in the idea that we need scapegoats. It is always easier to blame someone else. If there is one group readily available to be blamed, there will always be some who choose that group rather than self-examination to see why things are going wrong. But why Jews? Why, for example, does the Ku Klux Klan, associated in most minds with an animus against Blacks, believe that while Blacks are not to be trusted it is Jews who are really dangerous. As Raf Ezekiel makes clear in his book THE RACIST MIND, the KKK thinks that Jews are behind their troubles, using Blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, and others to accomplish their wicked aims. Why the Jews? Why across all these centuries and especially in the last century have Jews and Judaism been despised and attacked and blamed for so many things? Two explanations seem to me to be compelling. One of these is the roots of antisemitism in Christianity. The other is the development of racial hatred in the 19th century. For the better part of Christian history, Jews have been a player in the Christian mind with little regard for the reality of actual Jews and their religion. To a great extent that portrayal has been of a people who are the devil incarnated on the earth. This use of Jews as the symbol of evil has its origin in the Christian scripture. In the Gospel of John, it is said that the Jews sought to kill Christ. In the Gospel of Matthew, a Jerusalem mob is reported to have threatened Pilate if he did not crucify Jesus. In demanding this, they said that "His blood be upon our heads." In the book of Revelation, Jews are described as being "the synagogue of Satan." St. Gregory of Nyssa called Jews "haters of God" and Saint John of Crysostom said that "the soul of the Jews is the domicile of the Devil." Chaucer wrote of the "cursed Jews" and Martin Luther of the "damned, rejected Jews." In the 1930's, as Nazis prepared to exterminate as many Jews as they could find, Karl Barth described the wandering Jew as a testimony that "God must surely hate evil and punish sin." The head of the largest Protestant denomination in America said a few years ago that "God does not hear the prayer of a Jew." The Christian image of the Jew has been a hateful, disgusting, evil image that has caused immense suffering for the Jewish people. Christian antisemitism has its roots in the internal quarrel of a few Jewish people about Jesus. Most Jews in the first century never heard of Jesus. The few who did meet or hear of him divided into a handful of those who came to believe that he was a special emissary of God, perhaps even the messiah, and a much larger number who regarded him as just one more teacher, of which there have been many in Jewish history. Two things changed the tenor of the quarrel. One was the work of Paul, a Disaporan Jew who started the missionary movement to non-Jews in the Mediterranean world and was immensely successful. The influence of these Greek and Roman Christians had the effect of further separating the new Jesus sect from Judaism. The second event made that separation final. This was the destruction of the Temple and the city of Jerusalem in the year 70 CE. The Jesus-followers interpreted this event as a sign from God that Torah-faithful Jews were wrong, that the old Judaism of Temple worship was now a thing of the past, and that Jesus' messiahship was confirmed. (Incidentally, Jews also interpreted this event as a sign from God that somehow they had done something wrong and so they must create their religion anew. The result was rabbinic Judaism, which was the mode of survival for Jews scattered through many countries for some 1800 years.) The Gospels about Jesus that have been put into the New Testament were written after this traumatic event. They furthered the distinction between Jews faithful to Torah and Jewish and Gentle Christians. Jews became the enemy in the sacred writings of the Christian sect, contrary to the likely historical facts. When Jews are mentioned in the New Testament, almost always that mention is either descriptively neutral or it is a pejorative description. Jews are almost never spoken of in a positive way. These Gospel writings set the tone for what was to follow, namely a struggle over the next several hundred years between two religious peoples who laid claim to many of the same roots: a Holy Book called Tanakh by Jews and Old Testament by Christians, a feeling of being in a covenant relationship with God, a sense of having been chosen by God for a special mission, the symbol messiah for the saving force in history, and much else. Jews saw these elements as the continuation of a history that began with Abraham, was made concrete in Moses and the giving of the Law at Sinai, and that pointed towards the future coming of a messiah who would be like the legendary King David. Christians read these symbols as pointing to the need for God Himself to intervene in history as the only means by which humanity could be rescued from sinfulness. Jews, said Christians, had failed their calling, their covenant, and their chosenness. God then became human in Jesus to save us all. Christians pressed their case by what Jules Isaac would call "the teaching of contempt." Christians wrongly claimed that Jews were degenerate at the time of Jesus, that God dispersed the Jews for rejecting Jesus as messiah, and that Jews were Christ-killers, deicides, murderers of God. These are false, foolish, and highly malevolent charges that have brought untold misery to the Jewish people. The period when Jesus lived was one of the most creative of many creative periods in Jewish history. Jews had been dispersed and had dispersed themselves for 700 years before Jesus. Three-fourths of all Jews were living outside Judea when Jesus was born. It was Romans who killed Jesus not Jews. Romans used crucifixion as a means of execution, Jews stoning. These malicious charges had little but rhetorical interest until Christianity gained state power late in the fourth century. Then they became and have remained immensely dangerous. In the course of time Christians, using the justification of these three themes, imposed upon Jews every single decree of oppression and misery--and more—which the Nazis were later to visit upon them with the sole exception of extermination. Among other such oppressive measures, these included forced exile, the wearing of a yellow Star of David, the denial of the right to work, ghettoization, casual brutality without recourse to law, the destruction of synagogues without permission to repair or rebuild them, children taken from parents to be raised as Christians, and required attendance at Christian sermons with conversionary content. These tactics of assault upon Jews and Jewish life continued until the 19th century. They were grounded in the uneasiness of Christians at the continued existence of Jews as Jews. Why were Jews still faithful to Torah? Had not Jesus replaced the Torah? Was not Christianity the successor to Judaism? Should not all Jews be Christians? This uneasiness led to the creation in every Christian denomination of a mission to the Jews, a missionary work that continues to this day in a not insignificant number of Protestant denominations. Christianity demonized Jews. They equated Jews with the devil, with absolute evil. They identified Jews as the scapegoat par excellence in western culture. The United States Catholic Conference put it this way in 2001, commenting on the Vatican's statement, We Remember: "Christian anti-Judaism did lay the groundwork for racial, genocidal anti-Semitism by stigmatizing not only Judaism but Jews themselves for opprobrium and contempt. So the Nazi theories tragically found fertile soil in which to plant the horror of an unprecedented attempt at genocide." Christian antisemitism was the fertile soil into which Nazi racialism was planted and bore hideous flower. In brief compass, this is what happened. Religious influence in western society had begun to wane during the Enlightenment. Noting this, Napoleon offered the Jews of France the opportunity to leave the ghetto and become citizens of France. Other countries willingly or reluctantly began to follow suit. The emancipation of Jews from ghetto restrictions opened a new era in Jewish history. Jews began to think of themselves as patriotic citizens of their country of the Jewish persuasion. Unfortunately, the image of the Jew as the evil one did not disappear. More than 1400 years of teaching contempt for a people, embedding this contempt in doctrines, rituals, laws, customs, and languages, had made of the Jew something strange, even alien to European societies. It was common even among friends of Jews and sometimes among Jews themselves to speak of "the Jewish problem." The solution most commonly proposed was the elimination of Jews as Jews. The old way of doing this was by conversion to Christianity, a way some continued to follow: the Mendelsohns, Heinrich Heine, the Marx family, for example. The new way was by assimilation into the larger society after abandoning one's Jewish identity, as Benjamin Disraeli did. But most were what they were, Jews with Jewish beliefs and Jewish ways. This was not acceptable to many Europeans. With the development of new theories of race, a way was found to build upon Christian hatred of Jews a new, more perilous antisemitism. Popes and princes in Europe had for several hundred years been speaking of the inferiority of certain peoples—Africans, natives of the New World in the Western hemisphere, and Asians, all of whom seemed to the Europeans to be quite backward and simple. The new theories of racial superiority and inferiority would be more comprehensive and have a seeming patina of academic support. The new racialist ideas developed out of theories of language affinities.A British administrator in colonial India in the late 18th century first noticed the closeness of the Sanskrit language to Latin and Greek. Later scholars would see ties to Sanskrit in Celtic, Teutonic, Slavonic, and other languages. Early in the 19th century, a German orientalist named Lassen propounded a theory of an original language from which these languages had derived. He called this original language Indo-Germanic. He argued without any evidence to support his thesis that all the speakers of this family of languages were of one race. He compared this race to an inferior race he called Semites who, in his words, "do not possess the harmonious equilibrium between all powers of the intellect which characterize the Indo- German." Indo-Germans were also and often called Aryans. Wilhelm Marr, a German journalist, coined the term anti-Semite in 1879 to express the opposition of Aryan/German to Semite/Jew. A few years later the Frenchman Eduouard Drumont made the new racial antisemitism popular with his book LA FRANCE JUIVE. It sold 140,000 copies the first year and in ten years went through 140 editions. Drumont wrote of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Jews, he said, were an alien race, a foreign body introduced into the French bloodstream— biological language that Hitler would later use to devastating effect. Drumont believed that all economic woes could be traced to Jewish influence. He urged that social health required that all Jews be gotten rid of. Racial ideas, supported by learned anthropologists and sociologists and philosophers and linguists, dovetailed with the needs of the new nation states to find an organizing principle around which to build loyalty to the states. Religion was no longer possible as such a tool, as it had been for centuries of the Christian era. Race, the concept of what in Germany is called the Volk, replaced religion as the bedrock identifying factor of group identity for many Europeans. My race tells me who I am. To most people in Europe, Jews were not and could not be part of their race. They were a race apart, inferior, peculiar, unassimilable as Jews, a problem for every country. Openly antisemitic political parties were formed in several countries, notably Germany, Austria, and France. Antisemitic publications grew in popularity in western Europe. The notion of something ineradicable and bad about Jewishness hovered just below the surface of the mind in even the most decent and respectable Europeans. This was a worse condition for Jews than Christianity had imposed on them. Most of the time Christians had permitted conversion to erase the stain of being Jewish. In other words, for Christianity most of the time it was not so much Jews as Judaism that was bad. With racial antisemitism, though, there was nothing a Jew could do. Once a Jew, always a Jew. The taint was in the blood. That was the Nazi standard. So secular Jews and Jews who were Christians and any person with one-eighth Jewish heritage had to be eliminated. Racial antisemitism took over from Christian antisemitism and made the whole phenomenon more pernicious and brutal. Six million human beings died as a result. Those deaths and the way in which they occurred changed things. There is now after 2,000 years of longing a Jewish state where a Jew unsafe elsewhere, as many Jews still are, can go and know that there will be no antisemitism. Many of the world's Christian groups have seen what some of their doctrines and practices have done and have begun to root out the antisemitic elements of their religion. Simplistic categories of race have been discredited as we have come to recognize that, as one biologist put it, we are always "drifting genetically." It is no longer a common practice in most places to exclude Jews from education, clubs, employment, and housing. The Holocaust did change things. Some good came out of that monstrously evil event. But there are still people who are committed to the eradication of the State of Israel and every Israeli, people who seek out Jews to kill in every corner of the world. There are still Christians who read the same hateful texts and teach the same pernicious doctrines about Jews being Christ-killers. There are still groups like the Klan and the neo-Nazis and others that accept racialist ideas, at the core of which is still the view that Jews are what is wrong with the world. There are still places where Jews are not welcome, clubs and schools and jobs and homes that Jews cannot enter. There are still people who "blame the Jews." For what? For whatever seems to be wrong. The poet laureate of New Jersey blamed the Jews for 9-11. A year ago a lecture was given at the Chicago Public Library by the Rev. Matt Hale on the "history and present of Jewish ritual murder." There are people blaming the Jews for the war in Iraq, pointing to several Jews in the higher councils of government, assuming that because there are Jews there, they must somehow be in control and that their purposes are nefarious, ignoring the fact that a strong majority of Jews in this country and in others opposed the war in Iraq. All of these and hundreds of other examples of falsely, maliciously, stereotypically blaming the Jews make clear that antisemitism is very much alive in the 21st century. Because in my lifetime a group of people holding similar antisemitic views ruled a major European state and for a time held many countries under their sway, and during that time of power did monstrously evil things to Jews, I take any expression of antisemitism seriously. Every expression of such ideas is potentially lethal. I believe it is a moral obligation to repudiate antisemitic writings, speech, symbols, and action. Antisemitism is hatred and hatred cannot build a better world. Only love can do that. Let us commit ourselves, then, to the path of love, which is the path of justice and of understanding. Let us work together to build a better world, free of all the vicious prejudices (homophobia, racism, male chauvinism, anti-Hispanic and anti-Native American and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudices, to name the most common of these prejudices) that blight our existence. As the Hebrew scripture urges us to do, let us love our neighbor and welcome in the stranger till the whole world is truly one community. BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Ernest L. Abel, THE ROOTS OF ANTI-SEMITISM, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975. 2. Joel Carmichael, THE SATANIZING OF THE JEWS: ORIGIN AND DEVLOPMENT OF MYSATICAL ANTI-SEMITISM, Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1992. 3. James Carroll, CONSTANTINE'S SWORD: THE CHURCH AND THE JEWS, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001. 4. Dan Cohn-Sherbok, THE CRUCIFIED JEW: TWENTY CENTURIES OF CHRISTIAN ANTI-SEMITISM, Willliam B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992. 5. Lillian C. Freudmann, ANTISEMITISM IN THE NEW TESTAMENT, University Press of America, 1994. 6. Daniel Jonah Godlhagen, HITLER'S WILLING EXECUTIONERS: ORDINARY GERMANS AND THE HOLOCAUST, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. 7. William Nicholls, CHIRSTIAN ANTISEMITISM; A HISTORY OF HATE, Jason Aronson Inc., 1993.