When I walked past a group of shouting protestors holding placards announcing, ‘Christians for Palestine,’ I couldn’t resist: ‘If Christians hadn’t treated Jews so appallingly for so many centuries there wouldn’t have been a need for Israel,’ I said politely. ‘Do you genuinely think that one-sided polemics are appropriate,’ I asked. There was a pause for self-righteous reflection, before one of the group responded: ‘Typical! A Zionist playing the antisemitic card.’
Early in its history, the church removed the Jewish Jesus from the Christian narrative
The truth is that this Anglican priest with three Jewish grandparents wasn’t playing any card at all. I was trying to point out some of the inconsistencies and denial inherent in Christian opposition to Israel, which increasingly goes far beyond criticism of the situation in Gaza. Israel may now be close to 50 per cent Mizrahi (Jews from the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia) but its foundation was overwhelmingly Ashkenazi and European. In other words, Jews who had lived in Christendom. Some were ideological Zionists but most were fleeing horrendous persecution. Even with the former, it’s impossible to fully separate a philosophical Zionism from the context of pogrom, expulsion, blood libel, and slaughter. A slaughter that was often at its most manic during Easter.
Early in its history, the church had removed the Jewish Jesus from the Christian narrative – the Jew as Christ became the Jew as Christ-killer. St. John Chrysostom in the 4th-century is arguably the most infamous of the church fathers in this regard but he’s far from unique. He championed the concept of Jewish deicide, described synagogues as pagan temples and worse than brothels, and compared Jews to demons. His supporters argue that this was part of a conflict between two rival groups and not antisemitism as we know it, but reality cries out to be heard. Even if that argument were true, and it’s an impossible stretch, the man’s writings such as Adversus Judaeos – Against the Jews – did much to shape subsequent attitudes and prejudice.
There were hopes that the Reformation would improve the situation, and to an extent it did. But as early as 1537, Martin Luther worked to have the Jews expelled from Saxony and six years later, he published The Jews and Their Lies, in which he called for Jewish schools, homes, and synagogues to be destroyed. The Jews, he said, were, ‘base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth.’ For those who dismiss this as mere history, Martin Sasse, the Bishop of the Evangelical Church of Thuringia, supported Kristallnacht in 1938 and distributed a pamphlet entitled Martin Luther on the Jews: Away with Them!
By the 19th-century there was a belief among some in the Jewish world that Christian antisemitism was on the decline. The more assimilated the Jews were, they assumed, the more they would be accepted. Theodor Herzl, raised in a secular, German-speaking family in Austria-Hungary, shared this optimism as a young man. It didn’t last. He witnessed the horrendous treatment of French army officer Alfred Dreyfus, with the French Catholic church playing a leading role. It was clear to Herzl that patriotism, loyalty, and integration were insufficient, and only a Jewish state could guarantee dignity and protection. His portrait now hangs in the Speaker’s chamber of the Israel parliament, where he’s honoured as the founder of modern Zionism.
Less than forty years after Herzl’s death came the Holocaust. Nazism was philosophically pagan and anti-Christian but its anti-Jewish racism was accepted, or ignored, in much of occupied Christian Europe. Righteous Gentiles are remembered not because they were so numerous but so few. There were of course courageous Christians who defended their Jewish fellow citizens but one of the open wounds of modern Christian history is how little was done. A climate of the outsider, the lesser, the God murderer had been created over a thousand years, one that varied in intensity but was seldom completely absent.
Much has changed since then, with the development of Christian Zionism (not always helpful) and a post-Holocaust theology that emphasises the Jewish nature of Jesus, his family and followers (always helpful). But along with this is replacement theology, a belief that the church has superseded the Jews as God’s chosen. It has worrying implications and has gained popularity among anti-Zionists.
As for Jesus being a Palestinian, this is just fashionable propaganda. The word Palestine had been used by the Greeks but Jesus was a Judean, a Jew, and the crucifixion and resurrection took place in Judea. It was the Romans in the 2nd century who changed the region’s name to Syria Palaestina following a Jewish revolt and the expulsion of the Jews from their homeland. The medieval world continued the attempt to expunge Jesus’ Jewishness and some modern leftists have followed suit in the name of what they regard as justice and anti-colonialism.
Christians need to come to terms with their own history and filter criticism of the Jewish state through a sense of informed ownership and responsibility – and never accuse someone of ‘playing the antisemitism card.’ It’s just not the Christian thing to do.
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