Editorial, Fidelity, October 1983
Those who read it regularly may have noticed what amounts to the
formation of an editorial policy on the pages of Commentary magazine lately. Since
it is a Jewish magazine, Commentary is understandably enough concerned with
the phenomenon of anti-Semitism; however, in its attempts to get to what it
considers the root of the problem Commentary has decided upon Christianity itself
as the veritable radix malorum. According to two major articles written in the past
year, anti-Semitism is not simply a phenomenon which appears in Christian or
quondam Christian countries. On the contrary, Christianity is itself intrinsically anti-Semitic. As Norman Ravitch put it in his April 1982 article, "anti-Semitism was as
native to Christianity as mother's milk to a new born babe." Writing eight months
later, Hyam Macoby goes even farther, stating that "Christian anti-Semitism
derives not from some accidental and inessential layer of Christianity but from its
central doctrine and myth, the crucifixion itself."
As one has come to expect in such matters, both writers base their claims
on the writings of a theologian, in this case a Catholic theologian, who persuades
Messrs. Ravitch and Macoby to believe what they have always held anyway. The
theologian in question turns out to be Rosemary Ruether, and in her book Faith
and Fratricide she argues that Christians are afflicted with what she denominates
"supercessionism." Christians, in other words, persecuted the Jews throughout
history to prove to themselves that God no longer considered them the chosen
people and that they (the Christians) had taken their place. "All the hatred and
persecution of the Jewish people," writes Mr. Ravitch:
Mrs. Ruether finds explicated by this need to make the Jews finally admit that the
Church is right and they wrong about the coming of the savior foretold in the
Scriptures. A suffering Israel is needed by the Church for its own self-understanding and justification.
Mrs. Ruether spends a great deal of time in her book quoting Scripture to
support her thesis, but her arguments are only persuasive, as is the case with
most progressive exegesis, if one overlooks equally large passages which support
the opposite point of view. Both Ruether and Gregory Baum consider Paul's
Epistle to the Romans, especially chapter 11, as the prime example of radical anti-Semitism, yet their assertions are problematic from the beginning because of their
disregard of context.
Suppose, for example, you heard someone say that God had given the Jews
"a sluggish spirit." Would that statement make the person who said it anti-Semitic?
Well, the answer would depend upon the context in which the statement was
made. Suppose someone attributed the quote to Adolf Hitler. This would convince
us of its anti-Semitic intent. Suppose the remark was attributed to a government
official. Yes? Suppose the government official was Menachem Begin? Well, then,
no, primarily because Begin himself is a Jew.
But suppose the statement was attributed to St. Paul. Surely what he says
is absolutely central to Christianity. No one would deny that, and he does say that
the Jews are possessed of a sluggish spirit in his Epistle to the Romans. Does that
make Christianity anti-Semitic in the modern sense of the word, which is of course
the sense Ravitch and Macoby intend, replete with its implications of barbed wire
and gas chambers? And there should be no mistake in the matter, for Ravitch
means nothing less than to implicate St. Paul in the Nazi death camps.
Before I answer that question, however, I would like to take my line of
questioning one step further. Suppose Isaiah said that Jews were sluggish? Would
that make him an anti-Semite? If we are to disregard context completely, as
Ruether et al., do in this and other instances, the answer is unequivocally 'yes,' for
Isaiah does say just what we have been attributing to the anti-Semites all along.
St. Paul, in fact, got the passage from him. "For on you," we find written in the
Book of Isaiah (29:10), "has Yahweh poured a spirit of lethargy, he has closed your
eyes (the prophets), he has veiled your heads (the seers)." If St. Paul is ultimately
responsible for the death camps, as the writers in Commentary seems to be
arguing, then so are Isaiah and Elijah and anyone else who had anything
derogatory to say about things Jewish.
If, on the other hand, we are to read the Epistle to the Romans in context,
then those who make charges of anti-Semitism against Christianity will have to
come up with an explanation of passages like the following:
Let me put another question then: is it possible that God has rejected His people?
Of course not, I, an Israelite, descended from Abraham through the tribe of
Benjamin, could never agree that God has rejected His people, the people He
chose specifically long ago. (Romans 11:1-2)
The supercessionist argument, Messrs. Ravitch and Macoby should be
aware, is a game that both sides can play. According to Ravitch,
The Christian appropriation of the Scriptures and biblical history meant that the
traditional prophetic way of explicating historical events as the work of the Lord of
history could be used for Christian edification only at the expense of excoriating the
Jewish state.
Likewise, Macoby writes:
The role of the Jews was such that any sign of happiness or prosperity among
them gave rise to intolerable anxiety among Christians, for if the Jews did not
suffer, who would bear the guilt of the sacrifice of Jesus?
A number of points seem relevant here. First of all, Macoby completely
misunderstands the doctrine of the atonement. When Eugene Fisher, Executive
Secretary of the Secretariat for National Catholic-Jewish Relations of the National
Conference of Catholic Bishops, tries to set him straight in a letter to the editor in
which he cites the following passage from the Catechism of the Council of Trent:
In this guilt are involved all those who fall frequently into sin; for, as our sins
consigned Christ the Lord to the death of the cross, most certainly those who
wallow in sin and iniquity crucify to themselves again the Son of God" This guilt
seems more enormous in us than in the Jews, since according to the testimony of
the apostle (Paul), if they had known it they would never have crucified the Lord of
glory; while we, on the contrary, professing to know Him, yet denying Him by our
actions, seem in some sort to lay violent hands on Him.
Macoby simply ignores the issue.
Secondly, in the light of history, the supercessionist argument makes more
sense when turned in the opposite direction. While it is true that individual Jews
may have prospered vis a vis individual Christians, on the large scale the exact
opposite is true. The same Roman Empire which razed the Temple and dispersed
the Jews to the four corners of the earth became the Holy Roman Empire less than
four centuries later. Given the historical success of Christianity, it would seem just
as plausible to argue that Jews have their own psychological need to prove that
Christians have been on the wrong track from the beginning. Ravitch writes that "a
suffering Israel is needed by the Church for its own self-understanding and
justification," without giving any indication that a guilt-ridden Christianity is also
helpful to Jews like Ravitch and Macoby.
If Christianity is anti-Semitic, then it is evil. And if it is evil, or at least
radically flawed, then Ravitch and Macoby occupy the higher moral ground and
can use their position of moral superiority as a way of blackmailing concessions out
of what they consider a radically guilty Christendom. Lest guilty Christians be a
loss as to how to make their amends, Macoby spells out a program for them in his
response to the letters generated by his article. "On the general question of Jewish
Christian reconciliation," he writes:
We can derive some guidance from the story of Joseph and his brothers. Joseph
was able to forgive his violent brothers by giving them the opportunity to redeem
themselves by their behavior to Benjamin, also a favorite son and a source of
sibling rivalry. The Jews have set up a Benjamin, the state of Israel; and the
friendly attitude shown by many Christians to Israel has done much to convince
Jews of Christian repentance for evil done. (Commentary, March 1983, p. 21)
Because of their anti-Christian bias, both Ravitch and Macoby succumb to a
fundamental misreading of the Nazi period and its ideology. Even their own
statements on the relationship between Nazism and Christianity lack consistency.
At one point Macoby sees the Holocaust as "the natural (though not the inevitable)
outcome of previous religious history in Christendom," and yet at another point he
argues that one factor triggering the Nazi program of genocide "was the release
afforded by Nazism from all vestiges of the restraint imposed by traditional
Christian morality which had hitherto acted as a counterweight to Christian
mythology." According to Macoby then, Christian doctrine taught that it was good
to persecute Jews, and yet Christian morality taught that it was evil to act on such
doctrinal imperatives. Christians could, apparently, only act on their own doctrine
when neopagan Nazism had superceded it.
At another point Macoby writes:
When a community has been taught over centuries that it is weakness to be kind
to Jews, and that it is virtuous to persecute them, it is only a step (albeit a large
one) to Himmler's notorious speech to SS officers in which he lectured them on the
moral imperative of stifling their feelings of nausea about the mass killings.
Macoby, as is his wont, gives no source for these alleged "Christian"
teachings, nor does he give any indication that abjuring the Christian faith was an
explicit qualification for membership in the SS. He also makes no mention of the
Christians who died in the concentration camps or of the specific reckoning Hitler
planned for the Church once more pressing problems had been taken care of. Nor
does he indicate that for many Christians in the East, that reckoning had begun as
early as 1941. A note from the Holy See dated March 2, 1943 states:
At the beginning of October 1941, the number of priests from the diocese
"Warthegau," who were under arrest at Dachau, amounted to several hundred, but
this number swelled considerably every month as a result of the strong
intensification of police measures which resulted in the arrest and deportation of
further hundreds of clerics"
The fate reserved for those clerics who were members of orders was no less
pitiable. Several members of the clergy were shot to death or killed in other
manners. The overwhelming majority of the others were arrested, deported or
driven out" The diocesan seminaries were closed in Gnesen and Posen, Leslau
and Litzmannstadt"
Even the nuns who were members of orders were not able to continue their
charitable work without disturbance. A corresponding concentration camp was
established for them in Bojanowo (Schmukert) where approximately 400 sisters
were interned at the middle of 1941"
In light of such evidence, the claim that Christianity is a type of proto- or
crypto-Nazism becomes more and more difficult to maintain. It is also difficult to
maintain such a thesis in light of more recent documents, most specifically the
Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions of the Second
Vatican Council, which states:
Even though the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for
the death of Christ, neither all Jews indiscriminately at that time, nor Jews today,
can be charged with the crimes committed during the passion" Indeed, the
Church reproves every form of persecution against whomsoever it may be
directed. Remembering, then, her common heritage with the Jews and moved not
by any political consideration, but solely by the religious motivation of Christian
charity, she deplores all hatreds, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism leveled at
any time or from any source against the Jews.
Given their radical view of the evil in Christianity, it is not hard to predict the
outcome of Ravitch and Macoby's proposed cure. "The Christian doctrine of
atonement," Ravitch writes, "in which the Jews play the role of cosmic villains,
needs to be explained on its own mythological terms, not tarted up as respectable
sounding theology. No program of Jewish-Christian ecumenism should
compromise with this doctrine by allowing its theological validity." If, among other
things, Christians are to give up the atonement in the interest of ecumenism, then
the cure proposed by Ravitch and Macoby would mean nothing less than the
destruction of Christianity, and since they rely so heavily on the arguments of the
notoriously heterodox Mrs. Ruether, it seems that this is what they must have had
in mind from the beginning.
Mr. Ravitch, however, should be more aware of the views of his supposed
ally. In his article, he says of Ruether, "It would not be too much to say that
Rosemary Ruether's sympathy with the Jewish plight has brought her around to a
Jewish view of the Messianic question." Mr. Ravitch apparently has never read
Mrs. Ruether's account of her own spiritual and intellectual development,
something which appeared in Journeys edited by Gregory Baum. In it she wrote:
Having dwelt in the households of the suppressed faiths for a time, I felt I was on
more sympathetic terms with the Ba'al worshipers. I knew that Ba'al was a real
god, the revelation of the mystery of life, the expression of the depths of Being
which has broken through into the lives of people and gave them a key to the
mystery of death and rebirth" On the other hand, Yahweh had deplorably violent
ways, and a lot of evil had been done in the name of Christ" As for the defects of
Ba'al, were they more spectacular then the defects of the biblical God or Messiah,
or perhaps less so? (p. 43)
It seems, then, that the real link that unites Ruether, Ravitch, and Macoby is
their disdain for orthodoxy. "The overcoming of orthodox fundamentalism," Ravitch
writes, "can indeed liberate Christians and Jews from their confrontational faiths."
Unfortunately, the exact opposite is true. Were he not so blinded by his uncritical
acceptance of the anti-dogmatic principle, with Cardinal Newman called liberalism,
Mr. Ravitch would see that the only real basis for cooperation between Jews and
Christians lies in their mutual adherence to their own respective orthodoxies, which
have in common a code of behavior based on absolute moral laws. Ravitch's own
anti-Christian bias blinds him to the fact that theological liberals like Mrs. Ruether
are not so much interested in combating anti-Semitism as in finding another stick
with which they can beat the Church. In attacking Christianity, Ravitch and Macoby
simply give expression to the conventional wisdom of New Class Intellectuals, for
whom anti-Catholicism and (with the rise of the Moral Majority) anti-Fundamentalism are acceptable forms of bigotry.
The great tragedy here is that Ravitch and Macoby, by attacking orthodoxy,
may very well bring about the very anti-Semitism they deplore. First of all, because
bigotry begets resentment. But secondly because if orthodoxy with its absolute
prohibitions of certain immoral actions is destroyed, the only other source for moral
authority will be the law which specifies that "might makes right." This shift to a
"new morality" happened once with the advent of the racial pseudo-religion of the
Nazis, and it is happening again in our own campaign of exterminating the unborn.
It is a sad fact of contemporary history that liberal Jews are blind to the
connections between the two phenomena and to the fact that the orthodox were
consistent in their opposition to both. It is a known fact that Hitler admired the
theories of Margaret Sanger, the foundress of Planned Parenthood. How is it then
that liberal Jews fail to see that the connection between the Nazis then and the
proabortionsts now is that both are decidedly heterodox in their denial of the
sovereignty of God and the absolute nature of moral laws? Who but the orthodox,
both Christian and Jew, are more militant in their opposition to abortion and
infanticide, which are the clearest manifestations that Nazism is alive and well in
our day?
To see Jews like Ravitch and Macoby side with proabortionists like
Rosemary Ruether is a painfully ironic sight. It leads one to believe that St. Paul
was right all along:
Brothers, I have the very warmest love for the Jews, and I pray to God for them to
be saved. I can swear to their fervor for God, but their zeal is misguided. (Romans
10:1-2)