AP

Insofar as the general populace thinks on these things, there is a tendency in many circles to blame Christianity for the scourge of anti-Semitism. Martin Luther is seen to be somehow behind the Holocaust. A potted history may therefore be of some help in establishing a different, and more accurate, narrative. Let me begin not with a quote from Scripture but an observation by the ancient historian, Herodotus: ‘Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best.’ That can be a civil strength, and a spiritual bondage.

In the Old Testament period, Haman (in the book of Esther) tried to exterminate the Jewish people while, later, Antiochus Epiphanes (in the books of Maccabees) tried to exterminate the Jewish religion. Later still, Seneca, Tacitus, and Cicero reveal no great affection for the Jews. Liberal biblical critics have managed to find anti-Semitism in the New Testament. This confuses anti-Semitism (usually meaning a dislike of Jewish people) with anti-Judaism (a rejection of Jewish teaching as exemplified especially in the Pharisees).

References to Scripture can be selective, but when the divine Word became flesh, He became Jewish flesh (John 1:14). The Samaritan woman saw Him as a Jewish man (John 4:9), and Christ Himself said that salvation is of the Jews, not the Samaritans or anyone else (John 4:22). So earnest was the apostle Paul in seeking the salvation of his fellow Jews that in praying for them, he could wish himself condemned (anathema) if only they could be saved (Rom.9:1-3; 10:1). What love is that!

In the period of the early Church, there were debates with Jews which were serious enough, but not necessarily unloving. The medieval period saw some dreadful acts as Jews were sometimes accused of ritual murder, profaning the eucharistic host, and poisoning wells. In 1189-1190 rioters in York in England massacred over 150 Jews. King Richard I was horrified, but it cannot be said that the murderers received justice.

Luther’s attitude is notoriously problematic. In 1523 he wrote a rather tender work, ‘That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew’, where he argued that Jews ought to be well treated in order to encourage them to become Christians. Before his death in 1546, his tone had changed, for the worse. Converted Jews were to be treated as brothers, but obstinate Jews were to be exiled. For all that, which cannot be defended, his later anti-Semitism was spiritual; Hitler’s was racial; Hitler was raised in Catholicism in Austria where Luther’s influence was rather minimal; and there are 400 years between the lives of the two men.

The Puritans would seek the welfare of the Jews, both in being kind to them and in praying for their conversion. Enlightenment thinkers could go either way, but Voltaire regarded God’s ancient people with contempt. In Russia in the nineteenth century there were pogroms (massacres) against the Jews, while many authorities in France took seriously the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which told of a Jewish plot to rule the world. There is nothing quite like a conspiracy theory to stir up the masses.

In Germany, both before and after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, theological liberals and biblical critics often rejected the Old Testament as Jewish, and portrayed Jesus as the son of an Aryan soldier. There were students who did PhDs which interpreted Matthew 5:21-48 (with its refrain of ‘you have heard it said, but I say unto you’) as an attack on the Jews themselves, not on the Pharisees in particular. The German Evangelical Church divided into two: the pro-Nazi German Christians and the more resistant Confessing Church. To cite one dreadful example of the former, the German Christians of Thuringia, led by two young pastors, Siegfried Leffler and Julius Leutheuser, produced a hymnbook of Our Battle-songs, where one bombastic effort contains the line ‘Germany, awake, death to Judah’.

The anti-Semitism found in Islam – in the Quran and the Hadith – has been revived in recent times as Islam has regained some vigour. The death cult, Hamas, for example, won the popular vote of 2006 for the Palestinian Legislative Council, without quite gaining 50% of the vote. It sees no way ahead for the Middle East, except in the destruction of the Jews and of Israel. In the West, this has been mixed in with a residue of a Darwinian rejection of the Old Testament as a primitive religion. Jesus brings the new wine – where ‘new’ means ‘unprecedented’.

All histories are mixed, but today we have become too fond of a binary view of life – except where gender is concerned! For example, should we be proud of post-1788  Australian history or ashamed of it? Surely, the Bible sees this as a false dichotomy, which forces a lop-sided answer. There is evidence of God’s grace and of human sin. We can be grateful and we can grieve; we must be humble and also discerning.

All of us are in need of a Saviour because we have all sinned and offended God. That is true of Jews, Muslims, atheists, agnostics, and Christians. Divided by race, we can be united by grace. That is the message of Christ.

– Peter Barnes