Anti-Semitism

Irrational evil marks history of Jew hatred

GREG SHERIDAN

It’s the oldest hate of all, and the most terrible.

A few weeks ago, long before the Hamas atrocities and the inevitable Israeli response in Gaza, I attended a modest suburban function. I couldn’t believe the security, the twostage vehicular entry, the multiple guards. Even in peaceful, cheerful, law-abiding Australia, a Jewish community centre needs perpetual guarding.

Anti-Semitism, the hatred of Jews, is deranged, but widespread.

It’s the most difficult hatred of all to understand, partly because it’s irrational, evil and nourished from wildly divergent sources.

Today, several main strands of anti-Semitism disfigure our world. It’s to be found in the conspiratorial swamp fevers of the far left and far right, casually among cowardly universities (what’s the collective noun for vice-chancellors? a “lack” of principles), inferentially and unconsciously in countless media reports. It has a strong identity in the Arab world and in Islamist movements.

But let me say straight away the biggest source of anti-Semitism throughout history is Christianity.

These are hard words to say. I’m someone who believes Christianity is true, and that it’s been overwhelmingly a force for good. But the inheritance of anti- Semitism is a blight on Christian history.

It comes from faulty theology surrounding the idea that the Jews killed Christ. Of course, Christ was executed under Roman authority. The New Testament has remarks critical of “the Jews”. Properly understood, these refer exclusively to the temple authorities in Jerusalem at the time. Today we might say the Russians decided to invade Ukraine. Moral culpability resides only with the Moscow government, not the whole Russian people, or Russians in perpetuity.

John Barton in his absorbing treatment of Bible translation, The Word, recounts a proposal to substitute “Judaeans” to make clear the New Testament references are to a specific group of individuals at a specific time. Most modern bibles refer to “the Jewish authorities” rather than to the Jews.

In any event, it’s all 2000 years too late. The overwhelming majority of anti-Semitism today is not Christian. But it draws on centuries of images, stereotypes and lies perpetrated against Jews by some Christians.

Many of these images were propaganda inventions and fevered fantasies. In medieval times there grew up the idea that Jews killed Christian children to mix their blood in ritual bread. This was an imagined mimicry of Christ’s suffering and death. It was obscene, completely untrue.

This “blood libel” was condemned as a lie by popes, but it held an evil grip on popular imagination.

Much anti-Semitism was Catholic, though many Catholics understood the Jewishness of their own religion and admired the Jewish tradition. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval theologians, drew on Moses Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed.

The Reformation didn’t help Jews, and Protestants did their share of Jew hating. Martin Luther was a formidable theologian, but at a certain point he turned against Jews and authored some of the most savage anti-Semitic abuse. Over centuries, Jews were expelled from one European nation after another.

This, then, is religious anti- Semitism. It’s been denounced now by every Christian denomination.

Pope John Paul II apologised for Christian sins against Jews, saying: “We are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood.”

There’s religious anti-Semitism in Islam as well. The Koran, like the Christian New Testament, contains disparaging passages about Jews. Islamist extremists conflate this with political disputes involving Israel.

Much popular Arab media discourse is now frankly anti-Semitic; so is a portion of school curriculums.

Each new iteration of anti- Semitism has drawn on earlier iterations, especially the negative imagery and stereotypes. This is how evil lives on. At the dawn of the 20th century, the Russian secret police concocted an epic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This purported to recount the proceedings of a group of Jewish elders plotting world domination, not least through finance power. Though everything about the Protocols was a lie, they are one of the most successful acts of black propaganda in history.

The Nazis combined the global domination lie of the Protocols with a racialised version of religious anti-Semitism. Because Jews had rejected Christ, they were seen as alien to Western culture.

The Nazis detested Christianity, as they detested all religion. But they knew they needed some kind of ersatz Nazi Christianity as part of their ideology.

Like some arms of Palestinian propaganda today, the Nazis thus decided Christ wasn’t really Jewish. They reserved special hatred for Paul, who with his universalism – “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female, but you are all one in Christ Jesus” – had severed the link between blood and nationality, between ethnicity and citizenship.

The far right today continues with all the tropes of traditional anti-Semitism – Jewish global dominance, Jewish cultural otherness, and so on. If the Jews dominate the world, how did the Holocaust happen, you might ask. Just shows how fiendishly clever they are, is the demented right-wing conspiracy response.

Arab anti-Semitism always had its virulent side. The mufti of Jerusalem met Hitler in 1943 and the two were as one in their hatred of Jews. During the war, the mufti lent his support to Nazi SS recruitment campaigns.

The communist left always had a strong element of anti- Semitism. But popular left anti- Semitism really took off in the Cold War, during the alliance of Israel with the US. Leftist ideology grants no rights of indigenous identity to the Jews of the Middle East, casting them as a colonial, racist power acting on behalf of, or manipulating, the West.

Thus Jews are hated on the right because they are allegedly alien to Western culture, and they are hated on the left because they are allegedly exemplars of Western culture. The left’s antipathy to Israel, and its ignorant idealising of Islamist hatreds as “resistance”, have led to an irrational, hysterical hostility to Israel which is antiSemitism by another name.

All the different strands of anti-Semitism seem weirdly happy to link up and crossfertilise, to draw on the images and insults of their contradictory conspiracy theories and serially monstrous misunderstandings of the world.

In truth, the Jewish tradition is one of the most sublime, profound and beautiful the world has produced. Spend some time in the Old Testament if you don’t believe me. Read as your commentary the works of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

It’s also the case that the Jewish contribution to the arts, to science and to all branches of culture is magnificent. The world owes the sure knowledge of one God, the essence of monotheism, to Jewish experience and tradition.

The Old Testament in many ways is a continuous song of protest against the barbarities of ancient paganism.

Perhaps that’s the real cause of anti-Semitism. The Jews brought the Ten Commandments to the world. And the spirit of evil has never forgiven them.