A Case Against Christianity 1

... A CASE AGAINST CHRISTIANITY 1 ...

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Question: What accounts for the long, strange tradition of hating the Jews? When, during the God Friday services at St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome in 1963, Pope John XXIII, who led the Catholic Church at that time (something about that man the world loved), interrupted the recitation of a prayer at the altar in order to have the celebrant priest omit from his Latin text the time-revered phrase "perfidious Jews," the entire world sat up in astonishment and the Jews were moved and grateful. Such a thing had never happened in the entire history of the Church.

But progress is not always straight-forward. Sometimes the progression of history can be measured only by the kind of satirical command that was given to the Sabine Women as they advanced to battle in Andreyev's play by that name: "Two steps forward - three steps back - march!"

It wasn't until October 28, 1965, that Pope Paul VI thoughtfully proclaimed Jews not collectively guilty for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. So what were the feelings, better yet, the cause of the feelings, that the Christian population had, or were taught to have, toward the Jews before that Papal announcement? Granted, there were always exceptions. These feelings stemmed from the outrageous accusations that the Church had toward the Jews. See the above link for an explanation of this. If you are comfortable getting around your browser, you'll also find on that page a link to the holocaust years and from there to an unofficial response by the Catholic Church defending their actions during those years. Their response is interesting.

It's something we have to face in relatively recent times, I'm sure today but in more hidden ways. In President Nixon's Oval Office, the Rev. Billy Graham did not mince words in describing his feelings about Jewish people ahd the news media: "This stranglehold has got to be broken or this country's going down the drain." This was captured on tape (Nixon had that strange addiction to audiotaping all conversations in his office), and it took 30 years for Rev. Graham to apologize for those words. In his conversations with Nixon, mostly from January to June of 1972, the evangelist complained about what he saw as Jewish domination of the news media.

"You believe that?" Nixon asked in response.
"Yes, sir," Mr. Graham said.
"Oh boy. So do I," Nixon said. "I can't ever say that, but I believe it."
No, but if you get elected a second time, then *we* might be able to do something." Mr. Graham said.
Later in the conversation, when Nixon raised the subject of Jewish influence in Hollywood and the news media, Mr. Graham said:
"A lot of Jews are great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know I am friendly to Israel and so forth. But they don't know how I really feel about what they're doing to this country, and I have no power and no way to handle them." Nixon replied, "You must not let them know."

Truth is that Nixon *was* good to Israel during his administration, and for practical purposes, it is the action of a man that counts. But it's interesting to know, when the window is there, what goes on in a man's heart too.

Anti-Semitism is not new to the human scene; it was with us thousands of years ago. Constantine VII, Byzantine emperor (912-59), required from Jews in Christian courts a humiliating form of oath -- more Judaico (the Jewish oath) -- which continued in use in Europe till the nineteenth century. This humiliating oath was to be recited before a Christian judge by order of the otherwise humane Emperor Charlemagne. In some places, before taking this oath, the Jew was required to put a wreath of thorns on his head in damning memory of the crucifixion of Jesus ... the "hereditary" crime with which the Jew was always charged. Standing ankle-deep in water (in pointed scorn for his having rejected Christian baptism), he was forced to recite aloud: "In the name of the Lord Zebaot (the Lord of hosts) I swear truthfully ... But if I swear falsely, may my descendants be cursed, may I grope along the wall like a blind man ... at the same time, may the earth open up and swallow me as it did Dathan and Abiram."

Even more humiliating, if possible, were the circumstances under which the oath was for centuries taken in the kingdom of Saxony. There the Jew had to stand on the skin of a sow, an animal sternly forbidden to a pious Jew by ritual law as being the most unclean in the animal kingdom. In Silesia even more sport was made of the Jew when he appeared in a Christian court; there it was required that he recite the text of the More Judaico while struggling to keep his precarious balance on a rickety stool from which one leg had been removed. All this he did while wrapped in this tallis (prayer shawl) and wearing the ridiculous sugarloaf hat that the Fourth Lateran Council had mockingly made obligatory for all Jews in order that they might properly be identified as such by Christians.

On July 15, 1205, Pope Innocent III decreed that Jews are doomed to perpetual servitude and subjugation due to the crucifixion of Jesus. And on July 15, 1937, exactly 732 years later, Buchenwald concentration camp opened for business. So how innocent was Innocent; you plant the seeds, sprinkle some holy water on it, and given the right soil, and some incense to make it palatable, just sit back. Throughout my discussion here, I'll claim no direct causality, but the accusations and teaching throughout history certainly made things easier for the villains. Set a small spark among dry tinder, have the right combustible material, and a conflagration is sure to follow. Some aside about our innocent pope: In the summer of 1253, he ordered that all Jews be expelled from Vienne, France. I'm not sure what authority he had there but such an papal order was given.

The answer can also be a perversion of perception, a projection of what the Christian sees within himself. And upon whom would he project these feelings?; upon a group who for various reasons (jealousy included), has always lived better than the populace around them. When the majority were peasant farmhands, the Jews were into some form of commerce; even if like Tevya, selling milk from his cart, even when he had to pull that cart by himself.

Life always wasn't so good. In feudal times, the Jews were considered and treated as "outlanders." Being social outcasts, they had no legal, social, or economic status, but were juridically classified as servi camerai or Kammerknecht, "the king's servants" or "chattels." Like all personal property, they could be transferred, pawned, or sold outright by the rulers, the higher barons, and the princes of the Church. Their opportunities for earning a livelihood were painfully limited (another reason for being forced into the "moneylending" business ... put limits on an intelligent being, and he is going to find some outlet for it). An aside: I wonder how many criminals today are forced into their trade by society's subtle way of keeping certain people down, notwithstanding that in spite of that, some who are "stronger than the rest" rise above that punishment to bread into the mainstream.

Back to my point, though it is true that the Jews' circumstances may have varied in different places and from one century to another, yet certain conditions that were constant, handicapped Jews everywhere. They could not belong to Christian trade or merchant guilds nor could they form their own (except in Prague, where there were a few Jewish artisan guilds); they could own neither house, nor land, and they were strictly enjoined from engaging in farming.

For limited periods of time they were tolerated as doctors and in this profession they excelled. But when the medical schools of Europe began turning out sufficient numbers of competent Christian doctors, the Church officially placed the papal ban on the many educated and accomplished Jewish healers for Christian patients, and the field of medicine too was practically closed to Jews. Unhappily, occupations which still remained open to Jews by law were limited to the despised "coarse" or "marginal" trades such as junk-dealing, street-hawking,, the buying of old clothes and bones, and lastly, and most hazardously, moneylending, money changing, and the pawnbroking, all three being usually united in one establishment.

Here I should like to mention that these Jews were able to read when the general populace was illiterate. One reason for this was that reading was required for a boys bar-mitzvah at age 13; so in effect, to be a Jew it was required that the Jewish boy be able to read (even if only in Hebrew) ... and thus the key to reading was decoded early in the boy's life, and transferable to any language and country where he might relocate.

There was a Dutch rabbi named Menasseh ben Israel, who in 1656, cited the following psychological theory, and offered the very weird accusation of ritual child murder as an example. He claimed that people who hate the Jews notice something about themselves, and then project it onto the Jews. Here's a case in point:

In ancient times ritual child murder was imputed to the Christians by their pagan enemies. But in the Middle Ages, Christians took to imputing that same crime to the Jews. The Christians convinced themselves that Jews needed the blood of Christian babies in order to bake a properly sinister matzoh, or Passover bread. The absurdity of this is obvious when you consider the diatery laws that Jews have always observed. You can note the ... Jewish Dietary Laws ... where you will see that blood is totally forbidden in Jewish cooking ... to think otherwise is absurd.

But with this belief in mind, Christian mobs used to assemble during Holy Week and, enraged by their own fantasies, go rampaging through the ghettos, murdering Jews. And so (to push the rabbi's insight one more step), it was the Christians who ended up performing what could be described as ritual murders ... killings conducted in the name of religion, on dates selected from their sacred calendar.

Psychological inversions about Jews go back a long way in the history of Christianity. Now we all know that the historical Jesus was a Jew who was killed by the gentiles ... that is, the Romans. But in the Christian interpretation, the historical Jesus was nicely transformed into a Christian who was killed by the Jews. And Those same inversions have managed to reappear in modern times in all kinds of versions.

It is the commonest thing in the world, even today, to hear the Jews being accused of greed and money-grubbing. Yet as the Swiss banking scandal and a dozen revelations from the art museums and countries around the globe keep on demonstrating, it is the Jews who have been systematically robbed, on a giant scale, and by the finest of banks and governments too. And where Jews did become successful: in education, the arts, the theater, medicine, law, professional life, and business (including export-import), and of course, philanthropies, and most worthwhile human endeavors (way beyond their general proportion in societies), might there be reasons for it? Could it be study? Family? Hard work? And even some intelligence with the ability and perseverance to apply it?

And if there is such a thing as "Jewish intelligence" ... what in history (forgetting any religious explanation) might have happened to cause that? In our past, and maybe present, the most intelligent member of our communities (the old shtetles in Europe and Russia) was the Rabbi, and he followed the biblical command to be fruitful and multiply. Who were the most intelligent among the Catholics? They were the priests and the entire hierarchy above them. What happened to their seed? They were and continue to be told not to have children (complete opposite of the Jewish tradition).

I can't resist a joke at this point: The Pope dies and, naturally, goes to heaven. The reception committee meets him, and after a whirlwind tour is told that he can enjoy any of the myriad recreations available. He decides that he wants to read all of the ancient original text of the Holy Scriptures, and spends the next eon or so learning the languages. After becoming a linguistic master, he sits down in the library and begins to pour over every version of the Bible, working back from the most recent "Easy reading" to the original script. All of a sudden there is a scream in the library. The angels come running to him, only to find the Pope huddled in a chair, crying to himself, and muttering, "An 'R' ... they left out the 'R'." G-d takes him aside, offering comfort and asks him what the problem is. After collecting his wits, the Pope sobs again, "It's the letter 'R' ... the word was supposed to be CELEBRATE."

I could go on. The theme has the misfortune of being inexhaustible. Menasseh ben Israel turns out to have discovered a persistent truth of Western civilization. But how did those many strange psychological inversions from long ago manage to survive the end of the Middle Ages and wend their way into the modern age? How, for example, did they creep into Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" and other works of art in England, which then turned out to be the masterpieces of world civilization, therefore immortal.

James Shapiro, in his book, "Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play," show a very similar phenomenon, the preservation of ancient fantasies by means of art, this time in a German setting. Oberammergau is a quaint Catholic village in Bavaria that began putting on a passion play in 1634, or possibly earlier, and has performed the play every 10 years from that time on. Half the village takes part in the production, in one way or another, and the mass participation long ago created an impression that Oberammergau must be a sort of Christian Shangri-La, as Shapiro puts it ... a timeless place where the villagers "were believed to be somehow in touch with a primitive Christian spirituality."

By the 1930, hundreds of thousands of people were making the trek into the Bavarian ills to see the amazing spectacle. Yet what was Oberammergau's play, in its traditional form? It was an extended expression of loathing for the Jewish people. It was an extravaganza of spiritualized hatred, in which the performers and audiences could feel themselves borne away on clouds of innocence and love.

In 1860, the play was described in these words: "The Jewish race appeared hateful in your eyes, as you watched them gathering round the cross, looking upon the man they had crucified, and railing at him, and taunting him with his powerlessness and his pain. Then for the first time you seemed to understand the significance of those ungovernable explosions that in the history of the Middle Ages one reads of, when sudden outbursts of hatred against the Hebrew race have taken place, and have been followed by cruelties and barbarities unrivaled in history.

In later years, after the cruelties and barbarities of the Middle Ages had been rivaled and even outrivaled, a delicate but crucially important question arose on the topic of Christianity and its relation to modern barbarism. Did the Nazi (capitalized reluctantly) crimes draw on Christian tradition? Or did Nazism draw instead, as the Roman Catholic Church has argued, on pagan ideas that were distinctly anti-Christian? Whatever the larger answer might be, in the little village of Oberammerau it was not so easy to tell Nazi paganism from Christian tradition.

Professor Raul Hilberg in the Destruction of the European Jews, noted the parallel between Nazi anti-Semitism, and anti-Jewish legislation practiced by the Church (including the "Christ killer" reference; I remember as a child being called that). Hilberg refers to the churches anti-Jewish legislation as "fifteen hundred years of destructive activity." When we were kids, we would say "sticks and bones can break my bones, but names can never harm me," it is actually not true. Words and name-calling can actually hurt deeply. It also should be remembered that while a word is a word and a deed is a deed, words lead to deeds, and after the above words there were many times I would be beaten up for being a "Christ killer." Once a word has been said, it is almost impossible to take back, for a spoken word spreads to others in ways that can never be undone.

In his book, "A Moral Reckoning," Daniel Jonah Goldhagen lists a series of questions about the behavior of the Roman Catholic Church during the Holocaust, and they are not only good questions, but also questions that acquire a kind of cumulative force, placed one next to the other, as Mr. Goldhagen has.
Why, he asks, did the church, immediately after the war, create the fiction that the wartime Pope Pius XII had consistently condemned the Nazi persecution of the Jews, when, in historical fact, he said little of nothing when that persecution was taking place?
Why did the church aid and abet "the mass murderers of Jews" as they attempted to escape Allied justice (a reference to the role of high churchmen in helping ex-Nazi escape to South America)?
Why, when Hitler died in the ashes of Berlin in 1945, did the German Cardinal Adolf Bertram order that "a solemn requiem mass be held in commemoration of the Fuhrer"?
Understandably, I could never say all were guilty. Brought to mind is the Archbishop of Lvov who "on his own" provided hiding places for Jewish children and many scrolls of Torah; that was in 1942. There were countless other examples of this Catholic heroism ... but where the real power was, the papacy, there could have been, and should have been, more in words and in action. Instead, the Pope did nothing. Pope Pius even had the effrontery to receive the German ambassador, Baron von Weizsacker, on July 12, 1943; what they spoke about is a matter of history.
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