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The Jews. For Christians, the name of no other people on the face of the earth carries the resonance that this one does. Due to a fateful history together that resonance is charged, in both positive and negative polarities. Toward the Jews, the church has never been neutral.
A spate of recent books as well as a pregnant historical moment give us occasion to rethink all things Jewish. None of the works to be reviewed in this essay offers such a rethinking from a Christian perspective. That is precisely why these books are valuable for Christians to consider. For the entirety of Christian history we have viewed the Jewish people from within a theological perspective that makes it nearly impossible for us to enter into their self-understanding as a people; or for that matter, simply to read their history and understand their politics in a way like unto how we would consider the history and politics of any other people.
For Christians, the Jews are the chosen people of God, born out of the call of God to Abraham, distinct from the nations and unlike any other people on earth. In the mystery of biblical inspiration, they are both the authors and the subjects of the Holy Bible—all of the first two-thirds we Christians call the Old Testament and almost all of the New Testament. Jesus, the One we adore as Son of God and Savior of the world, was Jewish. All of his original apostles were Jewish. The most important of the first-century converts to Christianity, Saul of Tarsus, was a "Hebrew of the Hebrews." Christianity began as a Messianic splinter movement within Judaism, and its convictions are impossible to understand apart from these origins. As well, most Christian eschatologies hold out a significant role for the Jewish people as a way of tying up the most unsettling loose end in the Christian schema of salvation history.
How that loose end, that "Jewish question," has bedeviled Christian thought and besmirched Christian behavior for these 2000 years! God took human form in Jesus, we believe. But "He came to his own, and his own received him not." Jewish religious leaders, our four Gospels seem to tell us, were among the least responsive of all flesh to the coming of the Incarnate One. The Passion narratives depict them as at least complicit in his death. The Book of Acts generally portrays them as foes of the apostolic evangelistic mission. Yet as the New Testament era closes, the Gospel is progressing, despite the efforts of its most committed opponents in Jerusalem, or for that matter, in Rome.
Synagogue and church, portrayed as estranged in the New Testament, have remained estranged for most of these two millennia.1 And in these two millennia the church has wrestled with its ultimate theological loose end both through an array of frequently spiteful theological writings and through the incarnation of Christian frustration in a shameful variety of forms: suppression of Jewish religion and practice, coerced Christianity and conversion at pain of death, discrimination and ghettoization, forced emigration and deportation, pogroms, Crusades and massacres. This horrible history culminated in the twentieth century with the mass murder of the European Jews, at the hands of baptized Christians, in the heart of formerly Christian Europe, serving an anti-Christian idolatry called Nazism.
The Holocaust, once its horror was fully recognized, seemed to break the power of Christian anti-Semitism. Much of the Western Christian world, recoiling at the shock of what had occurred in its midst, eventually sought means of atonement. Politically, that atonement primarily took the form of the Western powers permitting and to a certain extent enabling the birth of the nation of Israel in 1948—an in dependent Jewish homeland for the first time since the Maccabean era. Theologically, the Holocaust led some Christians to undertake theological reflections with the aim of removing the cancer of anti-Semitism.
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