Any discussion of anti-Semitism is bound to raise the question of its cause. Widely-varying attempts have been made to explain this extraordinary phenomenon. Some have sought to find the explanation in factors of psychology, or economics, or sociology.
We are told that the Jew is hated because he is different, because he has his own cultural observances, keeps his feasts and holidays at different times from those of the majority, practices his own marriage customs and, most inconvenient of all if he observes them, has his own dietary laws. No doubt these things often make it difficult for Gentiles to have normal social relationships with Jews, but they hardly seem sufficient to account for the intensity of the dislike which many Gentiles feel for Jews.
We may be told that it is a case of “dislike of the unlike,” something comparable to color prejudice and other forms of racial discrimination, an inborn sense of aversion that centuries of contact have done nothing to eradicate. We may see the force of all this and yet feel that we are only touching the fringe of the problem.
The same is true of arguments oriented to economic factors. Jews are disliked because they are successful in business. They drive hard bargains and display their success in brash and obstentatious behavior. They are too exclusive; they live in a degree of voluntary segregation in neighborhoods they have largely appropriated for themselves. On the other hand, they will at times move into predominantly Gentile areas and cause resentment by their different standards of manners and behavior. Their strong sense of family loyalty is much to be admired, of course, but why must they be so smug about it? And why do they obtrude their Bar-mitzvah and circumcision celebrations in districts where it is only socially acceptable to be convivial at Christmas time? No doubt we have all heard arguments of this sort, but whether we agree or disagree we can scarcely regard them in any sense as adequate explanations of anti-Semitism.
Reaching Back Into The Past
Hatred of the Hebrew peoples has a very long history reaching back at least to the time of Moses and arising in countries where political and social factors have varied enormously. It is our contention that anti-Semitism is at root a theological problem and can never he understood apart from considerations of theology.
It is true that the Jew is different from other men, but the basic reason for his difference is his conviction, a conviction that again goes back to the time of Moses, if not to Abraham, that he stands in a peculiar relationship to God. The Jew if he is true to his faith must believe that God revealed himself to Abraham and entered into a solemn covenant with him, a covenant of which circumcision was the outward sign and seal (Gen. 17:7–14). Even before the covenant came into being, God had made solemn promises to Abraham: “I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed (Gen. 12:2, 3).
The promises were repeated to Isaac and Jacob, and through Moses God entered into a covenant-relationship with the entire nation. Israel then became a “peculiar people,” the people of the Covenant, pledged to observe the Torah, the law of God in which his purposes were revealed.
Israel therefore has a peculiar vocation among men, namely, that of reminding them of the reality of God and that he has a law which men are required to keep.
It is precisely this reality of God and of his demands upon men which men are often anxious to forget. Yet so long as the Jew exists, complete forgetfulness of such reality is impossible. Hence his very existence is resented, and attempts have been made again and again to destroy him. The fact that from the days of Pharaoh to the days of Hitler these attempts have failed, and that, in the words of Disraeli, the Jew has “stood at the graveside of his persecutors,” confirms his conviction that he is in a peculiar sense the man of the covenant who belongs to the people of God, a people that cannot be destroyed until God’s purposes for them are fulfilled.
A Reminder Of God’S Reality
Anti-Semitism is closely involved in original sin. The primal, original sin of man is disobedience. Man has rebelled against God, chosen his own way rather than God’s, and made himself instead of God the center of his universe. This leads inevitably to a desire to forget, if not deny, the fact of God’s existence and certainly the validity of God’s law. In the Genesis story man is depicted as rebelling and immediately trying to hide from God. The very first temptation of the Serpent was to cast doubt on the reality of the divine command. “Yea, hath God said?” It is therefore not surprising that man should react against a people who in a unique way remind him of the reality of God and of the binding validity of his law. Yet this is precisely what the continued existence of the Jews serves to demonstrate.
Three writers of widely differing background have borne witness to the fact that the Jewish people and their history afford irrefutable evidence of the reality of God.
The Protestant theologian Karl Barth has said that the Jews provide the “only possible natural proof of God’s existence.”
Nicholas Berdyaev, the Russian Orthodox writer, has described how as a young man he determined to test the materialistic interpretation of history by applying it to the story of one people after another. He found that it broke down hopelessly in the case of the Jews. On all ordinary human standards of reasoning they should long ago have disappeared from the face of history. Their continued existence could only be explained in terms of the existence of God.
Similarly, Jacques Maritain, the French Roman Gatholic philosopher, says that Israel can only rightly be understood as a “Mystery” comparable with the “Mystery” of the Church. She is in the world but not “of the world.” It is her inevitable destiny to remain in the world as a reminder of the God whom men would prefer to forget. Of course, men still try to explain the existence of the Jews as a purely human phenomenon, but they have a subconscious fear that it is not wise to look into the matter too closely.
It is safe to say that the average man has at least some knowledge of the Old Testament. Even if he never reads it himself, there remain somewhere in his memory echoes of generations of churchgoing with the inevitable “First Lesson” consisting of solemn warnings from the prophets against idolatry and dramatic stories illustrating the fate of those who “did evil in the sight of the Lord.” Coupled with all this is the recollection of the Ten Commandments to which no such comforting clause as “only five need be attempted” was ever attached!
It is as though the Jew constantly said to him, “Look at us and be warned in time! Here we are a people scattered over the face of the earth, a people with a tragic and terrible history, all because our fathers rebelled against God, refused to listen to his prophets, and rejected his laws.” This sort of object lesson is extremely unpleasant and naturally produces hostile reactions. People may seek to escape from the truth by pointing to the apparent prosperity of many Jews, but they forget that such persons are only the few fortunate survivors of the millions who have perished at the hands of their persecutors. Others may seize upon certain Jewish characeristics which they dislike, characteristics that are usually the result of centuries of maltreatment, and seek the explanation for anti-Semitism here.
The Hebrew And The Cross
There is, however, another far more subtle line of argument, more dangerous because of the strange mixture of truth and error which it contains. Did not the Jews reject and crucify Christ? Have they not been cast off and compelled to suffer as a result? Did not the rulers of Israel cry, “His blood be on us and on our children?” There can be no doubt that in the “centuries of faith” arguments of this sort were again and again used to justify anti-Semitism. It is often forgotten that for centuries persecution of the Jews was not only perpetrated by professing Christians but was carried out as the official policy of the Church in the very name of Christ! How are we to explain anything so utterly contrary to the spirit of the Christ who prayed even for his murderers, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
It is an oversimplification of the problem to say that the Church was corrupt and those who expressed hostility to the Jews were only nominal Christians. Good, even great, men of the Church adopted the traditional attitude. Chrysostom “the Golden Mouthed” preached the most violent sermons against the Jews. Peter the Hermit stirred up the Crusaders to turn their swords against the Jews long before they reached the Holy Land to fight the Saracens. Ambrose and Athanasius, Cyril of Jerusalem, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Hilary of Poitiers, all joined in the chorus of denunciation. It is true that not all these men advocated or even approved actual violence against the Jews, but there can be no doubt that the cumulative effect of ceaseless denunciation created an atmosphere in which deeds of violence were natural if not inevitable.
All of this is not a matter only of the distant past. Up to the early days of this century there were countries in Eastern Europe where it was not an unknown thing for “Christians” to come out of their Good Friday services so incensed with hatred against those whom they blamed for the crucifixion of Christ that they would go down to the Jewish quarter, burn Jewish houses and synogogues, beat up the Jews, and even put many to death in the name of Christ, while holding aloft the symbol of the Cross as they carried out their actions. The horrible Eastertide massacres at Kishineff in 1903 are only one example.
In order to understand anti-Semitism, it is essential to grasp something of the mechanism of the “scapegoat.” There are times when it seems essential for peace of mind to transfer a sense of guilt onto another. Hitler felt the need for this in Germany between the wars. He found a country smarting under the consciousness of defeat and thought it essential to demonstrate that the Germans were not themselves responsible for the disaster. Who then was to be blamed? The “obvious” answer was the Jews who had “corrupted and demoralized” an otherwise invincible people. Thus once again the Jews were called upon to play the traditional role of the scapegoat and nearly six million were put to death.
The Role Of The Scapegoat
It was this role of scapegoat that the Jew was in reality playing throughout the Middle Ages and before then. The cross of Christ was the most damning indictment conceivable of the human race. If it were true to say that once in time God Incarnate came upon earth and the best men could do to him was to hang him upon a cross, then here surely was a sin which by comparison all others must pale into insignificance. It was intolerable for the race as a whole to plead guilty to so monstrous a crime. Never was the need for a scapegoat more urgent. And here was the scapegoat ready at hand. Who crucified Christ? The Jews, surely, who still reject him, who refuse to believe that he was the Son of God or to be baptized in his Name. But can the rest of mankind, above all the Christians, consider themselves acquitted? Are Jews alone to be held responsible?
The evasion of guilt on the part of the Gentile world is historically untenable. Roman as well as Jew must plead guilty. It is surely no accident that in the historic creeds Jesus Christ is described as “crucified under Pontius Pilate,” not, as might so easily have been said, “under Annas and Caiaphas the Jewish priests.” We know that not all Jews rejected him. The first Christian believers, the first witnesses, the earliest missionaries, were Jews. However, these considerations were soon forgotten in the desperate need to fasten the guilt for the crucifixion solely upon Jewish shoulders.
It is perhaps no coincidence that a change of attitude was first seen among evangelical believers, who recovered the sense that all men are sinners, all must plead guilty to a share in the world-sin which crucified Christ, and that only through faith in the Crucified is forgiveness of sin possible. With them came a sense of fellow-feeling for the Jews. And with the Evangelical Revival came the first missions to the Jews in modern times. Attempts had been made before to compel Jews to accept baptism by means of threats. Now for the first time in many centuries the Gospel was offered to them in love. True, the terrible record of the past proved, as it still proves today, to be a formidable obstacle in the path of the evangelist; but little by little many Jews have come to realize that there are true Christians who do not regard themselves as in any sense superior to the Jews but who take their place alongside them as fellow-sinners at the cross of Christ. It was said of Lewis Way, one of the early pioneers of the “London Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews,” that he was the first Christian for many years to convince Jewish people that he truly and really loved them.
Anti-Semitism is basically a theological phenomenon, arising from original sin, an attempt to evade responsibility for the rejection of God’s provision of salvation. Its ultimate solution must also be theological. Christians and Jews will only learn to forgive each other when both find forgiveness at the cross of Christ.
