Combatting Contempt

CHRISTIANS & JEWS

"The worst deed of the Jewish people, the murder of the Messiah, resulted in the greatest blessings for mankind," says a widely used Roman Catholic text book, reflecting what has been for centuries a commonplace of Christian thinking. The teaching not only fosters anti-Semitism but also is historically wrong, according to a new book called The Teaching of Contempt (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $4), by the late French-Jewish Historian Jules Isaac.

Isaac turned to the critical study of anti-Semitism during World War II, when his wife and daughter were killed by the Nazis. In 1960, three years be fore his death, he urged his friend Pope John XXIII to express publicly the Roman Catholic Church's opposition to antiSemitism, which the bishops of the Vatican Council plan to do at the third session this fall. In Contempt, Isaac closely examined three fundamental misconceptions about Judaism that found their way into Christian thinking -- and argued that none of them had much basis in fact.

Shifting the Blame. Answering the charge of deicide, Isaac points out that it is illogical to blame an entire people, most of whom never heard of Jesus, for the crime of a few. Even Peter, in The Acts of the Apostles, says that the Jews had condemned Christ out of ignorance, not knowing him to be the Son of God.

Isaac does not deny that some Jewish leaders in Jerusalem were involved in the plot against Jesus, but he argues (and quotes Christian scholars who sup port him) that the Gospels, written at the time when Christianity was for saking its Jewish origins to convert the gentile, tend to shift the blame for the Crucifixion from the Romans to the Jews. Pontius Pilate, for example, appears as a weak but well-meaning governor instead of the brutal autocrat other sources make him out to be.

Historically, Isaac points out, the least justifiable of the Christian misconceptions about Judaism is that the Jews became the object of divine wrath for killing Jesus, and were dispersed into homeless exile after Jerusalem was destroyed by Roman troops in A.D. 70. The Jews began to emigrate from Palestine more than 500 years before Christ, and, far from being destroyed after Christ's death, they staged powerful uprisings against the Romans in the 2nd and 4th centuries. The very period of supposed exile was the time when Palestinian scholars united to transcribe the oral teachings of the rabbis into the first written Talmud.

What destroyed Palestinian Judaism over the course of centuries was a combination of war, rebellion and emigration. The effective end came in 1099 with the First Crusade, when Christianity's noble lords crowded the Jews into the synagogues of Jerusalem and set them aflame.

Christian theologians have often claimed that the Judaism of Jesus' time was decadent, "a world of ossified belief in the letter, of a narrow-minded caste spirit and materialistic piety," as the German Catholic Theologian Karl Adam put it. On the contrary, Isaac argues, the two centuries before Jesus' birth marked an era of great spiritual vitality, which produced both the beautiful writings of the Apocrypha and the flowering of the synagogue as a faith-renewing institution. Many of Jesus' own sayings can be traced to the teachings of the much-abused Pharisees, notably the great Rabbi Hillel (circa 110 B.C.-A.D. 10). Moreover, Isaac notes, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls proves that Judaism can claim a monastic sect--the Essenes of Qumran--that rivals the early Christians in ascetic ideals.

"Purifying Stream." Christianity, Isaac concludes, "does not require for her own glorification a corresponding disparagement of ancient Israel, of the people of the Old Testament, the people of Jesus and the Apostles." Fortunately, he adds, "a purifying stream exists in Christianity and grows stronger every day"--and Isaac's book appears at a time when almost every day brings new evidence that his cause is on the verge of victory.

This month, for example, saw the publication of a Catholic textbook survey by scholars at Jesuit-run St. Louis University that listed a number of pejorative references to Jews (and Protestants)--and urged textbook writers to take greater care in discussing other faiths. The Lutheran World Federation's Commission on World Mission at a consultation in Denmark declared that anti-Semitism is "a demonic form of rebellion against the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and a rejection of Jesus the Jew, directed upon his people." And in Florence, European representatives of an international society for Christian-Jewish cooperation met to discuss their latest efforts to combat antiSemitism. There, Catholics and Protestants attended a service of prayer at the city's Jewish temple in honor of "Jules Isaac Day."

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