[A visitor recently clicked this article posted way back in 2014; that always gets our attention enough to decide to repost. Here’s the original Introduction:
“This is from Rabbi Schmuley Boteach’s Kosher Jesus. Please check out previous posts from this MUST READ/MUST OWN resource; we’re sharing excerpts. In this chapter, Rabbi explains the roots of antisemitism and guess how big an influence is the Christian Scriptures’ depiction of the Jews who have been labeled ‘Christ-killers.’ Reformatting and highlights added.”—Admin1.]
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Chapter 9: The Fantasy of the Evil Jews
Though Jesus did not believe himself divine, he did believe that he was the Messiah. This meant he thought he was the long-promised messianic king that would restore Jewish political independence by throwing off the yoke of an external oppressor. This mission of political liberation – the creation of an independent Jewish nation capable of worshipping their God without the obstruction of an external oppressor -is the first and most important role of the Messiah. For believing this, he paid the highest price and was crucified for political insurrection. Jesus joined the ranks of his people’s martyrs, millions of whom have been prepared to die for their faith and the welfare of their people throughout history.
Once we agree that Jesus was a martyr, the more difficult question is this one: Who killed Jesus?
No question defines the Jewish-Christian relationship more than this one, for the Jews have long borne the brunt of being falsely listed in answer. The anti-Semitic claim that the Jews killed Jesus became the wellspring from which Christian anti-Semitism flowed, and its root is in the text of the Gospel itself. Just imagine the enormity of the charge. The Jews are accused of being possessed of such infinite demonic power that they were capable of murdering God himself, snuffing out the ultimate source of life and light. Only a truly savage and dark nation, enemies of the deity and all holiness, could be capable of even attempting—let alone succeeding–exterminating the Creator.
Leaven of the pharisees – Image from www.youtube.com
Portions of the New Testament seem to suggest quite clearly that the Jews in Jesus’ time possessed such deep, demonic power that they were reading, willing and able to murder God’s incarnate. From this allegation emerged the image of Jews and Judaism as agents of Satan, sworn enemies of God. In the long annals of history, has any nation or individual ever been accused of something more serious than killing the source of all that is? Just how monstrous must one be to snuff out the very light of the universe, plunging humanity into a hell of eternal darkness? All the anti-Semitic caricatures of the Jews manipulating banks and the media and intent on conquering the world itself stem from this charge. The Jews are jealous of God and His power and wish to claim all for themselves. They are voracious and insatiable. They will destroy and consume all who stand in their way, including the Creator Himself. The damage done by this abominable slander over the past two millennia is so great that it is simply too large to accurately reckon.
The truth is that the Jews did not kill Jesus, nor did they want him dead. The Roman government did, and it was they who dispatched him with great alacrity once he was perceived as a threat.
The Myth that the Jews Killed Jesus
The myth that the Jews killed Jesus has become so ingrained in our culture that even many contemporary Christians accept it as axiomatic. In the introduction to Our Hands are Stained with Blood, a book that proposes to condemn anti-Semitism, my friend the Jewish convert to Christianity, scholar Dr. Michael Brown, with whom I have debated Christianity and Jesus in high-profile debates more than twenty times, can’t help but write, “I am convinced that international Christian repentance for the Church’s past (and present) sins against the Jews will lead to international Jewish repentance for Israel’s past (and present) sins against Jesus.
This is simply amazing. Even in a book written to condemn historical Christian Jew-hatred, the author thinks nothing of condemning Jewish “sins” against Jesus, that is, the Jews’ rejection of Jesus and their turning him over to the Romans and demanding that he be crucified. Brown believes Jew still bear the blame for Jesus’ death, but nevertheless, Christians should not be anti-Jewish. His reasoning posits first that the perception of anti-Semitism prevents other Jews from potentially converting to Christianity. And second, even if the Jews are guilty of killing Jesus, they must be forgiven and brought to a belief in Jesus, since Jesus ultimately laid down his life for the atonement of human sin and was therefore complicit in the Jewish act of slaughter. This is truly a disheartening—and self-defeating– line of thinking.
Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, the influential seventeenth-century French orator and bishop, said the following about Jewish culpability in the death of Jesus:
“I hear the Jews crying out. ‘His blood falls on us and our children’ (Matthew 27:25). There it shall be, a cursed race! Your prayer will be answered more than amply. His blood will pursue you and your last offspring until the Lord, grown tired of His vengeance, will remember at the end of time, your miserable remnants . . . According to God’s hidden counsel, the Jews will survive in the midst of the nations . . . banished from the Promised Land, having no land to cultivate, slaves wherever they are, without honor, without freedom, without the appearance of a people.”
Bossuet’s brand of theological justification for inflicting suffering and slaughter on Jews has survived into the modern era. It served as the principal justification for the Catholic Church’s refusal to formally recognize the State of Israel until 1993. The Church could not accept a reconstituted Jewish sovereignty because their world-view relied, even in the modern age, upon imagining the Jews to be accursed, dangerous, outsiders, rebels, sneaks, and a host of other smears that allowed the Church to orient itself as the center of the good and right world.
Many anti-Semitic commentators would not be satisfied until the Jews of today express sorrow or shame for what, in their eyes, the Jews of antiquity had done. Ernest Renan, the French Orientalist and author of Life of Jesus, wrote,
“According to our modern ideas, there is no transmission of moral demerit from father to son; no one is accountable to human or divine justice except for that which he himself has done . . . But nations, like individuals, have their responsibilities, and if ever crime was the crime of a nation, it was the death of Jesus.” For Renan, the Jews as a nation can and do have the eternal mark of guilt upon them. Yet, somehow, the modern Christian cannot blame the individual modern Jew. In response, Renan enunciates a strange paradox as if saying to the Jew, “You as yourself are blameless, but you in your heritage and identity are demonic.”
Renan like so many others, wants Jews to feel ashamed and guilty. He wants the individual Jew to renounce Judaism for Christianity, and by doing so presumably escape the blame for Jesus’ execution.
Image from www.realjewnews.com
This line of thinking is not a modern innovation—it can be found in the words of one of the greatest Christian Church fathers, Augustine of Hippo. In his poisonous words,
“The Jews held Jesus, they insulted him: the Jews bound him; they crowned him with thorns, dishonored him by spitting on him; they scourged him; they heaped abuse upon him; they hung him on a tree; they pierced him with a lance.”
This quotation became popular in Eastern sermons in churches, and these very sermons often led to pogroms in Jewish communities.
Augustine wrote extensively about the fate of the Jews on earth.
“The Church admits and avows the Jewish people to be cursed,” he wrote in a letter, “because after killing Christ they continue to till the ground of an earthly circumcision, an earthly Sabbath, an earthly Passover, while the hidden strength or virtue of making known Christ, which this tilling contains, is not yielded to the Jews while they continue in impiety and unbelief, for it is revealed in the New Testament. While they will not turn to God, the veil which is on their minds in reading the Old Testament is not taken away . . . the Jewish people, like Cain, continue tilling the ground, in the carnal observance of the law, which does not yield to them its strength, because they do not perceive in ti the grace of Christ.”
He manages to be incredibly cruel even when he urges Christians not to outright murder Jews:
“Not by bodily death shall the ungodly race of carnal Jews perish. For whoever destroys them in this way shall suffer sevenfold vengeance, that is, shall bring upon himself the sevenfold penalty under which the Jews lie for the crucifixion of Christ. So to the end of the seven days of time, the continued preservation of the Jews will be a proof to believing Christians of the subjection merited by those who, in the pride of their kingdom, put the Lord to death.”
According to this vision the Jews should not be killed so that their presence can serve as testimony to God’s disfavor: they will forever live their lives as second-class citizens.
John Chrysostom (ca. 344-407 CE), a saint in the eyes of the Catholic Church, became one of the significant early instigators of intense hatred against Jews. He declared:
No Jew adores God! . . . The Jews themselves are demons . . . In their synagogue stands an invisible altar of deceit on which they sacrifice not sheep and calves but the souls of men . . . They live for their bellies, they gape for the things of this world, their condition is not better than that of pigs or goats because of their wanton ways and excessive gluttony. They know but one thing: to till their bellies and be drunk . . . Shun the evil gatherings of the Jews and their synagogues, both in the city and in the suburbs, because these are robbers’ dens and dwellings of demons . . . The Jews are more savage than any highwaymen.
According to this so-called saint, the Jews possess magical powers and perform strange demonic rites of an almost cannibalistic nature. The people who raised and listened to Jews, says Chrysostom, are utterly earthly and animalistic. Their code of living espouses a conduct of crime and bestial behavior. Chrysostom’s scathing rhetoric makes his message crystal clear: Fear the Jews. Fear them to your core. Fear them, hate them, and do not doubt that they will kill you to satisfy themselves. He transforms the Jews into something out of his personal fantasy of evil and excess, a living blight upon the earth that his personal Jesus came to save.
Even Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), arguably the greatest Catholic intellectual of all time, preached that the Jewish people were damned for killing Jesus, and could only be saved by renouncing their faith and accepting baptism.
“They should be compelled by the faithful, if at all possible to do so,” Aquinas wrote, “so that they do not hinder the faith, by their blasphemies, or by their evils persuasions, or even by their open persecutions. It is for this reason that Christ’s faithful often wage war with unbelievers.”
If anything, the Protestant Reformation made the situation even worse. In his work On the Jews and Their Lies, Martin Luther preached:
[Christians should] set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them . . . .I advise that [Jewish] houses also be razed and destroyed. For they pursue in them the same aims as in their synagogues. Instead they might be lodged under a roof or a barn, like the gypsies. This will bring home to them the fact that they are not masters in our country as they boast, but that they are living in exile and in captivity, as they incessantly wail and lament about us before God.
By the time of Hitler’s Holocaust, two thousand years of Christian hatred toward Jews made it easy for Europeans to look the other way, or even actively assist as Nazis slaughtered the Jews en masse. Rabbi Michael Dov-Ber Weissmandel escaped from deportation to Auschwitz and approached the papal nuncio for help in stopping the extermination of Slovakian Jews. The Catholic archbishop replied, “There is no innocent blood of Jewish children in the world. All Jewish blood is guilty. You have to die. This is the punishment that has been awaiting you because of that sin [the murder of Jesus].”
The Catholic Church’s tragic refusal at the papal level to make a public stand and commit itself to saving Jewish lives during Hitler’s Holocaust was all too consistent with the Church’s historical indifference to Jewish suffering. Pius XII was pope of the worldwide Catholic Church from 1939 to 1958, and was the first foreign dignitary to reach an accord with Nazi Germany after Hitler took power. It would be a stretch to refer to this deeply anti-Semitic pope as “holy” father. British journalist John Cornwell chronicled the life of Pope Pius in his international best seller Hitler’s Pope. Before ascending the papacy, Pius then Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, signed a concordat with Nazi Germany; this was seven months after Hitler had been appointed chancellor of Germany. As papal nuncio, Pacelli directly negotiated with Hitler, and HItler praised Pacelli’s treaty for being “especially significant in the urgent struggle against international Jewry.”
His papal record was just as tragic. After Pacelli was named pope in 1939, he shelved a papal encyclical condemning the outbreak of anti-Semitism in Germany that had been prepared by his predecessor, Pius XI. He refrained from condemning the Holocaust during the six years in which six million Jews, and millions of others in Europe, were systematically detained, deported, incarcerated, and exterminated. In 1942, he refused to sign an Allied condemnation of Germany’s systematic destruction of European Jews despite extensive pressure to do so. He actively flattered Hitler, courting his favor, writing him letters in which he praised him, referring to him as “the illustrious Hitler.” he also saw fit to turn Hitler’s birthday into a de facto holiday. As Cornwall writes,
“On April 20,1939, at Pacelli’s express wish, Archbishop Orsenigo, the nuncio in Berlin, opened a gala reception at Hitler’s fiftieth birthday. The birthday greetings thus initiated by Pacelli immediately became a tradition. EAch April 20 during the few fateful years left to Hitler and his Reich. Cardinal Bertram of Berlin was to send ‘warmest congratulations to the Fuhrer in the name of the bishops and the diocese in Germany,’ to which he added ‘fervent prayers which the Catholics of Germany are sending to heaven on their altars.;”
In December 2004, evidence surfaced that Pius had specifically ordered Church authorities not to return Jewish children to their rightful guardians after World War II had ended. In October 1946, Jewish parents came knocking on Church doors to retrieve children secreted away in Catholic guardianship during the Holocaust. In response, the Vatican sent its instructions to the papal nuncio in France, Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, who later became Pope John XXIII. Roncalli was a man of known compassion for Jews—he had been working to reunite Jewish children hidden in Catholic institutions with their parents, relatives, and Jewish organizations. However, this papal letter ordered Roncalli to desist:
“Those children who have been baptized cannot be entrusted to institutions that are unable to ensure a Christian education.”
Pope Pius insisted on depriving Jewish parents of their own children.
“If the children have been entrusted [to the Church] by their parents, and if the parents now claim them back, they can be returned, provided the children themselves have not been baptized. It should be noted that this decision of the Congregation of the Holy Office has been approved by the Holy Father.”
The Church’s authoritative Congregation deliberated and decided on this monstrous policy of refusing to return baptized Jewish children to their parents. And the pope himself personally approved it.
Robert Katz’s The Battle for Rome convincingly demonstrates that Pius collaborated with the Nazi government in their occupation of Rome and did nothing to stop the rounding up of Jews for extermination at Auschwitz. Plus was informed every step of the way as the Germans, on October 16, 1943, collected more than one thousand Jews of Rome, nearly all of whom would perish in gas chambers a few days later at Auschwitz. A special SS contingent was brought in for the roundup. Many of them had never before seen the great city, and they used this action as a partial tourist excursion. They brought the Jews to St. Peter’s Square and herded them into open trucks parked not more than three hundred feet from Pius’s window. Plus offered no protest and upheld a scandalous policy of strict neutrality while the Germans in his diocese literally turned the people of Jesus into ash.
Plus granted a secret audience to Supreme SS Politzeiführer Wolff, Himmler’s former chief of staff, serving in 1943 as the chief of German persecution apparatus in occupied Italy. The meeting took place in strict confidence, and Wolff came dressed in disguise. Years later, Wolff said of the meeting:
“From the Pope’s own words I could sense the sincerity of his sympathy and how much he loved the German people.”
But while he may not have prized the lives of Jews, Pius held the bricks and mortar of his churches in high esteem. As the British and American armies geared up for a massive offensive in the spring of 1944, Pius suddenly found his voice. He condemned the Allies for bombing the Eternal City and ordered his American bishops to launch public relations offensives in the United States to pressure the Roosevelt administration to preserve the sacred monuments of the city. This, while the Nazis were gassing more than fifteen thousand Jews per day.
These horrific details make abundantly clear that despite his white robes, Pius was an unholy soul whose beatification, now under consideration by the Church would be a sin against God, a stain upon Christianity, and an affront to the memory and teachings of the Jewish freedom fighter whom he worshipped, Jesus.
But we cannot be shocked at the pope’s actions nor the history of Christian anti-Semitic acts when we consider that Christianity has maintained for two thousand years that the Jews killed God incarnate. Only Pius’s illustrious and righteous successor, John XXIII, convened Vatican II were Jews finally absolved of the charges of deicide.
Without condoning or excusing such behavior, we can easily imagine how an allegation of such severity might make some Christians indifferent to Jewish suffering. For this reason, we must now put to final rest the utter falsity of the idea that Jews killed Jesus and that Jesus hated his own people.