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Theological
anti-semitism
Andrei Cornea
1. The story
goes that once, Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, asked his personal
physician whether he knew any irrefutable and supreme proof of God’s
existence. ”The Jews, your Majesty!” the doctor answered
[1]
.
Indeed,
the mere survival of this people, scattered across the whole world, subjected
to such suffering and yet outliving most of its former persecutors, still
seemed to many of Frederick’s contemporaries to be a most divine
plan. But, as time went by, a lot of people became uninterested in finding
any supreme proofs whatsoever; they simply claimed that: ”God died”.
And since nothing transcendental was worth proving any more, what more
need could there be for the Jews themselves? What could you do with a
”supreme” and even a living proof of the existence of a God
you wanted dead? That was the moment when the ”Final Solution”
became entirely possible.
My claim is that
Anti-Semitism relies on a theological and metaphysical basis. This is
precisely why there has always been something unique and special about
it: it is probably the only case in history when, for centuries, a whole
people have been turned into a theological and metaphysical proof. Of
course, in Anti-Semitism one can always discover the seeds of ”normal”
xenophobia, racism, nationalism, economic and political interests, as
everywhere where a minority is persecuted. Yet, Anti-Semitism is more
than that. I am not saying that the Jewish suffering has to be privileged
as such, as being more ”precious” than that of the Armenians,
the Tutzis, the witches, or the Blacks; Anti-Semitism is neither ”better”
nor ”worse”, neither bigger, nor lesser than any other ”anti-”;
it is just different to the extent it has a theological root, which is
missing in other cases
[2]
. Therefore, it must be understood differently from all other collective
and racial hatreds; and it is likely that, for the European civilization,
its meaning is crucial.
2. In my opinion,
Anti-Semitism is intrinsically bound to Christianity (and as such, intrinsically
bound to Europe), but it is so in two opposite ways. 1) First, any fundamentalist
Christian, no matter what his/her exact denomination was, could not help
but develop anti-Semitic attitudes. 2) Secondly, and paradoxically enough,
any radical anti-Christian outlook tends to be anti-Semitic as well. Therefore,
a radical anti-Christian formula is as anti-Semitic as a fundamentalist
Christian one. 3) Reciprocally, there is no radical Anti-Semitism that
does not become anti-Christian eventually. I shall try to uphold these
theses and to draw a few consequences for modern Anti-Semitism.
Authentic Anti-Semitism
— which has to be carefully distinguished from mere Anti-Judaism
—begins as soon as, with St. Paul, Christianity asserts itself as
distinct from Judaism. Ever since Jews have consistently been viewed by
Christians as the people-proof par excellence.
So, at least
according to the meaning of the word ”Anti-Semitism” I am
using here, I do not consider that the anti-Judaic outbursts among Greeks
and Romans ever represented a real Anti-Semitism, because they did not
originated within a theological idea, either transcendent, or secularized.
Nor is Islamic anti-Judaism anti-Semitic as such, due to the same lack
of a theological foundation. Persecutions against Jews in the Roman Empire
or in the historical Islam were almost always politically motivated and
they used to last just as long as the rulers found it expedient, i.e.
not very much. For instance, although the Romans disliked the Jews, they
still respected their particularity; from Julius Caesar onwards, Jews
were granted a unique exemption from worshipping Rome’s gods and
imperial images, and neither Caligula’s paranoia
[3]
, nor Hadrianus’ temporary decrees could end this privilege.
On the contrary,
for Christianity there has always been a ”Jewish problem”,
located in the very core of its identity, even when there was no political
reason for it. And even when active Christianity began losing its grip
on the European consciousness during secularization, the ”Jewish
problem” was passed on to different secular trends. Almost one hundred
years ago, the great German scholar, Julius Wellhausen, formulated briefly
this problem as follows: ”Jesus was not a Christian, but a Jew”.
[4]
3. Of course,
it has always been known that Jesus was Jewish; but it was only during
the last century that a new critical-historical approach to New Testament
texts has pointed out that Christ’s basic message was addressed
rather to ”the lost sheep of the House of Israel” than to
the Gentiles; moreover, Jesus never intended to replace Judaism by any
other new religion, let alone by a worship of his own alleged divinity
[5]
.
Most scholars,
walking in the footprints of a famous book by Albert Schweitzer, believe
that the historical Jesus (”rabbi Joshua”, as his disciples
used to call him) was an authentic Jew from 1st century Palestine.
He was leading a small apocalyptic sect and was preaching ”the good
tidings” of the imminent coming of ”God’s Kingdom”
on earth
[6]
. This was meant to be the desirable and long-awaited end of the whole
world, bad as it was, as well as the dawn of a new, extraordinary era,
when God himself would directly reign on earth and would root out any
suffering and injustice.
To prepare for
the ”Kingdom’s coming”, Jesus said, people should replace
normal ethics with a kind of an ad interim ethics. He conceived it in
rather radical terms: people were being told not to worry any longer about
housing, eating, earning and saving; he even told them to forget about
social conveniences, such as burying their close relatives, and to escape
family ties. Not that the Oral Law, taught by the Pharisees, was bad,
but, as world’s end was dawning, it was just about to be no longer
enforceable.
Yet, Jesus’
and the Pharisees’ approaches were not intrinsically conflicting;
they were just referring to different life-situations: while the latter
were teaching Israel how to adjust to normal circumstances, the former
was announcing exceptional times. Perhaps he also claimed he was the Messiah,
a claim which was not, in itself, contrary to mainstream Jewish beliefs.
Yet, Jesus never pretended he was ”God’s son” in the
concrete, carnal way Hercules was thought to be Jupiter’s.
So
why was Jesus put to death? E. P. Sanders thinks that the great-priest
Caiphas and his aids were afraid that Jesus’ apocalyptic and radical
message, welcomed by the crowds, could stir up social unrest in Jerusalem
and thus bring about a brutal Roman reaction. They acted according to
the maxims of political realism and denounced Jesus to the Romans as a
would-be Messiah. To Romans any Messianic claim amounted to treason, for
”Messiah” (The Anointed one) was an old, Jewish royal title,
challenging the Roman authority over Judea. Pontius Pilatus, whose cruelty
was well known according to Josephus Flavius, ordered Jesus to be crucified.
So ”Rabbi Joshua” died on the cross while waiting in vain
for the ”Kingdom” to come.
But
his followers never gave up hope. They believed that, somehow, their master
had been resuscitated and that the coming of the Kingdom was not cancelled,
but just delayed. But for how long? First, they thought the arrival of
the Kingdom, along with Jesus’ second coming (parousia), would occur
within their life span. Then, as some of them began to pass away, the
survivors hoped that at least one of them would live to see it. But when
the entire generation who had known Jesus died away, second-generation
Christians realized that the Kingdom was not meant to come during the
foreseeable future.
Then,
these Christians who had not known Jesus of Nazareth personally, said
to each other: perhaps Jesus’ message was misunderstood by his close
followers. And so an apocalyptic Jewish sect, which had lost its raison
d’être, seized the opportunity to transform itself into
an universal salvation religion.
4.
It is Saul, or Paul of Tarsus, who is thought to be the main author of
this huge transformation. Paul was a well-cultivated, Hellenized Pharisee,
a Roman citizen, who first persecuted Jesus’ followers and subsequently
converted to the very creed he had hated earlier. He is rightly considered
the founding father of Christianity as an universal religion, distinct
from Judaism.
Now, Paul was
well aware that, since the coming of the ”Kingdom” was not
about to happen in the near future, Christians could not live any further
by the ad interim ethics preached by Jesus and his close apostles. For
Paul, the fact that Jesus had died and risen again was more important
than what exactly rabbi Joshua had said or done, while alive. (In fact,
Paul had never known Jesus and so what Rabbi Joshua had said was of little
value for him.) So he replaced ”the message of Jesus” with
the ”message on Jesus”.
[7]
The
fact that a man could die and come back to life had no point in Judaism.
On the contrary, in the heathen mystery religions, a god who once put
to death could rise again and save his adepts through his death was very
commonplace. Therefore, Paul assumed that Jesus was a divine and not
just a human Messiah, sent on earth to suffer and to atone for mankind
through his blood.
[8]
But as a divine Jesus was blasphemous for Judaism, Paul realized
that the Christian sect had no future within Judaism.
Consequently,
he decided to try to convert the Gentiles, while giving up the former
requirement that, prior to baptism, every Gentile should become first
Jewish by circumcision and Sabbath observance. It was a decisive step,
which initially met some significant resistance from the apostles led
by Peter and James.
[9]
But eventually Paul won the apostles over to his ideas, because he
was right from a theological point of view: as the apocalyptic message
of Jesus the man was being proven false, there was room left but for the
salvation message on Jesus, God’s Son. But, as I have already said,
while preaching about a god who dies and rises again was just commonplace
with the Gentiles, it meant apostasy with the Jews.
Yet,
Paul never parted with Judaism totally; he knew he had to rely on the
religious legitimacy only Judaism could provide. He read the Bible (and
especially the Prophets) in a very special key and thought he found out
there that the death and the resurrection of a Savior had been predicted
long before Jesus’ birth. So, according to Paul’s interpretation,
Jesus Christ, God’s Son, came on earth to redeem mankind, as well
as to fulfill the Old Testament’s prophecies.
Paul’s
mixture of Judaism and mysteries religion was to become an extraordinary
success story
[10]
: on the one hand, it created a salvation myth, of universal appeal,
on the other hand, it provided the myth with a solid, peculiar historical
basis that was wholly lacking in the pagan mysteries religions. It was
this successful combination that helped spread Christianity all over the
Roman Empire. But eventually it also brought about a lot of theological
controversy and unleashed the anti-Semitic attitudes that have marked
out the European history ever since.
5.
At least one of the consequences of the Pauline synthesis, with much bearing
on the Christian-Jewish relationship, is obvious: if Jesus Christ ”fulfilled”
the Scriptures of the Old Testament, it was the Jews and especially their
wise men — the Pharisees — who should have acknowledged his
mission, rather than anyone else. In other words, if Jesus really came
according to the Scriptures, revealed to the Jews by God himself, who
else rather than the Jews, the qualified interpreters of the Scriptures,
would have to properly understand this event and, consequently, to convert
to Christianity?
Yet,
this did not happen. Besides, the more the Christians parted with the
authentic teaching of rabbi Joshua and focused on the Christ’s resurrection,
the worse the relationships with the remaining Jews became. For us this
is nothing but normal, since among Christians, the uncircumcised Gentiles
who believed that Jesus was a God — a blasphemous belief for a Jew
— tended to prevail numerically over the Jewish-Christians.
But
anyone who believed both in the divinity of the Jewish Scriptures and
in the divinity of Jesus must have seen the Jews’ reluctance to
endorse the Christian-Pauline message as extremely upsetting, since it
challenged the identity as well as the legitimacy of the new faith. Actually,
Christians met this challenge in three main ways:
a)
Some, a minority, decided to stay within the primitive Jewish-Christian
tradition. These are the so-called ”Nazarenes” and ”Ebionites”,
who rejected the divinity of Jesus and are still mentioned two centuries
after Christ as a small sect. But in the long run this re-Judaization
of Christianity was a failure: while it kept apart Christianity from the
mysteries religions, it did not make it appealing for the Jews either;
for it was all too obvious that Jesus’ main teaching on the imminent
coming of the Kingdom of God had turned out to be a false prophecy. On
the other hand, the salvation message was meaningless unless Jesus was
a divine being, for only the blood of a god could redeem the whole mankind.
Consequently, the Ebionite sect was doomed to remain marginal and to disappear
obscurely.
b)
The second way for some Christians to meet the identity challenge was
Gnosticism, especially the doctrine of Marcion.
[11]
The Gnostic-Marcionite response is as simple, as it is radical: since
Judaism refuses to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, one has to
totally reject Judaism itself, along with the Jewish Bible.
In
fact, Marcion, who lived in the 2nd century AD, drew the last consequences
of some aspects of the Pauline theology: whereas he accepted as valid
only a few Pauline Epistles and a ”cleansed” version of the
Gospel according to Luke, he totally rejected the Old Testament. He conceived
a dualistic metaphysics, grounded in his teaching about ”the two
Gods”: the former — good and supreme — God was wholly
spiritual and practically unknown to humans till the coming of Christ,
who was his messenger; the latter God is the biblical Jahwe, a bad and
inferior God, the Creator. He made the world, sin and grief. The Jews
and the Old Testament where he was worshipped as the unique God were actually
his devilish messengers, i.e. the messengers of the big Lie. Therefore
they had to be rejected because they told people lies and taught them
to ignore the true God.
[12]
The
Church fought hard to overcome the Gnostics, against whom Justinus, Tertullianus,
Iraeneus, Hippolitus, Epiphanes, Philostratus, Theodoretus wrote a lot.
Marcion’s dualistic solution had logic on its side, which made it
all the more attractive for those seeking to explain logically the cause
of evil and, consequently, it was a difficult match for its opponents.
But the Church Fathers were well aware that the radical, cosmological
Anti-Semitism of Marcion and of Gnosis in general could bring about utter
destruction upon Christianity.
Indeed,
if the Old Testament was thought to be a devilish work, what legitimacy
could it bestow upon Jesus? Actually the historical basis of Incarnation,
devoid of all its scriptural basis, would have had nothing to rely on!
And if the Jews were completely sinful and devilish, how was it possible
that the Son of the perfect and supreme God had been born from a Jewish
maiden? How was it possible that Jesus himself had been circumcised and
brought up in the Jewish Law?
Had Christianity
fared along the Gnostic path and had it got rid of all its Jewish historical
and scriptural background, it would have lost almost all marks that made
it so special among the other salvation religions of the Eastern Roman
Empire. So it would have developed into just another mystery cult, like
Mithra’s or Osiris’. The Fathers were aware that inside Christianity
there must be a Jewish hard core you could not do away with, for you would
simply suppress Christianity itself. Therefore, in Marcion we have a
good example of how any radical Anti-Semitism ends by becoming anti-Christian
as well.
c)
Now let us examine the third response to this identity issue: this is
the ”orthodox” response most Christians gave as they were
walking in the footsteps of Paul.
While
the Jewish Christians rejected Jesus’ divinity and the Gnostics
rejected his Jewishness, the Pauline Christianity in its both Roman and
Byzantine forms tried to come up with a bold synthesis: it sought to keep
both his divinity and his Jewishness.
[13]
Thus, the Pauline synthesis led to the Nicaean formula of ”homousia”,
whereas, as regards the Jews, it led to what I call an ”ambivalent
Anti-Semitism”.
Already
in the Synoptic Gospels, which reconstructed the life and the deeds of
Jesus in the light of the Pauline synthesis, the Jews were dealt with
in a very hostile way.
[14]
Subsequently, the apologists, like Justin the Martyr, took up this
fateful model and so did the Church Fathers later on. Many of these writers,
like Tertullianus, Cyprianus and, later in the East, Gregory of Nyssa
or John Chrysostomus, embarked upon a real hate campaign against the Jews,
charging them with every imaginable crime and sin.
[15]
But
the wound kept on bleeding: why wouldn’t the Jews accept Jesus,
a Jewish man, as the Messiah and the Son of God? Why did they obstinately
refuse to believe in his resurrection? The answer Pauline Christianity
had been offering ever since was that they were ”blind”, obdurate,
and their vices made them unable to see the truth located in their own
Scriptures.
[16]
Moreover, because of their wickedness and envy, they had allegedly
killed Jesus; this was the most terrible charge that could have been brought
to an ethnic group: the Jews were guilty of deicide, they were ”God-killers”
par excellence.
[17]
Yet,
one has to grasp just how paradoxical this charge actually was: for, since
the Pauline Christianity held that God’s violent death was necessary
for the redemption of the sinful mankind, there had to be a God-killing
people. So the crime and the guilt of the Jews seemed to be necessary
as well: hadn’t they killed God, there would have been no redemption.
So,
it is worth noting that this strong Christian-Pauline Anti-Semitism has
always revealed a certain amount of restraint, though relative. The reasons
were theological as well as practical:
First,
the Church Fathers could not help noticing that, despite the catastrophe
of 70 AD, Judaism went on existing, even thriving. In the aftermath of
the destruction of the Temple, rabbinical Judaism was reformed by Johannan
ben Zakkai and his school of Javneh. Subsequently, it got a new momentum
across the Diaspora and continued to make many proselytes among the Gentiles
and even among some Christians. As late as the 6th century AD, a few decrees
of the Roman Emperors were needed to stop this process, by outlawing it.
So, although God had severely punished the Jews, it seemed that He did
not want to destroy them.
Secondly,
no matter how much the Fathers wished to see the Jews as spiritually blind
and unable to understand their own Scriptures, they often could not avoid
resorting to their despicable wisdom: so did Origenes and Jerome, when
they wanted to improve their knowledge of the Bible beyond the standards
of the Greek version and gain access to the Hebrew original. They felt
compelled to go to the rabbis who taught them Hebrew, Aramaic and how
to interpret the Bible. Many centuries later, a few Reformation scholars,
like Reuchlin and Melanchton, did the same. So it seemed obvious that
old Israel had not yet lost its knowledge and wisdom altogether.
But
essentially the same old problem was looming over and over again: without
an act of God-killing and a people of God-killers there could have been
no salvation, and without salvation all mankind would be doomed.
7.
Thanks to Paul again, Christians (who belonged with the Orthodox, Nicaean
creed) came to believe that the Jews had to play a big part in the salvation
history, and that eventually, when times would be ripe, they would gladly
accept the Christ and voluntarily commit themselves to baptism.
[18]
This was the
origin of the theory of the ”mystery of Jewish survival”,
a theory which found its classical form in Augustine. Augustine compared
the Jews to Cain, who deceitfully killed his brother and deserved to die,
but nevertheless was spared by God and cursed to wander unhappily across
the whole world ever after. Like Cain, the Jews deserved to die, for they
were guilty of deicide; nevertheless God wanted them alive, but subjected
to a humiliating status, so they could bear witness to the superiority
of the Christian truth.
[19]
At the end of times they would voluntarily convert to Christianity
and, as Paul had said, by then ”all Israel will be redeemed”.
As Fred Gladstone Bratton noticed, the Jews were despised and hated because
of their alleged deicide, but simultaneously also respected because of
the ”uniqueness of their seed”.
[20]
The consequences
of this ambivalent status of the Jews emerged throughout much of the European
history. During the Crusades, for instance, on the one hand, large masses
of the fanaticized Christians attacked, plundered and killed the Jews
they met on their way to the Holy Land. On the other hand, some bishops,
Popes or other important personalities of the Church tried to exert some
restraint; they strongly opposed the killing of the Jews and even the
forced baptism. For instance, during the 2nd Crusade, Bernard
de Clairvaux censured the German priest Radulf for inciting the crowds
to murder Jews. In 1204, the Pope Innocent IV issued a decree that absolved
the Jews of the charge of ”ritual murder”.
[21]
We can now sum
up the features of traditional Anti-Semitism, which is based on an identity
crisis, central to Christianity: for traditional Christians, Jews are
a ”living proof”; yet this proof has always had a twofold
meaning: on the one hand, the painful condition of the Jews, and the persecution
every Christian could lawfully inflict upon them, were thought to reflect
the fact that the Jews were wrong and the Christians were right. On the
other hand, the Jews had to be kept alive and allowed to practice their
faith, for their mere survival was also thought to witness a divinely
devised plan. Ultimately, people used to believe that the strange and
mysterious fate befalling the Jews was proving both God’s wrath
and mercy.
All these speculations
seemed to acknowledge that the legitimacy of Christianity was being both
denied and upheld by Judaism. It was being denied by it due to the fact
that the Jewish people, the privileged depository of the sacred Scriptures,
had refused to hail Jesus the Jew as the Messiah and God’s Son.
It was being upheld by it due to the fact that not only the Messiah, but
also the Christian God, were concepts formed and developed within the
Jewish religious consciousness. Deep inside every Christian there was,
as it were, a Jew; therefore, on the one hand, the Church had to repress
the Jew in order to prevent him from resurfacing and from re-Judaicizing
Christianity; on the other hand, it also had to stop short of eliminating
the ”Jew from inside”, because if one had done away with him,
Christianity would have received a mortal blow as well. The Church feared
that the death of Judaism, either by genocide, or by forced baptism could
only trigger a resurrection of some un-repented anti-Christian Gnostic
beliefs.
Interestingly
enough, Jews themselves agreed with their persecutors that they, the Jews,
were the ”the people-proof”, so that their difficult existence
and their survival was theologically meaningful. Of course, there was
disagreement on what precisely was to prove. For instance, Jehuda Halevi
developed the concept of ”Israel, a suffering heart”, meaning
that, as Israel was the ”heart of the nations”, she also was
the most sensitive of them all. This way, Halevi tried to explain why
the ”Chosen People” was also the unhappiest.
8. As the Modern
Age debunked and later tore to pieces Medieval thinking, the traditional,
ambivalent Anti-Semitism I have just described lost its position and was
little by little replaced by other forms. Some of these were extremely
aggressive and eventually led to the Holocaust.
Of course, it
is beyond any doubt that modernization and secularization brought many
essential benefits to the Jews: in the 17th century they were
permitted to return to different Western countries from where they had
been expelled three centuries earlier; in the 18th century
and at the beginning of the 19th century, as the ghettos were
dismantled, Jews were granted civil and political rights. In Western and
Central Europe most of them were assimilated very quickly and, in general,
very successfully to the mainstream European culture to which they soon
contributed a lot. In Eastern Europe assimilation was much slower and
many Jews continued to live in traditional ”shtetls” and to
be subjected to discrimination, and even to periodic pogroms.
Nevertheless
towards the end of the 19th century, anti-Semitism was on the
rise everywhere in Europe: in France, this rise was highlighted by ”l’affaire
Dreyfuss” while in Germany, Wilhelm Marr had coined the word ”Anti-Semitism”
just a few years earlier.
Why, if just
a ”theological passion”, did anti-Semitism re-emerge precisely
when traditional religion seemed to be declining? Of course, one must
also consider the various social, political and economical explanations
that may account for this development. Yet, I think that, as paradoxical
as it may seem, Anti-Semitism continued to feed itself on the ”theology
of the people-proof”. From the 18th century onwards,
Christianity was not just abandoned by more and more European thinkers;
it was challenged by different powerful ”secular” faiths,
as Socialism, Nationalism, Progressivism, Racism, etc. The struggle was
one of antagonistic faiths rather than of one religion challenged by an
opposed irreligiousness. But any faith challenging Christianity, irrespective
of whether it was regular or secular, had in it as much a potential of
anti-Semitism as any traditional form of Christianity.
9. In modern
Europe, Christianity has often seen itself as a besieged city. It seemed
as if the divine order was being violated by the ever-growing secularism.
And the Jews were often thought to have an important part in this violation.
Due to the emancipation, the ”deicidal people” seemed to be
better and better off. Their ”crime” looked like not being
atoned for, any more.
Moreover, the
Jews seemed to be carrying on with their old sinister plans. In the view
of fundamentalist Christians, there were two well-known stereotypes that
properly described Jewish misdemeanor: the Jew seen as a capitalist and
the Jew seen as a socialist. Both characters were supposed to attempt
to subvert the Christian order, despite the paradox of their co-operation.
From Edouard Drumont’s ”France juive”, supported by
a large part of the French Catholic press and clergy, from the ”Dreyfuss
Affaire” and to the ”Protocols of the Sion’s Sages”,
both stereotypes occurred over and again. The old charge, that the Jews
had killed God, was turned into its modern counterpart: that the Jews
wanted to destroy the Christian nations.
Of course, in
the meantime the Church (especially the Catholic and a few of the Protestant
sects) has fared a long way from there. Yet the road has been thorny:
one has just to point to the shameful behavior towards the Jews of Pope
Pius XII during World War II.
[22]
Even the Vatican Council II failed to wholly clear the Jews of the
deicide charge. While the draft stated that ”the Jewish people should
never be persecuted, nor should it be considered as separated from God,
nor accursed, or guilty of deicide”, in the Council’s Acts
final form the last three words were dropped out.
Yet, in the recent
years, Pope John-Paul II made further steps on the way of discarding traditional
Catholic Anti-Semitism. He even apologized on the Church’s behalf
for the persecution and suffering to which the Jews were subjected for
so many centuries. Nevertheless, it is still unclear to what extent these
last events purport to a complete uprooting of theological Anti-Semitism,
or rather express a personal, though impressive, commitment of John-Paul
II himself. Actually there are some hints that the Vatican Curia was not
very happy with the apology and put some pressure on the Pope to soften
its wording, so it is uncertain whether the next Pope will fully endorse
it.
[23]
10. Naively,
one could assume that ”progressive” attitudes, opposed to
clerical and conservative trends, would reject anti-Semitism as well.
A lot of Jews fell pray to this naďve misrepresentation. In fact,
many advocates of the modernization, which ultimately sprang out from
the Enlightenment ideology — various sorts of liberals, socialists,
nationalists, republicans etc. — were strongly anti-Semitic. The
reason of this ”progressive” Anti-Semitism, if anything, is
obvious: they were anti-Semitic because they embarked upon a radical anti-Christian
and anti-”ancient regime” militancy. Their anti-Christian
position was not real agnosticism or skepticism. Rather, it was a true
religious passion, hardly disguised in secular clothes. These radical
and modern authors used to worship such modernity gods as Reason, History,
Proletariat, Nation, or Science, instead of kneeling before the much-hated
Jewish-Christian God.
One of the most
characteristic and earliest cases is Voltaire
[24]
: for him, the Jews were but a vile and superstitious sect, incapable
of progress, a kind of a despicable historical relic. But their most serious
sin was, according to Voltaire, that they had invented Christianity. Later
on, all Jewish vices were taken over by the Christian clergy. ”The
only difference between you (the Jews) and our priests — he would
write — is that our priests burned you with the help of the laymen,
while your priests have always sacrificed human victims with their own
hands.”
Many other writers
and philosophers who were fighting the so-called reactionary spirit during
the 19th century took a similar position. Their manifest anti-Christian
stance almost inevitably generated Anti-Semitism. Fourier, Prudhon, Michelet,
Fichte, Hegel, Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach and, of course, Karl Marx, are probably
the best known of these ”progressive anti-Semites”. The Romantic
historian Jules Michelet, for instance, reproached Judaism its alleged
”lack of ideal” and its parochial spirit. Ernest Renan, famous
for his defense of ”political nationhood”, popularized the
racial Aryan myth in France and held the Jews as inferior, just because
they were ”Semites”. According to Renan, the ”Semites”,
and all the more the Jews, were lacking a real creative mind, and, consequently,
had no epic, no mythology, no painting, no civic life. Nietzsche’s
more complex case deserves mentioning as well: while the philosopher opposed
the ever-growing contemporary German Anti-Semitism and nationalism, nonetheless,
because of his fierce adversity to Christianity, he charged the Jews with
authorship of the ”ethic of resentment”: Nietzsche claimed
that, in order to take revenge on the Romans, the Jews invented and spread
Christianity, which eventually subverted the noble virtues of the Ancient
World and poisoned the spirit of Modern Times
[25]
.
For most writers
of this kind, the solution to the ”Jewish Question” was assimilation:
the Jews had to be assimilated to their host-nations and had to disappear
as an ethnic-religious community. So, while for the ”reactionary”
clerical anti-Semites the scandal was that, by assimilation, the ”accursed
race” would loose its inferior social status - ”willed by
God” - without necessarily submitting to baptism, the ”progressive”
anti-Semites could not condone any attempt on the part of the Jews to
preserve at least a part of their Jewishness. In order to please the former
anti-Semites the Jews had to live apart, as they used to do for centuries;
to please the latter, they had to fully melt into their host-nations.
So, no matter how hard some of them tried, they could eventually please
neither.
In
fact, the reluctance of many Jews to fully give up their Jewishness seemed
to suggest the failure of the rationalist and ”progressive”
ideology, which could not account for the survival of this ”historical-theological
relic”. On the other hand, the Jews as a nation represented a challenge
to the ”one and indivisible Nation” this ”progressive”
ideology strove to legitimize. One way or another, the Jewish survival
down into the Modern Age seemed to ”prove” something; but
what else could it prove but the existence of ”the divine design”,
i.e. the existence of the Jewish-Christian God these authors were fighting?
The
case of Marxism is highly significant in this respect: for any orthodox
Marxist, modern Jews were an anomaly: they form neither a social class,
nor a nation (in the sense of Stalin’s famous definition of a nation),
nor are they a religious community, nor a national ”normal”
minority. Actually, Marxism failed to explain ”the Jewish Question”
in terms of class struggle, or in terms of economic determinism. The Jews
seemed to continue to exist despite the requirements of the ”most
scientific and progressive theory”. When, however, this theory attempted
to meet this challenge, the conclusions were lamentable as, for instance,
this statement by Jean-Paul Sartre proves: ”On ne trouve gučre
d’antisémitisme chez les ouvriers.”
[26]
The
failure of Marxism to address appropriately the ”Jewish Question”
could induce the idea of the failure of Marxism altogether. To avert such
possible danger Marxism developed a peculiar Anti-Semitism, very much
in use in the Communist societies: as a rule ”the Jewish Question”
was ”solved” by omission: one simply avoided speaking about
Jews, their culture, their history, their suffering, the Holocaust, Zionism,
etc. As Jews were still a ”negative theological proof”, this
would have jeopardized the alleged superiority of Marxism over Christian
metaphysics of history, so the less you referred to them, the better.
Thus, not being referred to, the Jews ”vanished” from the
theory, long before their almost physical disappearance from Central and
Eastern Europe due to the Holocaust and the emigration that followed thereafter.
Yet, some Jews
also felt attracted to the way Marxism wanted to solve the ”Jewish
Question” by means of omission. A lot of them espoused Marxism very
much, just because Marxism had no room for Jewishness as such. They thought
that, if this is the price to pay to get rid of Anti-Semitism, it is worth
paying it. Yet, this proved to be a mistaken choice: for Communist societies
developed a strange ”Anti-Semitism without Jews”, which they
subsequently passed on to their post-Communist heirs.
11. Still, the
most virulent Anti-Semitism was introduced by some racist and extreme-nationalist
authors, such as the Comte de Gobineau, E. Drumont, composer Richard Wagner,
H. S. Chamberlain, Paul de Lagarde, or, in Romania, A. C. Cuza, Nae Ionescu,
Nichifor Crainic.
[27]
What is striking is that these writers were either openly hostile
to traditional Christendom, and supported an ”Aryanized” Christianity,
or (as in the Romanian case) they embarked upon a ”Gnosticized”
Christianity, which they called ”Orthodoxy”. Actually, these
anti-Semites rediscovered and ”secularized” a few Gnostic
and Marcionite themes.
For instance,
the promoters of the ”Aryan myth” rediscovered a profoundly
dualistic theology: for them, history was but the theatre where two cosmological
antagonistic forces fought to death: the Aryans, who represented the good,
and the Jews, who were the evil. As for Marcion, the Jews were supposedly
damned because they had been created by an evil and imperfect God, so
for those who upheld the ”Aryan myth”, the Jews were a damned,
destructive race, which had to be wiped out. And as Marcion wanted to
keep his sect pure from Judaism, by rejecting the Old Testament, so did
the neo-Gnostics: they tried to deny any positive value to ancient or
modern Judaism, they strove to uproot Christianity from its Jewish soil,
they even denied the capacity of baptism to wipe the difference between
Gentiles and Jews. Taking up the teachings of Fichte or Paul de Lagarde
they wanted an ”Aryanized or Nordic Jesus”; and, unlike Marcion,
they rejected St. Paul too, on whom they blamed the ”Judaization”
of Christianity.
The emergence
of the neo-Gnostics confirms both theses no.2 and no.3: just because they
are anti-Christian they are also anti-Semitic; but their radical Anti-Semitism
makes them reject the core of Christianity as well, i.e.: that all men,
irrespective of their race, can be saved, provided they accept baptism.
12.
I think it is clear now why secularization did not put an end to Anti-Semitism:
for conservative, religious people, the Jews were disliked because their
assimilation was too successful; for the progressive republicans they
never did enough, while for the neo-Gnostics they incarnated the cosmic
evil no matter what they did. Traditional Christians regarded the Jews
suspiciously because they saw that, after the emancipation, the ”deicide
people” was no longer punished by a humiliating status for the crime
it had allegedly committed; while militant and radical anti-Christians
saw in the Jews the people who invented a much-hated God, or who spread
across the world an universal ethic they despised and wanted replaced
with a ”masters’ ethic”.
Eventually,
the obduracy of the Jews to live on came to exasperate everybody: socialists
were upset because they could not fit this people into their ”scientific”
theory, nationalists could not swallow the world’s and homeless
existence of the Jews among so many nation-states, militant atheists were
exasperated because the Jews had invented God, while fundamentalist Christians
were angry because the Jews had murdered God.
No
wonder that, when Nazi neo-Gnosticism prepared to exterminate the Jews,
the capacity and the will of other political, religious, cultural trends,
either from inside or from outside Germany, to resist and to vehemently
protest was so faint. This was why so many people who were not Nazi gave
in, or even became accomplices in the murder.
In
a world where God Himself was turning into a problem, Jews — the
people-proof par excellence — could be but problematic, too. The
problem (the ”Jewish Question”) was awaiting its solution,
even if this meant to distort, to conceal the living proof or to do away
with it. This was how the Holocaust was unleashed. This was why it remained,
in a sense, unique. And even when there were practically no Jews left,
as in some countries of Central and Eastern Europe, Anti-Semitism went
on existing: this was the ”Anti-Semitism without Jews”. This
is, perhaps, the last expression of an old theological passion, whose
object has been an intellectual fancy, but whose victims have always been
lots of real people.
Andrei
Cornea holds a Ph.D. in classical philology from the University of Bucharest. He is currently a researcher at the ”Sergiu Al-George” Institute
for Oriental Studies and an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of European
Studies of the University of Bucharest. He is the author of several
books on philosophy and he teaches Major Trends in Jewish Thought and
Israeli literature at the M.A. program in Jewish Studies organized by
the University of Bucharest.
[1]
Leon Poliakov, History of
Anti-Semitism, London, 1974. ”The uniqueness of the Jews'
destiny has tenaciously been regarded, down through the ages, as the
direct and explicit expression of the divine will, and this as much
by the world as large as by the Jews themselves” (Introduction,
p. 7).
[2]
See Gavin Langmuir, Toward
a Definition of anti-Semitism, Berkeley and L.A. 1990.
[3]
This is what Philo of Alexandria tells us in his Ambassade to Caius.
[4]
Fred Gladstone Bratton, The Crime of Christendom, Boston, 1969, p. 16.
[5]
E. P. Sanders, The Historical
Figure of Jesus, Parish, 1993.
[6]
Mark, 1,15.
[7]
I Corinthians, 1, 23.
[8]
Romans, 5, 12-21.
[9]
Galatians, 2,11.
[10]
On St. Paul, see: Günther Bornkamm, Paul
(1971, 1969); Frederick F. Bruce, Paul:
Apostle of the Heart Set Free (1978, 1984), Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians (1983).
[11]
Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve
and the Serpent, New York 1989.
[12]
Cesare Manucci, Anti-Semitism e ideologia cristiana sugli ebrei, Milano 1982.
[13]
See, for instance: Galatians. 3.23.
[14]
Mathew, 27, 25.
[15]
Homelies against the Jews, Migne, P.G.
t.48, p. 843-942.
[16]
2 Corinthians, 3,14.
[17]
In Mark and Matthew, Jesus is effectively beaten and crucified
by the Roman soldiers, while in Lucas and John - by the Jews themselves.
[18]
Romans, 11,15: See also Gavin Langmuir, History, Religion and Anti-Semitism, London
1990, chapter From Anti-Judaism to Anti-Semitism.
[19]
Robert S. Wistrich, The longest
hatred - Anti-Semitism, New York, 1991.
[20]
Fred Gladstone Bratton, idem, p. 87.
[21]
Gavin Langmuir, History,
Religion and Anti-Semitism, London 1990, chapter From Anti-Judaism
to Anti-Semitism, ”Yet, although some Christians... had tried
to extirpate Judaism and Jews by force, they had done so in defiance
of the authorities of their religion. For... the authorities defended
the presence of the Jews in their midst, as they could use the degraded
state of Jews as empirical evidence in support of Christian beliefs”
(p. 295).
[22]
John Cornwell, Hitler’s
Pope. The Secret History of Pius XII, Viking 1999.
[23]
Corriere della Sera, 13 March 2000.
[24]
Robert S. Wistrich, The longest hatred - Anti-Semitism, New York 1991, p. 45.
[25]
Fr. Nietzsche, The Genealogy
of the Morals.
[26]
J. P. Sartre, Reflexions
sur la Question juive, Paris 1954, p. 42.
[27]
A forerunner was Fichte in Reden an die Deutsche Nation (1808): V. Gun-ther Bornkamm, Paul, London 1975.