LESSON 5 - ANTI-SEMITISM
One of the greatest Jewish scholars of all time was Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, better known as the Ramban. He was the rabbi of Barcelona who led a Jewish delegation in a debate against church leaders in AD 1263. The Ramban made the following statement in defense of Judaism, “The Church comes as the Prince of Peace, but more blood has been spilled by Christians than all the rest of humanity together.
“You have come on behalf of the poor, but no one has exploited the poor more than the church. The proof of the eternal truth of Judaism is that a people like the Jewish people exist in this world. The proof of the falsehood of Christianity is that there are people who act and behave like the Christians.” (Yaffa Ganz, Sand and Stars (Brooklyn, NY: Shaar Press, 1994), 137.)
The words of the Ramban should pierce the heart of every true Christians. Christians should get on their knees, repent, and cry out to God for forgiveness for the tragic history of Christian persecution of the Jews. While Jesus said that love was the true mark of His disciples (John 13:34-35), organized Christianity early developed a theology and practice of hate towards the Jews. How did the church change the cross into a sword?
To begin with, most of the Gentile leaders of the early church had little regard for nor understanding of Jews. Many of them were Greek philosophers who attempted to merge Greek philosophy with the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament.
Due to the Greek influence in their lives and the lack of a Hebraic perspective of the Bible, most of the new Christian leaders were anti-Semitic. They interpreted the Bible through the eyes of Plato rather than Moses and Jesus. They expressed this hatred through their speeches and writings, which laid the foundation for anti-Semitic policies at the very beginning of the Gentile-led, Christian church.
Ignatius was the bishop of the church at Antioch in the second century. He wrote a letter called the Epistle to the Philippians. He wrote that anyone who celebrated the Passover with the Jews, or even received emblems of the Jewish feast, was a partaker with those that killed the Lord and His apostles. This is just the opposite of Paul’s instructions to the Gentile believers in Corinth to “keep the feast” (1 Corinthians 5:7-8).
Another letter written in the same time period was the Epistle of Barnabas. This letter was highly regarded by the early church. The writer said that the Jews no longer had a covenant with God and that it was a sin to say they did. This is totally contradictory to the Bible, which says God’s covenant with the Jews is everlasting (Genesis 17:7-8).
Justin Martyr, in the second century, claimed that God’s covenant with the Jews was no longer valid and that the church had replaced the Jews in God’s redemptive plan. This is contrary to Romans 11.
Irenaeus was the bishop of Lyon in the second century. He wrote that the Jews were disinherited from the grace of God. But the apostle Paul wrote that the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable (Romans 11:29).
Clement of Alexandria in the second century emphasized Greek philosophy rather than the Hebrew Scriptures as the means God gave the Gentiles to lead them to Jesus.
Origen, in the second and third century accused the Jews of plotting to kill Christians. He influenced many others with his way of thinking.
Hippolytus was a bishop in Rome in the second and third century. He said that the Jews were condemned to perpetual slavery because they killed the Son of God.
Another important Christian teacher and writer in the second and third century was Tertullian. He blamed the entire Jewish race for the death of Jesus. This is interesting since most of the Jews were scattered among the Gentiles when Jesus was crucified. They had not even heard of Jesus. Furthermore, as we earlier learned, many thousands of Jews acknowledged Jesus as Messiah.
Cyprian was the bishop of Carthage in the third century. He demanded that all Jews leave his region or die.
Eusebius lived in the third and fourth centuries. He wrote the history of the church for the first three centuries. He taught that the promises of God in the Hebrew Scriptures were for the Christians and the curses were for the Jews. He declared that the church was the “true Israel of God” that had replaced literal Israel in God’s covenants.
The Christian leader who expressed his hate for the Jews more than any other was John Chrysostom. He was the bishop of the church at Antioch in the fourth century. He said there could never be forgiveness for the Jews and that God had always hated them. He taught it was the “Christian duty” to hate the Jew. He said the Jews were the assassins of Christ and worshippers of the devil.
In one of his sermons, Chrysostom declared, “The synagogue is worse than a brothel ... It is the den of scoundrels ... the temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults ... a place of meeting for the assassins of Christ ... a house worse than a drinking shop ... a den of thieves; a house of ill fame, a dwelling of iniquity, the refuge of devils, a gulf and abyss of perdition ... As for me, I hate the synagogue ... I hate the Jews for the same reason.” (Malcolm Hay, The Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Liberty Press, 1981), 27-28.)
Jerome lived in the fourth and fifth centuries. His great contribution was to translate the Scriptures into Latin. He claimed that the Jews were incapable of understanding the Bible and that they should be severely punished unless they confess the “true faith.”
The basic concept behind these statements was that the Jews as an entire race of people killed Christ. Therefore, they lost their place in God’s covenant and have been replaced by the church. The church should persecute the Jews to show the superiority of Christianity over Judaism. However, Christendom should not totally destroy the Jews because some need to be left alive as a witness that they are suffering because they rejected Christ.
The Crusades were military expeditions conducted under the authority and with the blessings of the Church. Their purpose was to recover the Holy Land from the Moslems and stop the spread of Islam. The Crusades took place during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries.
When the Crusaders finally arrived in Jerusalem, they killed the Moslems, rounded up all the Jews, and herded them into the synagogue. These “Christian” Crusaders then nailed the door shut and set fire to the synagogue. As they burned the Jews alive inside the synagogue, the Crusaders sang, “O Christ We Adore Thee.”
In the twelfth century a new charge was leveled against the Jews. This was the charge of ritual murder. It was said that each year at Passover, the Jews killed a Christian boy and used his blood in the Passover ritual. This always caused angry mobs to attack the Jews.
The Jews were also accused of stealing the communion wafer (bread) which the Catholic Church taught literally became the body of Christ. The Christians accused the Jews of sticking pins in the wafer as a means of torturing Christ. This always caused violent mob action against the Jews.
To further humiliate the Jews, from time to time, the Christian nations expelled them from their countries. At other times, they forced the Jews to wear distinctive clothing or badges to readily identify themselves as Jews. In some countries the badge was a yellow “O” similar to the yellow star, which Nazi German would use to mark its Jews. As shocking as it may be to the reader, Nazi Germany got many of its ideas for the Holocaust from the church.
The Jews were also blamed for the plague that devastated Europe in 1347-1350. This plague, known as the Black Death, killed approximately one-fourth of Europe’s population. Many millions died. This terrible plague was transmitted by fleas and carried by rats. Because the Jews practiced better hygiene than the Gentiles, they were not as susceptible to the plague.
When people suffer, they need someone to blame for their misery. As usual, “Christian” Europe turned their wrath against the Jews. They accused the Jews of poisoning the wells. Unruly mobs attacked the Jews and killed them unmercifully. Before the plague ended, thousands of Jews were slaughtered and hundreds of entire Jewish communities were annihilated.
The Inquisition in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was one of the worst periods in all of church history. The church tortured and murdered tens of thousands of true Christians who were falsely accused of being heretics. In their passion for blood, they also killed hundreds of thousands of Jews.
The Inquisition was especially perilous for the Jews living in Spain and Portugal. Ferdinand and Isabella, at the insistence of the church, began a systematic action that brought great suffering on the Jews. Thomas de Torquemada was put in charge of the Inquisition. He gave the Jews the choice of forced baptism or exile. If they accepted baptism, the Jews had to renounce their Jewishness. Those who converted were called “conversos” or “marranos”, meaning pigs.
They were constantly interrogated to make sure they were not secretly practicing Judaism. If they refused to be baptized, they were tortured and murdered. Finally, in 1492, at the very time when Columbus sailed to discover the new world, the Jews were expelled from Spain.
Many Jews fled to Portugal. However, this did not prove to be a safe haven. The church initiated an Inquisition in Portugal that eventually led to the Jews being expelled.
The Protestant Reformation was certainly a needed blessing for Christendom. Yet, it brought further disaster on the Jews. While the reformers read the Bible in its literal sense, they continued to use the allegorical method of interpreting the Scriptures regarding the relationship of the church to the Jews and the prophetic Scriptures concerning Israel and end-time events.
Erasmus is known by Christian historians as the greatest scholar of the reformation. His most significant contribution was translating the New Testament based on fresh scholarly research. This is a man greatly respected by Christianity. Yet Erasmus hated the Jews. He wrote, “Who is there amongst us that does not hate this race of men ... If it is Christian to hate the Jews, here we are all Christians in profusion.” (Fred Wright, Words from the Scroll of Fire (Jerusalem: Four corners Publishing, 1994), 124.)
Martin Luther is revered by all Protestants as the man who sparked the Reformation. Tragically, he is also considered the “theologian of the Holocaust.” His pamphlet entitled, On Jews and their Lies contains some of the most hateful words that have ever been written against the Jews. His ideas and writings would later be used by Hitler for “Christian” justification of the Holocaust.
Luther wrote, “We are at fault for not slaying them. Rather we allow them to live freely in our midst despite all of their murdering, cursing, blaspheming, lying and defaming. … What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? Since they live amongst us we dare not tolerate their conduct ...
“Firstly, their synagogues should be set on fire, and whatever does not burn up should be covered or spread over with dirt so that no one may every be able to see a cinder or stone of it. And this ought to be done for the honor of God and Christianity in order that God may see that we are Christians, and that we have not wittingly tolerated or approved of such public lying, cursing and blaspheming His Son and His Christians.
“Secondly, their homes should likewise be broken down and destroyed. For they perpetrate the same things there that they do in their synagogues. ... Thirdly, they should be deprived of their prayer books and Talmuds in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught. Fourthly, their Rabbis must be forbidden under threat of death to teach any more. ... Fifthly, passports and traveling privileges should be absolutely forbidden to the Jews. ...
“Sixthly, they ought to be stopped from usury. ... Seventhly, let the young and the strong Jews and Jewesses be given the flail, the axe, the hoe, the spade, the distaff, and the spindle and let them earn their bread by the sweat of their noses.” (Wright, 135-136).
Luther further wrote, “I advise you [Christians] not to enter their [Jews] synagogues: all devils might dismember and devour you there ... For he who cannot hear or bear to hear God’s word is not of God’s people. And if they are not of God’s people, then they are of the devil’s people.”
“I cannot understand it except by admitting that they have transformed God into the devil, or rather the servant of the devil, accomplishing all the evil the devil desires, corrupting unhappy souls and raging against himself. In short the Jews are worse than devils ... . ” (Wright, 136-137).
As hard as it is to accept, we see from Luther’s writing that his solution the “Jewish problem” was the same as the Nazis. Thank God that some leaders in the Evangelical Lutheran Church have issued public statements repudiating Luther’s words and apologizing to the Jews for their past anti-Semitism.
There are no human words to describe the horrors of the Holocaust in which six million Jews and five million non-Jews perished. How could such a thing happen in “civilized” Europe? Unfortunately, as we have seen, the anti-Semitic policies of Christianity provided the theological justification that allowed Adolf Hitler to go forward with his “final solution” to the Jewish problem. He knew he could implement his plan to exterminate the Jews because European Christendom was anti-Semitic to the core.
Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and quickly extended his victories throughout Europe. With every victory, Hitler set out to destroy the Jews. In addition to mobile killing units, forced death marches, Ghettos, and every other evil imaginable, the Nazis shipped trainloads of Jews from their homelands to concentration camps. The Jews were told they were going to work camps. In reality they were death camps that could mass murder 25,000 human beings every day.
Upon arrival, the Jews were separated according to those who would live and those who would die. They were stripped of their clothes and herded like cattle into gas chambers, which they believed to be showers. When the room was full, the doors were shut and the people were gassed to death.
When it was safe, workers entered the chambers and removed the bodies long enough to extract gold teeth and wedding rings to be melted down into gold bars. Women’s hair was cut and used in the manufacture of cloth and mattresses. Body fat was used to make inexpensive soap. Afterwards, the bodies were cremated and their ashes used for fertilizer.
The Jewish population in Europe in 1939 was about nine million. Hitler reduced it to three million. The horror of the Holocaust awakened the Jews to the fact they would never be safe living in the Gentile nations. Hitler’s plan to destroy the Jews almost succeeded, but God had other plans. Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. Israel was born on May 15, 1948.
While no one would seriously believe that Hitler and his murdering thugs were Christians, it is still true that European Christendom, both Protestant and Catholic, refused to stand with the Jews. There were true Christian people who risked their lives to help the Jews, but these were the exception.
Where were the Christians during the Holocaust? They had centuries of anti-Semitism in their own church doctrines and practices that enabled them to embrace the Nazi propaganda of hate against the Jews.
Christians must examine their hearts and ask the Lord to reveal and remove any hatred we may have towards Jews. We must repent of the past sins of the church and then go to the Jewish community in our neighborhoods and ask for forgiveness.
We must determine to take our stand with the Jewish people and bless, comfort, love, and support them with our prayer and deeds of kindness. We must say, “Never again” will we stand on the sidelines when they are persecuted for the mere fact that they are Jews. Only then, will the curse of Abraham be lifted off the church and the fullness of God’s blessing given.
A. How could the Christian church become so anti-Semitic?
B. How should Christians relate to the Jewish people in light of the Holocaust?
C. How can you apply this lesson to your life?