In this blog I could not ignore the fact that Israel is now very much in the news.  The whole Israel-Hamas war [if that is the proper name for the conflict] has been on the minds of many around the world.  I felt I should acknowledge this war in my last post* and caution any reader who runs across my ideas that the situation there is not simple.  It is certainly not easy to comprehend.  It may also not be easy to “pick sides” as war often kills innocent civilians.  Some would say that this current conflict is rooted in the long-standing hatred for the Jewish state that was created in 1948 when Israel was declared a nation by the United Nations.  The “losers” in 1948 were the Palestinians who had to give up part of their territory when Israel was created.  At that time, the Palestinians were under the control of Great Britain and when British troops withdrew in 1948, the first Palestinian-Israeli war began.  The Palestinian state was never an independent country, but has been designated a “non-member observer state” by the United Nations in 2012.  However, the hatred began in 1948 and is ongoing.

Some would say that this is completely understandable; no one would be happy if their land was taken away and given to someone else, but Peter Gomes is not really focusing on the ongoing wars of Israel in his Chapter Six, “The Bible and Anti-Semitism: Christianity’s Original Sin”.**   He is discussing a topic much harder to deal with: the history of Christian hatred for the Jewish people.

I tend to socialize with Christians and since the recent conflict broke out, support for Israel among most Christians has been very common.  Gomes writes that this has not always been the case.  What I will be commenting on in this post and the next one will not be popular among today’s Christians.  It is a look into the past, a past when the Christian did not hold the Jew in high regard.  Most would rather not acknowledge this history; it can be seen as painful by the Christian community, but it was real.  We live in a time when denial of history is at an all-time high.   Some Americans would rather act like the travesty of slavery in America did not occur rather than admit that it did.  In the frenzy of fear in World War Two, a large group of Japanese Americans suffered in American internment camps because of concern about their collusion with the Japanese navy off the shores of the west coast. The indigenous people of America have suffered throughout American history because the “white man” wanted their land. 

And yes, American Christians hated Jews.  Gomes cites a representative letter from Pastor Bailey Smith [former president of the Southern Baptist Convention] who writes that other gods beside Jehovah and His Son Jesus are strange gods.  “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of the Jew.  For how in the world can God hear the prayer of a man who says that Jesus is not the true Messiah?”  This letter was written in August 22, 1980 and was reproduced in every major newspaper in the United States.  It ignited a firestorm. 

Gomes comments on the critical question this letter raises: “Is it possible to believe in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, and to believe the New Testament as the living and true word of God in which Jesus is revealed, and to not be anti-Semitic?…must the Good News for Christians always be bad news for the Jews?” [Gomes, 107].  Sadly, that’s the way many Christians have always felt.

What does the New Testament say about the Jews?  Of course, Jesus was a Jew but he suffered at the hands of his own people.  Jesus was sent to the cross by Jews who begged that Pilate release the common criminal Barabbas.  The Jewish people were deemed responsible for the death of Jesus: “His blood be on us and on our children” [Matthw 27:25].  This sets up what Gomes calls a “blood curse” upon all Jews down through the centuries.  This curse shows up in Latin homilies, is “enshrined in the great passion music of Christian composers” and has influenced Christian biblical scholars for centuries.   As it says in Numbers 35: 33-34 “You shall not thus pollute the land in which you live and no expiation can be made for the land, for the blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of him who shed it.”  For violent Christians in the past, there has been a license to kill Jews to revenge the death of Jesus.  It is hard to read of medieval Christians on their way to the crusades killing any Jews they encountered on the way.  It is incomprehensible to consider the massacres of the Jews in European countries and the creation of ghettos to house Jews away from Christians.   

What is the Christian attitude toward solving this problem?  Jews just need to accept Christ as the Messiah and become Christians. 

Now before we go too far, is this discussion saying that all Christians are inherently anti-Semitic?  Gomes would say no to that, but his words about anti-Semitism are chilling:  “The virus of anti-Semitism is in the bloodstream of inherited Christianity” [109].

We must never lose sight on Gomes’ perspective.  His view is that God has room in the church for the LGBTQ+ community, that Christian hatred for the Jews just shows how wrong Christianity can be, how the Bible can be twisted and how Christians must own up to their past and take responsibility for past hateful acts. 

I recently watched a painful Public Broadcasting show called “The U.S. and the Holocaust” by Ken Burns.  That documentary was a harsh look at the pathetic attempts that the U.S. made to help the Jewish people escape the concentration camps of Hitler’s Third Reich.  Some of the American leaders of that time enacted legislation and government regulation based on their “justified” dislike for the Jews.  They made it harder for Jews to immigrate. The facts were obvious; Hitler was rounding up Jewish people and killing them because they were blamed for all kinds of ills within the German homeland.  The spilling of their blood was a way to purify Germany.  The Jew became Hitler’s scapegoat.

As I stated earlier, some Americans would rather act like unpleasant acts of history never occurred. It is better to ignore the past or deny that it ever occurred; maybe that will make it better.  Maybe that will even make the problem go away.  Maybe that will make us feel sin free.  I will use an oft-quoted wise statement to close this post.  George Santayana said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  A current revision would be those who choose to ignore the past are condemned to repeat it.

Is Anti-Semitism alive in the world today?  Yes it is.

Is Anti-Semitism alive in America today?  Yes it is.

I will explore this topic more in the next post; the next section of Chapter 6 in Gomes’ book is entitled “After Auschwitz.”

*”Acknowledging the Contemporary Context”… November 17, 2023.  St. John Studies.

**From Gomes’ book entitled The Good Book