Helen Fry
Is Christianity Irredeemably Antisemitic, Part 4

Dr. Helen Fry - Is Christianity Irredeemably Antisemitic Lecture 4

- Okay, I’m going to make a start and others might still join us. So today, the fourth lecture in this series, The Partings of the Ways or what happens after the partings of the ways and what is an absolutely horrendous 2000 years of Christian anti-Semitism. And whilst I won’t be able to go through all the things today, I think, I’m hoping you’ll have something to think about and it’s really clear from the questions that you’ve kindly been sending into Lockdown University for Trudy and I to address in our debate tomorrow evening and it’s seven o'clock tomorrow evening, that you really thought about the material that I’ve been presenting. It’s something which I take very, very seriously. The material that I myself have studied and there are really big questions and I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that. That there are big questions. There are unanswered questions and I’m really hoping Trudy and I can can discuss tomorrow towards the end of that session, what’s the way forward? So, the last one in the series for today of the lectures before the debate tomorrow. We’re going to look at that period between the partings of the ways and the development of Christian anti-Semitism and as you can see… next slide please. Before 100 CE, the picture is incredibly complex.

There is a diversity on all fronts which pretty much begins to come to an end with the destruction of the temple and what emerges after the destruction of the temple would eventually lead to what we’re going to discuss today, what Professor Robert Wistrich called “The Longest Hatred” and I’m guessing that most of you will have read his works. If you haven’t had chance yet, please do get ahold of his works. An amazing professor who was so insightful and really sort of prophetic insight for our times, the late Robert Wistrich. So, please do read his stuff and we might ask ourselves, you know, why have Christians hated Jews? And I think some of the language we’re going to look at today, it’s shocking. You know, let’s not beat about the bush. It’s shocking words such as hatred. It has been, and in some quarters still is, a hatred. Is Christianity irrevocably anti-Semitic? I’m going to try and answer that at the end of today. Maybe it’s something we can discuss and tease out in more detail with Trudy and tomorrow to look for ways forward for the future. Next slide please. So just a couple of slides to recap. After the destruction of the temple, the Pharisaic Judaism emerges to become Rabbinic Judaism by early Jewish Christianity. Certainly, the group that was around the Jerusalem church headed by James, the brother of Jesus, they eventually would just die out. And it was the apostle Paul who would enable Christianity or to morph Jewish Christianity into the Gentile world, would enable it to survive and importantly to remember that his thinking, his religious perspective, his theology, is pre destruction of the temple.

And I do see a very clear difference in the Christianity of Paul and what he believes about Jesus. It is developing in his letters, but I think it’s very, very different from what was believed by the community of Matthews gospel, certainly of Luke’s gospel. And so we have this progression and reaction of fighting for true interpretation and originally of course that belief, prior to the destruction of the temple, that belief in Jesus did not supersede Jewish teaching or tradition. And that I believe is important. It’s an early, one of the earliest strands of Jewish Christianity, of Paul’s Christianity, that Jesus, belief in Jesus, whatever that belief is, in resurrection, does not supersede the Jewish teachings or traditions, but of course, after the destruction of the temple, we would see 2000 years of official Christian teaching that Judaism had been superseded, had been replaced by Christianity. And I’ll come to the changes in Nostra Aetate in the 1960s towards the end today. Next slide please. So what do we have then? Just to recap on one of the other slides from yesterday, the new Christian orthodoxy, which begins to emerge from around 100 CE. Both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity are trying to form a normative religion, the boundaries. And this is at the heart of a lot of the discussions of the Church Fathers, what is Christianity? There were a number of different views emerging which we don’t necessarily hear about today, that the Church Fathers decided were heresy and I’ll come to that shortly. I’ll give you two examples shortly.

The Church Fathers by 100 CE onwards firmly believed, had developed a religious perspective that said that Christianity is the new covenant. Judaism is the old covenant. It’s been superseded. And there was an expectation that ultimately, Jews would see the truth and would convert. And one of the problems I see in the history of anti-Judaism, it formed part of my PhD, I think personally, the problem is not belief in Jesus or what we would term Christology. I think it’s mission. I think it’s the belief, the conversionary outlook which directly led to aggressive anti-Judaism. There is the belief now that God’s promises have transferred to the church, which is the new Israel. So you’ve got all this imagery of old, of new, of faithful, the church is faithful, Israel is unfaithful, and belief in Jesus becomes the only means of salvation. So we’ve now got a very different, I think, a very different language beginning to emerge which will become the dominant orthodoxy for nearly 2000 years. This whole idea, you know, that Jesus has replaced the sacrificial system. The way that you atone for your sins is not by offering a sacrifice cause Jesus has now done that. And then the belief that, if you believe in that, that’s how you are redeemed. Redemption, salvation, all these difficult concepts begin to be taken up as the orthodoxy within the churches and I think it’s highly problematic. Next slide please. I’m being quite honest today, so I hope you’ll respect my honesty. I know there’ll be people with different views out there potentially, but it’s not come without a journey myself across 30 years. Okay, so the Church Fathers then, it’s important to understand they become totally obsessed with what is orthodoxy. And you see this in the various councils which emerge in the next two to three centuries are a number of councils and they are worried about heresy, about unorthodox beliefs developing, religious ideas, that is going to undermine the true message of the church. It’s all about staking the true interpretation.

Not only, they’re not just worried about heresy within the churches. They also, I wouldn’t say they could suffice to say Judaism’s a heresy, certainly not as a heresy, but they would equally want to define themselves. I don’t know what’s happened, something’s gone across my screen. Anyway, I hope you’ll ignore that. I don’t know if you can see that yourself. So, they wanted to define themselves… we’ll just ignore that, not as heresy, but they wanted to define themselves as the orthodoxy. And they’re defining themselves against a thriving Judaism and also against groups within Christianity, which could take Christianity in a very different direction. So, one of the main heresies that the Church Fathers are trying to combat is what was called Gnosticism. Gnosticism, the Greek word knowledge. And this group believed that they had some kind of secret knowledge and a whole collection of texts survive. They’re really, really fascinating. They were found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in, if I’m not mistaken, it was the 1960s. This whole belief in wisdom, they are the exclusive group who’ve been given this message. So very, very isolationist, not dissimilar, although their religious ideas will be dissimilar, but not dissimilar to the idea of the Qumran community that sort of shuts itself away. It has this exclusive community and group. You see the Gnostics were not that far off in many ways and they really do take on the idea of incarnation, which is developing within the churches at this time, but in some sense, God is literally incarnation in the person of Christ. Very, very different to what we see before the destruction of the temple and the whole purpose, they are now slightly shifting. Jesus’s purpose during his lifetime was to impart knowledge to a select few. So they’re incredibly, incredibly exclusive. Then the other main group, and there were lots of them, but the other main tradition which really upset the Church Fathers was the Marcion tradition, after Marcion who advocated that actually Christianity not only had superseded Judaism, but didn’t actually need the Hebrew Bible. You know, he’s rejected the Hebrew Bible, he’s rejected the God of Israel, and, you know, sees that whole imagery as the wickedness of Israel, Israel being tyrant, that the God that Jesus Christ has shown them is and comes from the New Testament, is a god of love.

So this is terrible, terrible imagery, but interestingly, the Church Fathers reject Marcion’s thinking. They were as fiercely opposed to him as they were to Gnosticism. So they did agree that they needed, Christianity needed its Jewish foundations, its Jewish roots. Next slide please. But going forwards, and this is important, the Jewish non-acceptance of Jesus becomes the major challenge and worry, dominates, that alongside heresy, pretty much dominates the views of the Church Fathers. This is a new religion trying to define itself against Judaism which is not only existing, but it’s thriving and it’s also thriving in the Diaspora. And if you’ve got the belief system that Judaism has been replaced by Christianity, the end times are coming, you know, okay, it’s been slightly delayed. Jesus is coming again. You’ve got this… Oh, we’ve lost our PowerPoint. Yeah, thank you. You’ve got this need to define yourself in relation, to establish your authenticity. It’s almost like the church sees itself in its preaching to the gentile world as almost competing with Judaism. I think that was certainly true. It did see itself very much so as competing with Judaism. So the Church Fathers then developing this important orthodoxy. Next slide please. We come to Justin Martyr. I’ve given his dates there. I think that’s particularly helpful. In around 160, just before his death, he wrote this tractate. It was a dialogue of Trypho the Jew. And my understanding from my studies is that Trypho was a Jew from Ephesus in Asia Minor and this dialogue probably is considered to be one of the earliest in what’s termed the adversus Judaeos tradition, the anti-Jewish tradition. So on the whole, it starts off pretty cordial, but with some anti-Jewish sentiments in it. Next slide please. So, we’re beginning to get writings which will concretely provide a foundation for the development of anti-Judaism and what he does, so yes we have some anti-Judaism, but he’s beginning to firm up, to sure up ideas of divinity which become problematic.

So it’s not just he develops incarnation theology, and this of course is just anathema to anything. A very, very tricky discussion in Jewish Christian relations, certainly. So, you have the idea developing before that somehow God was incarnate in Jesus and the Church Fathers had all sorts of problems trying to explain that. Do we understand it today? Well, no. So, but Justin Martyr started to develop this idea that Jesus was divine and this really is taking it. So Jesus has not only, so in rejecting Christ, who is divine, if you like, they’ve also rejected God. It’s a very dangerous message. And then this exclusivism that only by being in the church could Jews also receive salvation. And that underpinned, there was a missionary approach to Jews before Justin Martyr, of course. It was primarily though to the gentile world. But this becomes, I think, quite dangerous for Christian missionary activity because of course inevitably what happens when Jews don’t convert? It did lead to this horrendous history including by the Mediaeval period, forced conversions and forced baptisms. Next slide please. Melito of Sardis probably, I don’t know if any of you have heard of him, but I was shocked when I first learned about his theology because he is the first to formulate the charge of deicide. So he’s Bishop of Sardis. Sardis actually had a thriving Jewish community. He is reacting again against a community that is surviving, but not only is Judaism surviving, the problem he has is that some of the Christians in his community are still quite attracted to Judaism and would occasionally attend services in a synagogue, not to convert, but this was seen as a threat and he is the earliest to have coined, as far as we know, the term Old Testament.

And so he’s first claimed the charge of deicide which would remain unchallenged in Christian thinking and theology and official teaching for 2000 years until Nostra Aetate. So what is deicide then? Just basically, in killing Jesus, the Jews had killed God. Really, really dangerous move to go from, and of course, not what we’ve seen from the historical Jesus. It’s not the Jews who have killed Jesus. And it’s possibility that Trudy and I will discuss this tomorrow because some of you have raised this issue. Surely, it was the Romans who killed Jesus. So, we have a dangerous move now and it’s, in my perspective from the historical backdrop, this teaching has emerged because Christianity is feeling threatened. It’s survival. We think that by 100-150 CE, Christianity is going to survive. It’s by no means clear in my view. And it’s not until Constantine converts in 325 and Christianity becomes the official religion of the empire, the Holy Roman empire, that, you know, I think before that, anything could happen. So, for example, I just give you one of the terrible, terrible phrases from Melito’s tractate there. His dialogue with Trypho the Jew. The language you can see coming in. “O lawless Israel, what is this unprecedented crime you committed…” So that whole language of deicide and pinning it. “You lie dead.” I can’t see the rest of my quote actually, but you can see it on screen hopefully. So, linking deicide with words like crime. Next slide please. And as I said, and there are a number of Church Fathers in between. This is not a series about the Church Fathers and anti-Judaism per se. I wanted to bring a trail from the earliest times from the historical Jesus right through the 2000 years. So, I haven’t gone into detail about some of the Church Fathers in between, but 325 CE then, everything changes. Constantine’s mother Helena is a Christian.

She’s very pious and she persuades him not to persecute the Christians, but he eventually would convert to Christianity because he saw Christianity as a means to unify the empire. Becomes very dangerous because now church and state, so to speak, are deeply entwined. And as I’ve put there, I believe it had huge implications for the subsequent Christian persecution of Jews. Although Constantine himself, there’s no record that he actually persecuted Jews. And of course he’s revered in the Orthodox church today. Next slide please. I’ve got another couple of examples of some of the Church Fathers in the fourth century. This is a period where we have a number of tractates or Homilies. Archbishop of Constantinople in the fourth century wrote a series of Homilies. It was called the Homilies against the Judaizers. And this was to combat the attractiveness of Judaism to Gentiles. And as I mentioned earlier, Melito of Sardis found the same. Judaism still had an attraction even to Christians in the churches. And many of these Homilies were written just before major Jewish festivals and you could say the Church Fathers have become literally obsessed. The same ideas of supersessionalism. Now, you find the Church Fathers are inheriting, whilst they’re developing some of their own ideas, they have inherited and they keep the ideas of Justin Martyr, Melito of Sardis. So going forwards, the charge of deicide is firmly now part of official church teaching.

The whole idea of new covenant is very strong and the whole idea that the church has superseded. It has replaced Judaism which of course is not actually something that you will find in the teachings of Paul. We’ve come a long way. Next slide please. So, another couple of quotes just to sort of… I mean, absolutely dreadful, to give you a sense of the kind of things that are being written. “The festivals of the pitiful and miserable Jews are soon to march upon us one after the other and in quick succession.” And you can imagine that this stuff is being preached in the churches. It’s an over-exaggeration of language, describing Jews as “Wretched and miserable.” They’ve “Degenerated to the level of dogs who are gluttonous and live only for their bellies… They are stiff necked for they do not bear the yoke of Christ.” So all this diatribe is heaped onto Jews of the day. Ultimately, for rejecting Jesus. Next slide please. Cyril of Alexandria, and he is functioning towards the end of the fourth century and into the fifth century. So he dies around 444 CE. He stands very firmly within this tradition and of course he’s highly respected in the Orthodox churches and he describes Jews as the “Most deranged of all men.” “Their madness was greater than that of the Greeks.” “Killers of the Lord.” Incredibly dangerous religious development. Senseless, blind. Jews have misunderstood their scriptures and that’s why they’ve rejected Jesus, but the church has the true interpretations of scripture. It has the true interpretation of the Old Testament. And so this whole replacement ideology, you know, when Jews don’t accept this message, that’s when things become dangerous. Next slide please.

Another quote. “Let the ignorant Jews who harden their minds to complete stubbornness, realise that they pour self-invited destruction upon their own heads.” And it’s not a very far move to move from this verbal diatribe, I would argue, to the actual killing of Jews and we’ll of course come to the 20th century and to the Holocaust. Next slide please. Augustine of Hippo, he is the founder of Western theology at the heart of the Roman Catholic Church. He coined the idea of original sin, that men and women are born with sin, which goes back to Adam and Eve. So, it’s not as in a Jewish interpretation that you can have a propensity to good or evil. But there is this thing about original sin, very, very, again, problematic development. But it’s quite late. Until Augustine of Hippo, there’s no idea that all humanity is born sinful. You won’t find that in any thinking prior to Augustine of Hippo. And tragically, we might believe, he actually was canonised. He became a saint. He does still believe that the Jews will convert ultimately in the end times. Again, it’s sort of far off. Well, the belief of the end times could be at any point, but he’s the first to coin this Mark of Cain. Again, a very dangerous development in Christian religious thinking, which becomes part of official Christian teaching, that by rejecting Jesus, so not only are Jews killers of God, but in rejecting Jesus, God has made them bear the Mark of Cain and they’re going to wander the earth for the rest of their days and we don’t kill them because they are a reminder of what happens if you don’t accept Jesus. Next slide please. I’m skipping several hundred years forward cause I would say it’s not a lecture on the history of anti-Judaism into anti-Semitism. To the 4th Lateran Council, 1215.

This is the periods of the Crusades, the persecutions, and of course, within a couple of hundred years, there will be expulsions. Well, first, 1290 from England, but within 200 years from Spain and Portugal, Pope Innocent the third has presented 71 decrees. I haven’t read all of them, but I have picked out… Towards the end, number 68 is interesting. It says this, “Jews and Muslims shall wear a special dress to enable them to be distinguished from Christians.” And it was the 4th Lateran Council that forced Jews, their distinctive feature was to wear a yellow star. Next slide please. And much of what had developed in early Christian Church Fathers, what developed through the third century, fourth century, into the fifth century with Augustine of Hippo, for the next thousand years, starts to be incorporated into art. And we still see that in the stained glass windows of our churches today. We have the development… I should have put up an image actually of this, of Ecclesia and Synagoga. You’re probably aware of these female statues. If you are not, Notre Dame in Paris has one full length. Two women, one Ecclesia, Greek for church, is a woman with her head high, triumphant, holding the scriptures usually. And then Synagoga, the Senegal, is the woman who’s blindfolded, whose staff is broken. And this imagery is very, very powerful and it reinforces this thousand year history already just over a thousand years of anti-Semitic teaching by the church. And there is one just ahead of Ecclesia and Synagoga in Wolfram Abbey, just off the M25. So, if any of you go there at any point, do have a look. And it’s above, from memory, it’s a long time since I’ve seen it, but it’s above the altar, just the head and the shoulders and it says underneath Ecclesia and Synagoga. The woman’s blindfolded. So, this is depicting Christian theologies.

Now, moving as it inevitably does, into art. And famously, Michelangelo, his statue which is in the Vatican, if it hasn’t moved since I last saw it there, depicting Moses with horns. Next slide please. And then we come to Martin Luther again as a dreadful period in Christian history. He was of the Protestant tradition. So, it’s not that we’ve got anti-Judaism, anti-Semitism, only in Eastern Orthodoxy or in Roman Catholicism, but it permeates even the Protestant traditions that are emerging. And he develops these treaties against the Jews, never himself having met a single Jewish person. One of those was fairly sort of positive about the Jews, but three of them were definitely against the Jews and are vitriolic again in that line of adversus Judaeos with the Church Fathers. Next slide please. And he believes the Jews will convert in the end time. So, we’ve still got this apocalyptic thinking coming through. He believes there’s no need to keep anything Jewish whatsoever. God has rejected the Jews, but you see, he’s still expecting Jews to convert. All Jews will convert by the end times. But he does believe that his preaching, although he hasn’t met any Jews, in his head, he believes that his teaching in some sense, could have an impact on Jewish conversion. But because Jews are not converting, it becomes a real challenge for him, such that by the 1540s, he becomes really bitter, incredibly bitter. And there are these three anti-Semitic tractates. The worst, I think, but you can judge for yourselves, On the Jews and their Lies. The second one, The Ineffable Name and Lineage of Christ. And the third one, The Last Words of David. Next slide please.

So he’d spent, it’s that kind of disappointment again. The church really has a problem. And whether it’s the Church Fathers or whether it’s Luther, the church has a real problem with Jews not accepting the message. They just can’t get it. They just don’t understand. And some progress has been made in the late 20th century between Jewish and Christian scholars in the dialogue on this and on messiahship and views of Jesus and why there’s a difference, trying to get Christians to understand. But you see this whole history before that, the Church Fathers just see the truth of their message. They’re obsessed, I would say. They’re obsessed by Judaism. Jews have not converted. And of course, if Jews aren’t converting, well, what about the end times? If the end times going to come, are they going to convert just on the end times? And as I’ve put there, I’ve used some quite strong language. He does despair of what he calls in one of his tractates, blindness and stubbornness on the part of the Jews. But he adds a word and that’s willfully. Jews are now willfully blind and he reinforces in those tractates the charge of deicide, but he also brings in the charge of ritual murder. I believe that might be something we’re going to discuss tomorrow. So I’ll leave that, I won’t go into detail. But now, he actually argues that, not only have the Jews rejected Jesus, and in rejecting Jesus have rejected God, but they are the incarnation of the devil. Next slide please. So what should be done to the Jews, these Jews who are the incarnation of the devil? This is what he argues. I’m not sure if any of you are aware, how many of you are aware of this. So, I will go over this. Four main threads of what should be done with the Jews. Their synagogues should be set on fire. Sound familiar?

Their homes must be broken down and destroyed. They must be deprived of their prayer books and Talmuds in which “such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught.” And the rabbis are forbidden under threat of death to teach anymore. As I say, sound familiar? Next slide please. What did the Nazis do when they came to power in 1933? One of the first things that was republished was Luther’s tract on the Jews and their lies. And it’s no coincidence that this was republished again and circulated throughout Germany just before Kristallnacht. And we can argue, although the Nazis were secular, it was a secular anti-Semitism, secular political anti-Semitism. They haven’t drawn on anything new. You can see just through what I’ve outlined with Luther, Hitler has not drawn on anything new. He has 2000 years of Christian anti-Semitism to draw upon, even 500 years or so earlier. Luther actually advocating that we should be burning the synagogues. Next slide please. So is there a direct link between 2000 years of Christian anti-Semitism and the Holocaust? Big, big question. By and large, scholars and many of the churches see a direct link and I would agree with that.

There is definitely a direct link between these 2000 years of, first anti-Judaism, tipping into anti-Semitism, and the final solution. So the church, as I’ve put, there’s never officially sanctioned genocide, but in these three points I want to make quite, I think is important spiritually, the church, the different churches, has tried to wipe out Jews as Jews, spiritually, and the Jewish faith. So Hitler also, what’s he done? He’s reversed the laws of Jewish emancipation. And we know, the terrible, terrible annihilation of 6 million Jews. Some of you, probably most of you, have part of that as your family history. But importantly, whilst the church did not try to wipe out… Historically, the church didn’t try to wipe out Jews physically, certainly they did spiritually. Next slide please. And Marcus Braybrooke, Reverend Marcus Braybrook, who of course is very active in the Council of Christians and Jews at one point, now retired, has written a fantastic book, A Time to Meet. He was the one actually, I heard him speak in Exeter Cathedral in… I won’t get the year right. I think it was 1995. 1994 or 1995. And I found him utterly inspirational and it was thanks to him… we chatted afterwards, that I actually majored my PhD on an aspect of Christian Jewish relations. And he wrote this. He’s written lots of stuff, but his book A Time to Meet is really, really worth reading. And it’ll cover a lot of the issues. If you want a very easy readable way into this, it’s really good. He wrote, “Centuries of anti-Jewish teaching prepared the ground for Nazism… Today Christians need to enter into the painful horror of the Shoah and readily confess their penitence for the churches’ shameful record.” “If they [Christians] believe that God’s promises to Israel are eternal and unfailing, then they will recognise that the Jews are still a people of God.” And to our audience, of course that’s obvious. But within a Christian world, the shift that has to take place given what we’ve studied over these four lectures is enormous. Next slide please.

And of course, Apostle Paul says the covenant has not been revoked. And another man I met a number of times who was in his quiet, gentle way, he was a scholar, Rabbi Dr. Norman Solomon, very gentle, but had some profound things to say in the Jewish Christian relationship. He wrote, “Hitler’s core message about the Jews was Christian, only his methods were not.” “Jews see the Holocaust as a culmination of the centuries of Christian teaching of contempt.” Next slide please. And Mary Athans, there’s been a lot of dialogue in America too and that’s impacted a lot of writers, Christian Jewish writers. And she wrote, “The culmination of years of simplistic biblical interpretation, anti-Judaic pronouncements, legislation by the churches, and the behaviour of Christians laid the groundwork for the events of the Nazi era… While it is true that the basic orientation of Nazi ideology was atheistic, the Christian writings and proclamations of centuries provided a fertile soil in which the hatred of Jews could grow.” I can’t express it any better than that and I believe this to be true. Next slide please. Rosemary Radford Ruether, although she wrote her Faith and Fratricide in 1974, there is still food for thought for discussion. And she argued that the Shoah highlighted the urgent necessity for a revised Christian theology of Judaism. And we might want to discuss tomorrow, I don’t want to set the agenda cause it’s for Trudy as well. But you know, does the rise in anti-Semitism today necessitate a revised look at that, a look at revised theology of Judaism? There’s an urgent necessity. She shocked and that is true. She really did shock the Christian world in the 1970s by saying “The shadow side of Christology is anti-Semitism.” So it’s like two sides of one coin. And she says, “anti-Judaism developed as the left hand of Christology.”

So you can’t have one without the other. I actually would disagree with her in that. In my PhD, I think the shadow side of anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism was its exclusive missionary theology, which, yes, is tied to Christology. So the church has traditionally claimed that all messianic hope has been fulfilled in Jesus and of course she tries to overturn that and she was very controversial in her day. Next slide please. At the root of the problem, she argues, is a different understanding of Messiah. So Jews, the Messianic coming, this public world historic event is still to come. The Christians, this has been delayed. The belief in the second coming. And you know, I would disagree with her in that I don’t see the root of anti-Semitism as being under difference of messiahship. I think those two can coincide. It doesn’t necessitate persecution. I’m hoping that the trail of what I’ve shown today and in the last few lectures has shown how we got to where we are. And I don’t think that necessarily a disagreement over Messiahship is anti-Semitic. But she does say in her other book To Change the World, “The Nazi final solution to the Jewish question was not religious conversion,” which is traditionally the church’s view, but spiritual annihilation for the churches. “But physical extermination to make way for the millennium of the Third Reich.” Next slide please. And she also writes, “For us who live after the Holocaust, after the collapse of Christian eschatology,” eschatology being the belief of the end times. I mean, I think she’s very much seeing that as having sort of failed in Christian thinking. So, eschatology means beliefs of the end times. “After the collapse of Christian eschatology into Nazi genocidal destruction, profound reassessment of this whole heritage becomes necessary.” And you know, we might be back there again.

Something, you know, going forwards, we might want to think about. “Although Nazis,” she wrote, “hated Christians as well as Jews, the church nevertheless must take responsibility for the perpetuation of the demonic myth of the Jew that allowed the Nazis to make them the scapegoat of their project of racial purity.” And you know, that isn’t there, certainly, I would argue, before the destruction of the temple. And then of course, we get that gradual anti-Judaism. One might even argue, there’s a problematic passage in Matthew, which I think we are going to address. But what’s happened after 100 CE has led to this. Next slide, please. Franklin Littel, again, very influential historian in the dialogue. He wrote a book The Crucifixion of the Jews. He said, “We Christians need Jewry first.” This is a huge shift for Christian churches. “The Jewish people can define itself in history without Christianity.” And sometimes it’s worth being reminded of that. Christians need Jews, but Jews don’t need Christians to define themselves. And I’m not talking about in terms of acts of kindness and charity amending the world. All faiths need each other, I think, to do that. But it’s worth the Christian Churches remembering that it really can’t define itself without its Jewish roots. Next slide please.

So, the Orthodox church, this I’ve included because Father Yves Dubois, I met him in my younger days and when I was involved very much in Christian Jewish dialogue, he was one of the few Greek Orthodox pastors who was involved in the dialogue. And I will read the quote cause it’s quite a lot for you to quickly read. He wrote, “It is not sufficient.” He’s a rare voice, by the way. “It is not sufficient that occasional parishes or monasteries in the East or West should edit supersessionist or anti-Judaic liturgical texts when they use them in their own communities. While the printed liturgical texts remain unchanged, the whole supersessionist approach must be questioned and eliminated from the life of the Orthodox church.” Well, he would tip that over into other churches as well. And I remember having discussions with him that, yes, we’ve got problematic texts in our scriptures, but he said that you can’t just take them out and if you do, it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem because we have a lot of anti-Judaism in our liturgy and also in our hymns. I feel quite uncomfortable now. You know, having had this whole scholarship in history since my university days, I do find a lot of this anti-Jewish perspective is reinforced in the hymns that are merrily sung. And of course, the difficulties at Easter. Next slide, please. It does change. I’m going to come back very quickly to Nostra Aetate and I’m not going into it in any detail. I’m aware of our timings. It does change.

The Christian churches had begun, conferences of Christians and Jews founded in 1942 and thereafter begin to make an impact. The number of scholars who, through the dialogue, start to make an impact and a number of conferences occur. Lambeth conference I’m quoting here from 1988, “In order to combat centuries of anti-Jewish teaching and practise, Christians,” it says, its official statement, “Christians must develop programmes of teaching, preaching and common social action which eradicate, prejudice and promote dialogue.” And I’ll just throw this in now. I’m not sure where the state of Christian Jewish dialogue is now. I’ve been out of the picture for a while. Certainly, when I was involved actively in the 1990s, there was huge hope. And I was also involved in interfaith relations as well. So, I had my Jewish Christian dialogue work, but also involved in interfaith work. I don’t see any vocal signs of dialogue or progress. So, maybe something needs to be looked at here. Next slide, please. And the World Council of Churches in 1988. “The church must learn so to preach and teach the Gospel” So using very Christian language. “As to make sure that it cannot be used as contempt for Judaism and against the Jewish people. A further response to the Holocaust by Christians is a resolve that it will never happen again.” Next slide please. “She” the Nostra Aetate, “[The Church] deplores all hatreds, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism levelled at any time or from any source, against the Jews.” Nostra Aetate, the Roman Catholic Church, convened and came with the statement of Nostra Aetate in 1965. It took place over a number of years.

The second Vatican Council took place over at least two to three years. Really, really important statements. But perhaps most importantly, for the very first time in its history, it rejects the charge of deicide. The charge of deicide is no longer official Catholic teaching, Roman Catholic teaching. And you’ll find that’s also spilled into the other churches. Next slide please. Coming to my last couple of slides. You know, for me, one of the most moving moments, and I wasn’t there to witness it, but after 900 years, Pope John Paul II met the Chief Rabbi of Rome and stepped inside the synagogue. I still find that quite an emotional moment. And of course, the very fuzzy picture at the top there, he becomes the first pope to visit Jerusalem, to visit Yad Vashem. What an amazing man. He did so much for Jewish Christian relations and has an interesting past himself and if you can get hold of it, I urge you to read, there’s a very small booklet that’s been published by . I think it’s still in print and it’s called A Letter to a Jewish Friend and it’s his letter to his close Jewish friend, Polish Jewish friend. I can’t remember, name begins with K. I can’t remember his surname now. So, I want to just finish with how far we’ve come, really. The churches have disavowed anti-Semitism.

They largely accept the link between 2000 years of Christian anti-Judaism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. Big changes have been made, but I wonder, I think we’ve got stuck. And with the rise of anti-Semitism today, I think there are really big issues. One back please. There are really big issues that still need to be addressed. It’s far more complicated. Of course there are new aspects to anti-Semitism today, which make it hugely dangerous. But I do wonder where are the voices of the churches in all of this? Because I don’t hear them. That doesn’t mean to say they aren’t doing anything, but I do worry and I worry when my sons, we’re not Jewish, when my sons, sorry, I’ve begun to get quite emotional now, going to Golder’s Green. Sorry, please excuse me. Going to Golder’s Green to buy falafel at 11 o'clock at night and a car drives down Golder’s Green Road, slows down. They’re sat outside the cafe. Put out a Palestinian flag and shout obscenities in Arabic and drive off. That worries me. That really worries me. Okay. I want to finish with two quotes. Dr. Susanna Heschel, of course, the daughter of Abraham Heschel. One of the greatest, it wasn’t one of, it was greatest leading Jewish thinkers of the 20th century? What she has written, and I’ll read directly because I would never remember it, “Can anyone really believe it is to the greater glory of God that there should be no more Jews left in the world? What an easy solution. Let all the Jews become Christian. After all, there would be no more anti-Semitism if there would be no more Jews. But I believe,” she writes, “If there were no more Jews, there would be no more Christianity.” Next slide, please.

And I’m quoting my final, final quote from Joseph Yerushalmi, who wrote, again, a brilliant book, Auschwitz: the Beginning of a New Era? And although he wrote this in 1974, it’s so pertinent today, these two quotes. I want to leave you thinking with that ahead of our debate tomorrow. “This generation,” and we can think of this as our generation now, 40 something, nearly 50 years later, “This generation will be judged not by the failures of its ancestors, but by its own response or silence.” I believe we do have a responsibility to do something about this. And he says, and it’s so true, “For my people now, as in the past, is in grave peril for its life. And it simply cannot wait until you,” ie. the church, “Have completed a new Summa Theologica.” Thank you. I’ll see you with Trudy Gold at seven o'clock tomorrow.

• Thank you Helen. Thank you for that presentation. And thank you for your heartfelt affection for us and your feeling towards your children. And the dialogue that’s going on at home is very, very important. It’s good for the children. And talk it through with you. Well, thank you very much. We look forward to tomorrow. Thanks everybody for joining us.

• Thanks, Wendy.

• Take care. Thanks, as always. Thank you. Bye.