Archive/File: holocaust/reviews nicholls.001 Last-Modified: 1994/11/05 CHRISTIAN ANTISEMITISM: A History of Hate by William Nicholls. Northvale, Jason Aronson. 499 pp. $40. By Edward Alexander Those who complain, perhaps with some justification, that Jews are overly occupied in the study of antisemitism and the Holocaust do not necessarily intend to scant the importance of these subjects. Rather, they imply that, since the ideology of Jew-hatred and its catastrophic modern result originated in Christendom, it is Christians more than Jews who should be searching out their roots and trying to extirpate them. William Nicholls, who served for many years in England and Scotland as a priest in the Church of England before founding the Department of Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, shares this view. Nicholls believes that neither modem antisemitism nor the Holocaust can be understood without taking into account the way the people of Europe had been taught about the Jews from their childhood up by their own religious tradition. The popular view that the Nazis chose Jews as their primary target because 2,000 years of Christian teaching had accustomed the world to do so is, in Nlcholls's vicw, essentially correct. In fact, he traces all modern forms of antisemitism, from liberal and Marxist to conservative and Nazi, to the Christian myth of Jews as the killers of Christ. His book, a rare blend of prodigious scholarship, criticaI scrupulousness, and moral passion, declares that repentance by the various Christian communions for their historical mistreatment of Jews is not only a moral imperative but a means to revitalization of Christianity itself. According to Christian Antisemitism, the myth that has given Christianity its vital energy casts Jews as the enemies of Christ and God. The Jews, because they rejected and killed Christ, have themselves been rejected as God's chosen people. Since they broke their ancient covenant with God, He made a new one with a new people drawn from the Gentiles. As punishment for their crime, the Jews lost their Temple and were exiled from their land. The lethal combination of the theology of supersession (which gave the world the "Old Testament" in place of the Jewish Bible) and the myth of the deicide people made the Jews a permanent target for Christian hostility and contempt, destined to be preserved in misery that would be the eternal mark of their perfidy. The first part of Nicholls's book, "Before the Myth," distills and applies the results of modern biblical criticism and historical scholarship that undermine the Christian mythology of Jesus as the founder of Christianity, a pariah among his own people, and a crucified Messiah. On the contrary, "historical scholarship now permits us to affirrn with confidence that Jesus of Nazareth was a faithful and observant [though not typical] Jew, who lived by the Torah, and taught nothing against his own people and their faith. He did not claim to be the Messiah.... The Jews did not conspire to kill him and were not responsible tor his death." Since the investigation of Christian origins requires the investigator to make his historical imagination Jewish. Nicholls systematically uses Jewish sources to build up a picture of the world in which Jesus lived, a picture sharply at variance with that of the Gospel writers. All these, Nicholls persistently reminds us, were Christians, and most were Gentiles; they composed their works late in the first century, after the Church had been in existence for two generations, and therefore imagined Jesus to be more Christian than he actually was. The historical Jesus was lost because scholars attempted to reconstruct him from sources already corrupted by a Gentile myth, developed by Gentile writers from Gentile audiences (in whom Jesus himself had no interest) as part of a missionary effort that was ignorant of and alienated from the Jewish way of life. Nicholls's criticism of the Gospel account of Jesus' "trial," which would form the basis of deicide charges, exemplifies his method. Writers familiar with Jewish religion would have known that it is not a religious offense at all in Jewish law to claim to be the Messiah. Even if Jesus had made the claim (and he had not), he could not have been charged or condemned for it by the Sanhedrin. Moreover, Jesus could not have been tried for blasphemy as a result of making unfounded claims to be the Messiah for the simple reason that "an unfounded claim to be the Messiah could only be blasphemous for those [like the Gospel writers] who regard the Messiah as the divine son of God. Since Jews did not and never have believed that the Messiah will be the Son of God in this sense... it would have been impossible for his judges to have regarded a claim by Jesus to be the Messiah as constituting blasphemy." In addition, the writers of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) have Jesus arraigned before the Sanhedrin on the first night of Passover, an absurdity which only a Gentile audience ignorant of Jewish law and custom could have credited. The Gospel of Matthew adds the most implausible (and sinister) absurdity of all, the words "His blood be on us and our children." These are the very words, of course, that have been invoked through the centuries to justlty persecution of Jews not only by believing Chnstians but by their secularized offspring who declared that "there is no God, and the Jews murdered him." THE SECOND part of Nicholls's book, entitled "The Growth or the Myth," studies the impact of Paul. the first major thinker of Christianity and analyzes the strategies developed by Christian theology, institutions and custom for making the Jews into permanent objects of hatred and candidates for victimization and scapegoating. One of its most, intriguing chapters is the discussion of "Popular Paranoia," in which Nicholls, tenaciously adhering to his axiom that the origins of antisemitism are always to be sought not in Jews but in antisemites, imputes such phenomena as the blood libel and the allegation of host desecration to paranoid projection. In the case of the former, "Christians were subconsciously aware that they imagined and took satisfaction in literally killing and eating Christ, and drinking his blood. Since they could not allow this awareness to come to full consciousness, it surfaced only when they attributed the same wish to Jews." As for the charge that Jews were desecrating the host, it can hardly be believed that the Jews, whatever their hostility toward Christ was by the Middle Ages, cou1d satisfy that hostility "by maltreating a piece of bread that in their eyes had nothing to do with a long dead apostate from Judaism." Only Christians themselves would believe that the host provided a means of harming their savior, if they wished to do so. The concluding section of the book "The Myth Secularized," studies ideologues, who were emancipated from that part of the Christian myth that stressed spiritual love of God, but nevertheless preserved and even enhanced the anti-Judaic part. Nicholls ranges widely but also profoundly, covering a variety of abominations ranging from "liberation theology' to liberal and black antisemitism and the ferocious anti-Zionism of Jewish leftists like Noam Chomsky. He astutely observes that at the current time "Jewish self-hatred is more dangerous than antisemitism itself" and that the Jewish struggle for self-respect that began at the dawn of modernity has not yet been won. The book's final chapter grapples at last with the question that many readers will have anticipated from the opening chapter. If the Church as a whole could be induced by critics like Nicholls, to abandon its anti-Judaism would it still be Christian? Nicholls himself concedes that once the Church seriously embarks on the project of abandoning "layer after layer" of anti-Jewishness, it cannot logically stop anywhere short of Jesus the Jew, and the intolerable paradox that "If Jesus was indeed God incarnate, it follows that in becoming a believing and observant Jew God must have validated Judaism for all time against its religious rivals, including Christianity." The whole thrust of Nicholls's argument is that once all anti-Jewish elements are removed from Christianity, what is left is Judaism. lf so, can one realistically expect the majority of Christians to embark on the task of demythologizing their religion? For that matter, could one realistically expect Jews, after all that has been done to them in the name of Jesus, to repossess him as a Jew (not a Messiah) and the synagogue to "receive the Church"? Nicholls keeps insisting that "Christianity without Jesus is unimaginable. Christianity with Jesus may be impossible." Nevertheless, he sternly adjures Christians: Choose your side; you can no longer halt between two opinions - the anti-Judaism that culminated in the Holocaust or the return to your Jewish origins. It is a measure of the power of this remarkable book that the reader, even while recognizing that life and logic rarely converge, expects this challenge to be taken seriously. Reprinted with permission from Congress Monthly, Vol. 61, no.1. *1994, American Jewish Congress
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