Ending the bitterness

I feel deeply fortunate and grateful to be alive in the 21st century. You see, I am a Jew. My people and faith have been scattered, persecuted, subjugated and murdered. We have been falsely accused of the most horrendous, despicable acts and been labelled sub-human, non-human, Christ-killers and satanic.

We were forcibly separated, and also separated ourselves, from our persecutors and accusers. We knew little about their world and they knew less about ours, though we occupied the same spaces and breathed from the same cultural and social environments.

What meaning does this have for Christians reflecting on the new millennium? Everything, according to historians, sociologists, ethicists, and theologians of both traditions. The Jewish historical experience of anti-Semitism has been the direct result of the Christian churches' discomfort, confusion and outright supersessionist relationship to Judaism and the Jewish People.

So why might a Christian be interested and even rejoice in my survival? Because the Christians and Jews are moving toward rapprochement and understanding at the dawn of this new century.

It is good news for the Jews, but it is therapeutic and invigorating for Christianity. Liberating itself from hatred and prejudice, and armed with a new appreciation for God's pluralistic love, Christians are recognising that "God does not repent of the gifts He makes, or of the calls He issues (Romans, cited in Vatican II)", and can begin courageously to face their own responsibility toward history with repentance and healing.

Though Pope John Paul II insisted he was making a personal pilgrimage when he visited Israel this spring, it was clear that he was finalising the process of reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people that began with the Nostra Aetate declaration at the Second Vatican Council in 1965. The image of the Pope praying at the Western Wall of the Holy Temple, the most precious site to Judaism, is the picture most cherished and remembered by the people of Israel.

The Vatican's recognition of the state of Israel in 1993, coupled with the Pope's visit this year, puts to rest ugly ghosts of the past, such as the myth of the wandering Jew and exclusion from grace as divine punishment. The Jewish people can begin to trust the Church which has condemned anti-Semitism, confirmed God's continued covenant with the Jewish people, and renounced Christian mission to the Jews.

The dissonance between church and synagogue has probably led to one of the longest and definitely the most painful of conflicts in the history of the world. The negation of Jewish existence translated into political and social terms. Christianity, celebrating 2000 years of continued resilience, must come to a sobering and reflective moment when it necessarily remembers its prominent role in setting the stage for the Holocaust. This silence was deafening.

So loud was the silence of the Christian churches during the Holocaust - the extermination of one-third of all the world's Jews in the epicentre of Christian Europe - that it stunned all those who stopped to listen. And amid that silence a frightening sound was heard: the rumbling chorus of whispers and rumours and murmuring that came out of the church pews and books and seminaries which gave assent to and empowered the civilised barbarians of Nazism.

It was with horror that Christians in the last half of the 20th century realised that for nearly 2,000 years they had been encouraging what Father John Pawlikowski of the Catholic Theological Seminary in Chicago called "bad theology".

The turning point for many Christians came after they were exposed to the rigorous scholarly work of French historian Jules Isaac, who, while mourning the murder of his wife and daughter among the ashes, asked: "How Auschwitz?" His answer was in the seminal work of 1948 called Jesus et Israel, or The Teaching of Contempt, which documented the systematic anti-Semitism propagated by Christianity through the centuries.

It reached Pope John XXIII. As a result, the gentle Pope wrote a small prayer which had enormous consequences: "We see the sign of Cain written in our faith. For centuries our brother, Abel, has been lying in his blood shed by us. Forgive us the curse we uttered against the name of the Jew. Forgive us, that in their flesh, we crucified You again."

One of his first acts as Pope in 1959 was the elimination of sinister passages about "perfidious Jews" from the Catholic liturgy for Good Friday. His greatest achievement was his convocation of the Second Vatican Council, whose original purpose was to expel anti-Judaism through a clear and unambiguous declaration.

John XXIII died in 1963 before he saw his dream realised, but under Pope Paul VI, 2,222 bishops approved a Latin statement condemning anti-Semitism and the decide charge against the Jews.

They reminded their flocks of the Jewishness of Jesus and the early church, and that the church today "draws sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles (Romans 2:17)". It became a challenge of reform and change to its own churches and seminaries, and set off the chain reaction of similar or even finer statements from Protestant churches worldwide.

Numerous scholars point out that all the churches - Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox - agree on one issue alone: that the proclamation of the Gospel accompanied a refutation of Judaism. For many centuries the Jews were pushed to the margins of Christian society. The 15th-century humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam said: "If it is Christian to hate the Jews, then we are all good Christians."

By the Middle Ages, the Jews experienced every form of humiliation: in addition to being forced to wear distinguishing badges by Pope Innocent III's Fourth Lateran Council; ghettos were erected; books were burned; discriminatory laws and heavy taxes levied; expulsions and pogroms decreed; and pornographic art and vicious lies were circulated about the Jews.

Father Edward Flannery demonstrated, in a comparison of canonical laws and Nazi measures, that anti-Judaism had been a prominent part of Christian society. The church administrations had provided the Nazis with a blueprint for almost all their actions, with the exception of the technologically advanced death factories. What is often overlooked is that Jesus, mother Mary, Peter, Paul and the disciples would all have been sent to those very same crematoriums.

Courageous Christians who told the truth about the animosity and hatred were often ostracised or ignored. Even before the second World War, Anglican scholar James Parkes's doctorate at Oxford began a search called The Conflict Between Church and Synagogue. In horror at his findings of the deep-seated Christian animosity and competitiveness, he devoted his life to uncovering anti-Judaism within the early Church, which shaped Christian thought.

The Scottish Catholic church historian Malcolm Hay published in 1950 a searing indictment called Thy Brother's Blood. He wrote to Jules Isaac that "Auschwitz would have been impossible had not it been for the poisonous lies, which the Churches have infected Christian populations with for at least 1600 years". Though publishers initially refused to publish it, Hay's book eventually played a considerable role in framing the Vatican II statement.

Theologians such as the American Protestant A. Roy Eckardt understood the issues relating to a sibling-like conflict in his Elder and Younger Brothers. The younger and newer faith community, Christianity, coming from within and as an outgrowth of a rich and developed older faith tradition, Judaism, was desperately trying to attract the attention of the parent God.

The attempted negation of the Jews is built directly upon issues of birthright and jealousy, which produces the uneasy claim of being chosen. Scholars discovered that combating covenants and competing testaments were the theme of preaching by early Church fathers by the 4th century.

Additionally, the persecution and crushing defeat of the Jewish Revolt of 6670 AD caused the Gospel writers to shift the Christian alliance to Rome, and thus to present the Jews as the enemy. It was also an era that read events such as military defeats as acts of God illustrating His displeasure.

The paradox in the retelling of the passion is that a story of a Jew (Jesus) who was put to death by the Romans tragically was retold as if he was a Christian put to death by Jews! The initial reason for the arrest of Jesus - which was for suspected political subversion against the Roman government ("King of the Jews" affixed above his "crown") - became an accusation of blasphemy. This created an illusion that there was a rift between Jesus and his own Jewish people.

The sociologist and Benedictine monk Vincent Martin studied the common roots and parting of the ways between synagogue and church while he was in Jerusalem at the Hebrew University. His work is an example of the happy new reality of Christians coming to the Land of Israel, interacting and studying with a living and vibrant Jewish community.

He, and many modern Christians from all over the world, are learning the Hebrew language and reading the experience of Jesus and the early Church in Jewish historical context, with local archaeology and Jewish scriptural resources assisting. This kind of experience is two-sided as many Jews are enriched through the exposure and interaction with such academics as the Dominican Father Marcel Dubois, who was chair of the Philosophy Department at the Hebrew University for decades.

Together, Jews and Christians can study each other's traditions and share in commemorations such as Holocaust Memorial services and the Passover Seder. We can engage in interfaith dialogue, religious education initiatives, charity and social justice issues worldwide. We will find areas of disagreement and deep chasms between us, and we will find areas where religious faith and ethical uprightness will demonstrate that we are the closest of allies in an increasingly secular and Godless world.

The Jews were an endangered species, ending the 20th century with much fewer numbers than when that sad and violent century began. They have been resurrected through the return to their eternal homeland, the revival of the spoken modern Hebrew language and the gathering of their dispersed communities from all the continents of the world.

As a result of the lessons of the Holocaust, the world saw fit to create the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention in 1948, the same year that the state of Israel was reborn. It is crucial to consider that the last 35 years of the 20th century brought a remarkable and, hopefully, permanent rethinking as regards the Jews, in the documents of the churches, in the writing of the liturgy and theology, in the revision of textbooks and the teachings of the catechisms.

All of this, as well as the stress on religious dialogue, were the result of Vatican II's Nostra Aetate, which may have been the most important outcome of the flames of the Holocaust.

Together, Jews and Christians of integrity must monitor the unfolding of such events as the new presentation of the Oberammergau Passion Play 2000, the canonisation of certain popes and individuals, and church statements on the Holocaust, with an understandably critical eye. The concern for righteousness and compassion and the end of triumphalism and displacement is our obligation for the new millennium.

Our ongoing dialogue can serve as a beacon of hope for reconciliation in other conflicts, and create a living model for peace for both the secular and the faithful.

In 1948, Albert Camus illustrated how the eyes of all look toward religion for guidance and the moral imperative: "For a long time [during the Holocaust] I waited for a great voice to speak up in Rome. I, an unbeliever? Precisely, for I knew that the spirit would be lost if it did not utter a cry of condemnation when faced with force . . . millions of men like me did not hear it and believers and unbelievers alike shared a solitude . . . Christians should speak out, loud and clear and they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man . . . [Christianity must] confront the blood-stained face of history."

Dr Racelle R. Weiman is director of the Israel branch of Temple University, a Philadelphia-based global dialogue Institute, and a lecturer in Interfaith Relations and Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa in Israel