Suppose one day you opened your Sunday paper
and found out that a bunch of activist Christians had gotten
together and taken out an ad declaring that Judaism was
not responsible for the Russian Revolution. You would probably
think they were a little bit crazy to even say that, the
second thing you might think is that it is a little patronizing
for the exponents of one great religion to be "excusing"
the supposed transgressions of another. Deep in your mind
you might start thinking why someone would bring this up
in the first place, sort of like the political candidate
who says, "I have no doubts about the patriotism of my opponent"
when of course what he really wants is for you to start
thinking along those lines.
I felt something similar the other day, when I opened up the New York
Times last Sunday and saw that a bunch of Jewish leaders
had taken out an ad, saying that Christianity was not responsible
for the Holocaust. Well, that's nice, I thought, now where's
the ad saying that Islam is not responsible for Hiroshima?
But after awhile I got to thinking about it. I can understand
why Jews think that Christianity might be to blame for the
Holocaust. After all, isn't it frequently said that the
Holocaust represented the "culmination of two millennia
of Jew hatred"? The basis for that belief of course is because
of the disparaging treatments of Jews in the New Testament,
for example, because the Jews are portrayed as major players
in the Crucifixion, and because Martin Luther made some
nasty remarks about Jews while sitting at the dinner table,
and because the Oberammergau passion play makes Jews out
to be mean, or at least, did, until the ADL got them to
re-write the script.
It's interesting though that all of these presumed allegations about
Christianity being to blame for the Holocaust the critics
rarely provide any quotes. For example, they don't give
us quotes like this one:
All Jewish children are animals.
Or this one:
Jewish girls are in a state of filth from birth.
Or this one:
Jews prefer sex with cows.
Or this one:
Jews and others who reject the Bible will go to hell and be punished
there for all generations.
I would bet if these types who are out to excuse Christianity for the
Holocaust quoted things like the above, everyone would immediately
understand why these Jewish people were being awfully big
about letting Christians off the hook for the Holocaust.
After all, the above quotes are demeaning, they are nasty,
and and they seem to invite diminishing people and maltreating
people solely on the basis of their religious beliefs.
Yet there's a reason you won't see such quotes in any attacks on Christianity.
The reason is that all four of the above quotes are from
the Jewish Talmud, not any Christian writing, not even from
the crumbs that fell off Luther's table. Just substitute
the word "Gentile" for "Jewish" or "Jew" and "Talmud" for
"Bible" to get the original sense. (To be specific, the
references are as follows: Yebamoth 98a, Abodah
Zarah 36b, Abodah Zarah 22a-22b, Rosh Hashanah
17a)
Now let's just suppose I had a big hair up my nose about the Russian
Revolution, Joe Stalin, the GULAG, the Ukrainian Famine
and all the rest of it. I know a lot of Bolsheviks were
from a Jewish background. So I could construct an argument
like this: Jewish writings say nasty things about Christians,
some people of Jewish background did nasty things to Christians,
therefore the Jews were responsible for the Russian Revolution
and the whole mess that came afterwards. And then I could
get to the really good part. I could forgive them. I could
forgive the Jewish religion for what it did to us filthy
cow-lusting goyim.
Of course it would be a stupid argument to make. Trotsky and the rest
may have been from Jewish homes, but they weren't practicing
Jews and they weren't doing what they were doing so that
they could keep the Sabbath. They did it because they were
in the grip of an ideology that said it was OK to destroy
the lives of millions to "make a better world." As a matter
of fact, they were a lot like the Nazis, of whom there was
hardly a practicing or believing Christian in the bunch.
So the question that I am sure is still going to come up is: what about
all these nasty remarks? My response to that would be: Who
cares?
The historical fact is that for over a thousand years or more Jews
and Christians didn't get along very well. Sure, the Christians
were in the majority so when things got hot the Jews usually
came out on the short end of the stick, but any reading
of history that pretends that the hostility wasn't mutual
between these religions just hasn't been paying attention.
The relics of Jew-hatred in medieval or reformation Christian
writings, or even from the days of the New Testament, have
no more meaning than this, and neither do the nasty anti-Christian
writings that you can find scribbled in the Talmud.
Christians and Jews get along today for a lot of reasons, one of them
being that no doubt few people pay attention to the fine-print
anathemas in religious books. And they will continue to
get along, no matter how many times someone comes up with
centuries-old nasty remarks. They don't need apologies.
They don't need to be excused.
Bradley R. Smith, Publisher 