Legacy of An Impassioned Plea: Franklin H. Littell’s The Crucifixion of the Jews by David Patterson and Marcia Sachs Littell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Legacy of an Impassioned Plea: Franklin H. Littell's The Crucifixion of the Jews ed. by David Patterson and Marcia Sachs Littell James Carroll Legacy of an Impassioned Plea: Franklin H. Littell's The Crucifixion of the Jews. Edited by David Patterson and Marcia Sachs Littell. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2018. 316 pages. $29.95 (paper). When Franklin H. Littell published The Crucifixion of the Jews in 1975, the book's title announced an unprecedented Christian cri de coeur against antisemitism. Littell was a prophet of Christian reckoning whose writings sparked a major confrontation with the dark history of antisemitism as embodied by the Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, which he co-founded in 1970 with Hubert G. Locke. The Conference has now sponsored this new volume of essays honoring the centenary of Littell's birth. [End Page 384] Franklin Littell's work as a writer, pastor, lecturer, and organizer extended across decades, but it was this book that defined his achievement, as the phrase on its cover defined the book's impact. One of the authors in this powerful collection of essays refers to "the full text of The Crucifixion of the Jews as mere commentary on its title" (Stephen D. Smith, 309). The title was sensational—Littell's book was a searing indictment of Christian theology and tradition for the way both defamed Jews and made savage violence against them inevitable, yet the entire argument was encapsulated in five words on the book's cover. It was in some way outrageous to depict the Jews as a crucified people. Christians could regard the image as a blasphemous twisting of history, especially if they were among the many who remembered the crucifixion as the work of Jews. Jesus was uniquely the innocent victim, and his battered body, splayed upon the execution device, was not to be relativized. And if the title's implication that the Jews had been hung on the cross by Christians was not clear enough, the book's subtitle made the charge explicit: The Failure of Christians to Understand the Jewish Experience. But then Jews, too, could take offense, since the title could be read as suggesting that the suffering of the Jewish people, up to and including the Holocaust, amounted to a redemptive sacrifice, and could therefore be considered meaningful. Crucifixion, after all, points to resurrection, which is why St. Paul could glory in the cross (Galatians 6:14). In that case, a decidedly Christian image was being used, according to the old pattern of supersessionism, to replace the actual experience of Jews whose victimhood was devoid of meaning. Once again, a Christian category was being used to falsify Jewish experience, and that it was done with patently good intentions only doubled the insult by showing how deeply supersessionism sunk into the structure of Christian thought. For that matter, "the crucifixion of the Jews" could be taken as yet one more reduction of Jewishness to victimhood. Never mind that the Jewish artist Marc Chagall repeatedly portrayed Jesus as a crucified Jewish martyr, or that the prolific Jewish scholar Dan Cohn-Sherbok entitled his own history of antisemitism "The Crucified Jew" (Dan [End Page 385] Cohn-Sherbok, The Crucified Jew: Twenty Centuries of Christian Anti-Semitism [Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman's Publishing Co., 1992]). When Christians superimpose this explosive image over Jewish experience, as Pope John Paul II did when he called Auschwitz "the Golgotha of the Modern World," fingernails run down history's blackboard, which, in this case, bleeds. And no wonder—the cross marks the problematic dead center of Jewish-Christian relations. Obviously, to imagine the hanging of Jesus of Nazareth on the horizontal-vertical structure as the work of Jews, and not Romans, is the igniting incident of antisemitism, but the Christ-killer calumny is only part of the trouble. Jesus lives in the Christian imagination as the only victim of crucifixion. It is true that the Gospels tell of three crosses at Calvary, with Jesus flanked by a pair of thieves. Yet to emphasize that his suffering was unique and extreme—the infinite suffering required to atone for the infinite offense God took at...