Christian anti-Judaism Research Articles

The Two Bodies of the King of the Jews

Starting from Santner’s essay “Freud’s ‘Moses’ and the Ethics of Nomotropic Desire,” the article explores a remarkably intriguing and simultaneously debatable statement made by Sigmund Freud regarding the accusation of the murder of God as a central Christian source of anti-Semitism. This investigation leads into the differentiation between two bodies of the King of the Jews: Jesus Christ and Jesus Barabbas, through which early Christians not only distanced themselves from political messianism (“Barabbas”), but also assumed a political culpability, acknowledging their own responsibility for Jesus’ crucifixion. In doing so, they distanced themselves from those who neither acknowledged nor confessed a shared culpability, thereby designating them as the “Jews.” This demarcation from political guilt serves as the foundation for a “politics of guilt” in the form of a demarcation from “Judaism.” This gave rise to Christian anti-Judaism, which Freud ultimately traced back to the distinction between acknowledgment and non-acknowledgment of guilt in his book Moses and Monotheism. Drawing on the dimension of preserving communal unity through the confession of guilt, this article proposes that the Christian model of collective guilt confession should not be simply understood as a desire to liberate oneself from the superego pressures, as, according to Santner, a “spiriting away of spirits and specters.” Instead, it can be comprehended as a novel means of preserving a community through the exclusion of those who do not join in the declaration of guilt.

David F. Ford. The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary

David F. Ford. <i>The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary</i>

Understanding the Difference Between Antisemitism and Anti-Judaism

Understanding the Difference Between Antisemitism and Anti-Judaism Marianne Moyaert (bio) In his article, John Pawlikowski begins by discussing the Church's ambivalent position vis-à-vis the history of antisemitism. On the one hand, Pope John Paul II explicitly condemned antisemitism as a sin, a condemnation, which Pawlikowski notes, "represents the strongest theological statement against this pernicious disease." He also makes explicit what steps have been taken, especially since the Second Vatican Council, by both ecclesial authorities and theological scholars to remove anti-Jewish legacies from their theology. On the other hand, there are reasons to doubt whether the Church has taken responsibility for its implication in the history of antisemitism. The Church has tended towards arguing "that antisemitism came only from fringe elements in the Church who were muscled by wayward preachers and teachers." Such an argument denies the pervasive and systemic problem of antisemitism and disavows the view that it is deeply embedded in the Catholic tradition. The document We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah (1998), which Pawlikowski also mentions, is exemplary in this regard. While this document makes clear the necessity of thoroughgoing scholarly research to better understand the mechanisms that finally led to the Shoah and emphasizes that Christians have to confront the injustices of [End Page 373] the past to open up a new future (memoria futuri), the document also shifts responsibility away from the Church and its theological traditions to those Christians who failed to live according to what "might have been expected from Christ's followers."1 Rather than recognizing antisemitism as a form of systemic racialization legitimized and institutionalized by Catholic tradition and its authorities, the document tends to reduce the problem of antisemitism to the personal failure of some.2 To make matters worse, the document immediately contrasts the few rotten apples to the many initiatives taken by ecclesial authorities to halt the suffering of the Jews under the Nazis. In addition, We Remember emphasizes that National Socialism was in fact a modern, anti-Christian, pagan racist regime, which ought to be clearly distinguished from Christian anti-Judaism. By way of conclusion, the document acknowledges that "erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people" contributed to "feelings of hostility towards this people," but points out that such interpretations have been "totally and definitively rejected by the Second Vatican Council." Understood in this way, the problem of Christian anti-Judaism belongs to the past and has been dealt with appropriately within the Church; the problem of racist antisemitism is inimical to Christian tradition and its theological vision about the unity of the human race, and has been condemned in the strongest words. In contrast to We Remember, Pawlikowski explicitly states that "thus far the roots of antisemitism in the Catholic Church have [not] been fully erased from Catholic consciousness." To this day, Pawlikowski asserts, there is a problem of latent or dormant antisemitism, which can become the ground for new more explicit expressions of hatred, such as the attacks on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. To uproot antisemitism from Catholic tradition, Pawlikowski suggests a research program focused on biblical exegesis and the Patristic tradition, as well as on the failure of the Church to acknowledge how its anti-Jewish traditions provided fertile ground for the Shoah. Finally, he also urges us to revisit the issue of the Church's evangelizing mandate in relation to the Jewish people. [End Page 374] I am a Catholic comparative theologian working after Nostra Aetate and I find myself in full agreement with Pawlikowski. The history of Christian antisemitism covers almost 2,000 years and we only started to grapple with it in the aftermath of the Shoah. Far from it being merely a surface issue, antisemitic discourse has seeped deeply into the core of (European) Christian culture. Antisemitic patterns of thinking were imprinted on the Christian imagination through liturgy, prayer, and sermons, but also through art, illuminated manuscripts, theatre, music, as well as legislation. Even when one is dedicated to moving beyond antisemitism, it remains difficult to step outside of this framework. As David Nirenberg states, "The peril of fantasizing our freedom from the past is great": when we...

Theology in the Shadow of the Holocaust: Revisiting Bonhoeffer and the Jews

The scholarship on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Jews has focused on two questions: (1) To what extent did the persecution of the Jews drive Bonhoeffer's actions with respect to the Third Reich, and (2) Did Bonhoeffer's theology of Judaism and the Jewish people undergo a change as a result of the Nazi program of persecution and extermination? The work ranges from writers who reject the hagiography of a Bonhoeffer who for the sake of the Jews joined the resistance and paid the ultimate price, to those who argue that the persecution of the Jews was key in the development of Bonhoeffer's theology and his resistance to National Socialism. Bonhoeffer biographer Eberhard Bethge figured large in this second group; Bethge's work in this area coincided with his involvement in Christian post-Holocaust theology, an expression of the intensely philojudaic theology that emerged in the West following World War II. Driven by the desire to atone for millennia of anti-Jewish doctrine and action, post-Holocaust theology has exerted a strong influence on Bonhoeffer scholarship. The argument of this article is that the postwar focus on Christian anti-Judaism has led the church away from confronting the exceptionalism that persists in Christian identity and teaching. In its penitential zeal, the postwar project to renounce church anti-Judaism has instead replaced it with a Judeo-Christian triumphalism and a theological embrace of political Zionism that betray fundamental gospel principles. These run counter to the passionate opposition to the merger of hyper-nationalism and religion that informs Bonhoeffer's radical, humanistic Christology. Fashioning Bonhoeffer as a martyr for the Jews and as a forerunner of post-Holocaust theology does damage to the legacy of his theology and distorts the lessons of his life and witness. This carries implications for the role of the church in confronting the urgent issues of our time.

“Insiders” and “Outsiders” in Early Christianity in the Light of New Anthropological Theories

The article represents the problem of the development of early Christian anti-Judaism using the methods of Cognitive Science of Religion and Social Anthropology. This approach allows us to consider the early Christians anti-Jewish writings of 2nd — 3rd CE from another angle and to explain the reasons of emerging of anti-Judaism in a new way. In the works of early Christian authors Jews were always shown as “Others” (Outsiders) opposed to “Us” (Insides) — Christians. The image of Jew was stereotyped and passed through the Christian writings. Jews were characterized as deicides and apostates with worthless rites. They also caused troubles for Christians. At the same time Christians were depicted as new, eternal Israel, their New law replaced the Old law of Jews. For Christians “Us” were those, who rejected carnal sacrifices of Jews, circumcision and Shabbat day. Cognitive Science and Social anthropology explains humiliation of “Others” and exaltation of “Us”, pointing out that inter-group conflict emerge while groups have a common goal. At the same time, fear of “Other” makes inner-group connections stronger. Stereotypes and prejudices are the result of such inter-group communication. Stereotypes transmit, develop and strengthen within the group. Jewish-Christian relations of Antiquity are one of the examples of the conflict inter-group communication. Ancient anti-Jewish treatises demonstrate the growing of antipathy to Jews by Christians under the forming stereotypes.

Israel and the Individual in Matthew and Midrash: Reassessing “True Israel”

Since the Holocaust, New Testament scholarship has become increasingly sensitive to issues of Christian anti-Judaism. While many Matthean specialists have acknowledged the problems with polemical interpretations of the Gospel, the idea that Matthew presents Jesus and/or the church is the “true Israel” continues to enjoy broad acceptance. The scholarly conflation of Jesus and Israel recycles the Christian polemic against a comparatively inauthentic or inadequate Judaism. This article argues that Matthew does not present Jesus or his church as the true Israel, and that the Jesus-as-Israel interpretation could be refined by comparing the Gospel with later rabbinic discussion that connects Israel with biblical individuals. Genesis Rabbah 40:6 juxtaposes verses about Abraham and Israel to reveal a comprehensive scriptural relationship between the nation and the patriarch without devaluing either party. The rabbis’ theological thesis is predicated on both similarity and separation between Abraham and his offspring. Insofar as both Matthew and Midrash present similar biblical content and exegesis, a comparative analysis can provide Gospel commentators with a view of the Jesus-Israel paradigm that avoids the Christianization of “true Israel.”

Writing the Jews out of History: Pseudo-Hegesippus, Classical Historiography, and the Codification of Christian Anti-Judaism in Late Antiquity

AbstractScholarly narratives of the development of Christian anti-Jewish thinking in antiquity routinely cite a number of standard, well-known authors: from Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Justin Martyr in earlier centuries to Eusebius, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine in the fourth and early fifth centuries. The anonymous author known as Pseudo-Hegesippus, to whom is attributed a late fourth-century Latin work called On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De Excidio Hierosolymitano), rarely appears in such discussions. This has largely to do with the fact that this text and its author are effectively unknown entities within contemporary scholarship in this area (scholars familiar with Pseudo-Hegesippus tend to be specialists in medieval Latin texts and manuscripts). But “Pseudo-Hegesippus” represents a critical contribution to the mosaic of Christian anti-Jewish discourse in late antiquity. De Excidio's generic identity as a Christian piece of classical historiography makes it a unique form of ancient anti-Jewish propaganda. This genre, tied to De Excidio's probable context of writing—the wake of the emperor Julian's abortive attempt to rebuild the Jerusalem Temple, resurrect a robust Judaism, and remove Christians from public engagement with classical culture—renders De Excidio an important Christian artifact of both anti-Judaism and pro-classicism at the same time. This article situates Pseudo-Hegesippus in a lineage of Christian anti-Jewish historical thinking, argues that De Excidio codifies that discourse in a significant and singular way, frames this contribution in terms of its apparent socio-historical context, and cites De Excidio's later influence and reception as testaments to its rightful place in the history of Christian anti-Judaism, a place that modern scholarship has yet to afford it. As a piece of classical historiography that mirrors not Christian historians—like Eusebius and others—but the historians of the broader “pagan” Greco-Roman world—like Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus—De Excidio leverages a cultural communicative medium particularly well equipped to undergird and fuel the Christian historiographical imagination and its anti-Jewish projections.

The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism by Adrienne Williams Boyarin

Reviewed by: The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism by Adrienne Williams Boyarin Heather Blurton adrienne williams boyarin, The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Pp. 352. isbn: 978–0–8122–5259–0. $75.95. It has long been recognized that the Fourth Lateran Council’s decree that Jews should wear items of clothing that would distinguish them from their Christian neighbors contains an implicit acknowledgement that it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish Jewish people from their Christian neighbors. In The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism, Adrienne Williams Boyarin takes this issue seriously. Instead of focusing on how Christians tried to assert Jewish difference, Williams Boyarin looks at how they appropriated Jewish ‘sameness.’ The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess argues that ‘sameness’ is as important a category as ‘difference’ for understanding medieval Christian anti-Judaism, and that the figure of the Jewish woman is a privileged locus for the representation of this ‘sameness’ across archival and literary documents. ‘Sameness,’ however, Williams Boyarin asserts, is nevertheless an ideological aspect [End Page 107] of anti-Judaism insofar as it functions to ‘occupy and redefine’ Jewish bodies (p. 2). Williams Boyarin writes: ‘I am insisting that taking note of sameness as its own polemical category—and of saming as exegetical processes that can be analyzed like processes of othering—allows us to interrogate evocations of Jewish similarity or ambiguity as they co-exist with, and interact with, uses and evocations of contrast and difference. We should not forget sameness because it is (by design) difficult to see, nor because it seems somehow more humane than otherness, lest we unwittingly perpetrate its polemical goals. Wherever mimicry and uncertainty about the line between Christian and Jew exist, that uncertainty itself can be mobilized—legally, didactically, historically, politically—in rhetorical challenge to Jewishness, or in redefinition of both Jewishness and Christianness’ (pp. 92–93). In focusing on sameness and presence, Williams Boyarin seeks to reorient the terms of the debate around medieval English anti-Judaism, which, for a long time, has focused on tropes of alterity and absence. This reorientation is welcome, and it will open new avenues of inquiry not only for the Middle Ages, but for antisemitism studies in general. As the title implies, the book falls into two parts, dealing respectively with ‘The Christian Jew’ and ‘The Unmarked Jewess.’ The first half of the book ‘focuses on the means by which medieval Christians could identify with Jews and even think of themselves as Jewish’ (p. 1). The second half of the book is interested in medieval representations of Jewish women more generally. It addresses the argument that Jewish women were not ‘raced,’ or ‘marked,’ as Jewish men were. Williams Boyarin sees the ‘unmarked’ representation of the Jewess as doing the work of ‘sameness.’ The book blends literary and archival sources, and where it introduces stories from archival sources, four appendices offer original editions and translations of these texts. As well as addressing texts that normally appear in studies of medieval English anti-Judaism, such as the story of Hugh of Lincoln and the Middle English romance The Siege of Jerusalem, the book discusses texts that do not, such as Ancrene Wisse and the Ormulum. This treatment of works not usually considered in the context of medieval anti-Judaism is an implicit support of the book’s assertion of the ubiquity of ‘sameness,’ and it demonstrates the extent to which to talk about medieval anti-Judaism is simply to talk about medieval culture. Heather Blurton University of California, Santa Barbara Copyright © 2021 Arthuriana

The Racialization of the Jewish Question

Abstract This article explores how the Jewish Question went from being a question of whether to give Jews, as a religious minority, citizenship, to a racial theory of a conflict between the Aryan and Semitic races. It explores the origins of Christian anti-Judaism in Europe and describes how it flared up during the Crusades, Inquisition, and Pogroms. It then describes how and explains why the Jewish Question became pseudo-secularized into a pseudo-scientific racial anti-Semitism, which culminated in the Final Solution.

The fate of Jews hospitalized in mental hospitals in France during World War II.

The fate of Jewish psychiatric patients in occupied Europe during World War II is inseparable from the fate of the disabled and mentally ill, as planned by the Nazi regime. But Jews found themselves at the confluence of eugenics, Christian anti-Judaism and Nazi racist and anti-Semitic madness. They faced the twin promise of death - both as Jews and as mentally ill. They did not escape from the euthanasia programme and, if by a miracle they survived, they disappeared into the extermination camps. The modalities of annihilation of Jewish psychiatric patients are inseparable from the forms of German occupation, which differed from country to country. In this research we focus initially on various countries in occupied Europe, and then on France.

Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe by Paola Tartakoff

Reviewed by: Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe by Paola Tartakoff Sarah Ifft Decker Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe. By Paola Tartakoff. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. In the thirteenth century, Christian Europe felt under attack from both internal and external enemies: heretics, Muslims, Jews. In response to these threats, whether real or imagined, lay and ecclesiastical authorities heightened their efforts to consolidate Christian identity and reinforce boundaries between faiths. Rising anti-Judaism, in particular, reflected anxieties about the potential instability of Christian identity. However, these attempts to construct social and legal separation between Christians and Jews went hand in hand with the constant blurring of lines. The rhetoric of boundary maintenance itself revealed the troubled nature of these boundaries. Conversion, although potentially desirable, highlighted the permeability of the borders between faiths. Power dynamics in medieval Europe meant that, in theory, conversion should occur in only one direction: toward Christianity. But reality was messier than theory. A small number of born Christians converted to Judaism; Jewish converts reverted to their former faith; liminal individuals occupied the interstices between Judaism and Christianity. In Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe, Paola Tartakoff offers a nuanced exploration of how Christians and Jews thought about these compelling yet dangerous movements between faiths. Tartakoff adopts the pioneering approach of intertwining the study of Christian conversion to Judaism with that of Jewish conversion to Christianity, which she describes as “two subjects whose historiographies have passed until now like ships in the night” (9). By exploring conversion as a bidirectional phenomenon, she offers new insight into both the experiences of converts and the multifaceted attitudes of both communities toward conversion. Her careful delineation of the parallels and divergences between converts paints a portrait of religious transformation, change, and fluidity that is at once broadly synthetic and richly detailed. [End Page 231] Tartakoff frames her narrative around a particular case study, an unusual situation that is illuminated by the broader context of anti-Judaism and multidirectional conversion in thirteenth-century Europe. In 1144, the Jews of Norwich had weathered the earliest recorded ritual murder accusation: they were charged with the murder of a Christian boy named William. Then, nearly a century later, in 1231, a group of Jews from the same city were accused of kidnapping and forcibly circumcising a Christian child named Edward, with the goal of making him a Jew. The story of Edward intersects in striking ways with false anti-Jewish accusations of ritual murder and host desecration, on the one hand, and Christian forcible conversions of Jewish children, on the other. Tartakoff contextualizes Edward’s story by placing it in conversation with discourses of anti-Judaism, Jewish and Christian attitudes toward conversion, and the lived experience of converts. In closing, she offers a speculative yet compelling reading of Edward’s case as a Jewish effort to reclaim a neglected child of contested religious status. The author begins the book by addressing thirteenth-century Christians’ renewed anxieties that Judaism was attractive to Christians and that Jews were actively seeking to lure Christians from their faith. These fears reflected broader concerns about the instability of Christian religious identity. Such concerns went beyond Judaism: the prevalence of Christian heresy and the reports of Christian apostasy to Islam disquieted church leadership. Ecclesiastical writers portrayed Christendom as under attack from diverse forces of spiritual corruption, forces that at times became blended into a single enemy. The Norwich circumcision case both highlighted and reinforced these anxieties. Tartakoff then investigates the link between fears of Christian apostasy and other manifestations of a multivalent Christian anti-Judaism. The thirteenth century witnessed the consolidation of discourses of anti-Judaism that cast Jews (in reality, a vulnerable minority) as powerful enemies bent on the destruction of Christendom and the suffering of Christians. The allegations of ritual murder and host desecration that plagued Jewish communities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries framed Jews as dangers to present-day Christendom because they were deliberately working to reenact their past murder of Christ. Tartakoff focuses here on the motif of circumcision, central to the accusation levied against the Norwich Jews in the 1230s. Circumcision functioned as the sole aspect...

Revisiting the Early Christian Anti-Judaism in the 20th – 21st centuries: Between Theology and Science

Revisiting the Early Christian Anti-Judaism in the 20th – 21st centuries: Between Theology and Science

Christian anti-Judaism and early object relations theory

The central ideas of early object relations theory are heavily inflected with Christian anti-Judaism, particularly as found in the work of Ian Dishart Suttie, now credited as the founder of this tradition. The critique of Freud launched by Suttie repudiates Freudian theory as a “disease” inextricably connected to Freud being a Jew. Suttie’s portrayal of Judaism both conforms to and replicates those theological commitments that privilege a triumphalist, supersessionist Christianity that breaks with Judaism, understood as devoid of love, ethics, and social justice interests. The paper argues that the elements organizing the central concepts that structure Suttie’s Christian prejudice constitute distorting ideological interests that circulate and shape important strands of contemporary object relations theory. Central to the authors discussed is a repudiation of Freud’s theory of unconscious drives on the basis of privileging love and intersubjectivity as the motivators of human psychological development made possible by Jesus and Christianity. The paper demonstrates that contemporary object relations theory remains heavily indebted to Suttie while remaining oblivious to his explicit anti-Judaism.

Is the Apostle Paul the Father of Christian Anti-Judaism? Engaging John Gager’s Who Made Early Christianity?

Is the Apostle Paul the Father of Christian Anti-Judaism? Engaging John Gager’s Who Made Early Christianity?

Inclusive Quarantine: The Pathology and Performance of Jewish Existence in the Erlangen Opinion on the Aryan Paragraph

The Erlangen Opinion on the Aryan Paragraph, co-authored by Lutheran theologians Paul Althaus and Werner Elert, has proven controversial. Scholars have typically interpreted the document’s recommendation regarding the place of Jewish Christians in the church according to an inclusion/exclusion binary model. However, the Erlangen Opinion actually reflects a dialectical theology of Jewish existence that Althaus had developed during the Weimar years. Following this dialectic of pathology and performance, Althaus envisions neither the total inclusion nor total inclusion of Jews in the German state church. Rather, he proposes an inclusive quarantine of Jewish persons, who represent both a mortal danger to and indispensable factor for all communities—both societal and ecclesial. By probing the logic of this important artifact of Protestant theology’s complicated relationship to National Socialist ideology, the article sheds light on the ambivalent nature of Christian anti-Judaism and antisemitism.

Difficult Texts: Matthew 27.25

Any Christian who speaks about Matthew 27.25 needs to be aware of how it has been used to promote Christian anti-Judaism. Various approaches have emerged to reading it in such a way that this connection is broken. One is to argue that it does not reflect the true circumstances of Jesus’ trial and death but rather the conflicts of the communities in which it was written. Another depends less on such historical scepticism and instead puts clear limits around the responsibility of ‘the whole people’ conveyed by the text. Finally, it is possible to seek a meaning in the words that transcends the immediate intentions of the speakers and draws us as it did them into the saving mystery of the Passion.

Redeeming Our Sacred Story: The Death of Jesus and Relations between Jews and Christians by Mary C. Boys, and: Toward the Future: Essays on Catholic-Jewish Relations in Memory of Rabbi León Klenicki ed. by Celia M. Deutsch, Eugene J. Fisher, James Rudin, and: Restating the Catholic Church’s Relationship with the Jewish People: The Challenge of Super-Sessionary Theology by John T.

Reviewed by: Redeeming Our Sacred Story: The Death of Jesus and Relations between Jews and Christians by Mary C. Boys, and: Toward the Future: Essays on Catholic-Jewish Relations in Memory of Rabbi León Klenicki ed. by Celia M. Deutsch, Eugene J. Fisher, James Rudin, and: Restating the Catholic Church’s Relationship with the Jewish People: The Challenge of Super-Sessionary Theology by John T. Pawlikowski David P. Efroymson Mary C. Boys, Redeeming Our Sacred Story: The Death of Jesus and Relations between Jews and Christians. A Stimulus Book: Studies in Judaism and Christianity. New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2013. Pp. 387. $29.95, paper. Toward the Future: Essays on Catholic-Jewish Relations in Memory of Rabbi León Klenicki. Edited by Celia M. Deutsch, Eugene J. Fisher, and James Rudin. A Stimulus Book: Studies in Judaism and Christianity. New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2013. Pp. 255. $24.95, paper. John T. Pawlikowski, Restating the Catholic Church’s Relationship with the Jewish People: The Challenge of Super-Sessionary Theology. Frontiers of Scholarly Theology. Lewiston, NY; Queenston, ON; and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 2013. Pp. 114. $49.95, paper. Klenicki, of blessed memory, Pawlikowski, and Boys have all been long-term, valiant, and effective warriors in the struggle to end Christian anti-Judaism and for the amelioration of Jewish-Christian relations. All three books manifest an awareness of a radical revolution in our relationship that could not have been anticipated at the time of Vatican II’s watershed Nostra aetate and are equally aware of how much remains to be done. All three deserve more ink than this review can provide. Pawlikowski insists, as do all critical scholars, that supersessionism must be rejected permanently. In addition to the harm caused to Jews over the centuries, Christianity, in its claim to supersede Judaism and its neglect of its Jewish roots, “lost an important revelatory dimension rooted in Torah which Jesus himself had maintained” (p. 98). In this valuable and critical account of the diverse theological efforts to supplant supersessionism, he leads the reader through earlier single- and double-covenant theories to contemporary attempts at a newer, reformulated “incarnational” Christology as the centerpiece of a more adequate conception of our relationship. His own conviction is that a vision of two distinct but linked paths is necessary; that Judaism and Christianity must be accepted as standing on an equal footing; and that, for Christians, [End Page 343] significant newness and universality somehow must be seen as having broken through in Christ. Pawlikowski’s review of the scholarship on this issue—he refers to some fifty scholars along the way, mostly briefly, but more fully for a few—is extensive, trustworthy, and generally clear. He is fully aware that it is too early in the game for a completely satisfactory theology of religious pluralism, including his own, to gain universal acceptance, but he is rightly adamant that we have a continuing obligation to pursue the issue. “Incarnational” Christology, which for Pawlikowski holds great promise, needs further clarification and elaboration. Regrettably, the publisher’s proofreading is careless: I counted twenty-five typographical errors and misspellings in a book of this small size and high price; I noted only one in the other two books. If Pawlikowski’s focus on models and theories argues for an intended audience of scholars and those with some competence in the field, the Klenicki memorial volume is for anyone with an interest in Jewish-Christian relations. The emphasis of this somewhat disparate group of essays tends toward liturgy and spirituality, as well as the global context of the problem. The “future” of the title is satisfied in essays by Deutsch, David Gordis, and Peter Phan, and by Philip Cunningham’s recommendation for a reformed revival of the Catholic observance of the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus (with healthy suggestions for a new set of lectionary readings and homily). Hillel Cohn and Jacqueline Hidalgo raise awareness of Catholic-Jewish relations among Latinos/as. Tamara Cohn Eskenazi’s valuable essay examines the Hebrew Bible’s diverse positions on “the other,” including positive attitudes toward those outside the covenant. Equally worthwhile are Shira Lander on Jewish understandings...

A fuzzy distinction

Scholarly contributions on the responsibility of the churches for the extermination of the Jews during the Second World War contrast Nazi anti-Semitism (the aversion toward the Jews as a racial group) with Christian anti-Judaism (the Christian aversion toward the Jewish religion), as one would oppose the new to the old, the modern to the traditional, the political to the religious, science to theology. The author shows, using four examples (Leon Poliakov, Hannah Arendt, Colette Guillaumin, Thomas Nipperdey & Reinhard Rurup), that this distinction induces one to ignore the churches' actions in the process that led from the invention of the word anti-Semite in 1879 to the destruction of the Jews by the Nazis.

Christian Anti-Judaism and Jewish–Orthodox Relations among the Eastern Slavs up to 1569

Christian Anti-Judaism and Jewish–Orthodox Relations among the Eastern Slavs up to 1569

A Very Damning Truth: Walter Grundmann, Adolf Schlatter, and Susannah Heschel’sThe Aryan Jesus

Over the past several decades historians have turned a critical eye to the complicity of the German churches in fostering poisonous societal attitudes towards Jews on the eve of the Holocaust.1Emerging from this research has been the disputed relationship between Christian anti-Judaism and the intense race-based anti-Semitism of the Nazi era. Separating the content and motivation of these two forms of disparagement has allowed Christians to remove themselves from the genocidal equation linked to radical, racist attacks on Jews.2Susannah Heschel’sThe Aryan Jesustackles this issue by examining the historical backdrop and explicit content of racially motivated attacks on Jews by German Protestants in the years preceding and during the Holocaust. Targeting the Eisenach Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life together with the Institute’s leader, Walter Grundmann, her findings may well render obsolete any theoretical dichotomy between religious anti-Judaism and racial anti-Semitism.3