Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism
Rosemary Radford Ruether
Number of quotes: 16
Book ID: 88 Page: 7
Section: 4B
In his Voice of Illness, Aarne Siirala tells us that his visit to death camps in eastern Europe after the war overwhelmed him with shock and revealed to him that something was gravely sick at the very heart of our spiritual tradition.…
The holocaust may not be reduced to a monstrous criminal act to be deplored and then forgotten. Auschwitz has a message that must be heard: it reveals an illness operative not on the margin of our civilization but at the heart of it, in the very best we have inherited. The holocaust challenges the foundations of Western society.
…
While it would be historically untruthful to blame the Christian Church for Hitler’s anti-Semitism and the monstrous crimes committed by him and his followers, what is true, alas, is that the Church has produced an abiding contempt among Christians for Jews and all things Jewish, a contempt that aided Hitler’s purposes.
Quote ID: 2331
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 88 Page: 23
Section: 3A2A,3C
Virulent anti-Semitism entered the picture only when the Christian community was assimilated into the Gentile world and took over a preexisting, non-Christian “pagan hate” for the Jews.
Quote ID: 2332
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 88 Page: 25
Section: 4B
Since Hellenistic society regarded Greek culture as the standard for humane existence, that such a group of “barbarians” would refuse assimilation into Hellenistic culture on the grounds that its gods were false and its manners “unclean” was a cultural affront of no small proportions. The stage was set for Kulturkampf between Jewish and Greek society that took the form of forced attempts at Hellenization, such as that under Antiochus Epiphanes.
Quote ID: 2333
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 88 Page: 25
Section: 4A,4B
In addition, Jewish religious thought in the Diaspora and even in Palestine appropriated many Hellenistic elements, and Jewish Hellenistic apologists, such as the author of Aristeas’ letter, Josephus, and Philo, went far in the direction of presenting Judaism in the dress of Greek philosophy.
Quote ID: 2334
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 88 Page: 28
Section: 3A2A,3C
This special privileged status of the Jews in Roman society began to be rescinded only after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire and a Christian anti-Semitism began to express itself in anti-Jewish legislation.
Quote ID: 2335
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 88 Page: 29
Section: 4B
A ritual murder charge against the temple cult is found in Greek writers, but this charge is not taken up by the Church Fathers, who only recently had to refute the same charge against themselves.This idea arose quite independently of pagan tradition in the Middle Ages. The head tax (fiscus Judaicus), the prohibition against circumcizing non-Jews, and the exclusion of Jews from Jerusalem -- marks of punishment of the Jews after the Jewish Wars-- were to find their reaffirmation in Christian anti-Judaic legislation.
Quote ID: 2336
Time Periods: 26
Book ID: 88 Page: 37
Section: 2A6
For Philo, it is as wrong to abandon the letter of the Torah for a “purely spiritual religion” that imagines it can dispense with the outward observance, as it would be for a man to imagine that he can live purely in the soul while abandoning the body: It follows that, exactly as we take thought for the body because it is the abode of the soul, so we must pay heed to the letter of the laws.
Quote ID: 2337
Time Periods: 12
Book ID: 88 Page: 120
Section: 4A
The Christians’ opponents are the Jews of Christian imagination. The most elaborate of such dialogues is Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, which purports to be an informal conversation with a learned Jew.
Quote ID: 2338
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 88 Page: 185
Section: 3A2A
In regard to the Jews, however, the situation was more complicated. Judaism was the only dissenting and non-Christian faith that was to remain legal in Christendom. Its status, both as a pariah religion and as a religion tolerated minimally in this pariah status, was unique.
Quote ID: 2339
Time Periods: 4567
Book ID: 88 Page: 186/187
Section: 3A2A
On the contrary, the official view of the Church guaranteed the ongoing existence of Judaism. Although the vituperations of clerics and theologians often fell into language that suggested that the Jews should be killed, the official theory excluded the “final solution” as an option here and now.…
The Church felt called upon to enforce this status of reprobation in the form of social “misery,” but the “final solution” could not be executed by men, but lay in the hands of God at the time of the final eschatological drama.
…
One of the first things to concern the newly Christianized emperor Constantine (a matter which was to be constantly reiterated in later laws in Christian history and in the Nazi anti-Semitic legislation) was the prohibition of Christian slaves (or servants) to the Jews. First this took the form of prohibiting the Jew from circumcising his slaves.
…
But this prohibition against making slaves soon grew into a prohibition against Jews owning any Christian slaves. This was a law which bishops in the West were particularly concerned to enforce, even after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The reasons for the large amount of attention paid to this restriction by the Church never took a stand against the legitimacy of slavery as an institution. It was concerned to cut off this potent form of Jewish influence upon Christians.
…
This prohibition of Jewish lordship over Christians had a severe effect on Jewish economic life. In a slave economy, it was impossible to operate any large-scale manufacturing or agricultural enterprise without slaves.
Quote ID: 2340
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 88 Page: 188
Section: 3A2A
Jews were not immediately eliminated from agriculture, but these laws began a trend that was eventually to bias Jewish economic life toward trade and exclude them from their normal participation in landholding and farming.…
Another, related area of legislation prohibited Jews from proselytizing. At the same time, Jews were strictly forbidden to impede the conversion of Jews to Christianity. It became a crime to become a Jew or to aid in the conversion of anyone to Judaism. The convert to Judaism had his goods confiscated.
…
The fixed position of the Church was to forbid a return to Judaism by those who had been forcibly baptized, on the grounds that baptism was valid ex opere operato. The forced convert was classified as an apostate if he attempted to return to Judaism.
Quote ID: 2341
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 88 Page: 189
Section: 3A2A,3D
Theodosius I passed a blanket decree which made it a crime of adultery for any Christian man or women to marry a Jew or Jewess. Capital punishment was to be exacted for this crime.
Quote ID: 2342
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 88 Page: 189
Section: 3A2A
Jews were excluded from all civil and military rank and were gradually excluded from holding any type of public office. Later they were excluded from acting as lawyers or judges.…
For those who are “the enemies of the Heavenly Majesty and the Roman Laws” to “become executors of our laws” or to have authority to judge or decide against Christians is termed “an insult to our faith.”
Quote ID: 2343
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 88 Page: 190
Section: 3A2A
Other laws aimed specifically at the interference with Judaism as a religion. In 423 C.E. Jews were forbidden to build new synagogues or repair old ones, a decree that was repeated in the novella promulgating the Theodosian Code. This, too, was a law which was to be reaffirmed again and again, as late as the eighteenth century.…
In 425 C.E., Jews were ordered to observe Christian times of feasts and fasts. The practice of forcing the Jewish community to listen to Christian conversion sermons also began in the fifth century.
Quote ID: 2344
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 88 Page: 192
Section: 3A2A
Imperial officials occasionally displayed an unseemly zealousness in curtailing legal, economic, or religious activities by Jews. But the chief offenders in this regard were fanatical monks, who stirred up mobs of Christians to pillage synagogues, cemeteries, and other property, seize or burn Jewish religious buildings, and start riots in the Jewish quarter.…
In the middle of the fourth century, Bishop Innocentius of Dertona in northern Italy destroyed the local synagogue and erected a church on the site. He offered the Jewish residents the option of baptism or expulsion. These incidents of violence and forced baptism were rife in Syria in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Around 413 C.E., a band of forty monks, led by one Barsauma, swept through Palestine, destroying synagogues and temples. They completed their mission by massacring the Jews who had been allowed to weep at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.
…
Increasingly violent pogroms and street fighting between Jews and Christians led to the expulsion of the Jews completely from major urban centers in the fifth century. In 414 C.E., the Jews were expelled by Bishop Cyril from Alexandria, a city which had been the center of Diaspora Jewry for seven hundred years.
…
The synagogue is referred to in one early law of the Theodosian Code by a Latin slang word meaning “brothel”, a word which never before had been used for a place of religious worship in Roman law.
Quote ID: 2345
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 88 Page: 233
Section: 3A2A
In 1933, when Hitler came to power, there began the systematic reassertion of anti-Jewish laws which reversed the gains made by the emancipation. Jews quickly were again reduced to persons without rights, citizenship, or means of existence.…
Nazi propaganda flooded every means of communication. Even little children were held up for ridicule and abuse in school. Jews again were forced to wear the yellow badge and began to be rounded up for places of detention. The Talmud and Jewish learning again went up in flames. The Jews were being marked down for final elimination, although the decision to exterminate them, rather than expel them, only came about when all doors to Jewish emigration were closed with the war.
Quote ID: 2346
Time Periods: 7
End of quotes