The Church and anti-Semitismagain
By Kevin MacDonald
February 2, 2009
Recently there has been a media uproar about the reinstatement of the Society
of Saint Pius X (SSPX), a traditionalist Catholic group, that broke off from
the Church after the reforms of Vatican II. Jewish groups are furious that
there would be any attempt to reconcile these traditionalists to the Church.
This is not surprising since the issue that led to the schism was the reform of
the Church initiated by the Second Vatican Council and its declaration on
Judaism, anti-Semitism, and non-Christian religions.
The man behind the schism was Marcel Lefebvre. Lefebvre not only objected to
the changes wrought by Vatican II but also opposed Muslim immigration to
Europe. As noted in the National Catholic Reporter,
A troubled history with Judaism has long been part of the Catholic
traditionalist movement associated with
Lefebvre beginning with Lefebvre
himself, who spoke approvingly of both the World War II-era Vichy Regime in
France and the far-right National Front, and who identified the contemporary
enemies of the faith as Jews, Communists and Freemasons in an Aug. 31, 1985,
letter to Pope John Paul II.
Within the past year, a priest of the SSPX stated that the Jews were
co-responsible for the death of Christ. One of the reinstated bishops,
Richard Williamson, has questioned standard accounts of the Holocaust.
All this raises once again the issue of anti-Semitism and the Church. Visiting
St. Peters in Rome last summer I noticed that there was a fairly large and
prominent crypt of St. John Chrysostom. There is also a large statue of
Chrysostom as part of the Alter of the Chair of St. Peter by Bernini, as well a
statue on the colonnade. Chrysostom was certainly an important Doctor of the
Church. But he is also one of historys most well-known anti-Semites:
Although such beasts [Jews] are unfit for work, they are fit for killing . . .
fit for slaughter. (I.II.5)
[The Synagogue] is not merely a lodging place for robbers and cheats but also
for demons. This is true not only of the synagogues but also of the souls of
the Jews. (I.IV.2)
Shall I tell you of their plundering, their covetousness, their abandonment of
the poor, their thefts, their cheating in trade? (I.VII.1) (St. John
Chrysostom, Adversus Judaeos)
Or consider St. Jerome: If you call [the synagogue] a brothel, a den of vice,
the devils refuge, Satans fortress, a place to deprave the soul, an abyss of
every conceivable disaster or whatever else you will, you are still saying less
than it deserves.
Or St. Gregory of Nyssa: [Jews are] murderers of the Lord, assassins of the
prophets, rebels against God, God haters, . . . advocates of the devil, race of
vipers, slanderers, calumniators, dark-minded people, leaven of the Pharisees,
sanhedrin of demons, sinners, wicked men, stoners, and haters of righteousness.
I wrote a chapter on this in Separation and Its Discontents, proposing that the
Catholic church in late antiquity [4th6th century AD] was in its very essence
a powerful anti-Jewish movement that arose out of resource and reproductive
competition with Jews. This idea of mine hasnt received much attention
perhaps because it leads to some basic questioning about our beliefs and our
culture. Darwin really did have a dangerous idea. But since the issue is
topical right now, I thought that I would use this opportunity to summarize the
argument there, followed by some further comments on anti-Jewish attitudes in
Catholicism.
· The 4th and 5th centuries were a time of increased anti-Jewish attitudes
at all levels of Roman society. Preachers and bishops like Chrysostom portrayed
the Jews very negatively and attempted to erect walls between Jews and non-Jews.
· Jews had become economically prosperous during this period even though
the society as a whole was losing population and declining economically.
Accusations of Jewish greed, wealth, love of luxury and of the pleasures of the
table became common. Jews were prominent in certain sectors of the economy,
including the slave trade, banking, national and international trade, and the
law. Jews had also developed monopolies in specific industries, including silk,
clothing, glassware, and the trade in luxury items. Jews were seen as wealthy,
powerful, and aggressive.
· Church actions against the Jews and the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the
Church Fathers struck a deep resonance with popular attitudes. A historian
noted that if the Christian populace so many times threw itself into the
attack on synagogue after synagogue, it was not because it passively accepted
orders given from above.
If the anti-Jewish polemic was so successful, it was
because it awakened latent hatreds and appealed to feelings that were already
there.
· Emperor Constantine, who established the Church as the religion of the
Empire, had bishops in his entourage who held strongly anti-Jewish attitudes.
Constantine himself stated that the Jews are a people who, having imbrued
their hands in a most heinous outrage [i.e., killing Christ], have thus
polluted their souls and are deservedly blind.
· Several of the Church Fathers, including Chrysostom, came from areas where
there was a long history of conflict between Jews and non-Jews. Chrysostom
describes Jews as numerous and wealthy and seems to have seen Judaism more as
an economic force than as a religious organization. He often compared Jews to
predatory beasts and accused them of virtually every evil, including economic
crimes such as profiteering. St. Jerome also refers to Jews as encircling
Christians and seeking to tear them apart. Jerome complained about the Jews
love for money in several passages. And he complained that the Jews were
multiplying like vermin a comment that clearly suggests a concern with
Jewish reproductive success.
· Outspoken anti-Jewish attitudes were typical of many who rose in the Church
hierarchy and among many prominent Christian writers of the 4th and 5th century
(e.g., Eusebius, St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Ambrose,
St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. Gregory of Nyssa). In the Eastern Church during
this period, the monks were militant anti-Semites who had considerable
influence among the Church hierarchy. The suggestion is that anti-Semitism was
of prime importance in attaining positions of power and influence in the Church
during this period. Individuals exhibited their anti-Semitism openly, as a
badge of honor, and were made saints of the Church after their death.
· A significant percentage of all Christian writings during the period are
essentially anti-Jewish. These writings are attempts define an ingroup
fundamentally opposed to Jews. Christians saw the Old Testament and the New
Testament as fundamentally opposed: The adversos Judeaos tradition represents
the overall method of Christian exegesis of the Old Testament. . . . It was
virtually impossible for the Christian preacher or exegete to teach
scripturally at all without alluding to the anti-Judaic theses.
· This rhetoric was meant to apply not only to the Jews of the Old
Testament but also to their descendants in the contemporary world. According to
Chrysostom, Jewish responsibility for killing Christ and their many other vices
had been passed to the descendants of the ancient Jews as inherited traits.
· Anti-Jewish references occurred in Christian liturgy and rites, especially
those surrounding Holy Week emphasizing the role of the Jews in the crucifixion
of Christ. Prayers intended for use by the masses of Christians contained
reproaches against the Jews. Christian holidays and periods of fasting were set
up to be directly opposite to Jewish ones and to act as anti-Jewish
commemorations. For example, the Christian Holy Week originally coincided with
the Jewish Passover, but the Christian liturgy emphasized Christian mourning
for the Jewish act of deicide at a time of Jewish rejoicing. Friday became a
fast day commemorating the crucifixion, whereas for Jews, Friday was a joyous
time prior to the Sabbath. Anti-Jewish attitudes were deeply ingrained in the
important documents of the religion and closely connected to expressions of
Christian faith.
· The culmination of this perceived Jewish evil is, of course, the
rejection and killing of Christ. According to Eusebius an important Christian
theoretician, by rejecting Christ as the Messiah, the Jews rejected God and
forfeited their status as the Chosen People. Their punishment for this
rejection can already be seen by their defeats at the hands of the Romans,
their loss of secular power, and the loss of their priesthood.
· The result was a very potent anti-Jewish ideology. Christian anti-Semitism
was not only intellectually respectable, it also developed an emotionally
compelling anti-Jewish liturgy. With the political success of the Church,
society as a whole became organized around a monolithic, hegemonic, and
collectivist social institution defined by its opposition to Judaism.
· Christian writers, such as Eusebius, described Judaism as an ethnic
entity, but they saw Christianity as a universalist religion that would
eventually include all of mankind. Eusebius repeatedly contrasts the
universalist message of Christianity versus the religion of the Jewish race.
The new covenant is not for the Jewish race only but summons all men equally
to share together the same good things. Eusebius thought of Jews as biological
descendants of Abraham who have rejected the universal message of Christianity,
which remains open to them if only they would see the light.
· This Christian ideology was accompanied by an increase in anti-Jewish
actions sanctioned and even encouraged by the Church. Monks 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. Christians
were able to destroy synagogues with virtual impunity and with the tacit or
open approval of the Church. The Church pressured the government to forgive
anti-Jewish acts.
· A number of anti-Jewish laws were enacted, including laws against Jews
owning Christian slaves, laws discouraging social contact and intermarriage
with Jews, and laws regulating economic relationships between Jews and
non-Jews. Jews were barred from the legal profession and government service,
and they were prohibited from making accusations against Christians or even
testifying against them in civil or criminal legal proceedings.
· The government was often reluctant to pursue these anti-Jewish
restrictions and did so only as a result of ecclesiastical and popular
pressure. The Church was active and influential in changing imperial
legislation regarding the Jews, and the wording of the laws often betrays
extreme hostility to the Jews. The Church developed the ideology that it was
superior to the emperors clearly a necessary condition if the Church was to
be an instrument of anti-Semitism rather than having only a spiritual function.
· As with the official Muslim position, Jews were allowed to exist within
Christian societies, but, as a condemned people, their life was to be
miserable. With this type of ideology it is easy to see that Christian
religious ideology would be inconsistent with Jewish wealth, political power,
and reproductive success.
· I suggest that the reason for Christian universalism was that the Empire
had become a polyglot, ethnically diverse chaos of peoples (quoting race
theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain). The world became divided into Jews and
non-Jews. The Jews remained an ethnic group, while the non-Jews developed a
religious identification as Christians.
· The result was that ethnicity had no official place in Christian religious
ideology. This in turn had a number of important consequences in later
centuries. On the one hand, there is no question that Catholicism was able to
serve as a viable institution of ethnic defense in other historical eras,
notably the Middle Ages when, as James C. Russell notes, the Church was
influenced by German culture. On the other hand, the strands of Christian
universalism can lead to compromising the ethnic interests of Christians.
Indeed, since Vatican II, Catholicism has become part of the culture of Western
suicide. In the US, it is in the forefront of the open borders movement. It is
therefore not at all surprising that Jewish organizations would be dismayed by
any retreat from Vatican II.
Fundamentally, the Catholic traditionalists seem to desire a return to an older
form of Catholicism capable of defending the West as a cultural entity and
perhaps implicitly as an ethnic entity. Indeed, it is interesting to read the
article on Judaism in The Catholic Encyclopedia from 1910 during the papacy
of Pius X. The article shows that Catholic attitudes on Jews had not changed
much in the 16 centuries since Eusebius. Jews in the time of Jesus are
described as a "race" that rejected the call of Jesus for repentance, showing
no sorrow for sin, unfit for salvation and rejecting the true kingdom of God in
favor of earthly power: "Jesus justly treated as vain the hopes of His Jewish
contemporaries that they should become masters of the world in the event of a
conflict with Rome."
[The Kingdom of God] is the Christian Church, which was able silently to leaven
the Roman Empire, which has outlived the ruin of the Jewish Temple and its
worship, and which, in the course of centuries, has extended to the confines of
the world the knowledge and the worship of the God of Abraham, while Judaism
has remained the barren fig-tree which Jesus condemned during His mortal life.
...
[After the resurrection of Jesus,] the Church ... took the independent attitude
which it has maintained ever since. Conscious of their Divine mission, its
leaders boldly charged the Jewish rulers with the death of Jesus, and freely
"taught and preached Christ Jesus", disregarding the threats and injunctions of
men whom they considered as in mad revolt against God and His Christ (Acts 4).
The article portrays Church laws against Jews, such as laws against Jews having
Christian slaves and forcing Jews to live in ghettos, as necessary to protect
the Christian faith. And it accurately portrays the Church in later centuries
as at times protecting Jews against popular anti-Jewish actions. However, it
asserts that the causes of popular anti-Semitism included real conflicts
between Jews and non-Jews and are not only due to Christian religious ideology.
In particular, the causes of anti-Semitism are described as follows:
*
The deep and wide racial difference between Jews and Christians which
was, moreover, emphasized by the ritual and dietary laws of Talmudic Judaism;
*
the mutual religious antipathy which prompted the Jewish masses to look
upon the Christians as idolaters, and the Christians to regard the Jews as the
murderers of the Divine Saviour of mankind, and to believe readily the
accusation of the use of Christian blood in the celebration of the; Jewish
Passover, the desecration of the Holy Eucharist, etc.;
*
the trade rivalry which caused Christians to accuse the Jews of sharp
practice, and to resent their clipping of the coinage, their usury, etc.;
*
the patriotic susceptibilities of the particular nations in the midst of
which the Jews have usually formed a foreign element, and to the respective
interests of which their devotion has not always been beyond suspicion.
These ideas on the causes of popular anti-Semitism are pretty much the same as
the ones I emphasize in my overview of historical anti-Semitism.
The Catholic Church has played the role of ethnic and cultural defense in the
past. The reinstatement of SSPX is a hopeful sign that it may do so in the
future.
Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State
UniversityLong Beach.
Source with hyperlinks:
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-SSPX.html
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