There is an old Jewish adage that pretty much sums up Israel’s experience among the nations for the last 2,000 years. “Scratch a gentile,” the saying goes, “and you’re sure to find an anti-Semite.”
That notion is given credence by the fact that the first two millennia of the Jewish-Christian encounter culminated in the systematic slaughter of six-million Jews in the heart of Christendom.
But Dr. Paul R. Carlson, author of Christianity After Auschwitz, is cautiously optimistic that the dawn of this new millennium may lead to Jewish-Christian amity as the Church faces up to its past sins and seeks to work with the Synagogue against those demonic forces which threaten civilization itself.
However, as Carlson illustrates, the genocidal germ that gave birth to Hitler’s criminal regime still flourishes among countless Christians, many of whom would passionately deny they harbor any anti-Semitic notions or sentiments.
While the book is addressed primarily to Carlson’s fellow evangelicals, both Jews and Christians will discover that it provides the general reader with an overview of those critical issues which scholars alone have in the past wrestled with in the post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian encounter.
At the outset, Carlson is quick to concede that the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, a scion of the great Chechnowa Rebbe, was certainly correct when he insisted that “Christians have never tried to penetrate the soul of the Jews.
“They have read the Bible but neglected the oral tradition by which we interpret it,” he noted. “This makes a different Bible altogether.
For example, says Rav Soloveitchik: “To equate Judaism with legalism the way Christian theologians are prone to do is like equating mathematics with a compilation of mathematical equations.”
By the same token, old stereotypes die hard.
“The Jew has been pictured as the arch-capitalist and the arch-Bolshevik and chastised for being both, whipsawed by contending forces,” says Nathan C. Belth. “The Soviet authorities [saw] Jews as a threat to the state, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who castigate[d] Soviet terror, sees Jews as libertarians who brought on socialism, after, of course, rejecting Christ.”
Since time-immemorial, anti-Semites have also portrayed the Jew as the greedy, shady businessman or banker. But they conveniently forget stories such as that of Haym Salomon [1740-1785], the Jewish broker whose financial aid staved off starvation and desertion among American troops during our War for Independence.
At one critical point, Robert Morris, the American financier and statesman, sent a messenger to alert Haym Salomon of the plight of the cash-strapped Colonial forces. The man brought the news to Salomon while he was attending Yom Kippur services at Mikveh Israel Synagogue in Philadelphia. The congregation was shocked at the intrusion on the holiest day of the Jewish year; but Haym Salomon quietly informed the messenger: “Tell Mr. Morris our country’s appeal will not be in vain.”
But that old canard about Jews and their money remains grist for the anti-Semite’s mill.
By the same token, Jews have not been entirely blameless when it comes to their own stereotypes of Christians, particularly evangelicals.
Nathan Perlmutter confessed as much during his tenure as national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith.
“Our image of the fundamentalist and the evangelical is a kind of collage assembled out of bits and pieces from Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and Erskine Caldwell . . . ,” he admitted. “Even after all this time memories of the great swarm of sex-ridden, Bible-thumping caricatures continue to exert a pervasive power.”
But evangelicals would be among the first to admit that Jews have come a long way since the days of the infamous Toledot Yeshu, or Life of Jesus, which depicted the Galilean in scandalous terms.
Indeed, the Israeli author Shalom Ben-Chorin is representative of those Jewish intellectuals who now believe that “it is time for Jesus to come home again.”
Meanwhile, few Christians realize just how vulnerable many Jews feel in what they perceive to be “Christian America.” That perception is heightened by the 1992 American Jewish Year Book finding that “roughly 12 percent of Americans of Jewish heritage are now Christians.”
“There is another way of looking at what I have called a disaster in the making,” says former US Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, author of Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America
“Of the 6.8 million people who are Jews or of Jewish descent, 1.1 million say they have no religion and 1.3 million have joined another religion, adding up to 2.4 million,” Abrams observes. “This means that one-third of the people in America of Jewish ethnic origin no longer report Judaism as their current religion (Abrams italics).
Such statistics illustrate why Jewish leaders unanimously condemn those Christian missionary agencies which specifically target Jews for conversion. They have been particularly incensed by one recent evangelical effort, known as Peace 2000, which aimed to convert every Jew in Israel to Christianity by the dawn of the new millennium.
“Centuries of martyrdom are the price which the Jewish people has paid for survival,” says Brandeis scholar Marshall Sklare. “And the apostate, at one stroke, makes a mockery of Jewish history.
“But if the convert is contemptible in Jewish eyes,” Sklare adds, “the missionary — all the more, the missionary of Jewish descent -- is seen as pernicious, for he forces the Jew to relive the history of his martyrdom, all the while pressing the claim that in approaching the Jew he does so out of love.
“What kind of love is it, Jews wonder, that would deprive a man of his heritage,” Sklare asks. “Furthermore, given the history of Christian treatment of the Jews, would it not seem time at last to recognize that the Jew has paid his dues and earned the right to be protected from obliteration by Christian love as well as destruction by Christian hate?”
The distinguished Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was even more pointed about the matter. “I had rather enter Auschwitz,” he once remarked, “than be an object of conversion.”
All of this leads to the opening chapter of Christianity After Auschwitz, which introduces Christians to Emil Fackenheim’s “Eleventh Commandment” — or 614th Mitzvoth — which decrees that Jews are not permitted to grant Hitler any posthumous victories through intermarriage, assimilation, or conversion to a faith not their own. In a word, they are commanded to remain Jews.
By the same token, Jewish scholars are quick to recognize that any “open and honest” dialogue will at some point involve a frank discussion of the similarities and differences between the Jewish and Christian perception[s] of the Messianic hope.
With that understanding, the second chapter deals with the remarkable career of the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh and last Grand Rebbe of the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidim. Many of his talmidim, or disciples, believe he will ultimately be revealed as King-Messiah. His life and work are considered within the context of that of Jesus of Nazareth, as well as those of several pseudo-messiahs who have troubled Israel down through the centuries
The author then makes it clear that Jesus himsel
