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 Jews in America are often spoken of as a
“minority.” So they are, in more than a numerical sense, as I
will explain. But despite their small numbers they are also a powerful
faction, though the term faction is rarely applied to them.
In Federalist Number
10, James Madison gave a famous and useful
definition of the word: “By a faction I understand a number of
citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who
are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of
interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and
aggregate interests of the community.”
The organized Jewish
faction is what I call the Tribe. It’s a bit more specific than
“the Jews”; but it includes most Jews, who, as many opinion
polls show, overwhelmingly support the state of Israel and, furthermore,
overwhelmingly favor “progressive” causes like legal
abortion, “sexual freedom,” and “gay rights.”
What is striking about
the Tribe is not that its positions on such matters are necessarily wrong,
but that they are anti-Christian. They are even anti-Judaic, in that they
contravene the moral code of Moses. Jews today define themselves
formally by descent (or, less politely, race, though the term is taboo)
rather than by religion; and, less formally, by antagonism to Christianity.
It would be inaccurate to say that the Tribe adopts certain social
attitudes and political positions even though these are repugnant to most
Christians. It adopts them chiefly because they are repugnant to
Christians.
Within the Tribe, one
of the worst sins a Jew can commit is to become a Christian, as witness
Jewish hostility to Jews for Jesus. An irreligious or atheist Jew may
claim Israeli citizenship at any time, but a Jew who has converted to
Christianity may not. This antagonism is so predominant that the Tribe
opposes not only government endorsements of Christianity, but even the
public exaltation of the Old Testament (as in displays of the Ten
Commandments on public property) because Christians have adopted it too.
The “Judaeo-Christian tradition” is a sentimental myth,
treasured by many Christians but by very few Jews.
The Tribe has no pope
or authoritative body defining its creed, but its attitudes aren’t
hard to discern. As Samuel Johnson says, a community must be judged
non numero sed pondere — not by numbers, but by weight. And
the preponderance of Jewish sentiment is clear: it loathes Christianity
and Christian influence in public life. It resents Christian proselytizing,
one of the first Christian duties (virtually banned in Israel). It considers
the Gospels the very source of what it calls anti-Semitism. In fact, the
very word anti-Semitism is basically a Tribal synonym for
Christianity.
This was all spelled
out for even the most naive observer by the fierce Tribal reaction to Mel
Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ. The barely
concealed hatred of Christianity came roaring forth long before the movie
was even finished. The
columnist Charles Krauthammer spoke for many Jews when he
wrote that the story of Christ’s Passion had “resulted in
countless Christian massacres of Jews, and prepared Europe for the
ultimate massacre — six million Jews systematically murdered
within six years — in the heart, alas, of a Christian
continent.” Alas indeed!
 That Christianity
caused the Holocaust, along with “countless” other Christian
persecutions of Jews “for almost two millennia,” was a given
for Jews commenting on the film. Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation
League, along with other Jewish leaders, flatly predicted that
Gibson’s film would cause hatred and violence against Jews —
implying, of course, that Christians are fully capable of such rabid
conduct even now, though it would be directly contrary to Christian
doctrine. William Safire of the New York Times virtually
blamed the Holocaust on Christ himself, citing the words “I come
not to bring peace, but a sword” as evidence of Christianity’s
inherent violence.
Since the allegations
about the past are never more definite than Krauthammer’s
unspecified “countless” (would that be more, or less, than six
million?), we are dealing here not with genuine historical memory, but
with a mythological caricature of Christian history that still obsesses the
Tribal mind, both shaping and expressing its present feelings. So much for
“interfaith dialogue.” As Rabbi Jacob Neusner has observed,
for most Jews today Auschwitz has replaced Sinai as the definitive
moment in the Jewish past. And Auschwitz is projected all the way back
to Calvary.
It’s now a
Tribal article of faith that until the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the
Catholic Church taught that all Jews were “Christ-killers.”
This is of course false, as older Catholics know first-hand and as anyone
else can easily ascertain. The notion that the Church
“reversed” this supposedly ancient teaching displays modern
ignorance of the way the Church does business: It assumes that she can
arbitrarily make and unmake doctrines, like a contemporary dictator
changing the Party line overnight. She acts slowly and deliberately
precisely because she can never repudiate a settled teaching
while claiming infallibility. Even Catholic children used to grasp that.
When I joined the
Church in 1961, the only Jews I knew personally were some quite amiable
neighbors. If anyone had told me that the Halman family down the street
bore special responsibility for the Crucifixion, I would have been utterly
mystified. So bizarre an idea would have been an impediment to my
conversion: it simply wouldn’t have made sense. And it never
occurred to my Catholic mentors; they didn’t need a new Church
council to tell them that it was nonsense. They didn’t speak
nonsense. It had nothing to do with loving or hating Jews as such. I was
far more inclined to hate Protestant heretics at that point, but I never
even thought of blaming them for, say, Communist persecution of
Catholics. It would have been about as rational as blaming Julius Caesar
for Pearl Harbor.
The Tribe, however,
embraces the mythical charge of “Christ-killing” in order to
reverse it: Christians are Jew-killers. And it all began, by implication,
with Christ himself, whose followers, immediately after his death,
naturally began implementing his principles of charity by persecuting
Jews, a course they have persisted in “for almost two
millennia.”
Astute readers will
sense a discrepancy here. Christians were in no position to persecute
anyone for nearly three centuries, until the
conversion of Constantine in A.D. 313. Meanwhile, they suffered some
pretty severe persecution themselves. According to the Acts of the
Apostles, it began with the Jews who rejected Christ and tried furiously
to exterminate the infant Church. We also know this from the testimony of
one of the persecutors themselves, the turncoat Saul of Tarsus, whom we
know as St. Paul. Paul himself died as a result of charges brought by the
Tribe before Roman officials, just as Christ had.
The Tribe’s
cohesion and survival over the two succeeding millennia has often seemed
miraculous, even to Christians. By a fine irony, the Talmud claims
“credit” for Christ’s death beyond what the Church has
actually taught: It says that “our sages” justly condemned
him to death as a sorcerer, not even mentioning a Roman role in the event.
The Gospel of John merely says that “his own received him
not” and the creeds say that he “suffered under Pontius
Pilate,” passing up golden opportunities to affix Tribal guilt at the
outset.
 At any rate, Christians
knew from the start how the Tribe felt about them, and nothing has
changed since then except that today’s Christians have become
remarkably naive about it. Christ tells us to forgive our enemies, but he
doesn’t ask us to pretend that they are our friends. He predicted
persecution as the natural price of discipleship; hence we are to be
“wise as serpents, but harmless as doves.” Christians have
often failed on both counts, but the guidelines are clear enough. In fact,
Church officials have often condemned popular Christian outrages against
Jews, the worst of which occurred during the Black Death of the
fourteenth century. Not only Christian charity but worldly common sense
could see that the Jews were being victimized by a superstitious fury, a
madness brought on by an inexplicable calamity.
Anyone who
concentrates on the Tribe risks losing his sense of proportion. This
includes, preeminently, the Tribe itself. If the history of Christian Europe
is the history of persecution of Jews, the first question that naturally
arises is why the Jews have chosen to live in Europe for so many
centuries. If you were wanted for murder in Detroit, why would you choose
to move to Detroit, of all places on earth? Why have
“Diaspora” Jews persistently settled in Christian lands,
instead of rushing en masse to their “homeland” in the Middle
East, the Holy Land itself? “Next year in Jerusalem”? Why, as
Dodger fans used to say, “wait till next year”?
May I utter here, in the
privacy of my own newsletter, the dark and reactionary suspicion that the
perpetually plaintive Tribe was actually content to live in
Christian lands? Even today, more Jews choose to live in Christian
America than in the state of Israel, typically attacking Christians for
supposed bigotries they harbor instead of thanking Christians for their
long record of tolerance and benevolence.
Again, the Tribe
seems, by its own account, to have a long and puzzling tradition of
migrating to anti-Semitic countries. Or rather,
“anti-Semitism” is the explanation it gives for its own perpetual
unpopularity, and at the root of anti-Semitism, it insists, is Christianity
(though a new explanation has to be found for its unpopularity in the
Muslim world).
Enough already.
It’s time to face the possibility that Jewish problems are
sometimes due to Jewish attitudes and Jewish behavior. My father once
remarked to me that the Jews are disliked everywhere they go because of
“their crooked ways.” Though, as I later learned, Dad had been
an altar boy, he said nothing about Christ-killing; he’d long since
left the Church and he didn’t particularly care who had killed
Christ. As a matter of fact, he didn’t particularly dislike Jews; but
he did think it was their ethics, not their biblical record, that had earned
them their low reputation.
The
popular verb jew would seem to bear him out.
So do countless ethnic jokes about Jewish sharp dealing and devious
conduct. So, in fact, do Talmudic passages authorizing Jews to relieve
gentiles of their property, if they can do it without incurring anger
against Jews in general. These are the sorts of things that actually
irritate (and sometimes amuse) non-Jews. Has anyone ever heard a joke
about Jews killing Christ?
The Tribe’s
obloquy long predates the Third Reich’s propaganda. Government
libel campaigns, a feature of the modern world of mass communication,
rarely succeed for long; even popular myths die out over time. But a
durable reputation, lasting over many centuries, is hard to account for
unless it contains some truth confirmed by experience. Few Christians
have said that the Jews killed Christ; they have always said that the Jews
rejected Christ, as indeed Jews still do. The Tribe itself makes
rejecting Christ a defining feature of Jewishness, even more than
adhering to Judaism.
Where does the charge
of Christ-killing show up in Christian culture? I have done a bit of
spot-checking in English literature during the Christian era, in three famous
stories about Jews.
“The
Prioress’s Tale,” in The Canterbury Tales of
Geoffrey Chaucer, is a pious fable about a small boy whose throat is cut by
malicious Jews, who then throw the little corpse into a pit. The story is
designed to put the Jews in a bad light, by contrasting Christian piety
with inhuman Jewish cruelty; yet it says nothing about the Jews’
having killed Christ.
The most famous and
fascinating Jewish character in secular literature is Shakespeare’s
Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. He is a villain, but he also
speaks his piece so eloquently that readers are still divided over his
creator’s attitude toward him. Is he more victim than villain? At
any rate, one thing is clear: Though Shylock’s Christian enemies call
him a bloodthirsty usurer, a “wolf,”
“misbeliever,” “cutthroat dog,” and so forth,
none of them, even in their most violent vituperation, suggest that he is
guilty of killing Christ. The idea of Jewish guilt for the Crucifixion, which
Krauthammer insists obsessed Christians “for almost two
millennia,” never even crosses their minds!
 More important for our
purposes, Shakespeare doesn’t connect Shylock with the Crucifixion
either. Shylock speaks of Christ and Christians with brusque contempt, he
is tortured by his daughter’s elopement with a Christian, but, for
all his cruelty, he never adverts to the Crucifixion. The play assumes
enmity between Christians and Jews, but not the sort the Tribe’s
rhetoric would lead us to expect.
An even more telling
example is another play of the period, The Jew of Malta,
usually ascribed to Christopher Marlowe. Its chief character, Barabas, is
an uninhibited exaggeration of the villainous Jew: He walks abroad at
night poisoning wells for the sheer, gleeful pleasure of it; he poisons his
own daughter for becoming a Christian nun. His cunning malice, comic in
its sheer extremity, knows no bounds; in contrast to Shylock, Barabas is
robustly implausible. Yet nowhere in the play is there any hint of the
theme of Christ-killing. That would be beyond even this absurd Christian
fantasy of the hate-crazed Jew.
And of course Charles
Dickens created an unforgettable Jewish villain: Fagin in Oliver
Twist. Though far from inhuman, he is certainly disreputable,
teaching urchins to pick pockets and receiving stolen goods. Dickens
usually refers to him simply as “the Jew.” But again, there is
no hint that this Jewish rascal bears any guilt for the Crucifixion.
Hilaire Belloc and G.K.
Chesterton, two of the greatest Catholic writers of the last century, were
often critical of the Jews — each wrote a book about them —
and today are routinely referred to as anti-Semites. Neither of them
accused the Jews of killing Christ. In fact, both sought solutions to the
“Jewish problem” which would be fair to Christians and Jews
alike; Chesterton was pro-Zionist, Belloc anti-Zionist, and both spent
many pages defending the Jews against common charges. But neither of
these alleged bigots thought the accusation of deicide was worth
mentioning, either to assert or to refute.
In truth, the charge of
“Christ-killing” is hard to find anywhere, outside of
schoolyard taunts. Yet the Tribe “remembers” it, just as
innumerable baseball fans used to “remember” seeing Babe
Ruth’s legendary (and apocryphal) “called shot” in the
1932 World Series, the most famous home run never hit. Such
non-happenings are a regular feature of Tribal memory, as witness the many
testimonies of “Holocaust survivors” that have turned out to
be delusions or outright forgeries. A large proportion of the Tribe is still
absolutely convinced that Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope,”
despite mountainous, and mounting, evidence to the contrary.
(Hitler’s media called Pius “the Jews’
mouthpiece.”)
Similar bogus
memories of victimization surround the
state of Israel. Far from facing extinction in 1948, Zionist Jews enjoyed
great military superiority to the Arabs and ruthlessly drove the native
Palestinians from their homes with liberal applications of terrorism.
Since then the Jewish state has behaved according to the harshest Jewish
stereotypes, deceitfully, parasitically, and cruelly. It was supposed to
provide Jews with a safe haven from persecution, where they could at last
be self-sufficient; instead, it has depended for its survival on foreign aid,
chiefly American. Proclaiming democracy and equality, it has imposed
racial tyranny of the sort the Tribe roundly condemns everywhere else.
And it has failed in its
whole original purpose of ensuring Jewish safety. Despite its military
power and nuclear arsenal, it has engendered such hatred among Arabs
that Jews are afraid to go there and fret for its survival — even as
they fret about nonexistent Christian anti-Semitism in pro-Israel
America. As the Good Book says, “The guilty flee when no man
pursueth.” Zionism has vividly shown that the Tribe is perfectly
capable of making enemies without the help of the Christians it still,
after almost two millennia, loathes.
What is the source of
this deep enduring hatred of Christianity? No doubt there are several; an
obvious one is the Church’s claim to be the New Israel, a spiritual
one, supplanting the old ethnic one. Even many secular Jews resent
“supersessionist” Christian theology; it’s apparently
an affront to be replaced as God’s Chosen People even if you no
longer believe in God. This offense is avenged by blaming Christians,
especially popes, for the Holocaust, any doubt of which the Tribe treats as
heresy. In many Western countries the Tribe has
succeeded in criminalizing the expression of such doubts.
Moreover,
Christianity’s universality has given it a worldwide appeal that
Judaism by its nature can never enjoy. This consigns the Tribe to a
permanent minority status, confounding its proud expectation that with
the coming of the Messiah it would rule all nations. Worse, Christians take
it for granted that their ethic is immeasurably superior to that of the
Jews; this isn’t even debatable, for the Tribe can find no ground for
persuading Christians that the Jewish ethos is better. Just as the dwarf is
obsessed with height in a way people of normal size can hardly imagine,
the Tribe is obsessed with its marginal minority status, which it
experiences as victimization, imagining slights and insults —
“anti-Semitism” — even when none are intended. Its
inverted pride expresses itself in claims of persecution. The Jews are
still “chosen,” if only for a singular Christian hatred. The
emergence and military power of the Zionist state have partly assuaged
this ressentiment, while Arab hatred and Western disapproval have
also reinforced the feeling of persecution.
 A subtle twist on this
theme is offered by John Murray Cuddihy in his book The Ordeal of
Civility. For the Jews, argues Cuddihy, adapting to the modern West
has indeed been an “ordeal,” as they have found themselves
regarded as backward and “crude” against the
“refined” standards of Western Christian man. Such Jewish
ideologies as Marxism and Freudianism are disguised apologias for the
Jews, denying the superiority of Western standards. For Marx, capitalism
boils down to mere greed; while for Freud, romantic love boils down to
mere lust. Both view Western manners as mere hypocrisy, self-deluding
airs put on by the goyim. Marxist and Freudian reductionism have had
tremendous attraction for Jewish intellectuals, and not a few gentiles
who feel alienated from the Christian world.
The exaltation of
alienation has been the distinctive achievement of the Tribal intellectual.
To be alienated is to be superior, “chosen.” There is
something richly symbolic in the creation of the state of Israel, where an
alien population has claimed the right to dispossess the native one. Here
is the psychic Tribal drama played out in the real world, with the usurpers
of Palestine brazenly calling their regime a “democracy,”
while feeling victimized by the angry population they’ve robbed and
murdered.
President Bush
sometimes says that minority children suffer from “the soft
bigotry of low expectations.” They get the message that nobody
expects them to achieve anything, so they don’t even try. The very
term minority now signifies a group not only recognized as having
what Cuddihy nicely calls “accredited victim status,” but felt
to be incapable of meeting normal standards of conduct.
Polish-Americans, for example, are a numerical minority, but not a
“minority” in this subtly condescending sense.
One might also speak
of a “soft” anti-Semitism of low moral
expectations. Most gentiles respect Jews for their intelligence and
ability, but they have also come to take certain kinds of Jewish
misbehavior for granted. Israeli racial supremacism is assumed as
inseparable from “Israel’s right to exist”; loose
Jewish charges of anti-Semitism, especially against Christians, are
likewise so predictable as to cause little surprise or outrage. In public
life, at least, the Tribe has embraced this baneful form of
“minority” status and the implicit contempt that goes with
giving up hope of normal civility.
As with other
“minorities,” the Christian habit with the Tribe is simply to
pretend not to notice obvious and distressing things. This, we assume, is
just their nature; they aren’t going to change; maybe they
can’t help being this way.
This is what
“interfaith dialogue” has come to: Christian despair and
surrender.
Joseph Sobran
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