Dismantling Christian Anti-Judaism

I'm a very stubborn person, and when I discover an opportunity that I deem necessary for my personal development at a certain point in time, I am relentless in my quest to benefit from said opportunity. This was how I began my college experience: I didn't want to listen to the wise suggestions of my faculty advisor; instead, I wanted to take Jewish-Christian Relations, an upper-level course that, while having no stated prerequisites, would be difficult, time-consuming, and presumably far outside the skill set of an eighteen-year-old first-year student. Oh well, I told my advisor and the registrar. I'm taking it anyway. "Fine," the registrar replied, "but you need to go talk to the professor."

The professor was one Dr. Paul Jones, whose wife had been a friend of my mother's for years. I figured that the family connection would help me in getting a spot in the class. We had a short chat in which he told me that he didn't know if I was ready for such a class as this. This made me all the more eager to take the class; I like meeting challenges and coming up against obstacles others don't think I can tackle. I told him how hard I would work, how interested I was in the subject. He finally assented, and I trotted back to the Registrar's Office with a beloved purple course pass in hand (the first of many I would attain throughout my college career).

I went into Jewish-Christian Relations thinking I would learn something about Judaism, which had fascinated me since I was very young. However, I soon learned that the class should have a subtitle: Jewish-Christian Relations: A History of Christian Hatred of the Jews. We read Carroll's Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews, Flannery's The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism, along with about 1000 pages of miscellaneous articles and scholarly publications on the subject. We read the anti-Jewish vitriole of St. John Chrysostom (this is the same man whose prayer is recorded in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer - The Prayer of St. Chrysostom; he wrote specific adversus judaeos- against the Jews- literature), Martin Luther (read Luther's "The Jews and Their Lies"), and the writings of men such as St. Augustine, who theologized the justification for the continued status of the Jews as a pariah people - despised, hated, discriminated, and the future subjects of numerous crusades and pogroms.

My early college experience was a full year of nothing but the study of Christian anti-Judaism - of this dark underside of the history of my faith, this horrendous skeleton in the closet. At the end of freshman year, I traveled to Poland on a program called "The March of Remembrance and Hope," and visited Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Madajnek, traveling with other college students and faculty on a bus with two Holocaust survivors. At age nineteen, I stood in a gas chamber in Madajnek and felt the weight of history upon my shoulders, as I looked at the blood-stained walls, where victims had scraped their fingers bloody trying to escape the caustic lethal gases. I learned and know that it is not possible to encounter the history of the Holocaust, the history of Christian Europe (the small Polish town of Lublin sits right outside the Madajnek death camp; there are reports of the ashes of those murdered blowing through the windows and into the homes of Polish families as they sat down to supper; Lubliners could smell the burning flesh), or the history of Christianity without taking into account the long trajectory of theologized hatred, discrimination, violence, and killing of the Jews from its beginnings - the early Church Fathers - through to the Holocaust. Even if it were possible to remove Luther's anti-Jewish diatribes from the history (it is not; Hitler used Luther's words in his anti-semitic rhetoric), Christians in 2009 still must answer to the inaction and "bystander behavior" of millions of Christians in Nazi Europe. Further, we must contend with the fact that millions of our brothers and sisters in Christ were members of the Nazi party, and a number of those Christian Nazis worked in the death camps. Remove the historical trajectory that led up to the Holocaust, and Christians still must deal with the evil - the blackest sins - that their brothers and sisters in Christ committed during the reign of the Nazi party.

I am pleased that the Episcopal Church is contending with this history and with remnants of anti-Jewish language that remain in our liturgies. I pray that deputies and bishops will vote to pass resolution A091, "Dismantle Christian Anti-Judaism."

For further reading on this subject, please see:
From Intra-Jewish Polemics to Persecution: The Christian Formation of the Jew as Religious Other
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4044/is_200604/ai_n16452274/

This article is by professor Dr. Paul Jones, and was published in Encounter, Spring 2006. Refer to his extensive bibliography for even more reading.

The text of the Resolution:
Resolution: A091
Title: Dismantle Christian Anti-Judaism
Topic: Discrimination
Committee: 13 - Prayer Book, Liturgy and Church Music
House of Initial Action: Bishops
Proposer: Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music

Resolved, the House of _______ concurring, That the 76th General Convention direct the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music to continue to collect, develop and disseminate materials that assist members of the Church to address Christian anti-Judaism expressed in and stirred by portions of Christian scriptures and liturgical texts, including the preparation of a pamphlet explaining Christian anti-Judaism and ways to address it in teaching, evangelism, and congregational life; the development of age-appropriate educational materials for children; the identification and evaluation of available resources pertaining to liturgy and music, giving special attention to Holy Week and Easter liturgies and to the diverse traditions of song in The Episcopal Church; and to report the results of its efforts to the 77th General Convention; and be it further

Resolved, That the 76th General Convention request that the Theology Committee of the House of Bishops develop, in consultation with the Standing Commissions on Liturgy and Music and on Ecumenical and Interreligious Relations, a statement defining Christian anti-Judaism and why it demands our attention, and to report to the 77th General Convention; and be it further

Resolved, That the 76th General Convention direct the Joint Standing Committee on Program, Budget and Finance to consider a budget allocation of $10,000.00 for implementation of this Resolution.