Christianity and Anti-Semitism

Extract

That fervent Catholic, Leon Bloy, wrote in one of his works: ‘Suppose that there were people round you continually speaking of your father and mother with the utmost contempt, who had nothing to offer them but insults and offensive sarcasms, how would you feel? Well, this is just what happens to our Lord Jesus Christ. We forget, or rather we do not wish to know, that our God made man is a Jew, nature’s most perfect Jew, the lion of Judah, that his mother is a Jewess, the flower of the Jewish race; that the Apostles were Jews, as well as all the Prophets; and finally that our whole sacred Liturgy is drawn from Jewish books. In consequence, how may one express the enormity of the outrage and blasphemy of vilifying the Jewish race?’

These words are addressed to Christians, who ought to understand them. In truth, the superficiality of Christians who believe they can possibly be anti-semites is prodigious! As a matter of fact, Christianity, in its human origins, is a religion of messianic and prophetic type, the spirit of which, as utterly foreign to Greco-Roman spiritual culture as to Hindu culture, was introduced into world religious thought by the Jewish people. The ‘Aryan’ spirit is neither messianic nor prophetic; to await the coming of the Messiah—the irruption into history of forces beyond history—is foreign to it. Moreover, the fact that German anti-semitism has evolved into anti-Christianity must be considered a highly significant symptom. A wave of anti-semitism has broken upon the world, casting away the humanitarian theories of the nineteenth century and daily threatening to submerge new lands.