Christendom and Jewry: a Study in Irony

Extract

I take the terms ‘Christendom’ and ‘Jewry’ to mean the cultural and political embodiments of the Christian and Jewish religions. Christendom is the socially visible manifestation and product of Christianity, as Jewry is of Judaism. It is with these products of the two religions that I am concerned, not directly with the systems of religious belief and practice that constitute the two religions.

'Christendom', however, the concrete equivalent of the abstract ‘Christianity', is a much less definite term than ‘Church', which is so to speak the official and necessary embodiment of the Christian religion. Now it is in the almost Protean development of the indefinable, ill-disciplined, not always very Christian reality meant by ‘Christendom’ that I see much irony; not in the mysterious theological reality meant by ‘the Holy Catholic Church'. And I am presuming – I hope fairly enough – that as Christendom is to Church, so mutatis mutandis is Jewry to Israel. Jewry in its very different manner I find as ironical a reality as Christendom. My point, in fact, will be that in some ways Christendom would have been a much more suitable correlative to Israel than to the Church, and Jewry more suited to the Church than to Israel.

I take it as a starting point that some sort of visible embodiment in human society is of the essence of both religions. And that is why I cannot altogether agree with Dr James Parkes when he makes the generalization in one of his Parkes Library booklets (Jewry and Jesus of Nazareth by Maurice Eisendrath and James Parkes), that, whereas Judaism addresses man as a social being, Christianity addresses man as a person.