Approximately every thirty years Western Easter and Passover coincide, as they do this year. Easter elicits different responses from the Christian and Jewish communities. Christians celebrate Jesus’ death and resurrection. Jews find themselves forced once again into the role of villains within sermons and Passion reenactments as “Christ killers.” It has become popular among some Christians to celebrate a type of Passover Seder as part of their remembrance of Jesus’ last supper, which was a Passover meal, yet, these Christians continue to embrace many of the anti-Jewish tropes, biblical interpretations, and attitudes which have characterized Christianity historically.
The origins of Christian anti-Judaism stretch back to its earliest years. It is an important history for us to know. Within the modern West, however, terms like “anti-Judaism” and “anti-Semitism” conjure images of twisted Nazi crosses, concentration camps, and the Holocaust. Whatever the images these terms conjure in our minds, we rarely see ourselves or our stream of Christianity in it. Anti-Judaism to us represents the grotesque distortion of Christianity, and yet how many of us have heard it proclaimed during Holy Week, “The crowds that cried, ‘Hosanna,’ on Palm Sunday, cried, ‘Crucify,’ on Good Friday”? We miss the anti-Judaism latent within our interpretations of the Bible, our theology, and our explanations of our faith. The Nazis actually have assisted in this because they gave a face to this evil, and it doesn’t look like us. The West, however, both secular and religious, overlooks how the creation of modern Western society, beginning with the Reformation, was shaped by forces which aided and deepened ancient Christian anti-Judaism dressing it in a modern, enlightened garb. Because we remain unaware of these forces and ideas—many which remain with us to this day—we remain infected with the anti-Judaism of the West.
THE ANTI-JUDAISM OF THE REFORMATION: THEOLOGICAL JEWS
In his “History of the Life and Acts of Dr. Martin Luther,” Philipp Melancthon eulogized his teacher, “He here showed the distinction between the law and the gospel; he refuted the error then reigning in the schools and councils, which taught that men deserve remission of their sins on account of their own works, and the dogma of the Pharisees, that men are themselves just before God.” Melancthon fomented the idea, common within Protestant self-understanding, that the struggles of Luther parallel those of the early Church; where the early Church triumphed over Judaism, Luther and the Protestants triumphed over the Catholic Church. “Pharisees” in his words quoted above have no connection with the historical Pharisees; rather, they serve as a cipher for Luther’s opponents.
The Protestant Reformation continued the established Christian practice of using anti-Judaism as part of its inner-Christian critique against its opponents, in this instance, the Catholic Church. Yet, the nature of anti-Judaism of the Protestant Reformation differed from previous periods within Christianity. Its anti-Judaism formed the theological center of the movement. Protestants formulated an attack against the Catholic Church centered on Paul’s ideas of justification by faith. This became the theological heart of the Reformation and was seen as the center of Paul’s thought and, by extension, the heart of the New Testament. The center of Protestant interpretation of Paul and the rest of the Bible became an attack on the Jewish Law. Protestant thought juxtaposed “faith” and “grace” to “works” and “law.” Paul’s attack on the “works of the law” became central for Protestant theology, but it had no connection to Paul’s historical situation. It framed the inner-Christian conflict between Protestantism and the Catholic Church. Protestant anti-Law and anti-works arguments had nothing to do with Jews or Judaism.
For Luther, the story of Christ with Luther’s justification theology provided the lens to read the Old Testament, everything was about Christ, not Israel. A key part of the Reformation, particularly with Luther, focused on the literal meaning of Scripture. He rejected the allegorizing of the biblical text within Christian history, especially the medieval scholastics. He also rejected the traditions of the Church, including the authority of the Pope, where it clashed with his literal reading of Scripture. The combination of a literal reading of Scripture and viewing the Old Testament as about Christ led Luther often to cast Jews and Judaism as the opponents, the fools, the godless, as a witness to “Christ’s Cross.” Jewish presence in the world served no value for Luther; they were useless, even dangerous to him. He reached this conclusion, not from serious engagement with Jews or Judaism, but rather from his theology, which rested on earlier Christian anti-Jewish traditions.
The anti-Judaism of the Reformation had no real connection to Judaism. Herein lies the insidious nature of this anti-Judaism. It reinforced the historically negative image and attitudes towards Jews and Judaism within Christianity, yet it framed it within an inner-Christian polemic.
Within this context, the “Law” became generalized into a theoretical concept associated with degenerate, organized religion. Because the “Law” (Torah) was associated with Jews and Judaism, the term “Jew” also became abstracted evolving into the theoretical concept meaning a “religious” person in general. One who sought to “earn salvation” through “religion.” “Circumcision” became the “religious person’s” attempt to “earn salvation” as opposed to the actual cutting of the male foreskin, which marked a non-Jew as converting to Judaism within the ancient world. “Torah” (Law) and “Jew,” then, became theoretical terms within inner-Christian arguments with no real relation to actual Judaism, either in Paul’s day or in the period of the Reformation. “Legalism,” “Pharisaisim,” and “Judaism” became derogatory terms used to criticize and characterize the Protestants Papist opponents.
The anti-Judaism of the Reformation had no real connection to Judaism. Herein lies the insidious nature of this anti-Judaism. It reinforced the historically negative image and attitudes towards Jews and Judaism within Christianity, yet it framed it within an inner-Christian polemic. It gave birth to a theological anti-Judaism dressed in Pauline garb. Furthermore, because Protestant theology founded itself upon the juxtaposition of “faith” and “grace” versus “works” and “law,” which contained the abstractions of “Jew” and “Torah” within it, anti-Judaism became an integral part of Protestantism by virtue of its role within the Protestant attacks against the Catholic Church. Without taking aim specifically at Judaism, it deepened Christian anti-Judaism by focusing anti-Jewish sentiments and attacks upon its Christian opponents. This provided a certain justification for the anti-Judaism within Protestantism because it’s not a criticism of Judaism, per se, but a criticism of organized religion and those who sought to earn salvation through religion. Protestants could continue to embrace their anti-Judaism framed as a repudiation of organized religion and still maintain they were not anti-Jewish.
Towards the end of his life, Luther penned words about Jews and Judaism calling for their banishment from Christian lands. His work, “On the Jews and Their Lies” (1543), describes the Jews as “so thoroughly hopeless, mean, poisonous, and bedeviled a thing are the Jews that for 1400 years they have been, and continue to be, our plague, pestilence, and all that is our misfortune;” they are “worthy of hatred.” Even in his own lifetime, some of his contemporaries wrestled with his hate-filled words directed towards Jews and Judaism. And, while his words had physical effects upon Jews living in Europe in the sixteenth century and after, it was his theologizing of the Jews and Judaism which wove an anti-Judaism into the fabric of Protestant faith. The interconnection of Protestant faith with anti-Judaism would influence the Christian West for the coming centuries. As Enlightenment thinkers sought to shine the light of reason upon the superstitions of a Christian worldview, they did so through the lenses of the Reformation and its anti-Judaism. And, as European society drifted towards a more secular society, the categories of the thought of the Reformation remained, which meant anti-Judaism became a part of the secularism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The age of reason, tolerance, and universalism meant intolerance towards Judaism.
ANTI-JUDAISM OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND NINETEENTH CENTURY
The Protestant Reformation sought to liberate Christianity from the traditions and superstitions of the Catholic Church, shining a light into the darkness. The Enlightenment sought to do the same to Christianity as a whole, even Protestant Christianity. While the Enlightenment is a vast subject, its general purpose was the common belief that critical reason could improve society by exposing error, ignorance, and superstition. The traditions of Western Christianity came under its withering evaluation. Yet, as much as the thinkers of the Enlightenment sought to distance themselves from traditional Christianity and liberate Western society from Christian myths and superstitions, their criticisms often derived from a very Christian way of viewing things, including Jews and Judaism.
The spirit of the age sought religious toleration. Voltaire argued in his Treatise on Tolerance (1763) that the Greco-Roman world showed no signs of intolerance. Greeks and Romans were humane and undogmatic. They never persecuted anyone on religious grounds. So too, early Christians displayed such tolerance. For Voltaire, the Jews, not the Romans, crucified Jesus. Voltaire characterized religious intolerance by Judaism and the Old Testament, where God commanded Moses and the Israelites to use violence in service of religion. He relegated this behavior as something exclusive to Jewish theocracy and only pertaining to Israel. Yet, he noted that while the biblical prophets condemned the Israelite worship of idols, they rarely punished such behavior, indicating God’s true favor of tolerance. Thus, the tolerance preached by the Enlightenment was seen as universal and tied to the monotheism of Judeo-Christianity, and Jewish intolerance served as the foil for such universal tolerance. Yet, Voltaire’s cry of tolerance in place of intolerance had little to do with real Jews and Judaism; rather, the Jew played the role for the intolerance of the Christianity Voltaire railed against. Voltaire, and other Enlightenment thinkers, utilized the age-old Christian anti-Judaism in which the Jew serves to characterize one’s Christian opponents. The Enlightenment’s call for universal tolerance came at the expense of intolerance towards Jews and Judaism. For Jews to experience and participate in the age of tolerance, they would have to accept a more Christian view of Judaism.
The Enlightenment’s call for universal tolerance came at the expense of intolerance towards Jews and Judaism.
The Enlightenment thinkers, while seeking to break free from religion without reason, continued to view “true” Christianity very much through the categories introduced by the Reformers, yet they couched such thinking within secular categories. “Freedom” belonged to Christianity and its “true religion.” “Slavery” belonged to Judaism with its law. Immanuel Kant in his Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone (1792-1794) called for the de-Judaization of Christianity. Judaism called only for obedience to law and hatred of other peoples; therefore, it was not a religious faith, but a purely secular state. The teachings of Jesus, according to Kant, owe nothing to Judaism. He claimed, in fact, that Jesus’ teachings were Greek. Kant believed Christianity had to excise its Jewish origins, de-Judaizing itself to achieve its aim as a universal religion. Kant felt the Enlightenment provided a foundation in reason to enable Christianity to finally achieve its goal of removing itself from its Jewish origins. Such opinions would influence the new trends of biblical studies. Its impact remains upon biblical studies to the present day, allowing a professor at an internationally recognized university to declare, “The first thing you must do to be a good Christian is to kill the Jew inside of you.”
The Enlightenment also gave rise to modern science, history, and anthropology, which impacted and launched the modern study of the Bible. The nineteenth century would see the rise of ethnography and nationalism. The opening up of the East, the Middle East and Far East, to westerners at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth century brought discoveries and interactions with the broader world, including the ancient world as sites and artifacts began to be unearthed. Westerners had more direct contact with people of other religions too. Protestant westerners conceived of religion as an internal relationship of a believer to the divine. Faith was personal and private, and as such, it existed separate from society, government, commerce, or law. Religion referred to one’s internal relationship with God, while everything else fell into the realm of the secular. These westerners sought to impose a similar division upon the other religions they encountered, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism. Thus, Protestant Europeans came to define what was and what was not part of these other religions, and they articulated them and formulated them in a manner that made sense to the Christian West, whether it presented a true picture of how the faithful conceived of their faith.
What did this mean for Judaism? Since the days of the Hasmonean state (142-63 BC), Judaism possessed an ethno-political identity, even in exile. Judaism viewed its faith as centered in the God of Israel, the land of Israel, and the Torah. Scattered in the lands of the Jewish Diaspora, Jewish families articulated the connection between faith in the God of Israel, His Torah, and the land of Israel, and their hope for that land by stating at the Passover meal, “Next year in Jerusalem.” The Protestant reimagining of Judaism in the nineteenth century stripped Judaism of these realities. Judaism became an individual, inward manner of relationship to the Jewish God. It became nothing more than a religion in the usual (western Christian) sense of the word. The idea of a nation, a land, the tie between Jewish faith and Jewish national hopes were severed. To fit into European society, Jews had to abandon the idea of themselves as a people set apart; their Judaism existed only as individuals. To be citizens of European states, they had to set aside key aspects of their Judaism and accept a Christianized, enlightened Judaism. Nineteenth century thinkers, with their push for the universal rights of man, retreated to old Christian tropes of the Jewish Law as withered, inadequate, holding those who obeyed it in its dead, fleshly embrace. Christianity became aligned with universalism, which was seen as the aim of the age of reason, while Judaism wallowed in the filth of its particularism. For Jews to “fit into” European society, they must conform to western Christian definitions of Judaism. Judaism, the religion, was to replace the faith of the Jewish people, which focused on its particular God, the land He promised His people, and the Torah He gave them to codify their special relationship with Him. Jews did not belong to a nation, but to a religion.
For Jews to “fit into” European society, they must conform to western Christian definitions of Judaism. Judaism, the religion, was to replace the faith of the Jewish people…Jews did not belong to a nation, but to a religion.
Many European Jews accepted this status, seeking to bring Judaism into the modern age. This opened the possibility for modern Jews to push back against the centuries of rabbinic traditions and redefine Judaism for the modern world. Others, however, resisted. This led to the emergence of the Reformed and Orthodox traditions within Judaism. Many Christians believed that such a shift would lead Judaism to reform itself and align with the universalism valued by the age and the Church.
ANTI-JUDAISM AND THE RISE OF MODERN BIBLICAL STUDIES
In 1820, Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, set about constructing his The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, or as it better known the “Jefferson Bible.” He cut excerpts of the Gospels from six printed volumes published in English, French, Latin, and Greek, which he arranged in a chronological order to tell the story of Jesus’ life, parables, and moral teachings. His edited work excluded the miracles of Jesus and most mentions of any supernatural activity, including the resurrection. Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment, the age of reason. The Enlightenment saw the rise of a new manner of studying the Bible, one that applied reason and “scientific” thought to the Bible, removing it from Christian doctrine. This removed Bible study from the grasp of the Church and Church traditions and began to apply critical thought to reading its texts. Like Jefferson, the new biblical scholar tended to reject miracle and the supernatural, as well as divine revelation, those did not stand up to the modern age of reason.
Broad interest, discovery, decipherment, and advancement in ancient languages, like Greek, Hebrew, Cuneiform, and Egyptian Hieroglyphics, furthered these endeavors in biblical studies. The ancient, biblical world began to further open through archaeological discoveries in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Greece, Crete, and the Levant (modern day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and the West Bank). These discoveries fueled the new field of biblical studies. Yet, these eighteenth and nineteenth century thinkers continued to approach and interpret the Bible through the lenses of Christian tradition, especially Protestant tradition, with its anti-Judaism. A trend which continued into the twentieth century, playing a role in biblical interpretation and New Testament theology within European biblical studies and provided theological justification for the Holocaust.
There are many instances of the anti-Judaism within the developing field of biblical studies. We will focus on examples in scholarly treatments of Jesus and Paul, as they continue to influence modern study of the Bible, in books, as well as preaching and teaching within churches.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the rise of numerous biographies on the life of Jesus. To read these biographies one would conclude Jesus had been an enlightened European, sharing their values and outlooks. A moralist, even the greatest moralist, yet severed from the faith and the God of Judaism. Jesus, like the spirit of the age, was a universal man. As we noted with Kant, for Christianity to be a universal religion, it needed to de-Judaize itself, and for scholars of Jesus, this meant the de-Judaization of Jesus. This was achieved in several ways.
For Christianity to be a universal religion, it needed to de-Judaize itself, and for scholars of Jesus, this meant the de-Judaization of Jesus.
First, the nineteenth century saw the rise in linguistic studies, including ancient languages. Language studies often reinforced proto-nationalist beliefs, as well as the emerging idea of “race,” which often meant “culture” within the nineteenth century. The westernizing of Judaism led to the emergence of Reformed Judaism. One of its pioneers was Abraham Geiger. As part of his struggle with Orthodox, rabbinic Judaism, Geiger sought to advance his case for the use of German as a liturgical language within the synagogue of his time. He, therefore, sought to demonstrate rabbinic, Mishnaic Hebrew as “artificial” created in the rabbinic academies, while Aramaic served as the common language of the people. He made this argument in his work, Lehr- und Lesbuch zur Sprache der Mischnah (published in 1845). His point: modern Jews could break free from the confinements of “artificial” Hebrew and use German within the liturgy. New Testament scholars latched onto Geiger’s thesis and began to assert Jesus spoke Aramaic (this was suggested as early as the sixteenth century); Hebrew, as a spoken language, had been replaced by the first century. Geiger’s suggestion was refuted in an article published in 1908 by M.H. Segal, who demonstrated Mishnaic Hebrew was a living spoken language in the first-third centuries AD, yet New Testament scholarship continued to claim Aramaic had replaced Hebrew. How does this connect to anti-Judaism? Nineteenth century thinkers possessed a romantic idealism of the unity of nationalism and language. By arguing for the death of Hebrew after the period of the Exile (586-539 BC), it ushered in the death of the Jewish people as a nation and the death of Judaism as a particular religion. Aramaic, the universal language of the Persian Empire, replaced Hebrew; the particular and Jewish had been replaced by the universal and non-Jewish. The rise of Aramaic to replace Hebrew carried the theological implication of the downfall of Judaism and divine judgment on the Jewish people. Jesus could speak Aramaic and remain a universal man. If he spoke Hebrew, he was too Jewish. An Aramaic speaking Jesus allowed New Testament scholars to separate Jesus, the Gospels, and his movement from Jewish literature and Judaism. They even saw the writing of the New Testament in Greek (a universal language of the first century) as an indictment upon Judaism.
Second, New Testament scholars used language and geography to draw a distinction between Jesus and his followers and Judaism, particularly the learned sages of Judaism. Scholars argued by Jesus speaking Aramaic, he addressed the common, unlearned people, like himself. Jesus and his audience were distinct from the Jewish academies. Jesus spoke life and spirit, not the dead letter of Jewish Law. This contrast was further deepened in scholarly depictions of the Galilee of Jesus. New Testament scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries depicted the Galilee as a pastoral, romantic place separated from the religious heart of Judaism, Jerusalem. Galilee and the Galileans, according to these scholars, had been a place of non-Jewish peoples and influences, a “Galilee of the Gentiles.” This region stood in contrast to the Jewish Jerusalem. Jesus preached his universal morality in Galilee, but he confronted the Jewish religious establishment in Jerusalem. Both language and geography became powerful forces used within New Testament scholarship of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to de-Judaize Jesus.
Third, as Kant argued, Judaism was not the background for Jesus, the Greek world was. Therefore, scholars did not consider Jewish sources for the studying Jesus, his sayings, parables, miracles, and life. Or, if they did use them, they used them to show the superiority of Christianity to Judaism. Parallels to the Gospels were sought in Greco-Roman sources, an act that further severed Jesus from Judaism theologically and historically.
While the rise of modern biblical scholarship sought emancipation from organized religion, it continued to embrace the longstanding Christian anti-Judaism, even finding new “scholarly” arguments to support such assumptions. If Jesus needed to be de-Judaized, then it was inconceivable for scholars nursed in the Protestant ethos of Europe to imagine Paul within the world of Judaism. Thus, the Protestant assumption that Paul’s thought was a polemic against Judaism became the foundation for modern Pauline studies. Ferdinand Christian Baur, who founded the Tübingen school of New Testament historical criticism, sought to remove the study of Paul from Christian and Protestant doctrine. He argued that Paul should be understood within his world, yet he felt Greek sources, not Aramaic, Hebrew, or Jewish sources, provided the means to enter Paul’s world and understand him. Even though Baur sought to remove Paul from Protestant doctrine, he could not escape his Protestant anti-Jewish assumptions.
If Jesus needed to be de-Judaized, then it was inconceivable for scholars nursed in the Protestant ethos of Europe to imagine Paul within the world of Judaism.
These trends within New Testament scholarship in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries served the anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic attitudes within Europe well. When the Nazis established the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life in 1939, they had over a century of modern biblical studies to support the de-Judaization of Jesus and Christianity. Even after the Holocaust many of these assumptions remain within New Testament studies. While New Testament scholars repudiate the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, too few recognize the origins of many of the theories still taught within university classes as related to the study of the Bible. Discoveries in the twentieth century, like the Dead Sea Scrolls and inscriptions throughout the land of Israel, archaeological work in the Galilee, which shows it to have been a devoutly Jewish region, have had too little impact upon how New Testament studies confront the centuries long anti-Judaism that continues to influence use of sources, language culture, and interpretations of Jesus and Paul.