The chilling history of Christian anti-Semitism

Friday 27 January marks Holocaust Memorial Day – the commemoration of one of history’s most heart-rending chapters. But how did a plan that resulted in the death of 6 million Jewish people originate in what was a supposedly Christian nation?

The church in Acts was almost entirely Jewish, which explains why – in Acts 10 – Peter receives a vision of a large sheet full of unclean creatures to encourage him to visit the Gentile Cornelius.

The question ‘Can a Gentile become Christian?’ is addressed, too, in letters such as Romans, Galatians and Philippians, which deal with the issue of Gentile believers being urged to accept Jewish practices in order to belong.

Later, however, with the spread of the gospel, the number of Gentile converts gradually outnumbered the Jewish ones and the situation was reversed, with the question now becoming ‘Can a Jew become a follower of Christ?’.

If the Jews appeared to be rejecting Jesus – the Gentiles reasoned – then surely it was because God had rejected them.

Of course, if God had rejected them, then, to be a friend of God, one must surely become an enemy of those He’d rejected. And so God’s chosen race gradually became a pariah people – a people who, now regarded as ‘Christ-killers’, were thought to have been forsaken by God.

With the church’s theologians and leaders now tending to come from places like Alexandria or Carthage, and having pagan rather than Jewish backgrounds, the Jewish origins of the faith tended to be overlooked, forgotten or misunderstood, and Christianity presented in an increasingly non-Jewish light.

In time, with Christianity no longer looking Jewish to the Jews – even though it was originally regarded as a Jewish sect within Judaism – the Jews tended to stop looking to Jesus for salvation.

One of the greatest changes in Jewish-Christian relations occurred with the appearance of Constantine the Great (c.280–337), the first ‘Christian’ emperor of Rome – the man who protected the church from the persecution it had suffered under emperors such as Nero, Domitian, Trajan, Decius, Valerian and Diocletian.

Although Constantine built many magnificent churches, he also ordered the building of a number of magnificent pagan temples, had his second wife Fausta killed in the bath, and was responsible for the death of his son Crispus, his 11-year-old half-nephew Licinius Junior, and his brother-in-law Maxentius. (As a writer once put it, ‘He didn’t persecute Christians, only his family and friends.’)

Although Christians had originally been put to the sword under Rome’s emperors and popes, they eventually wielded it – the way of the Cross becoming a path to privilege, power, position and prestige.

In 339, two years after Constantine’s death, intermarriage between Christians and Jews was banned on pain of death.

Then, around 364, the Council of Laodicea – which wasn’t, unfortunately, a lukewarm affair – ruled against Christians eating with Jews. It also forbade Christians from resting on Saturday – Shabbat – the Jewish day of rest.

But it wasn’t just the papacy that persecuted God’s people, it was the preachers too.

John Chrysostom, who was born in Antioch around 347, became archbishop of Constantinople in 398 and died in 407, wrote eight homilies entitled Against the Jews – calling them ‘worshippers of the devil’. He described them as ‘pitiful and miserable’, and said their condition was ‘no better than that of pigs or goats because of their wanton ways and excessive gluttony.’

‘God,’ Chrysostom said, ‘… has turned Himself altogether away from you and has given you over to unending disgrace … You did slay Christ, you did lift violent hands against the Master, you did spill His precious blood. This is why you have no chance for atonement, excuse, or defence.’

The 4th or 5th century Testimonies Against the Jews, said to have been written by Bishop Gregory of Nyssa (c.335–c.395), describes them as ‘slayers of the Lord, murderers of the prophets, enemies and haters of God, adversaries of grace, enemies of their fathers’ faith … haters of goodness!’

Unfortunately, intemperate words like these eventually led to violent and discriminatory actions.

In 1095, Pope Urban II launched the first Crusade, with many Jews ending up murdered in the streets as the Crusaders passed through Europe en route to the Holy Land. When the ragtag army eventually arrived in Jerusalem, the Jews were slaughtered without mercy, regardless of their age or sex. The streets, the blood-crazed Crusaders later boasted, had become rivers of blood.

In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council ordered Jews ‘to be marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples through the character of their dress’ – forcing medieval Jews in England to wear a Ten Commandments-shaped badge on their clothing. In countries like Germany they were forced to wear a cone-shaped hat or yellow badge.

Even the Reformation hero Martin Luther (1483–1546), a Roman Catholic monk who was originally friendly to the Jews, later turned vehemently against them when they refused to convert.

In his pamphlet On the Jews and Their Lies, Luther wrote: ‘What then shall we Christians do with this damned, rejected race of Jews? First, their synagogues should be set on fire … Secondly, their homes should be likewise broken down and destroyed. Thirdly, they should be deprived of their prayerbooks and Talmuds … Fourthly, their rabbis must be forbidden under threats of death to teach anymore.’

Later, in 1555, the papal bull Cum Nimis Absurdum ordered the Jews to be confined to ghettos ‘to which there is only one entrance and from which there is but one exit.’

The reason, according to Pope Paul IV, was that ‘it is completely senseless and inappropriate to be in a situation where Christian piety allows the Jews (whose guilt – all of their own doing – has condemned them to eternal slavery) access to our society and to live among us.’

Tragically, the church’s persecution of the Jews was one of the worst Christian actions in history. It’s no wonder that, even today, Jewish people tend to think of Jesus’ name as one to be feared rather than revered; with most Jews having little awareness of just how Jewish the Christian faith is.

And yet it was the apostle Paul who wrote in Romans 9:2-5: ‘I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people, those of my own race, the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption to sonship; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah.’

Sadly, tragically, under the popes, the Jews were persecuted as Christ-killers or heretics. Under the tsars, they were persecuted for their faith, or for being Communists.

Under the Communists, they were persecuted for believing in God or for being ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, capitalists or Zionists.

They were the racial inferiors of Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich, and the enemy of the proletariat in Stalin’s Socialist paradise. If the fascists didn’t get them, the Communists would!

It was probably one of the few things that Hitler and Stalin could agree on.

All this, of course, led to the Holocaust (1933–1945); the systematic slaughter of 6 million Jews, including members of my family.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote: ‘I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator; by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.’

Under the Nazis, the Jewish people were once again forced to wear distinguishing strips of material and made to live in cramped ghettos. This time, however, the ghettos were but a grim gateway to the concentration camps into which they were crammed and then killed.

In Matthew 27, the Jews ask Pilate to release Barabbas and crucify Jesus instead. As Pilate attempts to absolve himself from responsibility, the people cry out ‘His blood is on us and on our children’.

It’s a verse that – throughout the ages – the institution of the church, with its Crusades, expulsions, Inquisitions and pogroms, has used to justify its persecution of God’s people.

But this bypasses an essential truth.

Romans 11:29 reminds us that God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable, irreversible, non-negotiable. His love for the Jewish people – His chosen people – remains. It’s permanent.

Yes, some of the Jews in Jerusalem, encouraged by the chief priests and the elders, called for Jesus’ death – and are guilty. But who let Jesus go to the cross, even though He knew he was innocent? Pilate!

And who was it who flogged Jesus, put a scarlet robe on Him and placed a crown of thorns on His head? Who mocked, spat and struck Him? Who nailed Him to the cross and cast lots for His clothes? The Romans – the Gentiles! It wasn’t just the Jews who were to blame.

In John 11:50, Caiaphas’ words, ‘It is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish’, proved prophetic. So, is it possible that the words in Matthew 27:25, ‘His blood is on us and on our children’, also have prophetic significance?

In Exodus 24:8, to mark God’s Covenant with His people, ‘Moses then took the blood, sprinkled it on the people and said, “this is the blood of the Covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words” ’.

(Earlier, as part of the preparations leading up to their departure from Egypt in Exodus 12, the people were told to take the blood of a lamb and, using hyssop, to daub it on their door frames.)

In calling out ‘His blood is on us and on our children’ during the Passover period during which Jesus died, were the Jewish people calling down God’s curse on themselves or – albeit unknowingly – prophetically evoking the Covenant enacted by Moses and God’s people: the blood of the Covenant literally on the people?

Yes, the Jews were guilty of Jesus’ death, but then so were the Gentiles.

But through Jesus’ death, prophecy was fulfilled, the dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile was destroyed (Eph. 2:14), and a way made open for Jew and Gentile alike to experience redemption through Jesus’ shed blood and sacrificial death. Jesus – the ultimate Passover Lamb!

Today, Jewish people still face persecution throughout the world, but they continue coming to faith in Jesus, their Messiah. There are at least three Jewish Christians in my church.

Despite attempts throughout history to destroy the Jewish people, they’ve survived. God keeps His Covenant.

If He didn’t, I might not be writing this now…

Gary Clayton is Copywriter and Editor at MAF (Mission Aviation Fellowship), a pion-eering Christian charity whose fleet of light aircraft serve vulnerable communities in some of the world’s poorest, remotest and most isolated nations. See www.maf-uk.org

See also in this issue:
Editorial: Anti-Semitism Then and Now
News: The Sizer Tribunal
Feature: From a Kibbutz and New Age to the New Covenant and Christ
Culture Watch: Anti-Smitism Among us Today