Helen Fry
The Image of the Jew in Medieval Christian Theology

Dr Helen Fry - The Image of the Jew in Medieval Christian Theology

- So far then we’ve had a look at the diversity and the development of Judaisms. We’ve touched on Jewish Christianity and the image of Jews in the New Testament, tried to understand the diversity within early Christianity that led to some of the views of Judaism and of Jews, some of which of course are those difficult sayings, incredibly difficult. And one of the reoccurring themes in that early period was the belief that the end was near, that the Roman occupation would end, that there would be some cosmic event instigated by God, possibly literally through the person of Jesus, the resurrected Christ. But that doesn’t happen. And we’re 100, 200 years later we are into the church fathers. And what they’re facing is the fact that that hasn’t happened. That as what’s now a second, put onto a second coming of Jesus hasn’t happened. And what they’re competing with is a vibrant Judaism. They’d expect this whole cosmic order. This is the backdrop to some of the teachings that get developed or been discussed today. That whole backdrop, we were not expected still to be here. It was going to be some apocalyptic fight in which good would triumph over evil. There would be the kingdom of God would be ushered in whatever that was a kingdom of justice and peace. It doesn’t happen. And the church is trying to define itself to develop an orthodoxy within groups within the church itself that are fighting each other. you have, and it’s something we don’t often learn about in Christianity and that is that Judaism doesn’t finish with the destruction of the temple. It doesn’t finish 100 years later or 200 years later. It’s not even a minority religion.

The church is really struggling with a vibrant Judaism, which in its view shouldn’t actually exist because of what it’s now believing. And so the more the stronger the Jewish communities in various places in the western world, it seems to me the more intense the polemic, the more intense the anti-Judaism to, for these church fathers to try and just by the fact they, they passionately believed that the church was the true successor. And of course they wrote treaties. They wrote homilies around Easter time to convince their congregations that they were the true belief because Judaism was still attracting Judaizers. Of course Judaism was not having an open mission to the gentile world. But nevertheless, the church was finding that gentiles were just as happy to go and sit at the back of a synagogue as they were to listen in some cases to preaching in a church. So it’s that existence of a vibrant, strong Jewish community. Particularly as we saw last week in places like Sardis that are the key challenge for the church that’s still trying to establish itself. And one of the worst church fathers, not, not the very worst, but one of the worst, John Chrysostom developed these terrible teachings about Jews. He is actually the archbishop of Constantinople in the fourth century, born in Antioch. So what was then under Roman occupation or Roman in the Roman Empire if you like, in current days, Syria and Christianity was by no means a majority.

And I think because it won out in the end if you like politically and just really spread throughout the western world and what we’ve inherited, you know, 1500, nearly 2000 years later, we tend to think that Christianity was always that strong majority but actually still minority. It is struggling for survive, has to become entrenched to assert its position. And I think if we understand the rest of the lecture today against that backdrop, a Judaism that is not going away in spite of what the church believes their scriptures might point to, it’s not happening. And there is also of course still the pagan majority in the Greek world, which are wrote eight Homilies. They’re like sort of lectures preaching often around Easter time around Passover, one of which was called the homilies against the Judaizers. And he is very firmly against those that want to keep parts of Judaism as identity whilst becoming Christians. So he wants to, so it’s not necessarily to be understood against the backdrop of all Jews for all time and sometimes that gets fathers don’t actually develop this further and to widen to the Jews, but what Chrysostom is actually fighting is a very real physical presence of a vibrant Judaism and he’s trying to combat the attractiveness of Judaism. And the best way to do that at that time was to you know, use polemic even to his own parishioners. So next slide please. So he is always preaching around the major Jewish festivals trying to focus his congregation on those who are wanting to convert to him and they’re not dipping in and out of church and synagogue. So he does have the same supersessionist ideas as Justin Martyr and Melito of Sardis. Remember from last week, Melito of Sardis is the first to categorically and overtly accuse the Jews of Deicide.

So not just of killing Jesus, but in so doing. And we know that actually historically the Jews were not responsible for killing Jesus. But that’s an aside for today. I don’t want to sort of go backwards, but he reiterates that case that in killing Jesus, the Jews have actually killed God and there is no worse accusation that can possibly be made. And there’s the belief that the church, this is a supersessionist idea has superseded, has taken over the church, is the true heir of all the promises in the Bible. It’s the new covenant. Judaism is the old covenant, but he’s shouting about this against the backdrop of a Judaism that is not in decline, that is not diminishing. And he becomes quite vitriolic in his views of the synagogue. He calls it the house of prostitution. He then says about devils, demons living in the souls of Jews. I mean really, really damaging ideology, which then gets carried forward. Next slide please. So he also has some dreadful language in some of his homilies and he refers, as you can see here, I’ve just pulled out a couple of quotes, “pitiful and miserable Jews”, “over-exaggerated language”. That’s the nature of the polemic of the preaching at that time that they would exaggerate. The trouble is I guess that’s been carried forward and quite often taken literally and became official church teaching. So his views have been taken outside the local community struggles that he has to actually make it into mainstream Christian orthodox thinking or orthodox teaching. And if we think that at that time, and I think it is worth saying, the church fathers are incredibly influential. They are amongst, they are the most in the Christian world. You have the monasteries and the nuns and in their convents that are also learning. But the bishops and archbishops, they’ve got degrees. So-called well equivalent of degrees in theology.

They are the ones that are debating and discussing, the average person in the church does not even have access to the Bible in his or her own language. Not yet. So they’re very much reliant on the priests, the archbishops, the bishops to actually interpret scripture because the people cannot read it in their own language. So yeah, you’ve got the dreadful language of Jews being wretched and miserable. So you can imagine a congregation hearing this and developing its stereotypes of Jews and in many cases there would be no real overlap, no real contact with some of these church fathers with Jews Proper. Next slide please. Which as we’ll see later is the case with Martin Luther. But they do know in this period that Judaism is thriving, the synagogues are full, there are Judaizers in the church, I.e., Jews who want to be Jews and Christians. And if we get time I’ll loop and follow that into Hebrew Christians, Jews for Jesus today ‘cause effectively they’re causing the unequal controversy in identity. So what’s at stake in a way, I suppose you can say it’s beliefs about Jesus and the Jews have in Christian terms rejected Jesus. But it is really about identity. They are still struggling as the early church did, but now it’s very serious 'cause they want to impose an orthodoxy, they’re struggling with identity. We have to understand these views. I’m not justifying it, I’m not saying they’re right, but we have to understand that it’s about identity. The church is trying to move towards a position where if Jews want to become Christian, they need to convert.

They cannot any longer be Jewish Christians. And so a lot of Chris Quartodeciman’s lectures and sermons are against the Judaizers, those Jews who are still trying to have it both ways to keep everything Jewish but also to say they’re Christian and some of them are starting to sort of move towards concepts of divinity. So you’ve got all this going on. And then there becomes this controversy over Easter and the Christian calendar and the Quartodeciman Controversy where you have these Judaizers, these Jewish Christians who function quite easily in the early church. But we’ve moved on two three, nearly 400 years, they wanted to celebrate both Passover and Easter. And the church fathers are saying, no, no, the church has superseded Judaism, the festivals, it doesn’t have to do it any longer. If you are Christian you don’t have to keep Passover. And so it’s identity essentially. So it’s the same kind of arguments that they were having in the early Jerusalem church and this led to this major schism in the church and it’s over issues of identity. Next slide please. It’s fascinating, actually, really fascinating. And with Cyril of Alexandria, another influential Patriarch Alexandria. So he’s patriarch there from around 412 CE, the common era. He was said to be utterly ruthless in the use of his power. He wanted to advance the Holy Roman Empire, which of course as we knew from last week actually Christianity now, although in places it’s still a minority, it is the official decree to be the official religion of the Holy Roman Empire. And Cyril himself was personally responsible according to Socrates, church historian Socrates, for the expulsion of Jews from Alexandria in 415. So we are now starting to get a kind of physical persecution that doesn’t appear to be there in the earlier periods. Next slide please.

So this anti-Jewish tradition, which we call adversus Judaeos, begins to consolidate in its mainstream quote unquote he’s saying “Jews of the most deranged of all men.” “Their madness is greater than that of the Greeks,” “Killers of the Lord”, “senseless, blind”. That whole imagery of the Jews being blind to the truth. I mean we know if we look back at the historical period, it’s not obvious that Jesus was the Messiah in actual fact, but now the church is actually denigrating Judaism calling Jews blind. I mean hugely damaging. And we’ll see that actually plays out in Christian art in the mediaeval period. “Foolish God-haters.” That Jews have misunderstood their own scriptures and that’s why they’ve rejected Jesus. So it is this whole rejection, they cannot understand why those Jews who do believe whatever they want to believe about the resurrection of Jesus, whether it’s physical or some kind of metaphorical experience, they still want to keep their Jewishness. They haven’t, and other Jews have effectively, their fellow Jews have rejected Jesus. And that rejection is really damaging because that underlies what comes hereafter. It’s that idea of blindness of rejection, not only of the church having superseded Judaism, but that polemic which says that Jews have willfully and made a choice to reject Jesus. But of course not understanding why that’s the case.

And we could look at that in contemporary modern times and actually provide a rational answer, historical context as to why the Jews, which is not helpful, but Judaisms at the time of Jesus, did not have the same affirmation of faith as the Jewish Christians and the Gentiles at start to emerge. Next slide please. But the church is still fighting a physical political battle, if you like, for supremacy to be the true inheritors against this vibrant Judaism. The best way they can do that is to argue that the various scriptures point to Jesus, they point to the church being the new covenant, but also to develop this exaggerated polemic. It does beg the question what would’ve happened if they hadn’t felt, if they felt secure in their own existence if they hadn’t developed this. But . So, Cyril of Alexandria then, a couple of his statements I’ve put up here, “Let the ignorant Jews who harden their minds.” Stubbornness, we’ve got language of stubbornness coming on, “Pour self-invited destruction upon their own heads.” We’ve got really dangerous language coming into the homilies and sermons now. Senseless Jews, you know, the truth is in Christ in his Commands. And you can imagine if the congregations throughout the Roman Empire are hearing these kind of messages when they can’t access the scriptures for themselves, they can’t look at the Christian scriptures and read for themselves. Next slide please. But of course by the time that happens, the adversus Judaeos tradition is so ingrained in Christian orthodoxy, it’s impossible for congregations to be freethinking. Now another character who’s not often studied in the anti-Jewish tradition is you can just about see his there is three, four, five to 420. So he comes from a more monastic ascetic Christian tradition.

He had studied classical literature, he becomes a priest and he had been born into an Orthodox family in Dalmatia. He’s the first, as far as we can tell, to translate the Bible into Latin. And that translation becomes known as the Vulgate. So we’ve got a bit of advancement in that those within the Roman empire that could read and speak Latin can now read the Bible in Latin and not yet in other countries in their native language. But of course once you translate from the Septuagint, which is the Greek version of the Bible into Latin, something gets lost in translation. And later it will be the Vulgate, the Latin that will be translated into native languages, which we still have today. So, so much has been lost in those translations, original meanings. But he had like so many of the church fathers actually studied Hebrew and he was one of the few that had quite a close contact with Jews. And on one occasion the local synagogue sent a delegation and brought some actual Torah scrolls for him to study for himself. And we might think that this would actually be some kind of progress. Next slide please. But unfortunately it doesn’t turn out like that. He interestingly has a number of, yes kind of relationships, which sometimes are beyond friendships with Roman women. And it’s fascinating that he actually encourages them to learn Hebrew. This is really important to be able to learn and to read the original.

And after the death of Pope Damascus I, he actually moves to Antioch and later he’s in Bethlehem and it’s, while he’s in Bethlehem, interestingly, he works with the local Jewish communities and he works on a translation of the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew Bible / Old Testament. And in so doing, he has this dialogue with Jews in Bethlehem. He even, you know, had his own Jewish teachers, he would sit down almost like a sort of Christian Jewish council, almost like CCJ, the Council of Christians and Jews where you know, you could study, sit down, look at these texts. And he actually helped with one of the translations of Job and the Jewish teachers helped him, they worked through and he acquired a sophisticated, I would say detailed knowledge of Jewish interpretation of exegetical traditions. And he begins to incorporate some of that. This is fascinating, why doesn’t get taken any further. He starts to incorporate some of that into the last inversion of the commentaries on these biblical books. Next slide please. As I’ve titled there “An ambiguous view of Jews”. So Jerome’s views in actual fact they are incredibly ambiguous. He’s working against this backdrop of a church that’s developing a several orthodox. He’s sort of trying to emerge church fathers trying to establish that orthodoxy and he’s kind of ambiguous and I’m not sure you know that he gets the space and doesn’t that, you know, no one’s following him to such a degree that this could be moved forward. But he does have have this ambiguous view of Jew.

So as I’ve listed there, he does believe that Jewish traditions are true and he himself enjoyed sitting down with local rabbis or sitting down with in the synagogues and learning and discussing. He had quite a lot of contact with local synagogue. Nevertheless he is critical and does attack some Jewish rituals and prayers. So there is that sort of ambiguity. But for his period in history, he’s kind of unique in actually endorsing Judaism, still a religion of survival. He is though still hostile to those Judaizing Christians. You know, you can’t blur the lines of identity he thinks between the synagogue and the church. So he most certainly does not believe that those Jewish Christians should still be going to synagogue even though he does have a respect for Jews, proper Jews that who are not Jewish Christians. And this then becomes, it has already, but it becomes that age-long struggle of between church and synagogue. And even today you still, well the other way you have Christians who are interested in Judaism, but of course Judaism is not a proselytising, not a missionary religion. And as we’ll come to, if I get time, we have those that still think you can fudge those lines, that you can be Jewish and Christian. So there’s that struggle that’s ongoing still 350 or so years after the death of Jesus between the Gentile church and those Jewish Christians still those identity issues. But not only that trying to cope with a vibrant Judaism, but he does, Jerome does have respect the individual Jewish scholars, but he can’t go as far as to wind back to 300 years of what the church fathers have developed. He can’t totally accept Judaism and we don’t know, you know, did he use his learning to attack Jews and Jewish practise? So he stands as I’ve put their ambiguous in the history of Christian Jewish relations. He stands ambiguous in the anti-Jewish history. He’s not quite in the same position as the other church fathers. Next slide please.

But then when we come to Augustine of Hippo, everything becomes firmly, well it goes a bit off the rails if I can put it, not find a point on it. We are still in a period of developing Christian orthodoxy. He becomes and is the most influential of the church fathers. He is canonised. So his status is very high in the church. He is seeing the church very firmly as a new Israel. He is the founder of that belief, original sin, which most of my Jewish friends and colleagues always say, you know what Earth is original sin. Well yeah, it’s one of those, yeah difficult Christian doctrines that we didn’t have until Augustine of Hippo. And effectively what it is, we go back to the sort of myth stories of Adam and Eve, a myth that’s sort of trying to tell about the beginnings of time and Eve eats the apple and as a result of that, Augustine has to be a woman, doesn’t it? Of course has to be a woman who’s eaten the apple. The serpent has tempted her but as a result of that, there is her sin. That original sin from Eve gets carried down, not dis as charge of Deicide I guess in a way on every generation thereafter. That’s why modern day churches have had this view of original sin in the western world that every very problematic theology, but that every baby that’s born is born with this original sin in in it. And the way to cleanse that, to get rid of original sins is going back to Hippo, Augustine of hippo’s views is to be baptised to believe in Jesus Christ. And that I hope gives you some kind of root, some kind of understanding. But there are many people, certainly scholars in the Christian world who really do wish that Augustine hadn’t, his view of original sin that he invented, if you like, his interpretation hadn’t actually come to be part of Christian Orthodox teaching and Canon Law. Next slide please. But in terms of the anti-Jewish tradition tipping into antisemitism, the worst I think teaching that emerges from this side on a level with the charge of Deicide is this terrible image of the “Mark of Cain”.

So Augustine believes that, well okay, he has limited contact with Jews, but okay, he does sort of say, well if they’re not going to convert now they will convert in the end times, we don’t have to worry. The end times will be coming at whatever point, Jesus will be coming again, this whole second coming. We kind of mustn’t get too hung up because they’re going to convert in the end times. And that’s the view which is carried through to aspects of Christianity. Not all but aspects of Christianity today. Particularly the evangelical world, they’re to come under the protection of the church. Which is a really interesting paradox because he then goes on to say, “But for rejecting Jesus, they bear the 'Mark of Cain’ and they’re destined to wander the earth from now until eternity, until they convert.” And it’s actually the teaching that underpins until the 20th century towards the late end of the 20th century, it underpinned Roman Catholic teaching on the state of Israel because the Roman Catholic Church until it was about a decade ago wasn’t it? The Roman Catholic Church formally recognised the state of Israel a huge breakthrough because the church had an official belief that because Jews had rejected Jesus, they’re destined to wander the earth, they’re not going to have a land of their own.

And it’s why the Roman Catholic church did not for nearly two, well 1500 years nearly, did not recognise that Jews would, could have a land. And after 1948 that the foundational state of Israel, the Vatican did not recognise the state of Israel. And it’s based on this teaching this that becomes Canon Law of Augustine of Hippo. I’m not sure whether you were aware of that. And he also says, I mean terrible, terrible that the Jews in bearing the ‘Mark of Cain’ in wandering around the world and being totally in diaspora, they’re a reminder to the rest of the world of what happens if you reject Christ. And because of that they have to come under the protection of the Roman Empire. And we know that’s a mixed history. We can’t go into all the history of today of how Jews were treated. Some they were partly protected under various kings and kings of England, et cetera and other places. But Jews should not be persecuted and vanished because we need them as a reminder of what happens if you reject Christ. I mean really devastating theology that’s now developed by Augustine of Hippo. Next slide please. So you have this starting to come into art, this imagery quote unquote “the wandering Jew”. And you get it in art, you get it in songs, poems, various stories, but you get it on stained glass windows as well. So you get it in all kinds of art. And that visual, I would argue is more potent and devastating in a way because I mean, okay, who reads the teach of Augustine of Hippo tody? Not unless you’re doing a theology degree, which of course I did and had to read the original teachings and his sermons. But you know these images survive partly because they’re preached and taught in churches through sermons, they’re part of Canon Law but because they survive in our everyday art in the western world, sometimes they’re quite subtle, but they’re there and it’s found its way also into the secular world.

And I also put on the right hand side, one of my favourite Jewish artists, he was around in the 70s and 80s, he lived in Plymouth in the southwest of England, Robert Lenkiewicz, if you look up his art, he’s done some very sexually revealing art with women. He’s very much in the tradition. I think he’s very much Lucian Freud. If you look at some of his paintings, one might think is that Lucian Freud? But Robert Lenkiewicz who came from an ultra orthodox family in Sanford Hill, rejected all of that and he went and lived, he was in Plymouth, in the city of Plymouth in the southwest of England and he’s done this incredible art. He was the first artist, known artist to actually paint a tramp. And I remember that when I was a child and everyone thought he was totally mad, but he actually painted a tramp. Why would anyone want to do that? He was pushing the boundaries, but he also did what I think is a remarkable if uncomfortable painting of the wandering Jew. Next slide please. So what about the image of Jews in the mediaeval period and in art? Well at this stage what I want to just focus on is the image on the right hand side because most people today, if you were to ask them they may not have even noticed this, but there are a whole series of different ways in which the church teaching about Judaism has actually found its way into the structure of churches and cathedrals. This is Ecclesia and Synagoga, church and synagogue. These statues in whatever form they’re in actually are called Ecclesia and Synagoga. And on the left you can see the church triumphant with the staff and scriptures in her left hand she’s facing out. But if you look at Synagoga, she’s blindfolded, her staff is broken in several places.

The 10 commandments are upside down and not even facing the right way. This is the blind Jew who’s not accepted Christian teaching, hugely damaging imagery. And there is one pair, the pair of Ecclesia and Synagoga on Notre Dame in Paris. There’s also one well closer to home in I want to say not Woburn Abbey, it’ll come to me in Hertfordshire Woburn Abbey, I beg your pardon, Woburn Abbey above the old switch, just two heads. And so not the full statue but deeply damaging, that now in the mediaeval period we have this anti-Judaism really ingrained in the architecture of the churches is a conscious decision. And you know, I don’t personally, I think you know, they needn’t have done it, but it’s now so ingrained in western teaching and you also get it in stained glass windows. Next slide please. So when we come, just before we tip back into the mediaeval period, Pope Gregory I, I thought I would, just focus a tiny bit on him. He’s interesting. He is known as Pope Gregory “the Great”, he endorses and carries forward that view that Jews are blind to the truth. Christianity, that whole imagery is still the true Israel, the new covenant. But look, you know now they’re going to convert eventually. Now this is a shift since Augustine of Hippo who comes up with this.

This is a gradual shift now. A belief in the church that look, you know, Jews will convert eventually and way back, two or three years, two or 300 years earlier, when Marcion had tried to remove the Hebrew Bible, what Christians called the Old Testament from Christianity completely, to remove its, of its Jewish roots. The church was really vocal and fought hard and declared those that community views to be heretical. So the church has always had this ambiguity with Jews and Judaism because it cannot be Christianity without its Jewish roots. And now there’s a sort of, we think it’s a softening but against a really difficult adversus Judaeos tradition, Jews will convert eventually. And therefore they must, Pope Gregory does say, “We must give them physical protection status.” And in one pogrom against the Jews. And there were a number of violences against the Jews, but in one in particular, he actually intervenes and puts the stopped it says, you know, we are not to be persecuting Jews. And in one case where one of the synagogues was burnt down, he actually orders the local bishop to rebuild it. These are parts of this ambiguous tradition we don’t actually often hear about. And it’s not so much to try and redeem Christianity, it’s to try and understand the progression and what’s behind the development of this thought and this anti-Jewish anti-Semitic tradition. Next slide please. But Pope Gregory is interesting for our point of view, for another reason and that is because of the Sicut Judaeis tradition. And those words actually mean as the Jews. So I’m not sure if any of you are aware, but Pope Gregory would always start his letters, Sicut Judaeis. So as the Jews went to whatever it is, and in 598, he writes two letters, one to the bishop of Naples and then another to the bishop of Palermo. And he’s actually setting out various foundations in his letters for protection in the the Roman Empire for Jews that they must have certain rights in the Christian world. And he always starts that with Sicut Judaeis.

And that then that phrase actually was used as part of Canon Law. Some 400, we don’t know exactly when it was first used, but four, 500 years later, this Sicut Judaeis that first guarantees legal rights in the Roman Empire. It doesn’t mean that there weren’t pogroms of course in the end of and 1290, sorry, yes, 1290 Jews were expelled from England, but no forced baptisms because we were starting to get forced baptisms to force Jews to be baptised, no violence whatsoever against Jews. Their property rights were to be protected and they were to be allowed to observe their religious festivals. And this is separate from the other requirements that they could only actually take on certain roles as money lenders and that kind of thing. Next slide please. So this is separate from the other restrictions, but of course pitched against that, Jewish communities right across Europe actually were subject to the most exorbitant taxation and in particular in parts of England at various points in mediaeval England where the king had run out of money, he would plunger, he would heavily tax the Jewish community, plunder the community of its wealth. So you know what happened then to what had developed as a Christian, a part of the Christian theology of Judaism, a part of Christian Canon Law, which said you have to protect those communities. But it wasn’t long until 12, roughly we don’t know the exact date, 1239/1242. It’s Gregory IX, who becomes the first pope to order the burning of the Talmud. And of course we can in our minds, fast forward think of Germany in the 1930s. Next slide please.

So the fourth Lateran Council in 1215, an awful lot was discussed in terms of orthodoxy and there’s now a split between the Roman Catholic world, a Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox world. But that’s aside is also the period of the crusades, Pope Innocent III, actually in this council decrees, well 71 decrees. And if you look at number 68, he says that Jews and Muslim shall wear a special dress to enable them to be distinguished from Christians. And that special dress, of course was the yellow star. They were forced to wear the yellow star so that they could be marked out. So, that they could, they in terms of identity, to avoid intermarriage so the communities could be separated. So the Jewish communities had legal protection. But you know, everybody looks say, how are you going to tell who’s Jewish, who’s Christian who get into marriage? And so that’s what happened in the Fourth Lateran Council. The first time. And it came from within Christianity that Jews would to wear a yellow star to distinguish them from non-Jews. Next slide please. And then we get to Martin Luther, German Friar monastic, in the monastic tradition, he’s an Augustinian. So he follows the teachings of Augustine of Hippo. He translates the Bible into the vernacular from Latin. So he now we have the congregations who can read the Bible in their own language. And previously the church was very much against that because it’s about power, it’s about control of teaching and thinking in the churches. But Martin Luther was quite radical in his day in thinking and in indeed translating the Bible from Latin into various languages of Europe. So in a sense he is the father of the Protestant Reformation, but he develops this racial anti-Judaism as I put there, it’s more direct, it’s not, it’s no longer in an anti-Jewish adversus Judaeos tradition. This has now moved to racial antisemitism and he never, it is said, ever met a single Jewish person in his life. But it’s all in his head. He’s developing these treaties, he writes his treaties.

One is positive the Jews, but that’s pitched against three, which are have definitely moved towards racial and firmly within racial antisemitism. Next slide please. So he becomes very, very bitter by the 1540. So his first treaties is fairly positive about Jews, but he becomes bitter. Jews haven’t converted, they will convert in the end times, but he’s still struggling with the Jewish rejection of Jesus. If he believes that the church is the true inheritance. But Judaism is still very, very strong. It’s surviving. And he writes these three track dates: “On the Jews and their Lies”, “The Ineffable Name and Lineage of Christ” and “The Last Words of David”. And they are firmly antisemitic. And he says very firmly, “There’s no need to keep anything Jewish because God has rejected the Jews.” So now again you have that coming back strongly again. This whole reinforce this whole rejection. Next slide please. And if you believe as he did that Jews were blind and stubborn, it then becomes very easy if you like, more straightforward to physically persecute. And that’s the problem. He had spent his whole life. He believed passionately starts out in the monastic tradition, he believes passionately in the truth of Christianity. And now there’s this whole hangup over truth orthodoxy. And he is defending it with his life and excuse me, he despairs of what he calls Jewish blindness and stubbornness.

This really terrible teaching which, yeah will hopefully get chance at the end to talk about what we do with that today. Because of course clearly if it’s not expressed as such, antisemitism is still so deeply embedded in Western culture, including secular culture. And he develops his view of Jews willfully blind as Devil-incarnate. He’s an advocate and loudly reinforces the charge of Deicide and also the charge of Ritual Murder. Next slide please. So Luther says what should be done with the Jews, and this is what he recommends in his track date. Their synagogue should be set on fire. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Their homes should be broken and destroyed, no prayer books or Talmud because of the they, they’re idolatrous and lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught in them. Their rabbis should be forbidden under threat of death to teach anymore. And the irony is that the early church fathers had spent so long, 400 years before Luther in defending the need to keep the Jewish roots of Christian tradition that Christianity can’t survive without Judaism. And here is Luther suggesting violent attacks, setting synagogues on fire. It’s unprecedented. It’d be hard pressed to find any of the earlier church fathers or any of the others within the early mediaeval period actually suggesting that Jewish homes should be attacked, destroyed rabbis should be killed, threat of death if they teach anymore horrific. Next slide please. And it’s no surprise then is it?

That Luther’s tract “On the Jews and their Lies” was published and distributed by the Nazis by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany in the 1930s. And it was circulated across Germany and of course Austria, which was part of the Third Reich by then, just before Kristallnacht the “Night of Broken Glass”, ninth of November, 1938. And of course the Nazis required Jews to wear the yellow star. It had been seen before there nothing new in what Hitler had instigated. If you look at that as we know, you can trace all of this back to that period in the church. And you know, I wonder how many Christians today are really aware, ‘cause so much progress was made in Christian Jewish relations after the Holocaust, after the Shoah, but how many mainstream Christians really realise that much of what the Nazis were doing actually had its roots in Christianity? Next slide please. So the Jews in mediaeval England, again, I don’t have time to go into it in any detail, but they were protected. They were, yes, they were only allowed to do certain jobs as money lenders, as silversmiths, as travelling peddlers. But they also kept a lot of the financial records called Ostraca. Fascinating, and these two photographs are original, well I want to call them scrolls. They’re not religious scrolls, but they’re transactions of the Jewish community in mediaeval Exeter, which is in the southwest of England. Fascinating, they still survive and they are now around over 800 years old, 900 years old. And historians are still allowed to look at them to physically handle these documents. It’s quite a moment actually. Next slide please. But we know there were pogroms that Jews were expelled and in 1490 expelled from Portugal and Spain. But again, we can’t go into that in detail, but I’m hoping that you are seeing a kind of progression in Christian teaching in its trying to deal with the continuing existence of a Judaism that it didn’t expect would survive.

And it gets taken over in mediaeval Christian art and you have the pointed hat, you have the nose and how much do we sometimes see that unwittingly when someone will say, and not necessarily meaning to be anti-Semitic, but will say something about Jews and money or something about, you know, he looks Jewish, he got a long nose or something. I certainly heard that in the 70s and 80s from people who weren’t anti-Semitic. So this imagery is incredibly powerful because that visual image has really got into people’s heads and is carried forwards. Now I’m not suggesting we go around smashing stained glass windows with antisemitic imagery in them, but it is problematic what we do with this art. And I guess it has to be about education. Next slide please. So you have that whole image coming in of, particularly Judas Iscariot. You can see him on the left there. He’s got his pouch of money in his right hand. He’s got the sort of long pointed chin, the sort of stereotype again of Jews with, and you can see he’s got a sort of hooked nose. And this is how it starts to be depicted in images of the Last Supper. It depicts Judas as the archetypal Jew evil hooked nose with a money bag. And very, very difficult to do what to do with these images which have gone forward. Even this one here as late as 1930 painted by Edward Armitage. And so, you know, this view that Jesus was all, so Judas was all part of that plan. It comes out in one of the church father’s Oregon. They’re drawing on some traditions from the gospel of Judas, which doesn’t make it into the Christian Canon, but that view that Judas, it’s the Jew who’s betrayed Jesus is carried forward in the mediaeval period and very visual in mediaeval art. Next slide please.

So a very big question, but one that I don’t think we have to answer or comment on any big detail. Is there a direct link to the Holocaust? I didn’t think when I was asked to do these three sessions on the image of Jews in Christianity, we could leave it without saying anything about the link to the show up. The link between millennia, two millennia anti-Jewish tipping into secular sort of virulent anti-Semitism in Christian teaching and the final solution. It’s true the church never officially sanctioned genocide. You think back in the whole of those 2000 years, you’d be hard pressed to even argue that Martin Luther had argued for genocide. But spiritually the church has for 2000 years tried to wipe out Jews as Jews and Jewish faith and practise. And Hitler reversed the laws of Jewish emancipation that we saw in Europe in the 19th century. Next slide please. And Franklin Little wrote 30, 40 years ago in his book, “The Crucifixion of the Jews”, “We Christians need Jewry first. The Jewish people can define itself in history without Christianity.” It’s true, “but Christians cannot establish a self-identity except in relationship to the Jewish people.” And I think we need to revisit that. You know, after so much progress, I think in the 1990s, we appear to have taken a backward step, particularly when that gets mixed up with the political events of happening, particularly in more recent times. And before I come onto that, we’re nearly at the end of comments for today. But the rise of get out of the emancipation, the rise and the enlightenment of the 19th century. We have in the 20th and into the 21st century, these Jewish Christians, again, the Hebrew Christians, some call themselves Hebrew Christians, some call themselves Jewish Christians, Jews for Jesus. Jews for Jesus being much more missionary and overtly proselytising and really quite in your faith with their views. But that the fact that they can think that Jews who who convert to Christianity can keep their Judaism and therefore in some of their churches, you will see a menorah next to a cross.

I find it theologically problematic. Anyway, the whole Jewish Christian movement today and the church still has problems with the Hebrew Christians, not so much the evangelical, that branch of the tradition, but the mainstream churches still have problems with mixing those identities. And of course the various Judaisms of today quite clearly obviously do have problems with Hebrew Christians that are not only confined to their missionary approach. So it’s interesting, it’s sort of come full circle again from the debates and discussions of the early era. Next slide please. So is there a direct link to anti-Semitism today? And I just want, I’ve got two or three slides left where I want to finish us with some thoughts. The Reverend Marcus Braybrooke, an Anglican minister Vicar who did a lot in the 70s, 80s, 1990s. He’s written a number of books on Christian Jewish relations. He was at one point director of the Council of Christians and Jews in London. He says, “Centuries of anti-Jewish teaching prepared the ground for Nazism. Today Christians need to enter into the painful horror of the Shoah and readily confess their penance for the churches’ shameful record.” And I want to ask today, and I’ve chatted a lot with my close Jewish friends, I’m struggling today. I’m struggling with the rise of antisemitism. What has happened to all this work? So much progress was made and the work of John Paul II, Pope John Paul II did so much in the Roman Catholic world. But what has happened to Christian Jewish relations today? Next slide please. Where are the churches today in the rise of antisemitism? Have I missed something? I’m not hearing the church is being really vocal. Perhaps I’m, maybe I’m isolated.

Are you hearing anything from the churches to condemn the rise of antisemitism? Where are the voices of the churches after the pogrom in Israel on the 7th of October? Has the modern world largely turned its back on Jews? Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Since the events, since I prepared this lecture of the last weekend when Iran attacked Israel with such, I think, unprecedented force. That’s not just sending a message, that’s not just your right to defend, sending over 300 of various thing over Israel. It’s a different, it’s a game changer. And it’s interesting that those western alliances have come to the defence of Israel. But what about the ordinary people? I’m not hearing the ordinary people defending Israel. Has the modern world turned its back on Jews? I hope not. You know, from all that we’ve done in the last three sessions, including today, I want to ask this question and it’s an unanswerable question, I guess. Is antisemitism so deeply rooted in western society that it can never be eradicated? You know, if that’s true, that’s deeply depressing. But I’m an optimist. I’m always optimistic, but I’m struggling to find a western society that can deal at the moment with antisemitism. Is antisemitism so deeply embedded in western culture that even a major theological shift can’t eradicate it today? I don’t know. Will the western world learn? Will it, why won’t it? Will it learn the lessons from history? And that’s why I think it has been a privilege actually to do these three sessions, to look at where the churches have come from, to understand 2000 years ago that the antisemitism wasn’t just immediately there after the death of Jesus. And the anti-Judaism certainly isn’t there in the ministry of Jesus. And I think it’s important that we do learn from history, that we study history and we understand. And I think the nuances and complexities, something happens within us and when we begin a shift, but it’s a huge task. Next slide please.

It’s a monumental task and I finish with this, on the rise of antisemitism, and the adversus Judaeos tradition, this hatred, it’s a quote from Yosef Yerushalmi way back in 1974, and it’s a quote I’ve used before from his book, “Auschwitz: the Beginning of a New Era”. He says, and it’s true today, “This generation will be judged not by the failures of its ancestors, but by its own response or silence.” I ask that question again. Where are the churches today in addressing the crisis and rise of antisemitism? You know, looking back at the history, surely the churches can do something and address the crisis. because as Yosef Yerushalmi said, “For my people now, as in the past, is in grave peril for its life. And it simply cannot wait until you,” the Christian world, the churches, “have completed a new ‘Summa Theological’.” It’s an urgent world. There isn’t time for us to slowly consider this new, a new theology of Judaism. It was started, it began after the show were so much progress, the last 30, 40 years, but the last decade or so, you know, we are back where we were, it seems. And so I’ll leave you with that question because maybe you have a different experience with your neighbours, with society. But I do ask, where are the churches in vocally standing in rejecting the adversus Judaeos tradition really strongly as it has in the past? Where is it standing up against the rise of antisemitism? Thank you.