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Hated without a cause?

HATED WITHOUT A CAUSE?
By Graham Keith
Paternoster Press. 301 + xii pages
ISBN 0 85364 783 6

When Nobel Prize-winning author and Holocaust survivor Elie Weissel was asked to state what he thought were the reasons for anti-Semitism, he responded by saying that he did not want to dignify anti-Semitics by furnishing them with a rationale for their hate.

It is possible that Elie Weissel had no answer to the question but there must surely be occasions when even he wonders why the Jewish people, more than any other nation, has attracted such prolonged and bitter hostility.

Hated without a cause? detects three basic types of anti-Semitism: religious, political and racial, each with its own particular policy of dealing with what it perceives as the Jewish problem. During the Middle Ages, Christendom saw the Jews as Christ-killers and demanded conversion, not only from Judaism but from Jewishness. With the Enlightenment, the Jews were emancipated from the ghettos on the condition that they proved themselves worthy of the new order. If they failed to match up to expectations, the new secular worldview regarded this as an inherent perversity. Thus the ground was prepared for later racial theories.

The medieval church had said, in effect, that the Jews had no right to live in a Christian society as Jews, while secular authorities ruled that this perverse people had no right to live among them. The pseudo-scientific racial theories of the Nazis, however, decreed the Jews, as a sub-human species, had no right to live.

Though secular forms of anti-Semitism have been worse than their Christian counterparts, Graham Keith does not attempt to whitewash the guilt of the church. He suggests, in fact, that anti-Semitism is a Satanic ploy to hinder Jewish people from considering the claims of Jesus. There is some justification for this suggestion as missionaries to the Jewish people can testify. One such missionary recalls being told by a Jew that he had 'six million reasons for not believing in Jesus'.

Keith sees the evangelisation of the Jews as the antidote to Christian anti-Semitism. If gentile churches 'forget that the Jewish people are beloved of God and their election is irrevocable, inevitably they will slip into anti-Semitic attitudes and practices. On the other side of the coin, to ignore the reality of Jewish unbelief and the fact that it makes them enemies of God, means that the Jewish people will be deprived of the greatest service the gentile Christians can give them - the testimony of Jesus of Nazareth as the Saviour of Israel.'

Inevitably, Hated without a cause? has attracted criticism from inter-faith groups. Nevertheless, it is a sane, well-balanced examination of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism in which the author does not hesitate to indict true Christians for the part they have played in establishing patterns of prejudice against the Jews. What emerges from his research is the conviction that, whatever the church's unworthy attitudes and practices towards the Jews may have been, its worst act of anti-Semitism is that for centuries she has kept the lost sheep of the house of Israel from their Shepherd.

Mike Moore