CRUIFICTION OF THE JEWS

(cont'd)

Tuesday, January 24

11 AM

For centuries Christians have presumed to define the old Hebrew, the Jews, Judaism, in ways that were patronizing, contemptuous, demeaning. It began at the theological level among the gentile* church fathers, reinforced by law during the millennial and a half** of Christendom. In the modern period it led directly to genocide. We Christians cannot escape the awful burden of blood and guilt: the red thread that ties Justin Martyr and Chrysostom to Auschwitz and Treblinka.

The corner stone of Christian Antisemitism is the superseding or displacement myth which claims that the mission of the Jewish people was finished with the coming of Jesus Christ and that Old Israel, replaced by the "New Israel, writes  us out of history. To teach that a people's mission in God's providence is finished, that they have been relegated to the limbo of history, has murderous implications which murderers, in time, will spell out.

Franklin H. Littell,"The Crucifixion of the Jews:

The Failure of Christians to Understand the Jewish Experience"

*Converts from the pagan world, never having passed through Judaism become the Church leaders.

**In the Eastern states of Europe there was no enlightenment or restoration. The Shoa was in direct and continuous line with the Jew hating Church since the 4th century BCE.