THE CHURCH AND THE ISRAEL OF GOD. INTRODUCTION.

 

   This is a survey of the comments written over the past two millennia in which antipathy has been expressed against the Jewish people. It is a simple register of of the teachings, theories, polemics, doctrines and superstitions which constitute the written evidence of the longest and most enduring hatred in human history.scholars

It is offered with minimum of comment,analysis, interpretation or censure: such deductions are the prerogative of the professional,-which I am not. A simple presentation of the evidence is the best ground for any unprejudiced judgement in a matter which has long been omitted from many general histories of Europe and its churches. Emotive or subjective comment has been avoided,-difficult as this has been. The intention is to allow the summaries or digests to speak for themselves about the authors’ intentions or motives.

A paper trail has been laid over nearly two milllennia which reflected the general opprobrium and contempt for Jews arising from faulty religious inferences, unfounded superstitions and cultural and social distinctions which underwent a metamorphosis in the last two centuries to emerge as a racial hatred. The writers who recorded their animus towards the Jews were secular and religious scholars, poets and philosophers. They wrote often haphazardly and without any foreknowledge of the final import which their writings would leave as a legacy for future generations. The residuary legatees of this age-old animosity are now holding court in the terror groupings scattered around the world , and in covert cliques lurking on the fringes of Western –style  democratic societies.

   Any reader will quickly realize that this collection of “digests” and quotations is blatantly tendentious and also a prosecution.=.- it is both  ! The whole of European society, at this present time and throughout history, has a charge to answer before God and before the Jewish people. The reader can survey these written evidences of an unfounded a

and shameful hatred according to their own unclouded conscience.

 

 

    Most of European society, including its churches, will disclaim any responsibilityfor the anti-Jewish writers of earlier generations, and will plead that had they lived during those past ages they would never have been guilty of such prejudice and enmity in word ordeed. Such an excuse is strangely reminiscent of the attitude of the Pharisees on the occasion when Jesus had cause to rebuke them, as recorded in the gospel of Matthew,ch.23,v.30-31 :-“If we had lived in the days of our forefathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets. So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets.”

    Europeans in the 21st.century are the descendants of the Jew-baiters and writers who berated them in past generations. We Europeans are now identified  with our cultural inheritance,- with all the good that has been generated by a “Christianised “society , and with all the wrongs that have been perpetrated . Our human oneness in European society binds us all in responsibility for its past misdeeds, while it also makes us inheritors of its benefits.                   i

    ( to be continued…)       .