Anti-Semitism of the Church
Recently the number of Anti-Semitic incidents has grown. I am convinced that those senseless actions are the lingering effect of the misguided views the Christian Church propagated against the Jewish people for more than two centuries. However at the outset, I have to make myself absolutely clear that my criticism of anti-Semitism of the Christian Churches does not contradict my condemnation of the current Israeli government’s actions against Palestinians. It is similar to my opposition to some policies of the Canadian government which is an act of patriotism. Once you get involved in the peace movement in Israel meeting with groups like “Women in Black” or “Rabbis for Human Rights,” you will soon find that in both Jewish and Palestinian communities in Israel there are many activists working together for peace.
Herewith I want to highlight one example of the seeds of enduring anti-Semitism planted by the Church in the past. It is the way Christians tried to misrepresent famous Biblical personalities to perpetuate anti-Semitism. Only a few scholars blame the pressure from the powerful ecclesiastical establishments. David Rosenbaum and a few other art historians have blamed the Church for the blatant misrepresentation of famous Biblical figures. Most of the Church historians forgave the mistakes caused by ignorance: “They have never seen circumcised men without clothes.” It’s such a feeble excuse.
As an example, I picked two from Renaissance art to illustrate how deeply and how long has the Anti-Jewish prejudice of the Church existed in the attempt to misguide the popular perception. Looking at two famous classic works of art, I wonder why two disrobed Jewish male figures are not circumcised. They are Michelangelo’s painting called “Risen Christ” and the statue of “David.” Jesus was a son of a carpenter in Northern Israel. David was the beloved King of the Jews in Bethlehem. I strongly suspect those artistic misrepresentations were the attempts by the Church authorities to deny that Jesus and David were Jewish.
It was Paul who created a distance between Christianity and Judaism. The first Jewish Christians community in Jerusalem were skeptical about Paul’s qualification to be an Apostle. Paul was a Jewish Diaspora who lived in today’s Turkey, never met Jesus in flesh and began his religious activism as a sworn enemy of the followers of Jesus. He claimed he heard the voice of Jesus and became a Christian. He appointed himself to be the Apostle for the Gentiles (Non-Jewish people.) I wonder if that was how the Christians in Europe began to move away from Judaism and planted the seed of anti-Semitism in the Christian Church in the Roman Empire spreading the falsehood to accuse the Jewish people as “Murderers of Christ.” My guess is in this process, the practice of circumcision has been abandoned amongst gentile Christians.
It resulted in the concerted effort by the Christian Church (both Catholic and Protestant) to erase the historical evidence of the Christianity that began as the reform movement of Judaism. Thus it planted the seed of Anti-Semitism. It culminated in the genocidal “Holocaust” under Adolf Hitler. Those renaissance works of art were a misguided attempt on the part of the Christian Church to erase the evidence that the Christianity was founded on Judaism. Unfortunately such a racist view is still very much alive.