Anti-Semitism is the bigotry that never rests. And these days, there are Catholics in the public sphere once again proposing degrading ideas regarding Jews. How is a Catholic to understand Catholic/Jewish history in a way that comports with the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Joe Heschmeyer joins us.
Cy Kellett:
Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I am Cy Kellett, your host, joined this time by Joe Heschmeyer, and we’re going to talk about a somewhat difficult topic for Christians to discuss, one in which we probably… Well, not probably. We have a very mixed history and, therefore, some things to regret, but not all things to regret. It’s not a simple conversation. That’s what makes it difficult, too. That is, anti-semitism and the Catholic Church, anti-semitism and the Christian worldview, anti-semitism and Christian people. There’s relationships here to all of these things, but the relationships are not always what they seem. They are difficult to parse, require some subtlety, especially given the horrific treatment of Jews over the last 100 years. It’s not a subject in which careful parsing is always available to us. So, we’ll give it a try today. We’ll see how we do. Joe Heschmeyer, thanks for being here with us.
Joe Heschmeyer:
My pleasure.
Cy Kellett:
This topic comes up because more and more we see… Well, the internet just bearing more fruits from all of us, the endless fruits of the internet. Among them is a growing assertion that in order to be Catholic, you really got to be against the Jews.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. There’s variations of that, but there’s kind of a theme of that. Obviously, it’s not coming from the top-down. It’s not like Pope Francis is saying, “Hey, guys, be more hateful against the Jews.”
Cy Kellett:
“We’ve really loosened up too much on the Jews here.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right. It’s not that. It’s from strange corners of the internet, but people are often looking…
Cy Kellett:
But well-populated corners of the internet.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. But it’s hard to know how well populated. It’s hard to know how many people are enthusiastically… But there does seem to be a rising tide of anti-semitism, anti-Judaic kind of views.
Cy Kellett:
There is a thing where the person wants to be orthodox with a little O. The person who comes to the point in their life where they’re, “I believe in Jesus. I believe he’s the founder of this Church. I want to be as faithful to what it really teaches and what he really teaches as I can.” So, they end up having to question lots of things in the light of that conversion. I don’t know: my relationship with capitalism, my relationship with; if I’m a man, with women; if I’m a woman, with man; my relationship with all kinds of things. Clearly, there is a long, long history of both good and bad relations between Catholics and Jews. So, where am I supposed to fall on that? I do think that there’s a reasonable question of how am I supposed to be an orthodox Catholic? That’s a good question to ask.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It is.
Cy Kellett:
But it gets hijacked.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Well, I think you’ve tapped into something: that people want to be radically Catholic.
Cy Kellett:
That’s it. That’s it, Joe. That’s it. Right. Right down to the root.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And that’s good, right?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
You should be radically Catholic, but you should just watch out for radicalism for its own sake. Being radically Catholic doesn’t mean you have to support a radical political ideology. It doesn’t mean you have to support radical ideas about race or about Jewish people or about any of those things. In fact, being radically Catholic is incompatible with most forms of everything I just mentioned there. You can’t be radically following Jesus Christ and radically following some secular ideology or some hatred or whatever. You have to serve either Jesus or Caesar.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Okay. I guess that idea of this growing, very positive idea of wanting to be radically Catholic and then questioning everything in the light of that, the question in people’s mind is not does the Church give me permission to be an anti-Semite? Because I don’t think people are… Well, no, I shouldn’t say that. Some people are looking for that permission. But I don’t think that that’s the common reason. What people are asking is, does the Church require me to be an anti-Semite? Because, look, 2,000 years, lots of things written and said by Catholics, lots of actions taken by Catholics, looking back, that are anti-Jewish, and, in many cases, even antisemitic. So, which tradition, in other words, am I supposed to appropriate here?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. It…
Cy Kellett:
Am I required to appropriate?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right, right. Because I think there’s a sense of wanting to be faithful. Because when you say, does the Church require or permit me to be antisemitic? If you listen to anything, any living Catholic bishop or priest in good standing is saying, they’re going to say very clearly, “No, this is totally incompatible with being Catholic.” But, as you said, you go digging in the history and you can find plenty of antisemitic, anti-Jewish comments made by prior generations of Catholics, including, sometimes, saintly Catholics. I mean, Saint John Chrysostrom has some homilies that he preaches against the Jews that are really uncomfortable to read…
Cy Kellett:
Ooh. Yeah. Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
… in the 21st century. So, that’s all there. Some people say, “Well, I don’t want to just jettison uncomfortable Catholic teachings,” and that’s a good impulse. But this was never an official church teaching. This was the prejudices and bigotries of a former generation. You are not forced to repeat your father’s sins. If you go back, the prior generations were not just perfect golden ages for the Church, for Christianity, for the simple reason that original sin exists. Every generation has sinners, and every generation seems to have its own maybe frequent sins. You don’t have to bring back dueling just because prior generations of Catholics turned a blind eye to the immorality of dueling, and they allowed these things to happen. That was wrong. You don’t have to burn witches. You don’t have to… You know what I mean? You go back in the history and…
Cy Kellett:
Wait, you don’t have to burn witches?
Joe Heschmeyer:
You don’t have to.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. Sorry, just a joke, Joe, I [inaudible 00:06:12].
Joe Heschmeyer:
We’ll have to do another episode now.
Cy Kellett:
On witches. Yes.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But the point is, like every generation, you go back through 2,000 years… There’s a billion people in Catholicism right now. You’re looking at the lives of innumerable people, and many of them are going to have views that are wrong or views that we can now look back on in a new light and say, “You know what? I don’t think they got that one.” And this is on a lot of issues. Even St. Thomas Aquinas saying women are misbegotten men. He’s repeating the best science of his day. It’s Aristotle. But now we wouldn’t say, “Oh, we have to believe in this really obviously false vision of men and women.” We could even say there’s something in that vision that it’s more obvious today is incompatible with the Christian vision of Genesis, that women aren’t just like a mistake in nature.
Cy Kellett:
No. Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
They’re part of God’s design. So, the light of Christ should be something we hold up both to our own generation and all of the things we get wrong, and to past generations and things that our forebears got wrong. We don’t have to just repeat those things because they’re old.
Cy Kellett:
In the middle part of the 20th century, a lot of stuff changed in the Catholic Church. I do think part of this reevaluation is what did we get right and what did we get wrong in all of that changed. One of the things that changed was the Church’s attitude towards Jews. I won’t say the Church’s teaching because I don’t know about that, but certainly the attitude. After the Holocaust, I think it became clear to many in the Church, certainly Pope John Paul II, that while the Church hadn’t taught anti-semitism, the Church had been…
Joe Heschmeyer:
Too hospitable to it.
Cy Kellett:
Very… fertile ground for… Let’s put it that way. It had been fertile ground for anti-semitism.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It is a nuanced story, that there have been instances where popes spoke out against, where they tried to help the Jewish populations. Even, for instance, the building of Jewish ghettos in Rome was a controversial thing where it was something that was helpful to Jewish people by protecting them from their Christian neighbors, was something that hurt… There’s often really complicated, nuanced discussions.
Cy Kellett:
Right. But for the Jews…
Joe Heschmeyer:
St. Casimir [inaudible 00:08:24].
Cy Kellett:
… themselves, they didn’t want to be in a ghetto.
Joe Heschmeyer:
St. Casimir in Poland was considered really good towards the Jews, and this is centuries and centuries ago.
Cy Kellett:
Well, this is why there were so many Jews in Poland. Polish Christianity traditionally…
Joe Heschmeyer:
[inaudible 00:08:36].
Cy Kellett:
… from about the year 1000 on was very open to Judaism. It didn’t have the same…
Joe Heschmeyer:
Vitriol.
Cy Kellett:
It’s so sad for the Polish people today that people think, “Well, the Holocaust was committed in Poland, therefore it was a Polish crime.” It’s not.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right. A lot of the Poles were in the camp alongside the Jews.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. So, in Poland, we have a thousand years of a better example than in much of the rest of the Church.
Joe Heschmeyer:
All that’s to say, the Church’s history with this is really nuanced in every age, where you have good and bad figures. You’ve got people who have very backwards views, and you have people who have very enlightened views on this issue. But I think it’s fair to say writ large, there were way too many times and places in which the Church was hospitable to these noxious and anti-Jewish ideas.
Cy Kellett:
I know a woman; she grew up in the Bronx back in the early part of the 20th century. She’s passed now. I knew her. She told me that for fun on Good Friday, coming home from Catholic schools, kids would throw rocks at the synagogue, saying, “You killed the Jews.” They weren’t trying to start a pogrom or something. This was just part of being in the Bronx, that the Italians were known for this; the Irish were known for that. But the Jews, on Good Friday, it was funny to throw rocks at the synagogue. That’s not even a hundred years ago.
Joe Heschmeyer:
No. [inaudible 00:10:03].
Cy Kellett:
You see what I’m saying?
Joe Heschmeyer:
I do. I do.
Cy Kellett:
That’s very recent.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. If you’ve ever been to Wittenberg in Germany, you see a much older example of this. On the parish church there, there’s a really offensive anti-Jewish depiction of a Jewish farmer with a pig, and pigs are completely forbidden.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, right. For Jews.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So, it’s a mocking kind of thing. After the church became Lutheran, they added the unspeakable name of God above it just to make it more sacrilegious. This is engraved on the church.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, Lord. Wow.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s shocking. It’s shocking kind of stuff. And you just think, okay. That’s worse than the teenage shenanigans. The teenage shenanigans are bad. But something like this is just like, that’s become institutionalized in a real way, that generation after generation of churchgoer saw this and thought, “Eh, we’ll leave that up there.” And it’s still there today. After the Holocaust, there was a move to remove it. Actually Jewish leaders spoke out and said, “No, no, we think you should keep it. We think we should…”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. I can see why. Because the…
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. People should know this was here. Now, there’s a little marker and everything explaining why it’s still there. But it’s shocking. It is a shocking testament. So, someone who grew up as I did in the middle part of the country where there isn’t a long history of strong anti-Jewish sentiment, partly because there isn’t a long history of there being a large Jewish population in the first place, this can feel like a very strange and foreign history. But this is part of our story as Catholics. And you’re right. This is not just a long ago sort of story, that you can find this stuff much more recently.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. What I think is, then, so in the middle part of the 20th century, so much changes in the Catholic Church. A lot of that change is in fact a consequence of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Although I might add that we see this change… Sorry. Sorry to interrupt.
Cy Kellett:
No, please do.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But I want to make something really clear here. Pius XI, who is writing before the Holocaust, sees the direction this is going…
Cy Kellett:
Oh, yes. I see what you’re saying.
Joe Heschmeyer:
… and really effectively calls it out well before there even is a Holocaust, at least a few years before the Holocaust begins.
Cy Kellett:
Well, Jews were being harassed, brutalized, and in some cases killed. But the mass killing hadn’t started yet.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right. Exactly. Exactly. For instance, in September of 1938, he says, “Mark well that in the Catholic Mass, Abraham is our patriarch and forefather. Anti-semitism is incompatible with the lofty thought which that fact expresses. It is a movement with which we Christians can have nothing to do. No. No, I say to you, it is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-semitism. It is inadmissible. Through Christ and in Christ, we are all the spiritual progeny of Abraham. Spiritually, we are all Semites.”
Cy Kellett:
And this is when? What year would this have been?
Joe Heschmeyer:
September 6th, 1938.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So 1938. You don’t say something like that in that context without that being a direct confrontation with Nazis. This is…
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Well, not only Nazis. But earlier in 1938, Mussolini had given his Aryan Manifesto. Now, Mussolini, as someone wrote in to point out to me, actually had a much better track record on killing Jews than did Hitler.
Cy Kellett:
Right. And the Italian military even better than Mussolini’s.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right. So, the Germans end up invading Italy because they’re not being an eager enough partner in the Holocaust. But despite that, there is still this stirring up of antisemitic sentiment, and you have this pro-Aryan thing going on in Italy as well as in Germany. I think the Church leaders recognize this is something new and alarming, certainly the degree and the violence of it. So, pretty famously, Pius XI also releases the only papal encyclical written in German: Mit brennender Sorge, which means “it is with deep anxiety.” It’s on the trajectory of things in Germany.
Again, he writes this before the Holocaust, and he writes this actually in March of 1937. So, even before the other part that I read, just warning about anyone exalting race, that they’re making a God of it, that this is something that only an idiotic mind could imagine a purely national or racial God, that it’s not faithful to who Jesus is as a Semite to be antisemitic, like to hate people of Jewish blood would mean hating your Savior. It means hating Mary; it means hating the apostles. It’s absurd. So, he calls out the absurdity of this in just that general trajectory.
Cy Kellett:
I believe the Nazis claimed that Jesus was not a Semite. They just removed that.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. They did a couple things. They tried to co-opt Christianity, make a national Christian church. They also started to try to revive Norse paganism and other, kind of like Germanic paganism, those things, because you don’t have to have any of the Jewish stuff.
Cy Kellett:
No, right. It’s not there at all because the Jews hadn’t reached there yet.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So, there’s actually something that I find strangely comforting about that, that for all their attempts to co-opt Christianity, at the end of the day, they realized you just can’t be Christian and a Nazi, so let’s get rid of this Christianity thing.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, sure. Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And so that’s good. It’s like, “Well, the Nazis get it.” Now, if the Christians could just get you can’t be Christian and a Nazi, then we’d be all set.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Exactly. Right. So, a very helpful discourse. But here we are, the middle of the 20th century, everything changes. Not everything. But it has that feeling of everything changes. People want to do an authentic, go back before that. It’s very helpful that you point out that Pope Pius XI, still a Catholic pope, according to everyone, I think. So, the pope…
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well, let’s explain that comment because I think that actually is important because a lot of the antisemitic stuff is closely tied with the deep suspicion and sometimes outright rejection of all the popes from John XXIII on. Someone who believes the last valid pope was Pius XII can look at all this stuff that is very openly antisemitic very much like here are all the good things the Jewish people have, very much embracing the legitimacy of the fact that God has not forgotten these people that he called. They look at that and say, “Ah, that’s just proof these aren’t the real popes.” Well, you can’t pull that move with Pius XI because he’s before Pius XII. That’s right there in the number. I think it’s worth pointing out. There’s a reason I’m going before the war, before the Second Vatican Council, before all these things, because it doesn’t allow the easy cop out of, like, “Oh, well, that was just Catholic guilt after the war,” or…
Cy Kellett:
Or this is some modernist pope.
Joe Heschmeyer:
… that was just this invalid… Right, right. Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Well, the tolerance, it does seem to me that there’s a tolerance of anti-semitism. There’s a very bad record of anti-semitism. We don’t want to. There’s a temptation to see that as the valid tradition because you have popes and bishops and who insist on Jews in the ghettos, and there’s the whole history of the translation of the Talmud into Latin and kind of a shock in the Christian world that, “This is what the Jews think of us?” And there was this back… which all taps into a much earlier suspicion of the Jews because…
Now, tell me if I get my history wrong about the Roman Empire, but the Jewish religion had a special place in the Roman Empire, in large part because of good relations between Jews and certain Roman emperors. So, the Jews have a special position in the Roman Empire. Once Christians are seen as a different religion from the Jews, are not permitted the privileges that Judaism is permitted. So, for the early church, they have a sense of grievance against Jewish leaders because Jewish leaders themselves are leaving these Christians, are more or less pushing them out of the privileged place they would have had they been recognized as Jews. Is that fair?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I think there’s something to that. You see that even in the first century. The Sanhedrin has an actual legal standing, that the Jewish leadership in Roman Palestine actually has some authority. Now, they’re still a subjugated people, but they have official recognition. And then in response to Christianity, you do find Jewish leaders who cooperate with the Romans in turning Christians in because they’re saying, “Oh, these guys are heretics. They don’t belong with us.” Understandably, from the Jewish perspective, they’re hearing these guys believe in a Messiah. This could bring down the wrath of the Roman Empire upon us.
You actually get this in the Gospel of John, in John 11. When the Sanhedrin is deliberating, one of the things they’re afraid of is this is going to be seen as a political movement, and the Romans are going to take all those privileges away and start being a lot harsher to the Jews because the Jewish people stood up so strongly in favor of monotheism that they refused to worship the Roman gods. Everybody else has to worship the Roman gods. The Jews get a pass because they just weren’t going to do it. It’s actually, in a lot of ways, a testament to the fidelity of Israel.
Cy Kellett:
Sure. Right. Very much so.
Joe Heschmeyer:
We talk so much about the infidelity of Israel, but compared to all the neighbors, Israel’s doing a great job. They’re not just giving up their local gods and going to worship the Roman gods. Israel’s saying, “No, no. We have the one true God of the universe, and he’s above Caesar and we’re going to follow him. And so we’ll pay taxes, but we’re not going to worship your god.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Okay. I’m going to go even farther back then, all the way to the writing of the Gospel of John. I think it’s in the Gospel of John that Jesus says, “Salvation is from the Jews.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
It is.
Cy Kellett:
And then the rest of the Gospel of John, you don’t want to be sitting with your Jewish friends when they’re reading it. You have a visceral feeling of, “Man.” The word Jews is used so negatively in this gospel.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I think there’s something to that. But again, we are reading that with 21st century eyes or ears, with a very fresh recollection of the Holocaust. We’re reading it as non-Jews. The same way that an American can write a song about an American intervention abroad, and no one’s like, “Oh, are you racist against Americans?” Because no, obviously not.
Cy Kellett:
I see. Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s criticizing from inside the house in a different way. You can speak a little more freely, in a little more of an un-nuanced way because you can assume a little more nuance. The Gospel of John is centered around the Jewish liturgical calendar. It’s a deeply Jewish book. When you look at what event is going on, it’s one Jewish holiday after another.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. That’s right. Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So, read it in those eyes, and you realize that when John talks about “the Jews,” he doesn’t mean in an un-nuanced kind of way every Jewish person. He doesn’t mean Jesus as a Jew. He means specifically the Judean leadership. The word Jew means Judean. The Judean leadership puts Jesus to death. Just like we can say the Romans put Jesus to death and we don’t mean every citizen of Rome, every member of the Roman Empire, anything like that. We are referring as with a shorthand to a specific elite, a specific group of people who are the actors at a particular time and place.
Bringing this back to the throwing rocks at the synagogue on Good Friday example, the biggest cop-out here is saying that the Romans and the Jews did this. It’s like, “No, no, I did this through my sin.” There’s the two things that get left out theologically in that cop-out of just blaming the Jews or blaming the Romans, is first that Jesus says, “No one takes my life from me. I freely lay it down,” John 10. John is actually very clear about this. This is not just a Jewish conspiracy.
But second, that this is a response to our sin. This is very clear from John 3: “God so loved the world that he sent his only son.” Well, why does he have to send him? Well, because of the story of sin, because of the story of us turning away from him. When we lose those two dimensions, that Jesus is the priest of this offering on the cross, and this offering is made because of the sins of the entire world, not just one religion, one ethnicity, one sect, one anything, but everyone, if you lose that, you’ve, you’ve actually lost the whole story. You’ve missed the big picture of what Good Friday’s actually all about.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. I appreciate that, and I agree with it. But we’re stuck with this accusation that the Gospel of John is antisemitic.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I think it’s not. Again, I think it’s a deeply Semitic book. When it’s read outside of its Jewish context, it can easily be misread in that way. There are particular passages when the crowd says, “His blood be upon us and our children.” A-ha! You can leap on those.
Cy Kellett:
That’s a blood curse that they put on themselves.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right. Right. Exactly. But it’s like, “Well, no. What does it…”
Cy Kellett:
What does that actually mean?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Benedict XVI points out, “Well, for the blood of Jesus to be on them, they’re actually calling down a blessing whether they know it or not.” “May his blood be upon us and our children.”
Cy Kellett:
That’s the irony because clearly John means that, too. He sees that as ironic.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes. Especially because, again, the Jewish liturgical context, he describes this as preparation day. He uses that language. Well, what is preparation day? Well, it’s the day you kill the Passover lamb, and then you smear the blood on the doorposts. And so, if the crowd’s clamoring for the blood of Jesus to be on them and their children, and it’s smeared on the wood of the cross, they’re asking for the Passover lamb.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
That’s not a reason to curse anybody. It’s like, read Exodus, and this story makes so much more sense. In other words…
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. I see what you’re saying.
Joe Heschmeyer:
… the problem with people reading the Gospel of John in antisemitic ways, they’re missing the entire Jewish meaning of the Gospel of John.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Okay. Let me just throw a 1960s analogy out and see what you think. In a certain point, I could have said the Americans illegally bombed Cambodia, or I could have said Washington illegally bombed, and I would’ve known you’re talking about the exact same thing. Washington are the Americans.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I was actually thinking of just something very similar. I was listening to Warren Zivon talking about America invading Mexico with the Siege of Veracruz, and he’s an American. So you don’t think, “Oh, I bet this guy hates all gringos.” Obviously, you listen to those words with a different understanding when you realize that it’s someone in a group saying “the Americans.” Americans saying, “The Americans did such and such,” means American leadership, the powers that be, and contextually, anyone picks that up.
Cy Kellett:
When John says “the Jews,” would you…
Joe Heschmeyer:
He is a Jew. This is a critical detail.
Cy Kellett:
But here’s another critical detail. He’s not a Jew from Jerusalem. He’s a Jew from the Galilee. Okay? So, is there any possibility that what’s being expressed here in the Gospel of John is the sense of peripheral Jews from the Galilee? Because you can see it all through John’s gospel. The people from the Galilee, they stand out compared to the people from…
Joe Heschmeyer:
They got a weird accent.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. They’re different in all the gospels. In John’s mind, when he’s saying the Jews, he’s talking about, like, if I were to say Washington has got another tax. Do you see what I’m saying? He’s talking about…
Joe Heschmeyer:
I do. I think you can… But even there, when you say Washington, you don’t mean even all the people of Washington, DC.
Cy Kellett:
No.
Joe Heschmeyer:
You mean the powerful elite. Now, you’re right that there’s a certain way people in the hinterlands talk about people in the center of power. But in this case, John actually has a familiarity with the centers of power. Remember, he’s able to go into the high priest courtyard because he knows.
Cy Kellett:
Right. I see what you’re saying.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So, even though he’s an outsider by birth, he knows the people he’s criticizing here. This is not…
Cy Kellett:
It’s very intimate.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It is very intimate.
Cy Kellett:
This is a very intimate… It’s almost a familial thing.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So, it’s very different than like a Nazi who’s never been friends with a Jew in his life saying, “Oh, the Jews, this, that, and the other,” when it’s just like a two-dimensional stereotype in their head. This is someone who is Jewish, who knows the high priest, saying a deep betrayal happened here.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Yeah. Okay. All right. That’s our travel down memory lane of the relationship. There’s high points and there’s low points. One of the things when you talk about, say, during the Crusades, the killing of Jews in Maines in… I don’t know how they say it in German. But in American we say Maines. Well, one of the things about that is they say they killed 10,000 Jews. Well, another part of that is there’s 10,000 Jews in Maines. When we think of the late medieval conflicts, well, we got to say, well, what happened that there’s hundreds of thousands of Jews and Christians living together in Northern Europe and all across Europe, that clearly there’s positives in this relationship as well. I’m not saying that to try to minimize… It really bothers me that in the 1920s and ’30s, Catholic kids were throwing rocks at synagogues and still do. And still do. I’m not trying to minimize that. I’m just saying that there’s a lot of untold positives in these relationships. There has to be.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely there are.
Cy Kellett:
Or we wouldn’t have lived together for a thousand years.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But I think… Let me go in a slightly different direction with that because I think one of the dangers, and I think I worry about this in some ways more as a universal problem than the specifics of anti-semitism or being anti-Judaic… By the way, the reason I distinguish that is anti-semitism, historically, is like a 19th century invention. It’s hating the Jews based on ethnicity or on blood, whereas a lot of…
Cy Kellett:
Racism is very modern. There’s a natural suspicion of the other in the human being, but [inaudible 00:29:03]
Joe Heschmeyer:
[inaudible 00:29:03] race as opposed to ethnicity.
Cy Kellett:
… racism is a very modern idea.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s a very loose kind of idea. The idea that pygmies and Ethiopians are all one people, it’s actually very simplistic. Even like, are Italians white? Ask someone a hundred years ago, and you’re going to get a different answer than you would today. The idea of race in general is a very loose… And usually it’s a very poor substitute for some other stand-in that’s a little more real: ethnicity being one thing, culture being one thing, that those ideas have a little more oomph to them where you can point to them a little more. The boundaries are porous. But there’s something there we can say there is a culture here; there is an ethnicity. When you try to define race, it’s loose.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, very loose. Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But all that’s to say, Leon Bloy called out anti-semitism.
Cy Kellett:
Who’s Leon Bloy?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Leon Bloy, 19th and 20th-century author. He was born in 1846, died in 1917. I discovered him through Pope Francis, who quoted him in his first homily as pope. Then the line he quoted was really shocking. It was, “Whoever doesn’t worship Christ, worships the devil.” And I thought, “Wow. That’s…”
Cy Kellett:
Wow. That’s stark.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. But Bloy actually was really a strong opponent of anti-semitism. He said, “Anti-semitism, a quite modern development, is the most horrible buffet that our Lord has received in his passion, which is still going on. It is the most outrageous and the most unpardonable because he receives it on the face of his mother and from Christian hands.”
Cy Kellett:
It’s a stunning quote.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Isn’t it?
Cy Kellett:
But it’s exactly right. If you want to hate Jews, you are going to hate Mary, the mother of Jesus. How far are we going with this?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. So, the other point I was going to make, this is tangential to that, but I gave that just to explain, anti-semitism is even a different history than anti-Judaism. But a lot of this is coming from the same place, particularly a lot of the anti-Jewish stuff, which is Christians and Jews lived alongside of each other for centuries and these Jews weren’t converting to Christianity. There are a lot of reasons for that.
But the easiest lie to tell yourself is, “Well, it’s not that I’m not converting; it’s not because of my bad example or my bad witness; it’s not for any of the positive things they’re finding in Judaism. It’s just because they’re bad people.” I mention this because I think we can do that. Maybe not the Jews. Maybe that’s not the group that you’re inclined to do that with. It can be “the liberals,” the non-Catholics, whatever, whoever it is, where you just say, “Oh yeah. Well, they are these two-dimensional villains. They are not like me, with an intellect and a will that’s drawn to truth and goodness. They’ve got a different composition,” and so now I can explain away why they haven’t converted.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. In a certain sense, there’s a certain pressure to explain the Jews because it’s a weird thing to say, Joe, but they’re so much Christians, that you have to explain them away or else that’s a threat to Christianity in a certain sense because they have beautiful families; they pray to the one God; they have a wonderful liturgical life. And you go, “Well, if I say that’s good, am I diminishing the uniqueness of Christianity?” I think there’s a little insecurity in it that comes with that.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well, I think we saw that on display when the Church did say, “Hey, here are all of these good things that are going on within Judaism.” A fair number of Catholics freaked out and said, “Why would you say Catholicism isn’t good?” It’s like, they didn’t say that. They didn’t. No one said Catholicism was bad. No one said Catholicism was incomplete, even, or that it didn’t have more. But just to acknowledge this good and this validity, it is a little bit of an insecurity. Again, I draw that back and say, when you realize your political opponent or the person of another political party or ethnicity or race… I mention political party just because I think that’s the main one today more than the ethnic stuff. But whatever your hatred, your animosity, your fear is, that move of admitting maybe they’ve got something right; maybe they’re onto something, is really worth exploring the insecurity there. It’s worth finding.
I was just talking with Todd, our editor here, that I find it very helpful to see figures that I like on issues I think they’re wrong because it lets me see them the way that people who disagree with them see them.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. And you can kind of practice…
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. You can see if they come off really haughtily, and you kind of reevaluate them because when someone’s being really smug and they agree with you, then you’re just like, “A-ha! They’re being really funny about it.”
Cy Kellett:
I know. “They nailed it!”
Joe Heschmeyer:
But when it’s on an issue you know they’re wrong… “Well, they’re actually more of a jerk than I realized.” Well, the flip side to that is…
Cy Kellett:
Which means I’m more of a jerk than I realize.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well, let’s not explore that part too deeply. But no, of course, that’s [inaudible 00:34:13]
Cy Kellett:
But that’s always case, right?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right. Yeah. You realize, “Maybe I come off that way as well.” There’s kind of a triumphalism really fun to be a part of that comes off terribly poorly because it’s very haughty. The flip side to that is to find the people with whom you disagree and find an issue on which you agree with them and see how they articulate it, and just allow yourself to agree with someone you maybe struggle with. It’s a concrete way to… If you want to call it loving your enemies, if you want to call it expanding your horizons, however you think of that, finding those things.
I bring that all back to this question of how we think of and treat the Jews. There are so many good things from a Christian perspective going on, and that was transparent for 2,000 years. But a lot of times Christians, close their eyes to that because there is, I think, an insecurity in acknowledging this person is a fellow human. This is another son of Adam. This is another I. This is a person who values many of the same things I do, and yet here we are disagreeing about this very important issue of Jesus.
Cy Kellett:
And you’re just going to have to sit with that, with whatever difficulty that gives you, because you can’t say that every good person is going to agree with me, even on the core of things. That’s just not how being a human being works. But we want it to work that way.
Joe Heschmeyer:
We do.
Cy Kellett:
We want that…
Joe Heschmeyer:
We do want it to work that way. And we want to make it very simplistic: You can find the good guys and the bad guys based on their views on whatever issue.
Cy Kellett:
I didn’t ask you about this, and I should have. In the history of anti-semitism among Christians, we didn’t talk about the person of Luther because he’s…
Joe Heschmeyer:
I thought about bringing a Luther and I thought that would look like a deflection. [inaudible 00:35:58]
Cy Kellett:
[inaudible 00:35:58] no, that’s fine.
Joe Heschmeyer:
No, no. We can [inaudible 00:36:00].
Cy Kellett:
But Luther was a virulent antisemite.
Joe Heschmeyer:
He wasn’t originally, though.
Cy Kellett:
Oh. He became…
Joe Heschmeyer:
I think he actually is a great embodiment of the thing I was talking about before. Early Luther is of the view that the reason the Jews still are Jewish, the reason they’re not Christian, is because Catholics have corrupted the gospel, that if they just heard the simple pure gospel, they would hear it and convert.
Cy Kellett:
Oh.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Now, that is a biblically ignorant…
Cy Kellett:
But what an interesting view, though.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It is an interesting view.
Cy Kellett:
But I never knew that he held that view. Okay.
Joe Heschmeyer:
After he proclaims Lutheranism…
Cy Kellett:
And they don’t.
Joe Heschmeyer:
… and they don’t convert, he then says, “Well, I guess it’s not that. I guess they’re just horrible people, so we should kill their rabbis, burn their synagogues to the ground.” He has all sorts of really terrifying solutions that the Nazis then seize upon. There really is a fairly clear line from Luther to the Third Reich. I mean, it’s not that simple, but the Nazis are claiming to be doing what Luther called for, and they’re promoting his work On the Jews and Their Lives, is the name of it, and it’s shockingly anti-Jewish. It is shockingly ugly. From someone who, not that long before, had been much better. Just zoom out and say the whole trajectory of Luther is he gets worse as he gets further from the Catholic Church. As a human being, he becomes worse and worse over his life. He is…
Cy Kellett:
I find that with myself, Joe.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Fair enough.
Cy Kellett:
Whenever I get farther away, the…
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. No, that’s true. But he becomes coarser. He becomes more offensive. He becomes more hateful. He is not growing in virtue in any discernible sense as he becomes more Protestant. Regardless of what one thinks about his theology, even the most passionate Lutheran just assessing the situation objectively would have to say…
Cy Kellett:
He grew bitter.
Joe Heschmeyer:
… Luther was just awful by the end of his life. Even other Lutherans like Melanchthon seem to be pushing away from him and distancing themselves from him.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. As you said, we don’t want to deflect. The truth is that the entirety of Christianity has a very complex and often negative history here. But I didn’t want to leave it out because it is connected to the Holocaust.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It is. Well, I think it also is…
Cy Kellett:
That’s not to blame Lutherans for the Holocaust or anything.
Joe Heschmeyer:
No. But I think in a lot of ways, Luther’s trajectory there is very understandable. You just think, oh, if only someone presented this argument, then that person would convert. And then it could be the Jews, it could be a atheist, it could be whoever. You just say, oh, if someone just presented it this way. I’ve got this amazing argument that’ll really persuade the person. And they don’t. And immediately, that sense of defeat can come with a really defensive, “Oh, they’re just a bad person.” Because if they didn’t listen to my argument and convert, that’s something wrong with them.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. I gave them the simple pure gospel and they rejected it.
Joe Heschmeyer:
There’s a hubris there. There’s a lack of understanding of the strange workings of grace. There’s a lot of things going on there that I would just say watch out for, because I think that’s one of the issues that has gone on historically in terms of Christian relations towards Jews. I think it’s something that happens in a wide variety of ways today.
Cy Kellett:
All right. I want to conclude just by asking you, what should I say to… I don’t want to focus on men here, but in my experience it’s young men. But it could very well be young women and I just haven’t listened well. But there’s a kind of machismo, a macho anti-semitism growing within the Catholic Church. It does have to do with the desire to be radically obedient, I think. It associates with traditions of the Church, lovely, beautiful traditions, simple traditions like women wearing veils or the praying of the rosary or whatever. But also traditions that might be traditions of men. Do you know what I’m saying? And among them, this anti-semitism.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Oh, I see. Yes.
Cy Kellett:
What do you say to the strong young man who wants to be manly in his Catholicism and he believes that that manliness requires a confrontation with the Jews?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I would say the great Christian insight in its confrontation with Rome was that humility wasn’t a vice, but a virtue; and that pride wasn’t a virtue, but a vice. If you go back and you look at Aristotle or the Romans, the Greeks before them, on virtue ethics, this is the one thing that the Greco-Roman world got wrong, is they thought of humility as bad and pride as good. They got a lot of other stuff right. They were right on the money about prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice, and the like.
Relatedly, there was the Roman virtue of magnanimity, being great-souled. In the Roman world, this was the person who is amazing and knows they’re amazing and they throw their power and influence and money around and they let the whole world see how great they are. Christians responded to that by saying, yes, magnanimity is a virtue. It is a virtue to be great-souled. But the example isn’t that guy, it’s the martyr who gives of himself completely, who lays his life down entirely.
Something like that is needed here, that Christian greatness is not being as hateful as possible towards the Jews or towards anyone. It’s of totally laying your life down. True machismo, if you want to call it that, true manliness, true virtus, virtue, is this radical self-emptying that Christ exhibits.
There was a line. I believe it was Mark Driscoll, the megachurch pastor who was up in Seattle. If it wasn’t him, I apologize. It was someone who was in that camp, who was kind of this mega-churchy…
Cy Kellett:
Someone macho.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Macho. Macho. Well, it’s kind of this mega-churchy, but macho evangelicalism.
Cy Kellett:
Gotcha.
Joe Heschmeyer:
He said he didn’t want to worship any Jesus he could beat up.
Cy Kellett:
Wow. Neither did the Romans.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s just like… Yeah. Well, I just thought like, wait till you hear about the scourging at the pillar.
Cy Kellett:
Good Lord.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s like the whole point of Jesus is you can beat him up. The whole point of Jesus is that he allows himself to be trampled upon. I read someone who was attacking the Eucharist by saying, “What a wee God, that he can be stepped on in the Eucharist, has to be covered with a humeral veil in the rain.” It was like, “Well, wait till you meet Jesus in the manger.” This is a God who delights in weakness. If you get that about God, then this really edgy, hateful, whatever attitude towards the Jews is just ridiculous. It’s trying to pick up your sword when Jesus says lay it down. Do that instead, would be my counsel to anyone who’s drawn in that direction.
Cy Kellett:
Joe Heschmeyer, thank you very much.
Joe Heschmeyer:
My pleasure.
Cy Kellett:
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I am Cy Kellett, your host. Thanks so much for being with us. We’ll see you next time, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.