The Ancient Jewish Hatred of Christianity

Recently there has been something of an uproar around an incident where Orthodox Jews spat at Christians in Jerusalem. This has been a complaint of the Christian community in Israel. First, the recent incidents.

From AP:

A video that shows ultra-Orthodox Jews spitting on the ground beside a procession of foreign Christian worshipers carrying a wooden cross in the holy city of Jerusalem has ignited intense outrage and a flurry of condemnation in the Holy Land.

The spitting incident, which the city’s minority Christian community lamented as the latest in an alarming surge of religiously motivated attacks, drew rare outrage on Tuesday from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior officials.

Since Israel’s most conservative government in history came to power late last year, concerns have mounted among religious leaders — including the influential Vatican-appointed Latin Patriarch — over the increasing harassment of the region’s 2,000-year-old Christian community. …

“What happened with right-wing religious nationalism is that Jewish identity has been growing around anti-Christianity,” said Yisca Harani, a Christianity expert and founder of an Israeli hotline for anti-Christian assaults. “Even if the government doesn’t encourage it, they hint that there will be no sanctions.” …

Activists who have been documenting daily attacks against Christians in the Holy Land were taken aback by the sudden wave of government attention.

“Attacks against Christians have 100% increased this year, and not just spitting, but throwing stones and vandalizing signs,” said Harani, the expert.

“Excuse me,” she added, addressing Israeli authorities. “But where were you?”

From The Jerusalem Post:

“The custom of spitting near churches or monasteries is an ancient Jewish tradition,” far-right activist Elisha Yered wrote on Monday in response to a video of Orthodox Jews spitting on Christian pilgrims. …

“The custom of spitting near churches or monasteries is an ancient Jewish tradition,” far-right activist Elisha Yered wrote on Monday in response to a video of Orthodox Jews spitting on Christian pilgrims.

The former spokesperson for MK Limor Son Har-Melech, of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, said that there is an even a blessing that Jews are supposed to say when seeing a church: “Blessed is He who has patience for those who violate His will,” which Yered described as a “blessing that praises God for not immediately punishing idol worshipers for their wicked deeds.” …

 

[Maxim] Gorky himself remained a philosemite to the end, although in 1922 he complained that there were too many Jews in the government (Solzhenitsyn 2011.2002, Ch. 18); he also commented that

the reason for the current anti-Semitism in Russia is the tactlessness of the Jewish Bolsheviks. The Jewish Bolsheviks, not all of them but some irresponsible boys, are taking part in the defiling of the holy sites of the Russian people. They have turned churches into movie theaters and reading rooms without considering the feelings of the Russian people.” However, Gorky did not blame the Jews for this: “The fact that the Bolsheviks sent the Jews, the helpless and irresponsible Jewish youths, to do these things, does smack of provocation, of course. But the Jews should have refrained. (In Slezkine 2004, 186).

Solzhenitsyn (2011/2002, Ch. 17):

We have not forgotten how it looked at the height of the decade [1920s]: Russian patriotism was abolished forever. But the feelings of the people will not be forgotten. Not how it felt to see the Church of the Redeemer blown up by the engineer Dzhevalkin and that the main mover behind this was Kaganovich who wanted to destroy St. Basil’s cathedral as well. Russian Orthodoxy was publicly harassed by “warrior atheists” led by Gubelman-Yaroslavsky. It is truthfully noted: “That Jewish communists took part in the destruction of churches was particularly offensive. … No matter how offensive the participation of sons of Russian peasants in the persecution of the church, the part played by each non-Russian was even more offensive.”

Solzhenitsyn (2011/2002; Ch. 18) quotes an author, S.S. Maslov, who emigrated in 1922:

Maslov tries to understand “the cause of the widespread and bitter hatred of Jews in modern Russia” and it seems to him to be the “identification throughout society of Soviet power and Jewish power.”

“The expression ‘Yid Power’ is often used in Russia and particularly in Ukraine and in the former Pale of Settlement not as a polemic, but as a completely objective definition of power, its content and its politics.” “Soviet power in the first place answers the wishes and interests of Jews and they are its ardent supporters and in the second place, power resides in Jewish hands.”

Those who carried out the mass murder and dispossession of the Russian peasants saw themselves, at least in their public pronouncements, as doing what was necessary in pursuit of the greater good. This was the official view not only of the Soviet Union, where Jews formed a dominant elite, but also the “more or less official view” among Jewish intellectuals in the United States (Slezkine 2004, 215) and elsewhere. (It is still far more common for leftist intellectuals to bemoan McCarthyism than the horrors of the USSR; see below.)

It is for the sake of creating a perfect human being … that Levinson steels himself for doing what is “necessary,” including the requisitioning of a weeping farmer’s last pig and the killing of a wounded comrade too weak to be evacuated. … The greater the personal responsibility for acts ordinarily considered evil, the more visible the signs of election and the inner strength they bespoke. Demonic as well as Promethean, Bolshevik commissars “carried within them” the pain of historical necessity. (In Slezkine 2004, 194)

Levinson, a character in A. Fedeev’s The Rout (1926) (a prominent example of socialist realism in the early Soviet period) is not ideologically Jewish, “but there is little doubt that for reasons of both aesthetic and sociological verisimilitude, canonical Jewishness seemed an appropriate expression of the Bolshevik vision of disembodied consciousness triumphing over [peasant] inertia” (Slezkine 2004, 193). So it is not surprising that Gorky’s mild rebuke of Jewish anti-Christian zealotry was too much for Esther Frumkina, a leader of the Party’s Jewish section. Frumkina accused Gorky of attacking “Jewish Communists for their selfless struggle against darkness and fanaticism” (Ibid., 187). In their self-perceptions, Jews are selflessly altruistic even when acting out ancient hatreds.