Paul E. Grosser - Anti-Semitism: The Causes and Effects of a Prejudice

Distribution of Jewish Population Circa 50 A. D.

The Causes and Effects of a Prejudice

Paul E. Grosser and Edwin G. Halperin

TO THE VICTIMS OF ANTI-SEMITISMJEWS AND CHRISTIANS

In the early days of World War II, as a war correspondent accompanying the German Army on its sweep through Eastern Europefrom Poland to Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and GreeceI saw at close hand what the Nazis were doing to Jews. Then came the night when Alex Coler, editor of the leading Rumanian daily newspaper, appeared at my villa on the edge of Bucharest Rumania and asked for sanctuary for himself, his wife and daughter, because, he said, his Christian friend had alerted him that the Rumanian Iron Guard was planning a pogrom that night and that his name was on the list.

After turning over the master bedroom to the Colers I sat all night in the hallway reading a book, with a revolver in my lap. No one came. When the servants announced breakfast I unlocked the bedroom door and Alex went directly to the telephone. He returned trembling with rage.

While we slept in your bed they went through the Jewish quarter, rounded up three or four hundred Jewish men and women, loaded them into trucks, drove them to the abbatoir on the edge of town, stripped them naked, made them get down on all fours like animals, drove them up the inclined runway, at the top of which a member of the Legion of the Archangel Michael (the official name of the Rumania Fascist Party) cracked each one over the head with a mallet, then others hanged the dripping corpses on hooks around the wall, as if they were the carcasses of animals, and then, as a last macabre touch, they stamped each one with a rubber stamp, Kosher.

After a moment of chilling silence, Alex Coler apologized for troubling me with such a grim report and suggested we now have breakfast.

Of course no one ate. As we sat in silence staring down at our plates I did more thinking than I had ever done before. My people (for I had been born a Christian) were responsible. Hitler and Mussolini at the time of their death were Catholics in good standing. Protestant chaplains were attached to the German Army. My namesake, St. John the Evangelist, one of the twelve disciples of Christ, had given great aid, comfort and encouragement to anti-Semities by his utterances and his writings.

These people called Jews for twenty centuries had suffered indignities, persecution, terror, catastrophe, which now, in Europe, was coming to a frightful crescendo, inspired by the maniacal rantings of a onetime Austrian Army corporal.

That morning in Bucharest Rumania I also acquired a deep-seated interest in the causes and possible cures of anti-Semitism. During the intervening thirty-five years I have read everything I could find on the subject. And written a bit on the subject, too. Recently I met the authors of this volume and was given the privilege of reading their manuscript. For me they have made the history of anti-Semitism clearer than anything else that has come my way.

This is truly a history of a hatred. The worst hatred that has ever plagued the world. The most persistent hatred. The most virulent hatred. Organized chronologically, it traces a pattern, from the Roman Period, through the Dark Ages, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Reformation, and the Twentieth Century. By throwing a spotlight, year by year, decade by decade, century by century, on the outbreaks of anti-Semitism, it shows how and where and when the disease has spread, has been temporarily brought under control, and then, suddenly, in some far part of the world, has become endemic again.

The authors have also provided us with a brilliant survey of the causes of this dread disease and in their chapter entitled Conclusions they theorize as to how Judaism and Jews have been able to survive the thousands of years of malignity and persecution and they express a certain hope for the future.

Scholars and historians will be grateful to Paul Grosser and Edwin Halperin for giving them a reference work that will save them much labor. The average Jew, who has suffered anti-Semitism without, perhaps, knowing its full history, will learn much from this volume. Christians should especially benefit, for among us are many, I know, who, once made acutely aware of the long list of crimes that have been committed in the name of religion, will wish to find ways to atoneor at least to do their part in helping wipe out the dreadful disease.

Robert St. John,

Washington, D.C.

April 2, 1977

For long centuries the rabbis taught: if the gentiles had understood the meaning of the destruction of the Temple, they would have mourned it more than the Jews. Today a parallel interpretation is growing up about another massive event: if the Christians were to understand the meaning of the Holocaust, they would mourn it more than the Jews.

The Holocaust was, of course, the bitter fruit of long centuries of Christian teaching about the Jewish people. From the time of the gentile Church Fathers and the legal establishment of a triumphant ecclesiastical and philosophical control system with Constantine the Great, Christendom treated the Jewish people with contempt and taught contemptuously of them. Precisely, in the statics of a triumphalist power structure called Christian, the baptized gentiles succumbed to that wrongheadedness against which Paul had warned: they turned in jealousy and envy against the very root that bore them (Rom. 11:18). Until the modern period, throughout the long centuries when ecclesiastical and political power brokers used a monolithic misinterpretation of Christian truth to justify their policies, dissenters were savagely persecuted and the Jewish people maligned, lied about, and consigned to destruction. In the modern period the logic of this false teaching and false position was worked out in Hitlers final solution to the Jewish problem.

In the shadow of this formative event, a new generation of Christian teachers is arising that is calling co-believers to a right relationship to the Jewish people. During the first great time of testing, the Holocaust, most of the Christian leaders and the masses of the baptized flunked their exams. It remains yet to be seen whether in the second time of testingthe foundation and achieving security of the state of Israel, the Christians will have learned their lessons. In any case, the survival of the Jewish people is the litmus test of authenticity for Christianity.

There were some teachers who did not succumb to the lust for power, expressed in persecution of dissenters and repression and murder of Jews. In the following pages they stand out like flickering lights in a great darkness. If the question is raised, why so many pages of darkness should be published, the answer lies in the nature of pathology. Just as every good medical scholar has training in pathology, because the study of sickness and decay gives clues to health, so in looking toward a healthy relationship between Christians and Jews the study of pathological teachings and relationships is imperative. This book makes available valuable material previously inaccessible to most teachers and students, and its authors deserve the warm thanks of all who are trying to straighten out their thoughts and actions to a healthier pattern of human reconciliation and brotherhood.