In last month’s Kol Emunah, I gave an account of the radical change of Christian attitudes regarding Jews and Judaism. Over the past fifty years most churches have completely re-thought their ancient teachings about us and our faith. For two thousand years Christians held that the Jews, by not accepting Jesus as messiah, had forfeited their claim to be “the people of God,” and had been replaced in that role by the church, the “new Israel”, the “new people of God.” In order to regain divine favor Jews would have to accept Jesus as messiah and convert to Christianity. But all that has changed. While some evangelical churches still hold to the old attitudes, the Roman Catholic Church and the mainline Protestant churches have completely repudiated their traditional teachings on this subject.

Continue reading →

The relationship between Judaism and Christianity has undergone more radical change over the last half century than in the two thousand years that came before. Since the emergence of Christianity out of Judaism, the two faiths had been content to define themselves in opposition to each other, a situation hardly conducive to mutual understanding.

When a new religion emerges from an older one, it will tend to compare itself to the worst in its predecessor. After all, if the old faith had been adequate, why would a new one be needed? But Christianity adopted an extreme version of this practice, incorporating Jews and Judaism as the dark side, the villains of its world view. According to Christian teaching, the Jews had not merely failed to recognize their own messiah when he arrived, they had actively rejected and killed him, and were thus guilty of the singular and unsurpassable crime of deicide. This toxic theory was promulgated for two millennia, exploding in an orgy of anti-Jewish violence in the medieval Crusades and laying the groundwork for the Holocaust in our day.

Continue reading →