The Community Security Trust (CST) reported the largest upturn in anti-Semitic incidents in England since 1984 during May and June 2021. Some of these incidents featured as threats on social media. Others involved physical assaults against Jewish people on the street, or intimidation, such as a convoy of cars driving in northwest London with Palestinian flags draped over their bonnets. Crowds in the street shouted: ‘Kill the Jews’.
My ‘Anti-Semitism’ file is filled with articles and newspaper clippings, with new incidents being reported daily. One headline read: ‘Anti-Semitic attacks doubled’ (a report of violent attacks against the Jewish community in the United States, which included vandalism and harassment). In another article, originating from Oswiecim in Poland, the writer quoted the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, who explained: ‘It’s the same old story with some different words.’ He said: ‘There is no difference between hatred of Israel and hatred for Jews’. ¹ The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights found that two out of every three Jews in Europe say that anti-Semitism is a problem, with nearly 60% having heard or seen someone claim that the Holocaust was either a myth or an exaggeration, while almost two-thirds of Jews who were violently assaulted were too afraid to report these crimes to local authorities. A Time magazine article related the story of a: ‘note jammed onto a windshield in Sweden’ that read: ‘We are watching you, you Jewish swine’. ² The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement campaign against Israel has stoked hatred against Israel and the Jews. Germany of the 1930s looms in the corporate memories of many people.
As believers, we must ask: What can a Christian today learn from the life of a brilliant young German theologian who paid the ultimate price for speaking Truth to Power during the darkest 2days of the 20th century? Errant theologies based on human philosophies, a false sense of patriotism and a commitment to volkisch nationalism resulted in the majority of German Church leaders succumbing to the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the Nazi regime. Where are the parallels in today’s current worldwide rise of anti-Semitism in the midst of a Western culture inundated with secular humanism and materialism?
‘The most efficient government on earth is that of an absolute and unrestricted despotism’, the author Manion wrote only five years after the Allies’ defeat of Hitler’s Germany. He continued: ‘In their own experience they had discovered that the God-given liberty of the individual citizen inevitably withers and disappears under the tender ministrations of an unrestricted government’.³ There is a threat to freedom of religion and freedom of speech at stake in many places today - if these freedoms have not already been removed or never attained because of dictatorships and tyrannical governments.
The Manion book was published only five years after the Allies’ defeat of Germany’s Third Reich. The knowledge of the Jew hatred that resulted in the death of a third of European Jewry left a raw and open sore in the collective memory of the world. The courage of the Church to speak against the anti-God philosophies led by dictators such as Hitler, Hirohito and Stalin had failed. Following World War II, the cry went up: ‘Never again’. Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic philosopher wrote: ‘It is when they obey the spirit of the world, not the spirit of Christianity, that Christians can be anti-Semitic . . . . AntiSemitism today is no longer one of the accidental weeds growing in a temporal Christendom intermixed with good and evil, but it is rather a disease of the spirit contaminating Christians’. ⁴
Today we enter the third decade of the 21st century, with swastikas desecrating Jewish cemeteries, synagogue attenders in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania being murdered while gathered for a Shabbat service and a general rise in Jew hatred ⁵ worldwide. The story of the young theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his stand on biblical principles in the face of Nazi atrocities cannot be left on dusty shelves just because he died almost 100 years ago. His story is as fresh as this morning’s headlines.
Is the Church today not facing a similar challenge? Are we not called, as Bonhoeffer was, to examine the scriptures in order to arrive at answers in today’s Western culture, which is rife with secular materialism and blatant anti-Semitism? Have we reached out to the Jewish community leaders where we live to say: ‘We see trouble coming, and we are standing with you’? Are we prepared to defend the Jewish people – whether believers or not yet believers – and let them know that they are not alone in the current tide of Jew hatred in the world? May the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob lead us to bless His people in our day.
Dr Theresa Newell July 2021