Antisemitism, Deicide, and Revolution

One hundred years ago my wife’s uncle owned a small shop in Slovakia. He and his family were among the 90 Jewish families that lived in the largely Catholic village of Zborov. Every year during Holy Week (the week preceding Easter Sunday) he had to close and board up the shop because it was a common practice for the Catholic neighbors to attack and sometimes burn down Jewish property. The perpetrators rationalized their violent antisemitic behavior as just punishment for the Jewish people who crucified Jesus 1,900 years earlier. This mythical collective guilt was normative Catholic theology for more than 1,500 years. During the long painful experience of Jews in Christian Europe, no idea was more responsible for the humiliation, persecution, and murder of Jews than this toxic charge of deicide

Easter is approaching, antisemitism is reaching tsunami proportions, and some of it still emanates from self-identified Catholics. Tik-Tok, X, YouTube, and Instagram provide convenient platforms for personalities like Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and Carrie Prejean Boller, all of whom parade their Catholic bona fides to justify their noxious rants about Jews and Israel. Worse still, their public antisemitism has boosted their popularity: They now have almost 9 million followers. Being publicly antisemitic is now chic and profitable. Is anything “new under the sun”? Is Esau—the symbol of Christianity in rabbinic writings—indelibly programmed to hate Isaac for all time?

Yet we no longer live in the Middle Ages—or even in the Slovakia of 100 years ago. Many Jews are oblivious to the fact that the Catholic Church has changed its teachings about Jews and Judaism in a fundamental way. After the Holocaust the Church began to realize where its anti-Jewish teachings led, and it came to grips with its past. Nearly all the bishops at the Second Vatican Council in the 1960’s approved Nostra Aetate, a magisterial document that rejected any teaching that blames the Jewish people for deicide, condemned “any hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone,” asserted that the covenant between God and the Jewish people is still alive and valid, acknowledged that Jesus was Jewish and that Christianity “draws sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree”—that is, Judaism. All these salutary beliefs now have the highest authority in the Catholic Church. Nor is Nostra Aetate a one-off: Since the Council, the Vatican has published four subsequent major documents emphasizing correct Catholic teachings regarding fraternal Catholic beliefs about Jews and Jewish-Christian relations. And in 1993 the Holy See established diplomatic relations with the Jewish State of Israel. So fundamental is this sweeping change toward Judaism and the Jewish people that historians have dubbed it “the Copernican revolution in Christianity.” This dramatic step is a sincere spiritual act of heshbon ha-nefesh (soul searching) and repentance.     

All of which leads us back to today’s Catholic antisemites. Realizing the dangers of rising antisemitism and responding to those who hate Jews in the name of the Catholic faith, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) did a remarkable thing: The USCCB issued a memorandum to all American Catholic bishops urging them to prepare their teachings carefully during this Easter period and ensure that they accurately present the Church’s positive teachings about Jews. Citing authoritative Vatican documents, the memo detailed these teachings as (1) “the Jews” didn’t kill Jesus, (2) God’s covenant with the Jewish people has not been revoked and continues, (3) Catholics should appreciate the Jewish People’s ties to the land of Israel, and (4) Catholics must recognize and combat antisemitism.

The USCCB also released a powerful video by Archbishop Alexander Sample of Portland urging Catholics to reject the conspiracies and lies against the Jewish people and noting that Jews are by far the most targeted group of religious prejudice in America.

Clearly, the Catholic Bishops are not content to rely on official theological pronouncements from Rome, which unfortunately only a few Catholics study. The Bishops understand that the moral imperative of the day is to be active and teach all Catholics—clergy and lay alike—to reject and combat antisemitism. They feel obligated to dispel the hate spread by the populist faux Catholic hucksters like Fuentes, Owens and Prejean Boller. As Pope Francis said many times, “A true Christian cannot be an antisemite.”

There is a lesson for Jews in all this, at this time of rising hatred toward, attacks on, and naked vulnerability of our people. We no longer live in the Middle Ages, when Christians more often than not wanted to convert us or kill us. Jews have agency and we are not alone.  We have allies in faithful Catholics, and it behooves us to understand, appreciate, and partner with these friends in fighting the antisemitism, the hatred, and the violence that are so pervasive today. Surely we will be more successful when we fight evil together rather than fighting it separately.

If we cannot realize Agnon’s miraculous transformation of turning “enemies into ones who love us,” we certainly can strive to become partners with Christians who in the past rejected our people and our faith but today seek to understand, defend, and support Jews, Israel, and Judaism.    

Eugene Korn holds Orthodox rabbinic ordination and earned a PhD. moral philosophy from Columbia University. He is the former Director of Interfaith Affairs at ADL and Executive Director of the Center for Catholic-Jewish Understanding at Sacred Heart University. His recent books are “To Be a Holy People: Jewish Tradition and Ethical Values” and “Israel and the Nations: The Bible, the Rabbis and Jewish-Gentile Relations.” Rabbi Dr. Korn lives in Jerusalem.