Jewish hostility to Christians: the prejudice no one ever writes about

[joeymaclover]

Damian Thompson
Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a journalist specialising in religion. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret". He is on Twitter as HolySmoke.
Jewish hostility to Christians: the prejudice no one ever writes about


The case of the Oxford lecturer in Jewish studies who says she was sacked after she converted to Christianity  has thrown a spotlight on to an acutely sensitive subject. I have no idea whether Dr Tali Argov was treated unfairly – that's for the employment tribunal to decide – but let's not pretend that Jews who become Christians don't face intense disapproval from their own community.

Christian anti-Semitism, Muslim anti-Semitism, Christian Islamophobia, Muslim persecution of Christians – all of these are acceptable topics of debate. But not Jewish hostility to Christianity.

You can understand why Jews might dislike the Christian religion: not only does it deify a man, the ultimate blasphemy for pious Jews just as it is for pious Muslims, but it's also implicated in centuries of anti-Semitism. (I think its role in inspiring the Holocaust has been exaggerated, but that's an argument for another day.)

Sometimes Jewish antipathy to Christianity spills over into hostility towards Christians. There was a piece in the Independent the other day by Christina Patterson that went way over the top in describing the rudeness of Stamford Hill's ultra-Orthodox Jews towards gentiles:

    When I moved to Stamford Hill, 12 years ago, I didn't realise that goyim were about as welcome in the Hasidic Jewish shops as Martin Luther King at a Ku Klux Klan convention. I didn't realise that a purchase by a goy was a crime to be punished with monosyllabic terseness, or that bus seats were a potential source of contamination, or that road signs, and parking restrictions, were for people who hadn't been chosen by God. And while none of this is a source of anything much more than irritation, when I see an eight-year-old boy recoiling from a normal-looking woman (because, presumably, he has been taught that she is dirty or dangerous, or, heaven forbid, dripping with menstrual blood) it makes me sad.

Stephen Pollard, the brilliant editor of the Jewish Chronicle, described this as "pure, unrelenting unadulterated anti-Jewish bigotry," on the part of Ms Patterson and indeed some of its undertones are disturbing. But monosyllabic terseness towards goyim? I've experienced it, and it's maddening. Let me recommend a gripping book called Postville by the secular Jewish journalist Stephen Bloom, who records the extreme bad manners of Lubavitch Jews who moved en masse to a town in rural Iowa to run a huge kosher butchery. In the end, angry Christian townspeople, who had initially been welcoming, voted to annexe the land on which the factory was built, so they could tax and regulate it. Bloom, who felt the Lubavitchers had displayed "despicable" attitudes verging on racism, supported the move.

Jewish hostility towards Christians isn't confined to the ultra-Orthodox. A woman friend of mine tutored the daughter of a Jewish couple in north London. When she said she wanted to take a break for Christmas, the wife went bananas. "We do not allow that word to be spoken in this house," she said. An unrepresentative incident, no doubt; but my friend's attitude towards Judaism changed after it took place. And I could tell other stories, of unbelievable haughtiness by the leaders of Anglo-Jewry, which would have led to diplomatic incidents if the Christians involved weren't afraid of being accused of anti-Semitism.

I suppose I'm afraid of that, too, which is why I'm going to point out the following. This blog has often highlighted the alarming growth of Islamic anti-Jewish rhetoric, much of it flavoured by the propaganda of the Third Reich. I've drawn attention to the case of Baroness Tonge, the appalling Lib Dem peer who has called for an inquiry into allegations of Jewish organ-harvesting (and who still takes the party whip). I warned in advance that the Vatican was doing a stupid thing by lifting the excommunication of the Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson of the SSPX.

But until now I've never written a word about Jewish prejudice against Christians, even though I've seen it at close hand, at a series of Jewish-run conferences I attended in America in the 1990s at which evangelical Christian believers were stereotyped as fanatics who needed only the right demagogue to turn them into murderous anti-Semites. If the conferences were being held now, I suspect most of the flak would be taken by Catholics.

It would be interesting read a book on anti-Christian sentiment among modern Jews, including Jewish historians who invest heavily in the notion of Christian or gentile collective guilt for crimes committed by others. But such a book would have to come from the perspective of someone without an axe to grind (ie, not one of the anti-Semitic nutcases who are such a depressing presence in the blogosphere). And something tells me it will never be written.


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