The True Face of Anti-Semitism

In “Veni Creator,” his lyric address to the Holy Spirit, Czeslaw Milosz reminds God of a couple of things, basic facts which, of course, God already knows: 

I am only a man: I need visible signs.
I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.  

It probably never occurred to one of Poland’s premier poets of the last century that his hunger for concrete connection might work both ways. God, too, may have need—in His humanity, that is—for sign making, for not wanting to bypass the body any more than the poet does. If the work of abstraction wearies Milosz, why should it not also weary God? In becoming one of us, God surely did not intend, in the words of another poet, Allen Tate, “to circumvent the image in the illusory pursuit of pure essence.” His immersion in the human condition was complete, total, lacking in nothing save sin. 

The enemy here is abstraction, the stairway of which is not worth building. Untethered from the real, it has nothing on which to rest. Like a door slammed against the sensible world, it can neither see, nor smell, nor taste, nor touch, nor hear. And so we shall have need of a very different staircase, one richly strewn with signs, if we are to ascend to God. He, of course, will have recourse to the same staircase in His descent to us. He’ll be moving in the opposite direction, of course, thus allowing for any number of interesting human interactions along the way.

How does Heraclitus put it, writing five centuries before the Event of Christ came along to dramatize the truth of it? “The way up and the way down are one and the same.” So long as it’s a human way, with traffic moving both ways—you and I hoping to go up, God deciding to come down—neither of us need ever get unduly tired. The only difference, to be sure, is that we live and move from within the world’s body without anyone having asked us to inhabit it, while God has the unique advantage of freely electing to do so. 

To what end, then, has all this been done? The Creed of Nicaea is pretty plainspoken on the matter: “For us men and for our salvation,” it declares, “he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.” 

Yes, but exactly what sort of man did God become? To answer that, we shall need to know something of His mother. Who, then, was Mary? Well, that’s easy enough. She was a young Jewish girl, in the purity of whose womb the Holy Spirit conceived a Child we call the Son of God. “In the midst of barren, despairing mankind,” Joseph Ratzinger writes, “God has placed a new beginning which is not a product of human history but a gift from above.” Mary is that new beginning. “Spell Eva back and Ave shall you find,” exclaims the martyr-poet Robert Southwell. “The first began, the last undid the bind.”  

Which means, of course, that Jesus Christ was no less a Jew than His own mother. And He was surrounded on all sides by neighbors and relatives, who knew Him well enough to be astonished by all that would later be revealed, and who were themselves Jews. From which the obvious inference follows that He, too, must have possessed all the features characteristic of a male Semite living in first century Palestine. In fact, He must have looked much like his own Mother. Jesus Christ was no less a Jew than His own mother. And He was surrounded on all sides by neighbors and relatives, who knew Him well enough to be astonished by all that would later be revealed, and who were themselves Jews.Tweet This

Not to accept these facts, which are neither subtle nor negotiable, is to fall into a black hole of heresy. Such was the position taken by the Marcionites, who early on argued that we don’t really need the Old Testament so let’s just cut Christ off from His roots in Judaism. To uproot faith from the soil in which it was first planted, forgetting the People of the Book, dumping all the promises made to Israel by God, is an act of violence against God.   

Anti-Semitism, we need to remind ourselves, is a Christian heresy that has been around since the beginning and, like a bad penny, keeps showing up to inflict its poison upon the world. We see fresh evidence of its malice anytime we read today’s news or watch TV. Its virulence can be seen especially on university campuses where the pathology of hatred has taken hold of both students and their professors, while feckless administrators fail to do anything about it.

It is the worst sort of iconoclasm, for it is not just an assault upon Jews, who bear the image of God, but of God Himself, who bore the image of the Jew when He first came among us to suffer and to die. “How odd of God,” we are told, “to choose the Jew.” Odder still, one would think, is for God Himself to choose to become one. 

And once chosen, God does not sever the connection. “For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable,” writes St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans (11:29). Indeed, in his book on the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, which came out in 1961, several years before the conciliar statement on the Church’s relationship with Judaism, Hans Urs von Balthasar spoke of “the dazzling eschatological light that falls on Israel from the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans…”

How simple the connection appears when seeing who the first saints in the canon actually are, beginning with Mary and Joseph, Peter, Paul, and all the apostles who followed. They were all Jews, most emphatically so. It should not be the stuff of controversy, therefore, to learn that, as Pope Pius XI announced back in the 1930s, against the rising tide of racist ideology and the looming threat of the genocide to come: “Spiritually, we are all Semites.”   

So, who then is the supreme Semite, the very one on whom the malice of the Evil One, and his countless imitators, have directed their hatred? It is no less than Jesus the Jew, who became Lord and Redeemer of the entire human race.