The Reformers on the Restoration of the Jews

John Calvin

"I extend the word Israel to all the people of God, according to this meaning, ­When the Gentiles shall come in, the Jews also shall return from their defection to the obedience of faith; and thus shall be completed the salvation of the whole Israel of God, which must be gathered from both; and yet in such a way that the Jews shall obtain the first place, being as it were the first born in God's family.

...as Jews are the firstborn, what the Prophet declares must be fulfilled, especially in them: for that scripture calls all the people of God Israelites, it is to be ascribed to the pre-eminence of that nation, who God had preferred to all other nations...God distinctly claims for himself a certain seed, so that his redemption may be effectual in his elect and peculiar nation...God was not unmindful of the covenant which he had made with their fathers, and by which he testified that according to his eternal purpose he loved that nation: and this he confirms by this remarkable declaration, ­that the grace of the divine calling cannot be made void."

(see Calvin's Commentaries, Vol. XIX, Epistle to the Romans, Baker Book House, 1981, p. 434-440.)

Charles Hodge

"The second great event, which, according to the common faith of the Church, is to precede the second advent of Christ, is the national conversion of the Jews....that there is to be such a national conversion may be argued...from the original call and destination of that people. God called Abraham and promised that through him, and in his seed, all the nations of the earth should be blessed...A presumptive argument is drawn from the strange preservation of the Jews through so many centuries as a distinct people.

As the rejection of the Jews was not total, so neither is it final. First, God did not design to cast away his people entirely, but by their rejection, in the first place, to facilitate the progress of the gospel among the Gentiles, and ultimately to make the conversion of the Gentiles the means of converting the Jews...Because if the rejection of the Jews has been a source of blessing, much more will their restoration be the means of good...The restoration of the Jews to the privileges of God's people is included in the ancient predictions and promises made respecting them...The plan of God, therefore, contemplated the calling of the Gentiles, the temporary rejection and final restoration of the Jews...

The future restoration of the Jews is, in itself, a more probable event than the introduction of the Gentiles into the church of God. This, of course, supposes that God regarded the Jews, on account of their relation to him, with peculiar favor, and that there is still something in their relation to the ancient servants of God and his covenant with them, which causes them to be regarded with special interest. As men look upon the children of their early friends with kinder feelings than on the children of strangers, God refers to this fact to make us sensible that he still retains purposes of peculiar mercy towards his ancient people.

As the restoration of the Jews is not only a most desirable event, but one which God has determined to accomplish, Christians should keep it constantly in view even in their labors for the conversion of the Gentiles."

(Systematic Theology V.3, James Clark & Co. 1960, p. 805. and A Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Presb. Board of Pub., 1836, pp. 270-285 passim. Now Published by Banner of Truth Trust)

John Murray

"To the Jew first, and also to the Greek...It does not appear sufficient to regard this priority as that merely of time. In this text there is no suggestion to the effect that the priority is merely that of time. The implication appears to be rather that the power of God unto salvation through faith has primary relevance to the Jew, and the analogy of Scripture would indicate that this peculiar relevance to the Jew arises from the fact that the Jew had been chosen by God to be the recipient of the promise of the gospel and that to him were committed the oracles of God...the gospel is pre-eminently the gospel for the Jew.

While it is true that in respect of the privileges accruing from Christ's accomplishments there is now no longer Jew or Gentile and the Gentiles "are fellow-heirs, and fellow-members of the body, and fellow-partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel" (Eph. 3:6), yet it does not follow that Israel no longer fulfills any particular design in the realization of God's worldwide saving purpose...Israel are both "enemies" and "beloved" at the same time, enemies as regards the gospel, beloved as regards the election..."Beloved" thus means that God has not suspended or rescinded his relation to Israel as his chosen people in terms of the covenants made with their fathers.

Unfaithful as Israel have been and broken off for that reason, yet God still sustains his peculiar relation of love to them, a relation that will be demonstrated and vindicated in the restoration."

(The Epistle to the Romans, John Murray, Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1984, Vol. I, p. 28 and Vol. II pp. xiv-xv and 76-101, passim.)

Geerhardus Vos

"The elective principle, abolished as to nationality, continues in force as to individuals. And even with respect to national privilege, while temporarily abolished now that its purpose has been fulfilled, there still remains reserved for the future a certain fulfillment of the national elective promise. Israel in its racial capacity will again in the future be visited by the saving grace of God [Rom. 11.2, 12, 25]....

Nevertheless such (Jewish) conversions remain for the present but sporadic examples, though at bottom expressive of a divine principle intended to work itself out on the largest of scales at the predetermined point in the future....

To the events preceding the parousia belongs, according to the uniform teaching of Jesus, Peter, and Paul, the conversion of Israel (Matt. 23:39; Luke 13:35; Acts 1:6,7; 3:19, 21; where the arrival of "seasons of refreshing" and "times of restoration of all things" is made dependent on the [eschatological] sending of the Christ to Israel), and this again is said to depend upon the repentance and conversion and the blotting out of the sins of Israel; Romans 11, where the problem of unbelief of Israel is solved by the twofold proposition: (1) that there is even now among Israel an election according to grace; (2) that in the future there will be a comprehensive conversion of Israel (vss. 5, 25-32)."

(Biblical Theology, Old and New Testaments, (c)1948 Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., Tenth Printing, p. 79, The Pauline Eschatology, (c) 1979 Baker Book House, p. 88, and Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation, The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos, p. 35, edited by Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., (c) 1980, Presbyterian and Reformed Pub. Co.)

Jonathan Edwards

"Jewish infidelity shall be overthrown...the Jews in all their dispersions shall cast away their old infidelity, and shall have their hearts wonderfully changed, and abhor themselves for their past unbelief and obstinacy. They shall flow together to the blessed Jesus, penitently, humbly, and joyfully owning him as their glorious King and only Savior, and shall with all their hearts, as one heart and voice, declare his praises unto other nations...Nothing is more certainly foretold than this national conversion of the Jews in Rom. xi.

Besides the prophecies of the calling of the Jews, we have a remarkable providential seal of the fulfillment of this great event, by a kind of continual miracle, viz. their being preserved a distinct nation...the world affords nothing else like it. There is undoubtedly a remarkable hand of providence in it. When they shall be called, that ancient people, who alone were so long God's people for so long a time, shall be his people again, never to be rejected more. They shall be gathered together into one fold, together with the Gentiles...."

(The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 1, Banner of Truth Trust, 1976, page 607.)

Matthew Henry

"Now two things he exhorts the Gentiles to, with reference to the rejected Jews: ­To have a respect for the Jews, notwithstanding, and to desire their conversion. This is intimated in the prospect he gives them of the advantage that would accrue to the church by their conversion, Rom. 11:12, 15. It would be as life from the dead; and therefore they must not insult or triumph over those poor Jews, but rather pity them, and desire their welfare, and long for the receiving of them in again.

Another thing that qualifies this doctrine of the Jews' rejection is that, though for the present they are cast off, yet the rejection is not final; but, when the fullness of time is come, they will be taken in again. They are not cast off for ever, but mercy is remembered in the midst of wrath.

The Jews are in a sense a holy nation (Exod. xix.6), being descended from holy parents. Now it cannot be imagined that such a holy nation should be totally and finally cast off. This proves that the seed of believers, as such, are within the pale of the visible church, and within the verge of the covenant, till they do, by their unbelief, throw themselves out; for, if the root be holy, so are the branches....Though grace does not run in the blood, yet external privileges do (till they are forfeited), even to a thousand generations...The Jewish branches are reckoned holy, because the root was so. This is expressed more plainly (Rom. 11:28).

The Chosen People: Chosen for What?

by Art Katz

As Jews, one thing that makes us recoil is being called “chosen.” It is something like the involuntary shudder that comes with the screech of chalk on a blackboard. After all, what has being chosen ever meant to us but trouble?

Better that the term had never been coined for all the good it has done us! Where does it come from anyway? Can’t we be left alone to live like other people without the ominous overtones that have always dogged us?Chosen for what? Why give to those who instinctively don’t like us yet further provocation and pretext for bitterness?

Perhaps you yourself, dear reader, are so reflecting even now. The litany of daily disasters with reports of suicide bombings and the increase of anti-Semitic episodes virtually everywhere in the world give us a heightened sense of dread. What will the end of all this be? Is this what it means to be a Jew? How long before we will be fearing for our children, or ourselves, that we will be singled out as Jews in the streets of America’s cities and suburbs?

Already, Jewish leaders in England, France and Germany are exhorting their communities to learn another language, pack their bags and prepare to move again! Is the answer to be more assertive, more insistent on our rights as citizens, demanding that public officials guarantee our safety? Or is it to be found in supporting Jewish organizations monitoring the activity of hate groups, who have access to policy makers in government and influence in the media?

In former times of distress, our more religious kinsmen would sigh, “When Messiah comes…” How plaintive, if not pathetic, to make that an appeal now! That frail expectation saved no one in the Holocaust? How much less now? Can even the Chasidim, who daily gather up into plastic bags the body parts and grisly, severed members of nail-torn bomb victims, sustain such a hope? What real defense do we have when America’s proudest commercial towers and, indeed, the very Pentagon itself are not exempt from attack? This vitriolic hatred, infecting even children, at first against “Zionists,” and now Jews in every place, threatens us all.

Chosen indeed! If there is a God, where is He now?

From the vantage point of our historic and present Jewish life, the evidence of a living God does seem painfully sparse. If there is such a God, how are we to interpret or understand His apparent, palpable absence? Perhaps from a biblical perspective, one might even suggest that He has a controversy with us, or has withdrawn His Presence, in proportion to our own indifference and alienation from Him. This is a supposition which the Scriptures, of which we have characteristically little knowledge or interest, seem to suggest.

The very first chapter of the Book of Proverbs sends the chilling message that “because we refused the call of wisdom, she will even laugh at our calamity and mock when dread comes upon us like a storm;” and it will be too late because: “they hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the Lord…But he who listens to me [wisdom] shall live securely, and shall be at ease from the dread of evil” (v.20-33).

By and large, are we not Torah indifferent, preferring to bury ourselves in literature of entirely other kinds, as in the copious folds of a Sunday Times and the like—all of which uniformly espouse views antagonistic to faith? The very idea of divine authorship, that is, Scripture actually inspired by God, is contrary and offensive to our incredulous, secular minds. We instantly, matter-of-factly and self-evidently dismiss it out of hand—no discussion necessary.

Though the Hebrew prophets proclaimed “Thus saith the Lord,” and Isaiah announced, in commencing his book, “The vision which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem,” we are persuaded, together with our more liberal rabbis, that such are altogether stylistic devices and quaint rhetoric peculiar to the Bible as literature.

A remarkably candid statement about this unbelief to which we have come is found in a recent article by conservative rabbi and scholar, Alan J.Yuter, Etz Hayim?—Torah For Our Times: Conservative Judaism’s Spiritual Response to Judaism’s Canon (Midstream, May/June 2002). Etz Hayim is the recently published Torah commentary by a panel of the best scholars and rabbis of Conservative Judaism. Yuter describes Etz Hayimas:

The most ambitious non-Orthodox Jewish Bible Commentary ever written for synagogue use in the history of Jewry, but framed in a modern world view that appropriates ancient ideas that are comfortably usable in modernity (p.21).

In commending this new work, Yuter informs us,

As modernists who reject pre-modern dogma, Conservative Judaism assumes that the Torah’s human language can, by definition, be no more than the work of human beings…creating stories that make religious statements. For Etz Hayim, the Torah is not history but pious, inspirational fiction…God as the hero of Scripture and as a mental and literary construct…God is no more than the power within us that makes for good, salvation, and redemption. There is thus a theological disconnect between the God of Hebrew Scripture, who “appears” as a real being in the Scriptural text, and the God idea of Etz Hayim’s elite community (p.19 Emphasis and italics ours, here and throughout).

He goes on to say,

For…Conservative Judaism, holiness and sanctification are a mental mood and not the consequence of obeying the Divine command…Etz Hayim exhibits intellectual integrity, but without the religious faith that the classical tradition mandates…The Torah informs but does not command the autonomous moral conscience of the modern liberal Jew…Its religion is not the religion of the Talmud or Bible, but a modern world view that appropriates ancient ideas that are comfortably usable in modernity (p.20, 21).

Evidently, autonomous man, in his mood and disposition, considers himself to be the measure of all things. This asserts the God of Israel to be a figment of Man’s imagination! It portrays the giants of our heritage as mere victims of delusion. What is staggering here is the “up-front” boldness, nay even a boasting, of these views. This is a proud, even arrogant, assertion of the primacy of man over God; of the superiority of an elite council of scholars whose intuited inspiration determines for us what is “comfortably usable” in modernity! As any even superficial assessment of Scripture will indicate—from the call of Abraham, the epochal suffering of Moses, to the Prophets and the Psalmists—not comfort, but obedience, if not sacrifice, has been the enduring motif of Biblical faith!

By making Man supreme, have we not laid ourselves open to assault on every side for the forfeiture of just that faith, inviting the very penalties of covenantal disobedience for which we were forewarned through Moses and the Prophets? How can we demand the protection of society from the anti-Semitic attacks that our own unbelief may have occasioned? Are we so thoroughly secularized as to be unable to see in our increasing calamities a divine cause? Can we not consider the fact that anti-Semitism pre-dates Christianity, and has haunted us in every place and time and nation as being perhaps the consequence of covenantal defection? Is it, in fact, the very evidence of that defection?

As Jews, the Chosen of God, the recipients of the tablets of the Law on Mt. Sinai, the descendants of the Patriarchs and heirs of the Prophets, should we not reasonably look first for an explanation for our distresses in a failed relationship with the God of our Fathers, before considering secular, social or political causes?

Are we aware of Moses’ warnings in the book of Deuteronomy (31:29; 32:18 and following) in regard to covenantal failure? If we will not heed God’s Word, must we not learn and be instructed, if it be true, through our bitter experience? As abiding as our distresses are, so evidently are the reality of God and the application of His word! What is this “modernity” to which all things must be submitted but the very golden calf of idolatry that has been our undoing from the very inception of our history as a people? Not only do we bow to it, but more so, are its creators and promulgators, corrupting others even as we ourselves are corrupted. Is this not perversely contradicting our call to be a “kingdom of priests” (Exodus 19:6) and a “light to the nations” (Isaiah 42:6)?

Every analysis and critique of “the Jewish predicament” will fall short if it does not factor in this inescapable call to the nations. Our purpose from the beginning was to be a witness of the One, True, Living God and Creator King to all the nations, and in all the nations. Ought we not to suffer proportionate retribution from that God for our willful failure?

If the biblical principle, “As the priests, so also the people” is valid, can’t we then say, as Israel goes, so go the nations? Is it for our failure as a priestly nation that some measure of resentment, even unconsciously, is kindled against us among the nations? Only a biblically-formed mind could conceivably think this way! Contrary and offensive though it might be to our norms of thought, could such a view be closer to God’s? Could we be held liable for our failure to align our thoughts with His? As we read in Isaiah 55,

For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, declares the Lord (v.8).

For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts (v.9).

Our unbelief reiterates to the world the mocking taunt of Satan in the Garden of Eden: “Hath God really said?”

If denying His truth distorts reality, perverts life and damages all the processes of living, what judgment could issue from a God, so misrepresented, upon that nation privileged to make Him known? Certainly, God’s continuing controversy with us, the Jewish people, is an index and a piece of His larger contention with all mankind; but the wider conflict likely awaits resolution first between God and “Israel, His son, His firstborn” (Exodus 4:22).

Can it be that our ‘effectual atheism,’ reflected in a liberally-oriented Judaism, springs from the absence of an actual experience of God by the Spirit? Or that our inability to experience God is, in itself, a judgment of God? A condition held for so long that it is now considered normative?

Those who reduce God to a “concept,” have no God personally whom they can seek. One experience of God, as God, dissolves all our doubts! How shall we ever be able to understand, as did the Patriarchs and Prophets of our own faith, that which alone has rightly driven our entire Hebrew past: the actual, experiential knowledge of God as God?

What alternative, then, in its absence, but to reduce the God, who is Israel’s glory, to no more than primitive anthropomorphisms, syncretism, and the influence of “other Near Eastern mythologies!” The passage of a people in flight from pursuing Egyptians, through a Red Sea opened by God, becomes the mere confluence of a movement of tides! Miracles are “explained,” and predictive prophecy, robbed of its revelatory power, is dismissed through ingenious alterations in time-line dating!

If we are offended by the super-natural, how then can God be God?

Hadn’t we better confront these issues on this side of eternity rather than on the other? Will we learn too late our God-rejecting error, when it will be unalterably fixed—eternally and without remedy? How shall we not be unspeakably ashamed for the triviality of a lifestyle that pores over stocks and bonds, or their equivalent, but omits the question of God Himself? For, as the Scriptures say,

The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God: God is not in all his thoughts. His ways are always grievous… (Psalm 10:4-5a).[1]

Such a disposition renders God a negligible object, making the knowledge of Him irrelevant.

The problem is pride, the unduly exalted opinion of one’s self!

A scholar of an earlier generation superbly comments on the above verses,

…[pride] is therefore impatient of a rival, hates a superior, and cannot endure a master. In proportion as it prevails in the heart, it makes us wish to see nothing above us, to acknowledge no law but our own wills, to follow no rule but our own inclinations. Thus it led Satan to rebel against his Creator, and our first parents to desire to be as gods. Since such are the effects of pride, such a Being as God, One who is infinitely powerful, just and holy, who can neither be resisted, deceived or deluded, who disposes according to his own sovereign pleasure, of all creatures and events, and who, in an especial manner, hates pride, and is determined to abase and punish it.

[Toward] such a Being, pride can contemplate only with a feeling of dread, aversion and abhorrence. It must look upon Him as its natural enemy…These truths torture the proud, unhumbled hearts of the wicked, and hence they hate that knowledge of God which teaches these truths, and will not seek it. On the contrary, they wish to remain ignorant of such a Being, and to banish all thoughts of Him from their minds. With this view they neglect, pervert, or explain away those passages of revelation which describes God’s true character, and endeavor to believe that He is altogether such a one as themselves.[2]

This commentator continues,

He [the unhumbled] never takes God or His will into consideration or consultation, to square and frame all accordingly, but proceeds and goes on in all as if there were no God to be consulted…no more than if He were no God; the thought of Him and His will sway him not. Such a God is not of their counsel, is not in the plot; nor is God in their purposes or advising; they do all without Him…all their thought is, that there is no God…[and] seeing there is no God or power above them to take notice of it, to regard or requite them, therefore they may be bold to go on.[3]

Hence, what issues from such an individual—and he is legion—is the inevitable contagion affecting all his conduct and life as the Scripture says, “His ways are always grievous.”

We have taken the liberty of inserting these lengthy quotes because they are so rare. Our own age is steeped in unbelief, so normative and unquestioned, as to taint the very air we breathe. To “seek after God” has rarely been commended to us. Indeed, who could do so? It would imply that there is a God who could be found, and who, being a Person, desires to be sought! Such a conviction would be enough to dismiss such an individual from polite society as clearly out of touch with “reality.”

Yet, is this not the very neglect of God that Israel’s own prophets have always protested to an unwilling nation? The covenant given at Mount Sinai, from which we have shrunk, is no icy piece of contractual formalism, but a covenant framed in love by the God who brought us out of Egypt, desiring to have us for His own:

Then Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain and said, “This is what you are to say to the house of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel: ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation’” (Exodus 19:3-6 NIV 4).

Pause for a moment and ponder this promise. By its very nature, it requires a vital knowledge and love of God to keep it, which is why He needs to be continually sought! Psalms 25:14 makes it clear that the fear of the Lord is the condition for having the covenant revealed to us. How great our need for the “new” or everlasting covenant spoken of in Jeremiah 31:31-33 and Ezekiel 36:26—a covenant promising “a new heart” and “a new spirit;” a covenant under which God declares that He will write His law on our hearts!

As our distresses mount, how much more should we seriously ponder the word of God in the Psalms, where we are told that:

The Lord is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble. Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek you (Psalm 9:9-10 NIV).

At the time that this is written, Israelis are building a wall of separation between themselves and the Palestinian population, penalizing entire families of suicide bombers, re-establishing tight Israeli Defense Force governance over the territories in a powerful and dangerous military build-up. May we suggest that perhaps we, as a nation, ought instead to consider GOD?

To “know His name” is not a technical formula. It is to experience God in His essential attributes, an intimacy only available to those who seek Him! Can it be that the frustrating helplessness of a besieged Israel is the urgent wake-up call of God to an essentially God-rejecting nation?—who, according to His promise, will not forsake those who put their trust in Him.

However horrific the means, can our increasing predicament be understood as a mercy to save us from yet worse catastrophe?

As the Scripture has already informed us, the same writer tells us that when every other appeal fails, God’s severity is yet His love!

If we read this verse [Psalm 9:10] literally, there is, no doubt, a glorious fullness of assurance in the names of God…The Lord may hide His face for a season from His people, but He never has utterly, finally, really, or angrily, forsaken them that seek him.[5]

Lest we assume that personal, ethical morality can substitute for a relationship with God, this writer terrifyingly makes clear:

The moral who are not devout, the honest who are not prayerful, the benevolent who are not believing, the amiable who are not converted, these must all have their portion with the openly wicked in the hell which is prepared for the devil and his angels…The forgetters of God are far more numerous than the profane or profligate, and according to the very forceful expression in the Hebrew, the nethermost hell will be the place into which all of them shall be hurled headlong.[6]

“The wicked will return to Sheol [hell], even all the nations who forget God,” declares Psalm 9:17. As our writer concludes,

Forgetfulness seems a small sin, but it brings eternal wrath upon the man who lives and dies in it.[7]

Such a willful forgetfulness is, as the Psalm says, wicked,

…for where the God of heaven is not, the lord of hell is reigning and raging; and if God not be in our thoughts, our thoughts will bring us to perdition.[8]

The same “wicked,” according to verse 3 of Psalm 10, bless “the covetous, whom the Lord abhors.” And covetousness, this root of idolatry, which the tenth commandment condemns, serves to dull the conscience against God. At its heart lies the desire for riches and material acquisition, the desire to unduly possess and to obtain. Every reasonable observer of contemporary Jewish life will acknowledge that this is more descriptive of us than the desire for God—and has even become our distinctive. Indeed, truth to tell, it is likely its substitute or alternative!

Our Rejection of God

If Scripture authenticates itself in the heart of every reader who loves and respects truth, must not our history as Jews reveal the tragic story of so cataclysmic a forfeiture as the rejection of God?

How far will this yet continuing rejection pursue us as misfortune, as the baleful reports of grisly tragedies in Israel, and rising anti-Semitism among the nations, now suggest? Losing our covenant consciousness as a people has not relieved us of its responsibilities, or its stated penalties. Moses included us, as with all previous generations of Jews, at Mt. Sinai:

Now not with you alone am I making this covenant and this oath [i.e., its blessings in obedience and its curses in failure], but both with those who stand here with us today in the presence of the Lord our God and with those who are not here with us today… (Deuteronomy 29:14-15).

According to Scripture, God yet waits for a future recognition from us that will come in the Last Days when we will rightly view our calamities in this covenantal context:

So it shall be when all of these things have come upon you, the blessing and the curse which I have set before you, and you call them to mind in all nations where the Lord your God has banished you, and you return to the Lord your God and obey Him with all your heart and soul according to all that I command you today, you and your sons, then the Lord your God will restore you from captivity, and have compassion upon you, and…will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, in order that you may live (Deuteronomy 30:1-3a, 6).

God’s rejection of us can be remedied only by our return to Him.

It is apparent, considering our present condition, that this “circumcision” of our hearts is yet future. What is not apparent to us, and far removed from our secular consciousness, is the recognition of this word as actually being God’s word. It shows that our disasters issue from a rejection of God, remedied only by our return to Him in genuine repentance! To this, virtually all the prophets testify:

For I will be like a lion to Ephraim, and like a young lion to the house of Judah. I, even I, will tear to pieces and go away, I will carry away, and there will be none to deliver. I will go and return to My place, until they acknowledge their guilt and seek My face; in their affliction they will earnestly seek Me (Hosea 5:14-15).

In the light of our predicament, are we now willing to look at that single most riveting Messianic prophecy, which gives every appearance of being rabbinically excluded, for obvious reasons, from all synagogue Haftorah readings: Isaiah 52:13-53:1-12? Should we not read it as if our life depended upon it?

Here are the words of the Prophet Isaiah:

Behold, My servant will prosper, he will be high and lifted up, and greatly exalted. Just as many were astonished at you, so his appearance was marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men. Thus he will sprinkle many nations, kings will shut their mouths on account of him; for what had not been told them they will see, and what they had not heard they will understand.

Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For he grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of parched ground; he has no stately form or majesty that we should look upon him, nor appearance that we should be attracted to him. He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and like one from whom men hide their face, he was despised, and we did not esteem him.

Surely our griefs he himself bore, and our sorrows he carried; yet we ourselves esteemed him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was pierced through for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the chastening for our well-being fell upon him, and by his scourging we are healed. All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; but the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him.

He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to slaughter, and like a sheep that is silent before its shearers, so he did not open his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away, and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, for the transgression of my people to whom the stroke was due? His grave was assigned with wicked men, yet he was with a rich man in his death, because he had done no violence, nor was there any deceit in his mouth.

But the Lord was pleased to crush him, putting him to grief; if he would render himself as a guilt offering, he will see his offspring, he will prolong his days, and the good pleasure of the Lord will prosper in his hand. As a result of the anguish of his soul, he will see it and be satisfied; by his knowledge the Righteous One, My Servant, will justify the many, as he will bear their iniquities. Therefore, I will allot him a portion with the great, and he will divide the booty with the strong; because he poured out Himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet He himself bore the sin of many, and interceded for the transgressors (Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12).

Of whom does this speak?

Jewish authorities have insisted that it describes the redemptive suffering of the Jewish nation itself. Certainly it is suggestive of much of our historical experience, and perhaps more ominously, that which is yet to come. But who is the “he” who is despised and forsaken of men, and the “we” who have hid our faces from him? Who is the “he” who bore “our” griefs, who was pierced through for “our” transgressions, crushed for “our” iniquities? Are we not the sheep who have gone astray, turning every one to our own way? Has not the Lord caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him?

Do consider that this prophecy was written seven centuries before the advent of the Galilean, Jesus of Nazareth, and even before the formation of the Roman Empire, whose distinctive execution through crucifixion this sufferer is evidently bearing (a look at Psalm 22 confirms this[9]). Surely, in Isaiah 53, it could not be said of us Jews that we “…had done no violence, nor was there any deceit in his [our] mouth,” since it was because of “the transgression of my people to whom the stroke was due” (v.8). Note the genius of the inspired Scriptures in that both the Prophets and the Psalms so plainly declare this event centuries before its time.

…when Thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall My Righteous Servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities…because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors (Isaiah 53.10b-12).[10]

He “shall be satisfied” evidently signals this servant’s life-after-death continuation! Indeed, everything hinges upon the resurrection of this Suffering Servant.

However unfamiliar this is to us, it is nevertheless, not “Christian,” or gentile per se, but indisputably and Hebraically Biblical!

The logic of what we have been saying so far brings us now to a place considered ‘out of bounds’ for us as Jews.

Could our difficulty be, not the consideration of what we think to be an alien, novel and “goyish” New Testament, but our failure to perceive what had preceded it, what had actually been foretold in our own Hebrew Scriptures? Having failed in the first, a failure that yet prevails, must we not necessarily fail in the other? The unbroken continuum of the two Testaments is lost to us because we have not adequately embraced the first!

Are we not still refusing, now as then, even to consider the exhortation of the despised Galilean to his rejecting contemporaries to search the Jewish Scriptures, of which he himself said, “it is these that bear witness of me” (John 5:39)? He declared that if we had believed Moses, we would believe him, for Moses wrote of him (John 5:46). Could it be that our mountingtzuris (trouble) is again a consequence of that very same stubborn inconsideration?

How may we now be better able to consider the unfamiliar opening statement of the Gospel of John:

For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus [the] Messiah (Christ in Greek, Y’Shua Ha Mashiach in Hebrew) (chap. 1:17).

Could it be that the Law’s demands, requiring our complete observance, and by that very process, is intended to bring us before God in an acknowledged, broken dependency? This recognition would necessarily then precede the enablement given by the same God as a “gift” (grace) to those few who seriously seek righteousness with God through the Law, but necessarily fail to obtain it. Therefore the New Testament says,

He came to his own, and those who were his own did not receive him. But as many as received him, to them he gave the right [authority] to become children [sons] of God, even to those who believe in his name (John 1:11-12).

Paul, the Jewish apostle, brilliantly explicates the connection between the Law given through Moses and the grace that came through Jesus, in his Letter to the Romans,

…in order that the requirement of the Law [Torah] might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh [a rules-guided, human determination to fulfill divine commandments],but according to the Spirit…and those who are in the flesh cannot please God (Romans 8:4,8).

For Paul, as for Jesus, the Law is holy and is not to be abrogated or annulled. Rather, Jesus says,

Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill (Matthew. 5:17).

Unhappily, much of historic Christianity has lost, rejected, or never understood, its continuity with its Hebrew roots. This, tragically, has served to discourage us as Jews from even considering the place of Jesus in our Jewish heritage.

What we would suggest now, though it flies in the face of our deepest Jewish prejudices, is that though the Church that historically bears his name has shamefully misrepresented him, the issue of this “messianic pretender” is, more than we are presently able to realize, the very issue of God. Life and death decided by one’s own disposition toward him!

Never has so much hung, then, on the recognition of a single person!

The recognition of these truths, as well as their fulfillment to us, waits upon a bestowal of God’s Spirit, Ruach, promised to us by the Prophets—the very medium of Divine revelation and empowerment for which our scholarly and rabbinical elites are an inadequate substitute! Therefore, Jesus mystified a sincerely inquiring Nicodemus, “a ruler of the Jews,” when he said,

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water [the Word of God] and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, but that which is born of the Spirit is spirit… You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things?” (John 3:5-6,10).

Likewise, Jesus astonished the congregation at his own synagogue in Nazareth by reading the appointed text for that Shabbat from Isaiah 61:1,

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He anointed me to preach the gospel [good news] to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are downtrodden, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord (Luke 4:18-19).

And he, astonishingly concluded by saying, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (v.21). With this, he proclaimed the very inauguration and authorization of his messianic call!

Consider, if you will, that if it is true, as he himself consistently affirmed,that he was “sent of the Father,” what must the consequence of his rejection be to a people who persist in rejecting him, as those to whom he was especially sent? What a slight to the Father whose voice, according to the record, came from heaven over the transfigured Messiah, “This is My beloved Son…hear ye him” (Matthew 17:5b). For what reason do we disclaim this account? Can this be a fulfillment of the inspired warning foretold us by Moses:

The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to him…and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. And it shall come about that whosoever shall not listen to My words which he shall speak in My name, I Myself will require it of him (Deuteronomy 18:15,18b-19)?

What blessed provision have we also spurned in persisting in that same refusal to consider him who said, “I came that they might have life, and might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10b)

What true Pesach (Passover) can we have if he is, as John the Baptist proclaimed by the banks of the Jordan River, “Behold the [Paschal] Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29b). Could John have been considering that:

…the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement (Leviticus 17:11).

If there is no blood shed to atone for our sins, what valid Yom Kippur, required by the Law, remains to us after the destruction of the Temple, Priesthood, and Sacrifices?

This being so, can rabbinically determined “mitzvot,” fasting, and a day’s Yom Kippur synagogue attendance, be an acceptable substitute in the sight of God? Or are these merely expediencies, conceived by well-meaning men, upon the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, which seemed to offer coherence and continuation for a now dispersed nation? In this, they also avoided the only other option, already chosen by tens of thousands of Jews, who understood the sacrificial death of Yeshua Ha Mashiach (Jesus the Christ) as God’s once-and-for-all Yom Kippur. These same alternatives confront us today!

Jesus grieved, both as Messiah and Prophet, foreseeing the consequences that would befall us in our rejection of him. He foresaw prophetically not only the destruction of the Temple and the dispersal of the nation, but also the tragic events that would pursue us into the Diaspora.

And when he [Jesus] approached, he saw the city [Jerusalem] and wept over it, saying,

If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace! But now they have been hidden from your eyes…and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation (Luke 19: 41-42,44b).

This was the historical and critical point of disjuncture and departure from Biblical, Messianic Judaism.

Either the crucified Messiah was the once-and-for-all Atonement to which the Biblical sacrifices had pointed, and for which purpose he said he had come, or the Jewish nation is left with the cruel dilemma of the Mosaic requirement rendered inoperable by the destruction of the Temple and the dispersal of the priesthood. This continues as an unresolved issue to this day.

Surely, then, the Jesus who warned of our being liable for every idle word we speak would not lightly exclaim,

…for unless you believe that I AM He, you shall die in your sins [i.e., without necessary atonement] (John 8:24b).

Foreseeing the unspeakable anguish of such loss, as well as the prospect of terror of an endless torment, the divinely instructed apostle Paul proclaims,

The wages of sin is death [eternal and irremediable separation from God], but the free gift of God is eternal life in Yeshua Ha Mashiach Adonoi [Jesus the Christ, our Lord] (Romans 6:23).

Why, dear reader, if you have patiently borne with us thus far, should younot consider these things? What perceivable error do you find to justify rejecting them? However relativistic one’s mindset, can God in His divine prerogative not insist upon a scandal of particularity centering in this One? What if that same One specifically fulfills the over 300 prophecies that speak of His birth, its time and location (Micah 5:2), and His suffering, rejection, death and resurrection (Isaiah 53), and His yet future and imminent return when, “…they will look upon me whom they have pierced” (Zechariah 12:10b)? And learn that “the wounds between Your hands” were “those with which I was wounded in the house of My friends” (Zechariah 13:6b)?[11]

The New Testament confirms these prophetic themes when it declares,

…these [things] have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name (John: 20:31).

Yes, we know that “Judaism does not believe” that God has a Son.[12] But with all due respect, may we ask, what is this Judaism? Is it some sacrosanct entity greater than God, or rather, a compendium of rabbinical opinion framed for two thousand years in conscious opposition to, and repudiation of, the messianic claims of Jesus?[13] Let us be sure we do not invoke “Judaism” to sidestep our obligation as menschen (responsible individuals) to consider issues of truth for which we are eternally liable.

Are we so persuaded that our traditions’ concept of God apprehends the full richness of biblical monotheism? What of a possible composite tri-unity, whose definition by men, must always be less than its ineffable glory? Might God not be One [Echad], even as we are, made in His image—body, soul and spirit—and yet be One?

Many of us who are formed in the Jewish tradition will have to consider the words of Him who was also the author of the renowned Sermon on the Mount: “Don’t you know me…even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father…and I and the Father are One” (John 14:9). He spoke repeatedly of having come from the Father, and that “He should depart out of this world to the Father…that He had come forth from God, and was going back to God” (John 13:1b, 3f). Ought this not to give one, as it has us, sufficient reason to re-examine one’s conception of God?

Without question, if these things are true, it will turn one’s world upside down. All our trusted categories, will necessarily be challenged. Except we be willing to bear that consequence, how shall our allegiance be ultimately tested in the foremost commandment to “love the Lord, our God, with all our heart, soul, mind and strength”?

Will you yourself not ask the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob about the crucial claims Jesus made for himself? Will you not choose to rise above that instinctive, historically-conditioned enmity to His name should they prove true? Scripture soberly informs us, “There is no other name under heaven that has been given among men, by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12b). Will you not trust and test the Word of God by acting upon it?

For as the Scripture says,

Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed. For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek [Gentile]: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him (Romans 10:11-12 AV).

Even the famous “doubting” Thomas, who said, “Unless I shall see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the place of His nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe” (John 20:25b), upon seeing the resurrected Christ, let out the astonished gasp, “My Lord and my God!” (v.28b)! Jesus, forsaking a once-and-for-all opportunity to squelch a preposterous and blasphemous exaggeration, acknowledged it as being perfectly appropriate to Himself, adding, “Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet have believed” (John 20:29b).

Someone wrote, “The climax of sin is that it crucified Jesus.” Think on it. We, a people, who have but a scant consciousness of sin (what need for atonement then?) ought to ponder that God, knowing how sin disguises itself, became Himself our victim, in order to reveal, as nothing else could, the inexorable truth of our condition! Is it not significant and revealing that the best of Roman Law, coupled with the best of Jewish piety, put to a cruel death the long-awaited object of our faith? Tragically, not only were we too blind to recognize Him, but as a nation were sufficiently offended and threatened by Him, making His removal by death a necessity! As the Scripture says, “Like one from whom men hide their faces He was despised, and we esteemed Him not” (Isaiah 53:3).

What person or nation can be absolved from such sin as this? If this be so, what passage of time can in any way mitigate our personal and corporate guilt? Our defiant declaration, “His [Jesus’] blood be on us and on our children” (Matthew 27:25), has haunted us throughout our history more than we can know.

If He be the Son of God, “very God and very Man,” as ancient creeds declare, we have committed an appalling sin. Not the sin of a failed moment’s error, mind you, but rather the summation of all sin, chronic and ages old, and repeated again in a Judaism that, to this day, prefersthe rulings of a rabbinical “elite,” and of “ideas comfortably usable in modernity.” Against this, ironically, stands the timeless Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4-6 that either defrocks Jesus as ultimate blasphemer, or shows Him to be the very One for whom, in the wisdom of God, the ancient creed was given! As our painful history testifies only too well, “Be assured your sins will find you out.” (Numbers 32:23).

Have we been the “Cain” to this “Abel”—moved to murderous envy of a “Son” of the Father more virtuous than we, whose greater, altogether righteous sacrifice, accepted by the Father, leaves our own sacrifice unaccepted and unacceptable? (Genesis 4). Ours, the inept product of our own sweat and industry; His, the ultimate, acceptable blood-sacrifice, satisfying the Holiness of God, which cannot be placated for the terror of sin by anything mankind can humanly or religiously provide!

Have we, like Cain, become fugitives and vagabonds in the earth, hidden from the face of God, marked, but all too often not spared? The comparison is altogether too close to be comfortable! Ought we not be stricken with sorrow, seeing our likeness to that first murderer? May we not bear, ever so remotely, any resemblance to Cain’s penalty! Better yet, “Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be delivered [saved]” (Joel 2:32a).

But what does it say? The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart, that is, the word of faith which we are preaching, that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved (Romans 10:8-10).

Thus, the Apostle Paul, Hebrew of the Hebrews, did not forsake his Jewishness. Nor do we, in proclaiming the good news of our Messiah,

For it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek (Romans 1:16b AV).

A Prayer:

Lord, grant mercy to me, the reader in this once-and-for-all moment. You know well how every power in the world, the flesh and the devil have conspired against You. Grant me, in this moment, a respite from all that has barred us, as Jews, from calling upon Your Name. Give me some measure of the same humility that You Yourself bore nakedly in that public shame on the Cross. Thank You for making this crisis of decision possible for me. In Yeshua’s holy, and till now, untried name, I ask it. Save me. Amen.

A Final Prophetic Consideration

Some may ask, why must there be a soon-coming “time of Jacob’s trouble,” as prophesied by Jeremiah (chapter 30:7)—a global anti-Semitism threatening to exceed even that of the Holocaust? Because, truth to tell, are we not still Jacob (“schemer”), and not yet Israel (“prince with God” Genesis 32)? Is there not a Man waiting with whom we must ourselves wrestle till daybreak—in a night that must come, and hastens even now? Are we not barred from full possession again of the Land of our fathers by the inveterate “Esau,” who would again have our life? Is there not a final drama of reconciliation with a vengeful brother, which we must play out first by confronting God in a Man?

But, like our father Jacob, whose heel-grasping nature we yet painfully retain, for all our success in the Diaspora, our “pillowed head” is once again upon a stone! And yet, God is in that place, however “dreadful” it be, and though we know it not, it is the gate to heaven! Pour oil upon that stone though you will, and promise the Jacob’s tenth though you will, it is but a token of the total consecration that alone makes of a Jacob anIsrael. Is it not for this that God waits?

He waits at that threshold of blessedness as the Man we have too long avoided. But there is no entry into that blessedness till we shall say like Jacob, “I will not let You go unless You bless me” (Genesis 32:26). It is this stubborn specificity of God, coming in the form of His own choosing, with which we must grapple! Only recognizing the face of God in thatscandalous Man breaks, and is calculated to break, our inveterate, self-determining, self-affirming Jacob-pride. Yeshua alone, face to face, turns us into the Israel of God!

So “send over all” that we have, divide our substance into two bands, devise every Jacob scheme that we will; it will not save us from the outraged brother who brings his “four hundred with him”! That Man, whom we have struggled so long to avoid—only His touch at the hip socket of our Jacob self-sufficiency, power and confidence can “cripple” us and make us, for the first time, a worshipping, lame supplicant at his Altar—the altar of El-Elohe-Israel!

Out of “a broken and contrite heart,” which He will not despise, issues the authentic, self-surrendering worship that transfigures Jacob the usurper into a servant-son—now rightly named Israel! (Psalm 51:17). Reconciled to God, as a son to his father, we will, with Him, overcome every enmity, however ancient and bitter.

All the object of our Jacob-striving propensity to obtain by our wit and cunning is, ironically, what God all along intended as our inheritance—had we but known Him as we ought, and received it in all humility at His hand! Break, break, O sons of Jacob. The Father of our fathers, the Ancient of Days, the Lord of Glory, the Savior of Israel awaits our worship. And till it come, what possession of our inheritance, what priestly service to “bless all the families of the earth,” (especially of the kin of Esau and Ishmael), can there be? (Genesis 12:3). Our neighbor, with whom we have striven, needs now to be blessed by an Israel that indeed is Israel, and who has at last admitted, and is blessed in the admittance, that,

Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord (Psalm 118:26a).

That blessedness is worth our every present travail. Do you recognize the press of God in the anti-Semitism raised once again to haunt us? Our false, secular and non-biblical hopes have not, and cannot, save us. The sins of our fathers, being also our own, pursue us in every generation, awaiting their acknowledgment and repentant forsaking (Leviticus 26:39-42). Our sins have required Him to turn His face from us for the “moment” but with abundant mercy will He receive and restore us and make us His own—to the everlasting praise of His glory.

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1. Authorized Version of the Bible (The King James Version). All other Scripture quotations are from the New American Standard Bible unless otherwise noted.
2. From Chas. H. Spurgeon’s The Treasury of David, Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, Mass., Vol.1, pp 117-118, A Commentary on the Psalms.
3. Ibid, p118.
4. “NIV” means The New International Version of the Bible
5. From Chas. H. Spurgeon’s The Treasury of David, Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, Mass., Vol.1, pp. 98-99
6. Ibid., pp.100-101
7. Ibid., p.101
8. Ibid., p.112
9. Consider the graphic details of death by crucifixion, astonishingly recorded a thousand years before the event, and described in Psalm 22.
10. Authorized Version of the Bible
11. (According to a literal rendering of the Masoretic text.)
12. This, in spite of the testimony of Psalm 2:7, “I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee;” Psalm 2:12, “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him;” and Proverbs 30:4, “Who hath ascended up into heaven, or descended? Who hath gathered the wind in his fists? Who hath bound the waters in a garment? Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son’s name, if thou canst tell?”
13. We are aware of, and deplore, the painful and forced confrontations to which our people have been subjected under “Christendom.” We appreciate the rabbinical defense of Judaism against the encroachment of what was rightly understood then as an apparent pagan idolatry. God forbid that this booklet be thus misconstrued as being in keeping with that ungodly coercion. Nevertheless, “God would have all men to be converted,” that is, to voluntarily and totally turn to Himself in spirit and in truth. Our effort here is to challenge and stir the reader to that consideration.

Three Addresses on the Jews

by Adolph Saphir
(Originally published in 1898)

"I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery." – Romans 11:25

It is the duty of every minister of Christ to explain the mystery of Israel. It is a part of our holy religion.

It belongs to the counsel of God. It is inseparably connected with the truth as it is in Jesus.

There can be no true and full preaching of the Gospel without explaining the mystery of Israel. The very "simplest form of speech which infant lips can try"—the most elementary expression of our faith—is, "Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah"; and who can understand what is meant by the word Messiah who does not know the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, that this is the book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham? The sum and substance of all the declaration of the Church is this—that Jesus has come in humility and died upon Golgotha, and that Jesus is coming again in glory. And who can understand the first and the second advents of our blessed Lord, without understanding that people which, so to say, forms the link between the two, even Israel, whom God has chosen that through them should be made known His glory and His salvation?

A minister is a steward of the mysteries of God—things which no human wisdom, and things which no human mind by its own exertions, can understand, but which God has revealed unto us in the Scripture and by the Holy Ghost. There is the mystery of godliness, "God manifested in the flesh." There is the great mystery of "the Church which is His body." There is the mystery of Israel, the everlasting nation, chosen of God to be the centre of the earth, and to show forth His power and goodness to all nations.

Now in these three mysteries there is one side which is patent and intelligible to all men.

Jesus Christ is an historical character. The words of Jesus are read by all. It is a matter of history that there was Jesus, and that He exerted a mighty influence in the world. But there is a mystery of godliness—God manifest in the flesh; and no human analysis will be able to discover that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. We, then, if we are messengers of Christ, must tell every one we know that there is a person, Jesus; but who Jesus is can only be revealed to you by the power of the Holy Ghost. We declare to you the mystery of godliness. Likewise every person knows that there is a Church, that there is a community of people who profess to believe in Jesus, but what the Church really is, is a mystery—Christ the Head, and we the members.

In like manner, who is so ignorant as not to know the history of the Jews?

Who is so ignorant as not to know the Ten Commandments, and the wonderful revelations of God which through them have become the property of all civilised nations? And who does not know the fact that at this present moment there are twelve million descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, scattered among all the nations of the earth, and yet a people separate by themselves? But the meaning of Israel no one knows, unless the Holy Ghost has enlightened him through the Scriptures. There is a mystery about Israel: there is something which no philosopher will be able to discover. Their present existence, their present dispersion, and their future destiny, have all been revealed to us in the Word; but God's Word can only be apprehended through the teaching of the Holy Ghost. It is quite in accordance with this remark that one of the most acute philosophers—the greatest philosopher that Germany has produced—Hegel, a man who was very fond of showing the meaning of history, said, when he came to the history of the Jews, "It is a dark, troublesome enigma to me. I am not able to understand it. It does not fit in with any of our categories. It is a riddle." It is a mysterious nation—just as mysterious as Jesus is mysterious. His name is "Pâle"—"Riddle"—"Wonderful." A nation is known by its highest exponent. The Roman nation found its culminating point in Caesar Augustus. The Jewish nation has its culminating point in Jesus, and therefore it is a mysterious nation. "I would not have you ignorant of this mystery" (Rom 11:25)

And this is one great reason why God in these latter days has raised up a mission to the Jews, because Christendom has become apostate—because even Christians who believe in the Scripture in a certain way, and in the Holy Ghost, do not believe the testimony of the Scriptures, and that God, the Living One, is about to arise and to introduce a new era into this world—that the history of the world is coming now to its crisis, to its culminating point, and that the fifth monarchy, the kingdom which shall never be destroyed, is about to be ushered in by the appearing of the Son of Man. And, therefore, God is directing our attention to this wonderful nation, beginning with Abraham, but not ending until time shall be no more. Do not be astonished, and do not let it be a hindrance to your acceptance of the truth, that this aspect of God's revelation has for many centuries been hidden even from God's own people. When we look back into the history of the Church we find that the whole truth was preached by the Apostles, but that immediately after the days of the Apostles there was only a partial apprehension of the truth, so that in the first ages of the Church God's people dwelt chiefly on the Incarnation. Afterwards they dwelt on grace in the days of Augustine. The doctrine of justification by faith was hidden from the Church for nearly fourteen centuries, until in the time of the Reformation this bright jewel was brought forth to the light. And if this was so, why should we be astonished that this mystery of Israel has not been understood and acknowledged till in recent days?

In bringing before you very briefly this great subject, and only mentioning the culminating points, I want to view it in a threefold aspect. How does faith regard it? How does hope regard it? How does love regard it? There is a quaint inscription on an old house in a German city—"Faith lays the foundation, love builds the house, hope ascends the roof and looks into the joyous prospect." And so indeed it is. Let us take the Scriptural order, faith and hope before love, because love requires both faith and hope to sustain it.

Now what does faith say about Israel? Time does not exist to faith; so I do not care where faith takes up its position, it will always see the same thing.

Supposing we take up our position with Abraham. There we shall see the land, the nation, and the Messiah promised to Abraham, and the nations of the earth blessed in this central nation. Supposing we ascend Mount Nebo with Moses: we see the same thing—Israel redeemed out of Egypt on account of the covenant made with Abraham; Israel about to enter into the promised land; Israel chastised on account of their iniquity and unfaithfulness; Israel restored to show forth the praise of the Most High. Supposing we take up our position with David. There we see the same thing—David speaking to his son and to his Lord, and David in Psalm 72 beholding that universal kingdom of righteousness and of prosperity extending from the river to the great sea, the centre of which is the Son of David, the King of Israel. Or let us take up our position after the Babylonish captivity in the day of Zechariah. God's promises were not exhausted and fulfilled when the Jews were brought back from Babylon. Zechariah beholds the nation again, and above that nation the man—the man that was the equal of Jehovah—who is His fellow, and Israel looking unto Him whom they have pierced. And then he beholds this Messiah called the King of the whole earth; and from Jerusalem as the centre the streams of love and righteousness go forth to all the world. Or let us take up our position with aged Simeon. What does aged Simeon see? "A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of His people Israel" (Luke 2:32). Or take up your position with the Apostle Paul after he had experienced all the unbelief and hatred of the Jews. He is perfectly sure that God has not cast away His people, but that all Israel shall be saved. It is all the same. Wherever faith takes up its position it beholds the eternal counsel of the Most High, which must stand for ever. It develops; it unfolds; and nothing is able to withstand its progress. The very unbelief of Israel, and their very chastisement and dispersion among the nations of the earth, cannot make the promises of God of none effect. The Lord has chosen Israel, and this choice of Israel is rooted in the everlasting counsel of God, of which Jesus is the centre.

When we believe this, we who know Jesus as the centre cannot place the centre anywhere else but where God has placed it. Round Jesus are the people of Israel. That is the circle immediately round Jesus; and Jesus and Israel are perfectly inseparable. There we have election, God's own will to manifest His glory; and while the purpose of God is the manifestation of His glory, the inside of that purpose is nothing else but love. It is His glory that He wishes to manifest Himself to all the ends of the earth. It is this election which is its own force and its own motive—out of which comes the whole history of Israel, and out of which comes the whole history of the Church. Your salvation and the election of Israel are inseparably connected; and because God chose Israel, therefore He called Abraham, and therefore He made a covenant with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob—an unconditional covenant. Mark this, because upon this rests the whole Gospel.

This covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which embraced the Messiah, our Lord Jesus, the nation Israel, and the land of Palestine, is a covenant which depends exclusively upon the faithfulness of God—not upon our faithfulness; not upon our works. It is an absolute election of grace. It is quite true that when Israel is unfaithful she is chastised and punished, just as we are chastised and punished when we depart from our Lord Jesus Christ. But the counsel of God, the plan of God, the thoughts of God, the election of God, cannot be altered. "The gifts and calling of God are without repentance" (Rom 11:29). He may suffer them to be afflicted for four hundred years in Egypt, but He will bring them out on account of the covenant. He may send them to Babylon for seventy years, but He will bring them back on account of the covenant. He has punished them for nearly 2,000 years on account of their rejection of Jesus, but He will bring them back because the covenant is unconditional, and His purpose is unchangeable.

Unconditional is the covenant, and the counterpart of that is the doctrine of grace. Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His own purpose and according to His infinite love, has He given us salvation in Christ. With regard to this covenant which the Lord God has made with Israel, and of which our blessed Savior Jesus Christ is the centre, in the whole history of God in all His dealings with Israel, He has continually to go back to His love, else He would have to give them up altogether; and so we find that to reveal Himself to Israel and to carry out His great promises, there appeared among the people of God two things, which do not appear among the other nations, and which are a great stumbling-block to all unbelief. Why do people find such great difficulty in accepting the Bible? There are two things which they do not like. The first is prophecy, and the second is miracle—prophecy and miracle. And when I speak of unbelief I am sorry to say that I have to include a great many people who think themselves Christians and Christian theologians. But faith they have not, whatever else they may have.

Prophecy is God revealing Himself to man and foretelling the future in a miraculous supernatural way. Miracle is God Himself interfering and showing His direct power and goodness to rescue His people. But if there is a living God there must be prophecy and miracle. Prophecy is the interference of God by His word; miracle is the interference of God by His act. The culminating point of prophecy and of miracle is the incarnation of Jesus. Jesus is the wisdom of God, when the world was not able to find out God. When all human reason and speculation ended in nothing else but ignorance and darkness, then God Himself came down from heaven, and we beheld the countenance of God in Jesus Christ, His Son. That is the incarnation of prophecy. And again, when we were perfectly helpless as sinners and under the power of death, God, by sending His own Son, took away sin and overcame death.

All the miracles that are recorded for us in the history of Israel lead up to the central truth. God redeemed His people Israel out of Egypt by miracle. God sustained His people in the wilderness by miracle. God planted His people in the land of Canaan by miracle. After He had done this, there was a pause—there was a quiet development until it became necessary again to interfere. So in the days of Elijah, when the people were well-nigh lost in idolatry, God interfered again by miracle. Then there came a long pause in which there was no miracle. Then came Jesus, and with Him the revelation of the power and goodness of God in miracle, and in the days of the Apostles.

And now there has been again a long pause, when there is no miracle. But God is still living, and the time is coming when there will be again a direct interference of God in miracle through Israel; for as He has not begun and continued His people Israel without the direct interference of His omnipotence, neither shall He consummate the history of Israel but by appearing in such a miraculous way that all nations shall be astonished, and the whole world shall exclaim, "The Lord is God!" and "The Lord God Omnipotent reigneth!"

I have spoken of faith's vision of the past and of the future of this wonderful and mysterious nation; let us now cast our glance more especially at the present. In the whole history of Israel it is made evident that the real people of Israel, with whom God is dealing, are only a remnant, only a minority. And here there is a very important lesson for us all. God does not care for numbers; God does not care for outward power. On the contrary, He must make it perfectly plain that His is the power, and that ours is only weakness. Now look at the people of Israel. How many entered into the promised land? None but Joshua and Caleb. Look at Gideon. Thirty-two thousand were ready to go forth into battle, but God said, "I do not care for thirty-two thousand. They must be real godly ones that trust in Me, and who know that I am with them and in them." And the thirty-two thousand were reduced to three hundred. Oh, how different God is from us! We want to force everybody into the Church to make them Christians, whether they like it or not—to call them or label them Christians, although they do not believe, because we want to bring in, as it were, the whole nation into the Church. God's plan is to winnow, to sift—to separate the chaff from the wheat. Three hundred out of the thirty-two thousand! Look at the time of David. Who was it that acknowledged David when he was persecuted? Saul was a tall man, and had all the splendid and regal qualities that made him to be estimated a powerful and suitable leader. But it was a poor and despised people who flocked round David.

Look again in the days of Elijah. Poor Elijah thought that he was the only one left. There were seven thousand; but they were scattered and hid. Look at the days of our Lord. Who welcomed Jesus? Who believed in Jesus of the whole Jewish nation? Who gathered round Him? Not the Scribes, not the Priests, not the Pharisees, not the great or wise; because in those days it was just as it is in our day. There were the learned theologians, and there were those who were addicted to the ceremonial law, and to the priesthood; and there were the Herodians—those that took statesman-like views of things, and were always meddling with politics, and always studying the interests of the House of Herod. But none of these great men—none of these great parties—gathered round Jesus. Oh, no! it was a poor afflicted people that the Lord had left among them—a remnant.

So also there is a remnant now according to the election of grace among Israel. This idea of the remnant we must always keep in mind.

But now, after Israel has rejected Jesus, and has been scattered among all the nations of the earth, what do we behold? Faith enlightened by the Word of God is alone able to account for their existence. Nothing else can account for the existence of the Jewish nation, when so many of the other great and powerful nations have disappeared, or, if they have not disappeared, have altogether lost their vigor. Here is Israel. Why do they exist after all the persecutions which they have endured? Pharaoh tried to drown them; but they could not be drowned. Nebuchadnezzar tried to burn them; but they could not be burned. Haman tried to hang them; but it was of no avail. All the nations of the earth have persecuted them; but here they are, and more numerous at the present day than ever before. Why? Because God calls them an everlasting nation. Now, mark you, God says: "You who know the sun and the moon and the stars; you who know that every year there is spring after winter, and summer after spring, and autumn after summer—as surely as those ordinances exist, so sure is it that Israel shall be a nation before Me for ever." We see them among all the different nations of the earth, and yet they cannot be absorbed in them; they cannot be amalgamated with them. How does faith account for that? Faith accounts for it through the Word of God. Balaam already, in the fields of Moab, predicted that they would dwell apart from all other nations. We see them without a king, without a prince. They have lost their independence; they have lost their country. They are not even a tributary kingdom as they were in the days of our Lord. We see them still adhering to God, free from idolatry; whereas in former years, before the advent of our Lord, they constantly fell into idol-worship.

How does faith account for it? It is written in the Prophet Hosea, "They shall abide many days without a king, and without a prince, without a sacrifice, and without an image, and without an ephod, and without teraphim" (3:4). These are exactly the features which characterize the Jewish nation now. Faith sees that they have rejected the blessed Savior; but has God rejected them on that account? The Apostle Paul asks you this question in the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans: "Has God cast away His people Israel?" (11:1). And how does he answer the question? He says, "I also am an Israelite"—as much as to say, "If there is only one Jew converted after the crucifixion of Jesus, and after the stoning of Stephen, that one case proves the whole principle, namely, that, notwithstanding the fearful sin of Israel, God has not cast away His people." If God had dealt with Israel according to their merit, and according to what we might naturally and reasonably expect, no sooner had Jesus been crucified, and Stephen been stoned, than God would altogether, leave Israel to themselves.

But God has not totally rejected His people, and the conversion of even one Jew—so Paul argues—is a proof of it. This then is how faith beholds Israel now, in the apostasy. Great is that apostasy. They have crucified Jesus. They have made the Word of God void by the traditions of the elders. They have sunk into superstition and legalism; they have sunk into worldliness and materialism. Many of them have fallen even into unbelief. Oh! the state of Israel is one that should move our deepest sympathy. They are enemies for the Gospel's sake. Wrath has come upon them to the uttermost. Blindness has happened unto Israel; the veil is upon their hearts. But yet what does faith see, notwithstanding all this?

Brethren, let me speak to you freely on this subject. The apostasy of Israel is not as the apostasy of Christendom. The apostasy of Christendom is incurable; but the apostasy of Israel is curable. Although Israel have rejected Jesus, they do not wish to reject God; they still believe in His Word; they still invoke His Holy Name. They still remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy. They still, as the Apostle Paul says, "have a zeal for God, although it is not according to knowledge" (Rom 10:2). There is still a godly remnant among them. There is still the fear of God and the acknowledgment of God before their eyes. Whereas, what is the history of apostate Christendom, as it is presented to us in the Scriptures, and the beginnings of which we can see already? First, people do not believe in Jesus as an atonement. They begin with that. They do not like the blood of Jesus; they like the character of Jesus very well. Then they give up Jesus altogether. Then they give up the Father too, and do not believe in a Creator. And then they become agnostics, and say that they know nothing about it—whether there is a God or not—the worst thing that this world has ever seen, and the most insulting to God. And then they give up morality, as necessarily they must give it up; and then they fall into the most abject pessimism, and look upon man as a flower of the field, which is to-day, and to-morrow is cast into the oven. This is the downward career of the Gentile apostasy. But in the Jewish apostasy there is still kept the connecting link, the golden thread—a spark dying, yet not dead, of a belief in God, however unenlightened, and in a future. So faith looks upon the mystery of Israel.

Now let us see what hope says of Israel. Hope is built entirely on the Word of God. We accept the future on the ground of what God has revealed to us in the Scriptures. And here I must repeat again that whether a thing is fulfilled or not fulfilled, has not the slightest bearing upon the attitude of faith and hope. Why do you believe that Jerusalem and the temple have been destroyed? Because it is written in Josephus and in history, or because it is written in the Word of God? Jesus said that the temple would be destroyed, and all the prophets announced the judgment that would come upon Israel. And God fulfilled it. And just as we believe the destruction of Jerusalem and the judgments which have come upon Israel because God foretold them, so do we believe the restoration of Israel simply because God has told us—because it is written.

Our hope is built upon nothing less than the Word of God. It will require the omnipotence of God to raise the dead out of their graves. But so it is written in the Prophet Ezekiel that the dead bones shall live. It will require all the attributes of Deity to bring about the wonderful things which God has promised to us in the Scriptures. But God will do it. In the Word of God the restoration of Israel is always based upon the power and love and the unchanging character of the promises of the everlasting God. And just as God says, "I, even I, have created the world; I, even I, have redeemed sinners"—so it is only God who Himself is able to restore His people Israel. "For My own Name's sake I will do it." And how will the Lord do it? The Lord is an holy God; and Israel having departed from God there are these two principles which seem to be conflicting—the holiness of God and the sin of Israel. But God is able to subdue their iniquities and forgive all their sins, and renew their hearts, and to put a right spirit within them. Do not imagine that any temporal glory or power will be entrusted by God to Israel as an unconverted nation. That would not be for the glory of God, nor would it be for the welfare of Israel and the world. They must be led through deep waters. They must be brought through fearful judgments. They must experience the wrath and the indignation of the Lord. They must be led into the valley of humiliation. Then will the Lord appear unto them, even as Joseph appeared unto his brethren, and the spirit of grace and of supplication will be poured out upon them; and there will be weeping such as this world has never heard; and there will be repenting and contrition more profound than the angels have ever witnessed upon earth, for they shall mourn over Him as over their only child; and then God, having cast them into the fire of His indignation, and having by the Holy Ghost worked in them repentance and granted to them the remission of sin, shall fit them for the wonderful work that is before them in the future; for a nation that has come through such repentance and through such faith—a nation that has so tasted the bitterness of sin, and the sweetness of the infinite love of God, which is stronger than death—will then go on for a thousand years without ever looking back. In the Old Testament you always read, "Oh, backsliding Israel." They are always backsliders; they have always to be restored. But there are so many passages in the Prophets which tell us that after Israel has been brought back the second time they will never look back. There will be no backsliding any more; but for a thousand years Israel shall go on in the fear of the Lord, and in the love of the Lord, and from Israel shall flow forth blessings in all the world.

Notice this. It is nowhere said that Jesus died for any nation, except for the Jewish nation. He died for that nation, and for that nation only. He died that all the children of God should be gathered in: but you see there is a difference. He died for the nation, and He died for the rest as individuals. It is nowhere said in the Bible that any nation will exist for ever; but it is said of the Jewish nation that they will exist for ever. This nation has God chosen, and when He divided the world unto mankind, it is written in the Book of Deuteronomy that He planned it all in relation to the central nation of Israel, who are to be the point from which all His blessings will radiate. And therefore this is the remarkable thing about Israel. "All Israel shall be saved" (Rom 11:26)—the nation as a nation, that is to say, that godly remnant that shall be left after all the judgments which shall come upon Israel; and then they shall be a blessing to all the world.

And as Israel shall thus be truly spiritually brought unto God and endowed with His grace, there shall be restored unto them their land; there shall be restored unto them their sanctuary; there shall be given unto them more abundant harvests than ever they had before. There shall be a more joyous, prosperous, national life than Israel has seen even in the days of Solomon. And this will be the wonderful thing—that in Israel as a nation there will be then presented that of which we hear so much talk, but of which we see so little reality, namely, that there will be nothing in the national life separate from the knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ, whom He has sent. We hear a great deal in this nineteenth century about Christianity penetrating and pervading everything. We hear a great deal about "religion in common life." There is plenty of common life, but I cannot say that I see the religion in it. I do not see how religion is now penetrating and pervading our whole national life. I cannot say that our literature is Christian. I cannot say that the greatest poets and authors and philosophers which England and France and Germany have produced this century are Christian. Far from it. Most of them are anti-Christian. The culture of the present day is not Christian. I cannot say that art is Christian. I do not know whether it has even a high standard of morality. I cannot say that politics are Christian.

What is Christian? Oh, we are a poor, poor minority—strangers and pilgrims here upon earth, very much as we were in the days of the Apostles; and the world, even with that which is great and powerful and beautiful in it, lieth in the wicked one. Still, the idea is perfectly correct. Christianity, godliness, ought to pervade everything that God has created. The world—the whole world—shall be full of His glory. "Holiness unto the Lord" shall be written even upon the bells of the horses (Zech 14:20). Politics will be Christian; science will be Christian; poetry will be Christian; everything will be Christian. In their seed-time and in their harvest, in their journeys and in their commerce, in their work and in their recreation, in their garments and in everything about them, from one end of the year to the other, there will be no branch of life, there will be no branch of knowledge, there will be no branch of activity, there will be nothing, that will not be sanctified unto the Lord, for they shall walk in the name of the Lord, and the light of the Lord shall be their light, and the glory of the Lord shall be their beauty, and all the nations will follow their example.

Oh, we pray every day, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." And this is what I hope, and what every Christian must hope—that, through the intervention of Jesus Himself, and through the mediation of the Jewish nation, there is a time coming when God's will will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Talk of drunkenness; talk of profligacy; talk of all the crimes and vices which now pollute the earth: they shall be done away. But that is only the negative side of it. How is God's will done in heaven? There is no drunkenness there; there is no profligacy there; there is no war and bloodshed there. True; but how is God's will done? It will be an angelic world. As the angels above, so will men be here upon the earth, "for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it." Then the promise, "In Thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blest" (Gen 22:18), shall be fulfilled, and the Son of David shall rule over all the world, and righteousness shall flow as a river, and the knowledge of the Lord shall cover all the earth as the waters cover the sea. That is what we hope about Israel, and all because of Jesus.

Now let me ask you what love says to the mystery of Israel? Faith, hope, love.

Do you love Israel? I wish to speak to you first about what is said against Israel; why people do not love Israel. They have crucified the Lord. Ah, dear friends, that is true, and no one feels it more than an Israelite who believes in Jesus; and you know how ultimately Israel will acknowledge their sin, and weep on account of it. But I want to ask you this question: Have not you crucified Jesus? If you have not crucified Jesus, then Jesus has not saved you by His death. If you have not wounded Him by your transgressions, and if He was not bruised and pierced on account of your iniquities, you have no salvation. Look at it. Have you any feeling of hatred to Adam because Adam was our representative, and because Adam did not stand the test? It is just in the same way that Israel was chosen to be the representative of humanity and mankind. They were put to the test in order that blessings should come unto all ends of the earth through them. And will you therefore remember that wherein you also are like Israel, and forget all the suffering which they have endured on your account, and all the labour with which they have toiled in fulfilling and in holding fast the promises before your time?

Remember how God loves Israel; and, here again, I wish to appeal to your experience. You read such passages as "I have loved thee with an everlasting love. Therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee. The mountains may depart and the hills be moved: but My lovingkindness shall not depart. My thoughts are thoughts of peace concerning you." And you apply them to yourself. Why do you apply that to yourself? You are quite right to apply it; but why? What right have you? Oh, these promises were given to Israel. Now, listen to me. God says to Israel, "I have loved thee with an everlasting love. Although the mountains depart I cannot change My love to you. I will plant you in your own land." With My whole heart and with My whole soul; and even during the time of their banishment and captivity He calls them "the beloved of My soul." If God does not mean this to Israel, how much less does He mean it to you! You apply the assurances of love which God has given to Israel, and argue by analogy that the Lord will also be faithful and loving and forgiving to you. Ah! therefore you must believe the first to be true. Oh, God loves Israel! Jesus loves Israel, and wept over Jerusalem. The Apostle Paul loved Israel, although he had thousands of converts among the Gentile nations. Love Israel, because God loves Jesus, and because Jesus loves Israel.

Oh, remember how Israel loved you. Remember how David and all the Prophets knew no greater joy than to think of the time when the idols shall be abolished, and when all the Gentile nations should rejoice in Jehovah as their God and as their portion.

And if you thus love Israel, then it is for you to show mercy to Israel, and to labour for Israel, that through your instrumentality there may be gathered the remnant according to the election of grace.

I notice that when speaking about the Jewish Mission to some people, a kind of painful resignation comes over their countenances, as if it was a very disagreeable duty that had to be performed, and one in which there was no encouragement and no joy. Oh, pity their ignorance, and pity also their lukewarmness; for if their heart was in the right spot, they would soon know what has been done among Israel during the last fifty years. I may mention to you the testimony of one who had the greatest knowledge of mission work in the world, the late Dr. Barth, of Calw (Germany). His work was in connection with the missions among the heathen. There was scarcely a mission among the heathen with which he was not acquainted, and with the missionaries of which he did not correspond, and about which he did not collect most carefully the information and spread it throughout Germany. Now, this eminent man of God said shortly before his death, and said it repeatedly, "God has greatly blessed the mission among the heathen, but nothing in comparison with the blessing which has attended the Jewish Mission. The result of the mission among the heathen in China, India, Africa, and wherever it has been, has not been as great as the result of the mission among the Jews. In proportion to the number of Jews, there have been a far larger number of converts during the last fifty years brought to the knowledge of Jesus from amongst them than from among the other nations."

You do not see them. They do not live in one country. They do not live in one city. They do not stand out conspicuously. They have their different spheres of usefulness where God has planted them; but this simple fact alone will show you that the Jewish Mission is unparalleled, not only in the Scriptural importance which God has given to it, but also in its result—that during the nineteenth century, as far as we can compute, three hundred thousand converts have been brought to the Savior, and that this very day there are about three hundred ministers of the Gospel, Jews, who by the grace of God have been brought to the knowledge of Christ.

Therefore faith believes the testimony of God; hope cherishes the promises of God; love loves where God loves, and love rejoices that God has blest us, and that His power and His Holy Spirit are with us in this work. In all humility, and often in sorrow, this work must be carried on. In the Jewish Mission more particularly, this is the dispensation where we must sow in tears, but it is the blessed assurance that we shall reap with joy, for as sure as the mouth of the Lord has spoken it, all Israel will yet welcome Christ, and Christ shall yet be the glory of Israel.

Anti-Semitism

by David Baron
(Originally published in 1901)

There are many difficult problems grouped around the name "Jew" powerfully affecting the world and the Church, and as, in Europe especially, the issues involved become intensified from year to year, the nations of Christendom, in the midst of whom the mass of the Diaspora has been located since the destruction of the second Temple, are earnestly beginning to find solutions, and it is more and more obvious that " the Jewish question" is fast becoming an international one.

To the Bible student, with the key of the future in his hand, it is very interesting to watch some of the more recent phases in the development of this "question," and to observe how the great God is, in His providence, now rapidly preparing the way for its final and only possible solution. Anti-Semitism, though no doubt a symptom of the diseased moral, political, and economic systems of Christendom, for which Jew and Gentile must bear equal blame, is nevertheless of great significance, and an unmistakable sign of the times when viewed from a Scriptural standpoint.

What is anti-Semitism? 

Before me lies the 17th edition of the "Anti-Semiten-Katechismus," a small book of four hundred closely-printed pages compiled by Theodor Fritsch, and published in Leipzig. It is one of the very vilest products of the nineteenth century, and carries its condemnation within itself. 

The first part is in the form of a catechism, containing twenty-one questions and answers, and the first question is, " Was Versteht man unter Antisemitismus?" (What is to be understood by anti-Semitism?) And then the answer, "Anti" means against, and "Semitism" describes the character of the Semitic race. Anti-Semitism, therefore, signifies waging war with Semitism. As in Europe the Semitic race is almost exclusively represented by the Jews, we understand the term Semites as referring in its narrower sense to the Jews. An anti-Semite, therefore, in our case means an opponent of the Jews ("Judengegner“).

Into the long indictment which this oracle of anti-Semitism contains I will not enter. The fact is that the professional "Judengegner" on the Continent, has been morally blinded by his hatred and prejudice to the extent of being no longer able to distinguish between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, and often allows himself to be carried by his passions to the greatest lengths of injustice and villainy. In the eyes of the anti-Semite it is not only a question whether Jews, like other men, are sinners, or are greater sinners than others, but the Jew himself, from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head, his very existence is an unpardonable crime. His very virtues are brought up as accusations against him, and the whole literature of the world, from the writings of Cicero down to the ravings of the unspeakable Edouard Drummond of Paris, are ransacked, and often misquoted, in order to prove that every Jew who has ever had the impudence to live, has been nothing else than an unmitigated rascal, to whom all the woes which have ever come upon the uncircumcised are to be traced. 

For samples of anti-Semitic accuracy in quoting ancient or modern writers commend me to the collection of passages from Talmudic works and from the Bible which takes up a good part of this handbook. The promises of God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and passages from the prophets, are quoted as proofs of Jewish pride and arrogance, and when the prophets utter curses and scathing denunciations on account of sin, it is still brought up in proof against the Jews that they are, and ever have been, the very worst nation under heaven. It reminds one of the story told of the Roman Emperor, who, walking one day with his retinue, happened to meet a poor Jew on the roadside, who most humbly bowed and saluted. The Emperor stopped and cried out, " What, you, a Jew, have the impudence to salute the Roman Emperor! Off with his head !" A little further on he met another Jew, who, observing from a distance what had been done to his unfortunate brother, simply stopped on the roadside, and in fear and trembling allowed the tyrant to pass by without saluting, whereupon the Emperor turned round and cried: "What, you, a Jew, have the impudence not to salute the Roman Emperor! Off with his head!"

An instance how an anti-Semite reads Jewish history is supplied by the brief summary of the life of Joseph, who in words of Scripture is made out to be first an ungrateful profligate, who immorally assaulted the chaste and virtuous wife of his master Potiphar, and later on robbed and despoiled the famished Egyptians for his own ends, and for the enrichment of his tribe.

How is it done ? Very easily : all you have to do is to string together some half-sentences broken off from their context, and quote a lie as if it were a truth, and the thing is done. But, as an instance how the anti-Semitic Diabolus can quote Scripture for his own ends, I will translate the section on Joseph verbally just as it stands. 

“Joseph in Egypten.”

The Hebrew slave which thou hast brought unto us came in unto me to mock me ; and it came to pass as I lifted up my voice and cried that he left his garment with me and fled."
.. Let him appoint officers over the land, and take up the fifth part in the seven plenteous years (without payment)."
... And Joseph gathered corn as the sand of the sea very much until he left off numbering, for it was without number."
... And Joseph gathered up all the money that was found in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan for the corn which they brought."
... Joseph said, Give your cattle, and I will give you for your cattle if you have no more money.”
... We will not hide from my lord how that our money is spent; my lord also hath our herds of cattle ; there is not ought left in the sight of my lord but our bodies and our lands."
... And he made it a law that they should give from everything a fifth. And so Israel dwelt in the land of Egypt in the country of Goshen, and they ruled over it and grew and multiplied greatly.?

It is a sad fact that perhaps ninety-nine out of every hundred " Christian " readers of this vile production in Germany and Austria are so ignorant of Bible history that they are taken in by these parodies of Jewish characters as if they were actual history. I may mention that my first acquaintance with this "Antisemiten-Katechismus'' was in the drawing-room of a Christian Hospitz in Berlin, where it was evidently kept for the enlightenment of benighted Christian travellers. But is there no ground for the accusations of anti-Semites? I am not one to hide up the sins of my people. There were no greater patriots than the prophets, yet they speak of Israel as "a sinful nation; a people laden with iniquity," and many centuries of wanderings and oppressions have not tended to ennoble them. No, Israel in a state of apostasy from their God are not a blessing among the nations as they yet shall be (Zech. 8.), but this I say, that false accusations by anti-Semites through the ages, of crimes which they knew in their conscience they were not guilty of, has been Satan's chief means of hardening Israel's heart into a Pharisaic self-consciousness, and of blinding their eyes to their real state of need before a holy God. 

The true underlying causes and effects of modern anti-Semitism have been well summarized by Dr. Herzl in that remarkable pamphlet, " Der Juden Staat," which has given birth to the Zionist movement. " Modern anti-Semitism," he says, " is not to be confounded with the religious persecution of the Jews of former times. It does occasionally take a somewhat religious bias, but the main current of the aggressive movement has now changed. In the principal countries where anti-Semitism prevails it does so as a result of the emancipation of the Jews. 

"When civilized nations awoke to the inhumanity of exclusive legislation, and enfranchised us, our enfranchisement came too late. It was no longer possible legally to remove our disabilities in our old homes. For we had, curiously enough, developed while in the Ghetto into a bourgeois people, and we stepped out of it only to enter into fierce competition with the middle classes. Hence our emancipation set us suddenly within this middle-class circle, where we have a double pressure to sustain, from within and from without. The Christian bourgeoisie would not be unwilling to cast us as a sacrifice to Socialism, though that would not greatly improve matters. At the same time, the equal rights of Jews before the law cannot be withdrawn where they have once been conceded. Not only because their withdrawal would be opposed to the spirit of our age, but also because it would immediately drive all Jews, rich and poor alike, into the ranks of the revolutionary party.

"Nothing effectual can really be done to our injury. In old days our jewels were seized. How is our movable property to be got hold of now? It is comprised in printed papers which are scattered over the world, locked up maybe in the coffers of Christians. It is of course possible to get at shares and debentures in railways, banks and industrial undertakings of all descriptions, by taxation, and where the progressive income-tax is in force, all our realised property can eventually be laid hold of. But all these efforts cannot be directed against Jews alone, and where they have nevertheless been made, severe economic crises, with far-reaching effects, have been their immediate consequence. The very impossibility of getting at the Jews nourishes and embitters hatred of them. Anti-Semitism increases day by day and hour by hour among the nations; indeed, it is bound to increase, because the causes of its growth continue to exist, and cannot be removed. Its remote cause is our loss of the power of assimilation during the Middle Ages ; its immediate cause is our excessive production of mediocre intellects, who cannot find an outlet downwards or upwards—that is to say, no wholesome outlet in either direction. When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of the revolutionary party; when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse.

Effects of anti-Semitism

"The oppression we endure does not improve us, for we are not a whit better than ordinary people. It is true that we do not love our enemies ; but he alone who can conquer himself dare reproach us with that fault. Oppression naturally creates hostility against oppressors, and our hostility aggravates the pressure. 

"It is impossible to escape from this eternal round. 'No!' some soft-hearted visionaries will say; 'no, it is possible! Possible by means of the ultimate perfection of humanity.' Is it worth while pointing out the sentimental folly of this view ? He who would found his hope for improved conditions on the ultimate perfection of humanity would indeed be painting a Utopia! 

"I referred previously to our 'assimilation.' I do not for a moment wish to imply that I desire such an end. Our national character is too historically famous, and, spite of every degradation, too fine, to make its annihilation desirable. We might, perhaps, be able to merge ourselves entirely into surrounding races, if these were to leave us in peace for a space of two generations. But they will not leave us in peace. 

"For a little period they manage to tolerate us, and then their hostility breaks out again and again. The world is provoked by our prosperity, because it has for many centuries been accustomed to consider us as the most contemptible among the poverty-stricken. 

"It forgets, in its ignorance and narrowness of heart, that prosperity weakens our Judaism and extinguishes our peculiarities. It is only pressure that forces us back to the parent stem ; it is only hatred encompassing us that makes us strangers once more. 

"Thus, whether we like it or not, we are now, and shall henceforth remain, an historic group with unmistakable characteristics common to us all." 

To turn again to the oracle of anti-Semitism to which I have already referred, in answer to the question, " Wie soil die Judenfrage nun gelost werden ? " (How shall the Jewish Question be solved?) we have the following paragraph: " Either the Jews must procure some territory for themselves—best if it were out of Europe (means they have plenty) and be allowed a definite period, say ten years, to depart from our midst, or, if they remain, the following enactment should be made: 'The Jews are only allowed to occupy themselves with agriculture or productive manual labour, in which they are to have only Jews as their assistants. From every other sphere and occupation they must be excluded, and for a non-Jew to be in any way in the employment of a Jew should be highly punishable to both parties.' 

" The laws emancipating the Jews, and which granted them civil rights, should be repealed, and they should only be allowed to exist as aliens under special law" (" Judenrecht").

I hold in my hand three curios of modern anti-Semitism. One is an exact imitation of a German railway ticket. On the front we read these words : " Nach Jerusalem (to Jerusalem). There, but not return, 4th class, 20 mark." Across one end the route and date are as usual indicated, which are " Germany—Palestine," and across the other end, which usually has the initials of the railway company, the word " Isaac " is spelt out. Turning it over, on the reverse side we find the following inscription. First, in large letters, there is the Hebrew word "Kosher" ("clean"), a word with which things lawful for Jews to eat are usually sealed, and then this admonition, " Fahre hin mit 100,000 Deiner Bruder and taufe in Jordan Dich doch—Kehre niemals wieder" ("Go with 100,000 of thy brethren and immerse thyself in the Jordan, but never return “).

The second curio is an anti-Semitic bronze medal bearing the arms of the city of Berlin, with the date, beneath which are the words, " Hep ! Hep ! " On the obverse side are the names of the three best known and most violent German Jew-haters, for whom it calls " Hoch ! " (" Hurrah!") " Vivant sequentes." The third is a ticket to a public concert in Vienna, the price of which is a florin, but beneath there is this saving clause, " Fur Juden ist diese karte ungiltig," which is equivalent to " Jews are excluded." 

The first of these curios expresses the aim and object of anti-Semitism, which is to drive them out of Christendom : " Go to Jerusalem, and never return ;" and the other two show us the weapons of anti-Semitism, by which they seek to accomplish their object, namely, by insult and exclusion, and if that will not answer, then " Hep! Hep ! " This apparently harmless word is the symbol of blood and death to the Jews. It is formed as already explained, 1 of the initial letters of the Latin phrase, " Hierosolyma est Perdita ! " and was the watch-cry of the Crusaders in their attacks and wholesale massacres of the Jewish communities in their bloody march to the East. 

The Dreyfus case and the cries of " A bas les Juifs !" " Mort aux Juifs ! " which have so recently rung through the streets of the city which calls itself " the mother of civilisation," are but symptoms of the implacable hatred of the Jew which underlies anti-Semitism. Nor are Paris and Berlin alone in their attempt to revive the cry of "Hep! Hep!"

During several recent visits to Austria I had occasion to observe the consternation manifested in large Jewish circles at the developments of the anti-Jewish campaign in that tottering Empire. In Vienna a great municipal war which has helped to demoralise all the political parties, has ended, in spite of interpositions of the 1 See page 114. Emperor, in the repeated election of a burgomaster and a vast majority of councillors who are avowedly pledged to make the life of the 125,000 in that city, and the nearly two million Jews in the Empire generally, as wretched as possible. Mr. Arnold White, in his "Modern Jew," speaks of the leader of the anti-Semites in Austria " as a man of great personal charm." This is a matter of taste, but his spirit in relation to the Jews may be judged from some of his public utterances, which breathe of fire and sword. 

It is not so long ago that a notorious Roman Catholic vicar near Vienna ended a series of weekly harangues against the Jews, delivered in his parish church, with the words, " Verbrennt die Juden zur Ehre Gottes. Amen." (" Burn the Jews to the glory of God. Amen.") " No one can deny the gravity of the Jews' situation," says Dr. Theodore Herzl, in that statesmanlike pamphlet from which I have already quoted. " Wherever they live in perceptible numbers, they are more or less persecuted. Their equality before the law, granted by statute, has become practically a dead letter. They are debarred from filling even moderately high positions, either in the army or in any public or private capacity. And attempts are made to crowd them out of business also. ' No dealing with Jews!' 

"Attacks in Parliaments, in assemblies, in the press, in the pulpit, in the streets, on journeys—for example, their exclusion from certain hotels — even in places of recreation, become daily more numerous ; the forms of persecution varying according to the countries in which they occur. In Russia, impositions are levied on Jewish villages; in Roumania, a few human beings are done to death; in Germany, they get a good beating when the occasion serves ; in Austria, anti-Semites exercise terrorism over all public life; in Paris, they are shut out of the so-called best social circles and excluded from clubs. Shades of anti-Jewish feeling are innumerable. But this is not to be an attempt to make out a doleful category of Jewish hardships ; it is futile to linger over details, however painful they may be. 

"I do not intend to awaken sympathetic emotions on our behalf. That would be a foolish, futile, and undignified proceeding. I shall content myself with putting the following questions to the Jews: Is it true that in countries where we live in perceptible numbers the position of Jewish lawyers, doctors, men of science, teachers, and officials of all descriptions, becomes daily more intolerable ? True that the Jewish middle classes are seriously threatened ? True that the mob are incited against our wealthy representatives ? True that our poor endure greater sufferings than any other proletariat ?

"I think that this external pressure makes itself felt everywhere. In our upper classes it causes disagreeables, in our middle classes continual and grave anxieties, in our lower classes absolute despair. 

"Everything tends, in fact, to one and the same conclusion, which is clearly enunciated in that classic Berlin phrase : 'Juden 'raus!' ('Out with the Jews !’).

"But what is the meaning of anti-Semitism in relation to Israel's future ? A full answer to this question is given us in the Word of God. In Ps. 105., which sings the story of Israel's future redemption as prefigured by their past history, we have these words : "Israel also came into Egypt, and Jacob sojourned in the land of Ham, and He increased His people greatly, and made them stronger than their enemies. He turned their heart to hate His people, to deal subtly with His servants, He sent Moses His servant, and Aaron whom He had chosen." Then there follows a list of the plagues which He poured out upon Egypt, culminating in the slaying of all the firstborn in their land, " the chief of all their strength," so that " Egypt was glad when they departed, for the fear of them fell upon them. . . . For He remembered His holy promise, and Abraham His servant And He brought forth His people with joy and His chosen with gladness." 

It is remarkable how history repeats itself, and in relation to Israel the words of the preacher may especially be applied : "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be ... and there is nothing new under the sun." 

If we substitute the word "nations" for Egypt we have an epitome of the origin, development, and issues not only of the ancient but also of the modern phase of the Jewish Question in the three or four verses of the psalm which I have quoted. 

1. The origin of the Jewish Question in Egypt is summed up in the words : " He increased His people greatly, and made them stronger than their enemies." This is brought out still more clearly in the original account in Exodus, where we read : " And the children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceedingly mighty, and the land was filled with them." It was on that account that the new Pharaoh who knew not Joseph became alarmed and took counsel with his people, saying, " Come on; let us deal wisely with them," the results of which were measures of repression, and when these did not answer, the promulgation of an edict for their extermination. 

The modern phase of the Jewish Question originated and becomes from year to year intensified from the same cause. 

We have already seen how since the commencement of the nineteenth century, the Jews are multiplying at a rate which is perfectly marvellous. Look, for instance, at the following comparative table in reference to Austria, where the Jewish problem is assuming a more and more acute phase :–

Jews in Austria at various times (exclusive of Hungary"). 

Maria Theresa's Reign ......... 200,000. 

1830 ..... ............. 355,000. 

1850 .................. 476,000. 

1869 .................. 822,000.

1880 .................. 1,000,000. 

1890 …………….1,143,305

According to the same authority there were in Hungary in the reign of Joseph II. 25,000 Jews; at the end of the last century there were 50,000; in 1830, 100,000; in 1847, 270,000; in 1870, 500,000; in 1883, 700,000; whilst at the present time the number has reached 1,000,000. 

And not only is it in point of numbers that God is again causing His people "to increase greatly," but by their superior wits and energy and by their habits of frugality and thriftiness He makes them " stronger than their enemies," so that in those regions where the bulk of the nation is to be found, wherever the Jew has a fair chance he naturally places his Gentile neighbor in a less favorable position in the struggle for existence. The superior ability of the Jew is openly acknowledged by anti-Semites, and often appealed to as a ground for the restrictive and repressive laws which are in vogue against them in some countries. 

The following is taken from a chapter which summariszs "the case for Russian anti-Semitism" in a work from which I have already quoted (" The Modern Jew," by Arnold White). 

"But there is still another element which the rulers of Russia are constrained to take into their consideration. The intellect of the Jew is masterful. His assiduity, his deadly resolve -to'get on, his self-denial and ambition surmount all natural obstacles. If all careers in the Russian Empire were thrown open to the Russian Jew not a decade would go by before the whole Russian administration from Port Arthur to Eydtkuhnen, and from Archangel to Yalta, must pass into Hebraic hands. This is a sober statement of facts." 

The same is true of other Continental countries. The following is a passage from an apology for anti-Semitism in Austria, which, though somewhat exaggerated, is largely true :— " The Jews are all powerfully represented in every walk in life that leads to influence and fortune. In the professions of law, medicine, and literature their numbers are out of all proportion to their quota of the population. Finance and commerce are practically in their hands. The great business houses, the banks, the railways that do not belong to the State, are all controlled by them. The Produce Exchange, and of course the Bourse at Vienna, Prague, or Budapest, are deserted on Jewish holidays. The press, with the exception of the Czech organs, is almost exclusively in the hands of Jews." 

The proportion of Jews in the Austrian Universities is far in excess of what might be expected from their actual number in the country. For instance, in the Vienna University in 1887-88, out of 6,530 students there were 2,500 Jews— i.e., 40 per cent. In Vienna itself one person in every ten is a Jew, but the proportion of the Jewish population in the whole Empire is only 5 per cent. It is a notorious fact that an increasingly large proportion of the great specialists and best known Professors in Vienna are Jews or of Jewish origin. At the end of 1887, out of 660 qualified attorneys in Vienna 350 were Jews. Indeed, the faculty of law may almost be said to be a monppoly of the Jews in Austria, and also in Germany, where they form not only a large percentage of the attorneys, but also of the judges of the highest courts, and have, as in England and France, supplied from their ranks ministers of justice and judges of appeal. In Berlin 120 of the Professors and Privatdocenten are Jews, and in the whole of Germany there are about 400 Jewish Professors. 

2. The next step in the old Jewish Question in Egypt was that " He turned their heart" (that is, of the Egyptians) " to hate His people, to deal subtilly with His servants." This is how the great God causes the wrath of man to praise Him, and when His purpose is accomplished "restrains the remainder." Pharaoh and his councillors said, "Come on, let us deal wisely with them," and attempted to solve the Jewish Question in their own way, namely, by persecution and extermination ; but God turned the wisdom of the Egyptians into foolishness. " The more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew." Instead of succeeding in drowning them in the Nile, Pharaoh and his host were in the end drowned in the Red Sea. But what is the meaning of His "turning their heart to hate His people"? It had a double significance. 

(a) In relation to Israel it was the means which God employed to stir up their nest and to make them willing to leave the land in which, until the persecutions broke out, they had been content to live for centuries. " For He remembered His holy promise, and Abraham His servant," and the time had come according to His own Divine forecast to Abraham (Gen. xv. 13, 14) that they should come out of Egypt, and takes possession of the lands of the Amorites, whose iniquity was now full. 

(b) In relation to Egypt it was "an evident token of perdition " and precursor of the plagues which came upon it. The judicial hardening of the heart of Pharaoh and the Egyptians was in itself part of the punishment from a righteous God upon a cruel nation sinking lower and lower to the most contemptible depths of idolatry. God has often chastened His people " with the rod of men, and with the stripes of the children of men," but He has no pleasure in the scourge which He employs, and as a rule uses for the chastisement of His people men or nations whom He designs to give up to destruction for their wickedness. 

Now, in these respects, too, the ancient Jewish Question in Egypt finds its parallel in the modern phases of the problem which are accentuated by anti-Semitism. The millions of the poor and less cultured orthodox Talmudic Jews in Russia, Galicia, and Rou-mania have long ago been convinced that these lands cannot much longer remain their resting-places, and that it is about time for them to "arise and depart" toward that land for which they have never ceased to cherish a yearning desire ; hence the many colonising schemes and the more than thirty Jewish colonies which already exist in Palestine, consisting almost entirely of Russian and Roumanian Jews. The remarkable thing is that, as the result of the newest phases of the anti-Jewish movement on the Continent, the more cultured, wealthy, and rationalistic Jews are at last digesting the truths that it is not by the so-called "reform" movement which aims at assimilation with the nations that the Jewish Question will be solved ; for, after all their efforts in this direction for more than half a century and their desperate eagerness to strip themselves of all that is true and false in orthodox Judaism, as a kind of peace-offering to the mysterious, deep-seated antipathy of the Gentiles, they find that it is just against themselves, more even than against the less cultured of their brethren in Russia and Eastern Europe, that the bitterest animosity is manifested, and that Christendom, though it is itself for the most part apostate from truth and from the faith of Christ, is even less reconciled to the rationalism and neology of the modern cultivated " Israelite," than it is to the Talmudism of the more consistent orthodox "Jew" who still wears his kaftan and peyoth. 

What is this but a repetition of the warning words which God in His providence has so often spoken to Israel: " And that which cometh into your mind shall not be at all ; in that ye say, We will be as the nations, as the families of the countries." 

And in relation to the nations it is again an omen of approaching judgment which will culminate in the overthrow and destruction of the armies of the great confederacy, as shown in another part of this volume. "Jehovah frustrateth the counsel of the nations: He maketh the devices of the peoples of none effect. The counsel of Jehovah standeth for ever, the thoughts of His heart to all generations."

Dachau // A Silent Witness

by Art Katz

  As men, our integrity and eternal destiny are going to be measured and determined by the nature of the questions we ask.  Despite countless volumes of study and speculation, despite the assaults of human wisdom and moral exertion, I believe the Holocaust has remained an unresolved mystery precisely because we have not raised the deepest and truest questions. 

    Perhaps this is so because in our hearts we already sense that were we ever to commit ourselves to finding the deepest roots of our Jewish calamities, our lives would be forever altered.  Perhaps we have perceived in our hearts that the truth of the Holocaust and of Jewish existence is going to cost much, and therefore we prefer to examine and speculate about the Holocaust rather than confront its haunting and unsettling enormity, and ask, “why has this happened to us?”  Nevertheless, the Holocaust, so vast in its dimensions, so all-encompassing in its implications, demands a correspondingly total and complete response from us.  To ask less than an all-embracing “why?” and to throw less than one’s whole being into searching that question out, regardless of the cost, are not to make a meaningful response at all.

    In Dachau, Germany, the concentration camp used in the Nazi era can still be found.  The gruesome reality has become a museum, and seems to be a witness to a sincere commitment to truth, regardless of how painful and incriminating it may be.  Or does it?  What if it is a picture of our Jewish relationship to the Holocaust, costly and provocative, but seeming to stop short of that final and total confrontation and meaning which alone constitute truth?

    The screams and shrieks that once permeated the air of Dachau have been muted, entombed behind glass windows.  A barrack has been built to exact specifications, a perfect replica of the original, but it is antiseptic and clean, utterly devoid of the stench of death, untouched by the indelible stain of human torment and degradation.  The museum, with its manicured grounds and memorial plaque, has submerged the reality of the Holocaust, blunting its true magnitude and impact far more effectively than could bulldozers and asphalt. 

    At Dachau today, the Holocaust has been reduced to manageable proportions, to dimensions which can still be contained within the limits of our understanding and emotions.  The museum and its apparent candor is a relatively small price for the Germans to pay for the privilege of considering the Holocaust a past event, a momentary aberration of history, which, for all of its horror, is being explained in a sense, but only within the limits of our humanistic assumptions, thereby allowing our human optimism to remain intact.  The shame and remorse evoked at Dachau are relatively easy alternatives to the unbounded shock and consternation which the Holocaust, untainted by human cosmetics, must inevitably produce.

    As Jews, we may actually have been unsuspecting accomplices with our German brothers.  Content to let remorse suffice, we are as unwilling as they to allow our perennial, human optimism and deep self-assurance to be brought into question.  Even our own Holocaust memorials have served to insulate us from the full impact and deepest implications of our tragedy.  The indignation and grief that Dachau evokes in the Jewish heart are preferable to, and far easier to live with, than the shock and total dislocation of mind and spirit which the Holocaust should, of itself, induce in us.  We have acquiesced to explanations born of our own wisdom, weaving of them a cloak beneath which the impassioned “why us?” burning in our hearts has been smothered and suppressed.  That question continues to burn, unquenched by our wisdom, just as the flames of the Holocaust continue to burn, though suppressed and hidden by the thin layer of civilization and culture stretched over the surface of our modern world.  We have appeared willing to reckon with the Holocaust, to ponder it, but the truth is, we have not yet truly faced it.

    One writer, reflecting upon the establishment of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw observed that “the calamitous march of events shook many pious Jews from their traditional moorings.”  With few exceptions, we have drifted back to the traditional moorings of Judaism; we have drifted back to our humanistic optimism, to faith in human progress and to those religious traditions and practices that have come to characterize Jewish life.  Today, as in the past, there are multitudes of false prophets among us, crying “peace, peace!”  They are no longer found standing in the streets of Jerusalem, but in universities, in government offices and behind pulpits in synagogues.  Their popularity with us today is as great as that of their predecessors.  Yet, the truth is, there is no peace.  We are only superficially healed.  Most of us remain tied to our traditional moorings, content to believe in the optimistic words of our chosen “prophets.”

    Let there be those who will risk being torn loose from those moorings by the impact of the questions raised by the Holocaust in just the same way as their fathers in Warsaw and Dachau were torn loose and set adrift by the actual events.  Let there be those who will have the courage to dig deeper than the statistics of those horrors, deeper than the ashes and charred bones, deeper than the veneer of culture and civilization, for whom the comforts and securities of this present life are as transparent and cruel a deception as were the showerheads and bath-house fixtures of the death camp gas chambers.  Let there be those who will come to acknowledge the still-burning fires of the Holocaust, mirrored in their own hearts as the burning question of “why?”

    If we are still tied to our traditional moorings, then we have not yet recognized the reality of the Holocaust, for it is the very essence of the Holocaust to defy and undo our insistent optimism, to shatter all our illusions, to strip naked, to remove every prop and support, and leave us lost men “drifting through a fog-enshrouded world searching for light.”  To experience the Holocaust as ultimate calamity is to be delivered from every illusion of security, from our country clubs and suburban homes, from our professions and bank accounts, and from our pious repetition of religious clichés; and then to be cast out into a storm of bewilderment and anguish from which alone the true cry of the heart can issue forth: “Why?  What have we done to deserve it?”

    Few have a heart for such questions.  It is far easier to enter into intellectual speculations than to confront the Holocaust as a direct challenge to all our conceptions of what life means in general and for us Jews in particular.  How is it that we have so long avoided those questions?  How have we been able to go on in our customary ways while the Holocaust has only been superficially explained?  Why have we not been gripped, compelled to risk all, to commit all of our passion and energy with an unrelenting urgency to find the answer to the deeper questions raised by the Holocaust?

    The museum at Dachau is visually accessible for analysis; it is there to be questioned, but for many it remains submissive to their preconceived ideas.  The real Dachau is not so submissive; rather, it is calculated to assault and refute every valued category we have held about the Holocaust.  The man confronting the true Dachau must be prepared to have his moral systems shattered, his accommodations with his own peculiar circumstances utterly wrecked, and his uneasy peace with life irremediably disturbed.  For such a man, the answer to “why?” must become a consuming passion.

    As moderns, are we prepared to confront that reality today?  This is no rhetorical question; the Holocaust is no mere historical event, but rather the most recent and devastating expression of the continuing state of Jewish existence.  Like a malignant tumor, the Holocaust is but the dramatic and visible revelation of a cancer that is spread throughout the entire body.  The whole logic of our history is calculated to disturb us, to jar us out of every secure peace with the world.  Jewish history has been little more than a series of jarrings and proddings designed to force us to question our assumptions about our Jewishness and ourselves.  In this respect, the Jew is the quintessential man.  Life’s unprecedented calamities have cornered us, thrusting agonizing questions in our way.

    Are we willing to ask why we have so long been a people in exile, scattered over the earth?  Are we willing to ask why we have remained a foreign substance in the body of every nation in which we find ourselves?  Or why it is that we have been preserved over the centuries, yet never delivered from our chronic alienation, predicament and vulnerability?  From biblical times we have been haunted by our separateness, seeking to be like the nations around us, yet forever scorned and kept apart.  Our being chosen of God as a light to all nations is evidenced by the inescapability of its implications. 

    Our suffering has been too great to comprehend, and our preservation too uncanny to explain in terms of chance, or in terms of our own perseverance.  We are a people trapped in an eternal predicament, never far from perplexity, chosen and yet seemingly forsaken by God.  The question of the Holocaust is but an expression of a greater question, the enduring mystery and enigma of all of Jewish existence.  To question the Holocaust is to question everything about ourselves and our purpose for being.

    The Holocaust is essentially the daily reality of Jewish existence writ large to compel our acknowledgment; its torments, its insecurities and its fears are no more than the eruptions of the torments, insecurities and fears that underlie our life as a people.  On the one hand, the Holocaust is the conspicuous evidence of our exile, even our inevitable predicament; on the other, the countless insults and humiliations of daily life are there to remind us that we are yet vulnerable and alone. 

    The Holocaust has had repeated rehearsals preceding it in Jewish history. From even before the conquest of Judea by the armies of Babylon in 597 BC, out history has been punctuated by a repeating refrain of destruction and suffering. As a people in exile, we have endured the murderous riots of Alexandria in 38 AD, the leveling of Jerusalem and the dismemberment of the nation by Rome in 70 AD, the humiliation of the yellow badge begun in 1215, expulsion from England in 1290, the Spanish Inquisition and the exile from Spain in 1492. The herding ignites and the countless pogroms all preceded and foreshadowed the great nightmare that swept across a “civilized” Europe in our own lifetime. 

    It is as if the Holocaust has always loomed inevitable in the life of the children of Israel, a great black dread and portent permeating our past, dimming and contradicting all hope for the future. We are a diverse people, yet one thing alone unites us, transcending every boundary of time, geography and culture, and this one thing is stamped upon our consciousness as the indelible mark of Jewish identity, namely, the sense of inexplicable and inescapable alienation and pursuit, a mark which no amount of reason, effort or assimilation can ever erase. This mark is our common bond, our common and inescapable heritage. The Holocaust is the permanent and pervasive condition of our lives. 

    The conflagrations, of which the Holocaust is the greatest, have been intermittent, but the fire from which they have sprung has been incessant. While our physical bodies are no longer being thrown into ovens, we are being subjected without ceasing to the warping and corrosions, the slow demoralizing and dehumanizing inner burnings of that same unquenchable flame. So many centuries of so tortuous an existence have left a permanent and visible mark on our lives. The psychological casualties far outnumber the physical. We have been stunted and compressed; our ulcers and heart conditions, our dependence upon tranquilizers and psychiatrists, our addiction to the amusements of the world and our ceaseless string and activity are all agonizing testimony of our unrelieved distress. We are a driven people, either pursuing an explanation and a solution to our condition with an unrequited passion, or else engaged in a frenzied effort to escape or deny it. But if our pursuit after success and wealth and acceptance has failed to deaden the awareness of our condition, neither has our pursuit after knowledge gained foe us any deliverance. We have attained whatever superficial relief that advantageous circumstances have allow us, but we have not arrives at any permanent cure or relief. 
    
    The pattern of Jewish existence has not been broken. For secularized and religious Jew alike, the land of Israel has long been the last hope and ultimate dream of deliverance. Yet, recent history has proven that Israel, far from reversing the pattern of Jewish life, has revealed it all the more plainly and painfully. 

In a country that has frequently been accused (even by its friends) of having a paranoid “Massada complex,” the sense of discontent is all pervaisive. Almost like a biblical plague, the Arab attack on Yom Kippur in 1973 swept away the sweet, fat, confident years that followed the 1967 war. (Time Magazine 12/2/74)

    Professor Ammon Rubinstein, then Dean of the Tel Aviv Law School, make this comment shortly after the Yom Kippur War of 1973: 

I am pessimistic like everyone today. It feels like we’re back where we began – a small weak country facing a much greater power with the odds against us. In many ways we’re worse off now that in 1948. We’re back to square one as Israelis and also as Jews. The pro-Jewish sentiment that followed World War II has disappeared and many people today feel that 30 years is time enough for atonement. Arafat’s appearance at the U.N. awakened in me memories of films of Hitler’s speeches. The feeling is one of being totally alone and not realizing why or what we have done to deserve it. It is a return to the Jewish predicament. 

    A return to the Jewish predicament is to be surrounded and compressed by a great power without, while feeling vulnerable, alienated and perplexed within. The circumstances of Israel have not changed since those melancholy words were spoken. In the intervening years, the grip of the Jewish predicament has only tightened. The identity of the enemy changes; the political and economic circumstances alter, but the essential pattern of Jewish existence remains the same. So inevitable in its reappearance, so immune to space and time, the pattern of our life compels us to look beyond the range of our normal vision. It evoke a cosmic question. The current predicament of the state of Israel, like the current state of our lives as Jews, testifies to the fact that we have not yet fathomed the meaning of the Holocaust, and we stand, therefore, in jeopardy of having it repeated. 
    
    As a people, Jews have sown the abundance of the creative energy and genius into the cultural soil of every nation in which they have found themselves, only to reap, all too frequently, persecution and rejection. We have been the builders of cultures and civilizations, the architects of ideologies and philosophies, only to later find ourselves confined in the enslaving ghettos built from the very products of our own labor. A German civilization, invigorated by nearly 2000 years of Jewish life, brought European Jewry to near extinction. Regardless of what we sow, we reap only exile and death. Whatever the answer may cost us, we are compelled to ask “why?”. Whatever the answer may cost us, the cost of failing to ask is bound to be far greater. 
    
    The Holocaust is not so much a historical event as a present accusation, penetrating irresistible towards the very center of our lives. The power of this assault, the sting which pierces the heart and fastens the whole unbearable weight of our suffering is the realization that all this was allowed by the God of Israel. 

    “Characteristic is the rebellion against God, against heaven, which is noticeable among many Jews who no longer wish to declare God’s judgement right.” That status made about the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto, but it is applicable to all, regardless of time and place, who awaken to discover themselves walled in and compressed, confined within the narrow limits of the Jewish predicament. Perennially confident of the favor of God, we, like the Jews of Warsaw, are confronted by God’s silence and abandonment in the hour of our extremity. The Holocaust is present to us today, inducing in our hearts the same crisis as was induced in Warsaw. The Holocaust continues, a fire of mockery and scorn, consuming our pious platitudes and evaporating every false and convenient idea of God. The whole of our history is but the accumulated weight of contradiction and frustration, the accrued substance of shrieks and cries, wails and laments, directed toward a God who seemingly did not answer us in our every crisis. 
    
    How many of us stand in jeopardy of becoming hypocrites, continuing to profess a religious faith, persisting in religious traditions, while harboring in our hearts as unspoken accusation against the God who allows six million Jews to perish in the Nazi era? We pay a religious service to God without our lips, while doubts and charges fester and ferment into bitterness and rage. In our hearts we judge and condemn Him, secretly agreeing with those in the Warsaw ghetto who no longer desire to declare God’s judgement right. And are we any less the hypocrites who have spurned faith and railed against God without ever earnestly questioning either Him or ourselves? 

    To truly confront the Holocaust, then, is to truly confront God and ourselves. Indeed, few men are disposed to ask such ultimate and supremely costly questions. Do we have the courage to stand in identification with the Jews of Dachau and Warsaw, to have our whole world demolished, our souls thrust into anguish and perplexity by the awesome silence of God? 

    For many, the Holocaust has been the ultimate ground for rejecting God. But the truth is just the opposite. The Holocaust is the fire that burns and consumes everything that we have placed between God and ourselves. Our Jewish way of life, our Yiddishkeit, our philanthropies and our Zionism have permitted us to avoid facing the reality of our condition, namely, our utter and total alienation from the God of Israel. 

    Ponder the great shout of praise, so filled with the assurance of the presence of God, that brought the mighty walls of Jericho tumbling down; and contrast it with the result upon the fortress of Jewish life and culture by our silent shudder in the seeming absence of God from Dachau, Auschwitz and Warsaw. 

    The silence of God, superficially considered, will provoke accusations and judgements against Him, but the silence of God reckoned with in the depths of the heart, and allowed to sound and reverberated throughout our secret and guarded chambers, will shatter and wreck, will humble and strip bare, will call out into the light all secret apprehensions and fears, and will compel us to cry out “why?” and “where was God?” How many of us have a heart for such questions? 

    Until such questions are asked, our very piety and Jewishness will constitute a willful self-deceit. And no less is true of the seemingly bold humanism and secular idealism that have become so characteristic of our life. Thought we talk about an abstract, impersonal “force” behind the universe, our humanistic values, far from being the last resting place of a mind fatigues and disappointed after earnestly searching for the Author of biblical record, are rather the first resort and hiding place of the heart which will not rush all for the sake of finding Him. 

    Humility and honesty require of us the admission that while scorning belief in a living God, and while regarding His silence as final proof of His impotence and irrelevance, we have never earnestly sought Him nor truly desired to meet such a One. Our indignation and rejection are in essence just as much as means of insulating ourselves from the deeper issues raised by the Holocaust as has been our continuing religious piety. The place of true confrontation is not attractive to many, and requires the laying aside of our hopes that mankind will over time improve itself, which was so powerfully refuted in the ashes of the Holocaust, a refutation as irrevocable and complete as the contradiction of traditional religious piety write in those same ashes. 

    The silence of God demands the forsaking of cynicism as much as the abandonment of our supposed piety. it requires the shedding of the prosecutors robes as much as the laying aside of the defendoer’s cloak. Ultimately, it will require the laying aside of the difficult issues of our suffering if we are ever to respond to the question that God’s silence has raised. Our pain and lament must be set aside lest they too become a shield and barrier between ourselves and the God with whom we have to do. let neither our atheism, not our piety, be factors in our failing to perceive that in His silence God has spoken. 

    In His silence, God has contradicted our conceptions both of Him and of ourselves. In His silence, He has wrecked our traditional moorings and invited us to come seeking after Him, naked and in truth. The terrible inadequacy of our ideas of His has been uncovered and displayed by the grit of our historical experiences. This unyielding, impenetrable silence is the true meaning of the Holocaust. It lies at the heart of our lives, both as a people and individually; it is the substance of the Jewish predicament. God’s silence makes disquieting claims on all our categories and theories; it assaults our confidence and assurance; it contradicts our faith in ourselves. We can deny it; we can sink from its challenge in despair, but we can never truly escape it. Who has the courage sufficient to answer such a challenge? Who will stand in utter nakedness? Who will allow himself to be divested of all tradition, stripped of all intellectual and moral preconceptions and presumptions? Who, in the deepest and truest sense, is Jewish enough to encounter such a God?

    In the hour of crisis, and delivers unjustly to the fiery furnace, three Jewish men, Shadrach, Mechash and Abednego, discovered God amidst the flames. God stood with them in the furnace, and delivered them without a burn, without even the smell of smoke. Where was the God of Daniel’s companions when six million of Israel’s people were being cast into the flames of the Holocaust? If His presence in the one furnace speaks to us, what, we are bound to ask, does His absence from the other say? 

    By the hand of God, Job was a man delivered over to inexplicable suffering, stripped of everything, all his security and reason confounded. He was a man brought down to the dust, reduced to his “naked existence” without explanation, invited to “curse God and die,” (Job 2:9) to transmute his anguish and perplexity into bitterness and despair. But Job refused, and asked instead, “Let me know why You contend with me. Is it right for You indeed to oppress, to reject the labor of Your hands, and to look favorable on the schemes of the wicked?” (Job 10:3)
    
    Like Job, have we asked why God might be contending with us? Are we not rather without explanation for our plight, with both our enlightened humanism and our traditional religious understanding of God and of ourselves failing to provide an adequate answer? How do we understand a sovereign and contending God? 
    
    “But I would speak to the Almighty, and desire to argue with God.” (Job 13:3) This is not the impious and blasphemous cry of a self-righteous man but the only true response of a heart, in anguished search for truth, being thrust nakedly beyond all limits of pride and extremities of pain, into the presence of God.  

So-Called “Christian anti-Semitism”

by Rev. Fred Klett

Some Jewish leaders today are recognizing that the best friends the Jewish people have are the conservative evangelical Christians. Admittedly, some see Israel in prophetic terms, but this is not the primary reason for sympathy toward the Jewish people. It is rather because they take their Bibles seriously, read about the history of Israel, realize that Jesus is Jewish, and also have a biblically rooted sense of justice. All that being said, there has been a sad history, within European “Christendom” of mistreatment of the Jewish people. (Those, thankfully, there been some bright spots, such as Bernard of Clairveaux, who protected Jews during the crusades.)

The average seminary graduate knows much less than the average Jewish person about the unfortunate history of Christian-Jewish relations. Few church members know about the persecution the Jewish people have suffered at the hands of professing Christians. The bloody history of “Christian” persecution of the Jewish people and forced conversion to Christianity continues for centuries, but few Christians today know anything o this lamentable history. Beyond question, such treatment of Jewish people is completely contrary to anything Jesus taught! Some would say “No true Christian did such things!” However, that is too simplistic an approach. In fact, even true believers can and do sin. King David was a “true Jew” and a prime example of a man after the heart of God, yet David sinned terribly, committing, covetousness, adultery and murder. True believers have failed into sin, in spite of it being in contradiction with their faith. 

During the first three centuries of the church Judaism and Christianity competed for the pagan mind. There was an active polemical debate between Christians and Jews, but it was on a theological level. Tertullian’s apologetic work, Adversus Judaeos, was an intellectual refutation of Jewish arguments against Christianity, but written with no anger or hatred. Flannery calls the works of this period “moderate” in their “general attitude toward Judaism” and that their “condemnations are usually tempered with a note of sadness and hope for reunion.”[1] Flannery says the fourth century brought a turn for the worse. 

Augustine started the idea of the Jewish people as a “witness people,” that is, whatever happens to them demonstrated God’s blessing or judgement. Though he would have not approved, this idea served in later centuries as a rationale for persecution of the Jews. Augustine also said Judas is the picture of the Jewish people. The Jews are destined to be slaves, yet we should love them and lead them to Christ. He advocated preaching to the Jews with a spirit of love. 

Jerome, translator of the Bible into Latin, wrote that the Jews are the image of Judas and haters of all men. 

John Chrysostome wrote that the Jews are “most miserable of all men” (Homily 4:1), Jew are to live “under the yoke of servitude without end” (Homily 6:2) and that God hates the Jews and has always hated the Jews. He also said, “He who can never love Christ enough will never have fighting against those [Jews] who hate Him” (Homily 7:1). Jews are “lustful, rapacious, greedy, perfidious bandits… inveterate murderers, destroyers, men possessed by the devil” whom “debauchery and drunkenness have given them the manners of the pig and the lusty goat.”[2]

Gregorry of Nissa (331-96) said the Jews are “slayers of the Lord, murderes of the prophets, enemies of God, haters of God, adversaries of grace, enemies of their father’s faith, advocates of the devil, brood of vipers, slanderers, scoffers, men of darkened minds, leaven of the Pharisees, congregation of demons, sinners, wicked men, stoners, and haters of goodness.”[3]

The seventh council of Toledo (694) ordered all Jewish children above the age of seven to be taken from their parents by force and raised as Christians. 

The Crusades began a new wave of persecution in the name of Christ. Jews were murdered by the thousands in the name of Christ. 

According to Flannery, from January to July of 1096 1/4-1/3 of the Jewish population of Germany and northern France were massacred.[4] Charges of ritual murder and “desecration of the host” were used to justify the slaughter of Jewish people in hundreds of incidents. 

In 1298 100,000 Jews were killed because of this charge. The yellow identifying badge we associate with the Nazi era began in thirteenth century France. 

Forced attendance at sermons became more frequent in the 13th century and was even taken up by some Protestant reformers. 

In 14th century Spain 50,000 Jewss were killed by a mob inspired by Martinez, Archdeacon of Seville. During the Spanish Inquisition, Isabella expelled Jews from Spain along with the Church. In Portugal during the inquisition all Jewish children were ordered baptized and taken from there parents. Many Christians were so appalled by this that they came to the aid of the Jews. (Flannery 90-141, passim)

The Pogroms sanctioned by the Russian Orthodox Church persecuted and uprooted whole Jewish villages. 

Lest Protestants think themselves beyond reproach, consider the words of Martin Luther: “What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews?… First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or a cinder of them… Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed… Instead they might be lodged under a roof or in a barn like the Gypsies… Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught be taken from them. Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb…Fifth, I advise that safe conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews… Sixth, I advise that lending money at a high rate of interest be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them and put aside for safekeeping. The reason for such a measure is that… they have no other means or earning a livlihood than usury, and by it they have stolen and robbed from us all they possess… I wish and I ask that our rulers who have Jewish subjects exercise a sharp mercy towards these wretched people, as suggested above, to see whether this might not help (though it is doubtful_. They must act like a good physician who, when gangrene has set in, proceeds without mercy to cut, saw, burn flesh, veins, bone and marrow. Such a procedure must also be followed in this instance. Burn down their synagogues, forbid all that I enumerated earlier, force them to work, and deal harshly with them, as Moses did in the wilderness, slaying three thousand les the people perish!”[5] Luther was responding to a medieval Jewish fiction called On the Generations of Jesus, a horribly blasphemous work, but I do not think we can excuse him. Luther, like King David, fell into sin. The statements of Luther were used by Nazis to justify the Holocaust during the Nuremberg trials.[6] Thankfully, Lutheran denominations have emphatically and officially renounces Luther’s statement! 

Though Calvin was generally very positive in his views of the Jewish people (see quotations here), even Calvin, says J. Verkuyl in Contemporary Missiology (alluding to a study by a Dutch pastor) “could at times revert to a medieval penchant for abusive name-calling. His descriptions of Jews was shameful” (p. 126). Historically, however, countries and churches influences by Calvin have had a positive history in terms of Jewish-Christian relations. 

Clearly, anti-Semitism on the part of professing Christians has contributed to the difficulty we have in sharing the good news of salvation with the Jewish people. Almost every week Jewish news outlets have at least one article mentioning anti-Semitic remarks or actions associated with those perceived as Christians by the Jewish community. 

White supremacist groups often characterize themselves as “Christian.” most Jewish people can relate an incident when they were slapped, insulted or ridiculed because the “killed Christ.” My brothers Jewish boss had his driveway spray painted on Easter with the words: “You Jews Killed Christ.” I have even heard some pastors and seminarians in ignorance use racial stereotypes in describing the Jews, describing Jews as fish and shrewd, and using expressions such as “Jewing down the price.” Remember Bailey Smith’s insensitive remark to the effect that God does not hear the prayers of a Jew? 

“Christian Anti-Semitism” is an absolute oxymoron. A Christian is someone who worships and serves the King of the Jews! Christian means “follower of Messiah”–the Jewish Messiah! To the extent that we fail to radically purge anti-Semitism–and all forms of racism–from the church we fail to follow our Savior. We all long to see progress of the gospel in the world, but such progress will be delayed and hindered if we fail to radically expunge this sort of thing from our midst.

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1.  Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews, ©1985, Paulist Press, (p. 41)

2.  ibid. p. 50-51

3.  ibid. p. 50

4.  ibid. p. 92

5.  Martin Luther, On the Jews and their Lies, Luther's Works volume 47 (p. 268-272)

6.  David A. Rausch, A Legacy of Hatred, Moody Press, Chicago (p. 28-29)

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This article was taken with permission from Chaim.org and Rev. Fred Klett