belonging, as we have already seen, as much to me as to my tradition. I have no right to judge the hatred of Jews from a place on the moral high horse.
It helps to know how that hatred perverted the story of Jesus, starting with the very human conditions within which the New Testament faith first grew, coming eventually to the apocalyptic climax of 1945, and continuing to the Christian reckoning that has been occurring since then. The long, tragic drama includes unpredicted turns of history more than any will of God. And it shows that, just as the first intimate friends of Jesus betrayed him at his hour of greatest need—all fleeing, except the women—so, too, were the second and third generations of Jesus people treasonous when, however inadvertently, they remembered him in a way that set him against his own people.
Even before that, was there perhaps betrayal when, in the phrase the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus uses of them, “those who first loved him and could not let go of their affection for him”22 stopped proclaiming the Kingdom of God, as Jesus had, and began instead to proclaim Jesus himself as Lord? The primal texts are complex when it comes to this question, as we will see. But what Jesus never did—put himself in the place of God—the Church did, making his humanity deeply problematic. Twenty centuries later, the most fateful consequence of that twist in the story was made brutally clear, for Jesus’ Jewishness had thereby been made problematic, too.
There’s the surprise. The deep past is far more present with us than we think—not only a past that is defined by the figure of Jesus, but a past that took its shape from forces with which, despite seeming dissimilar at first, we are in fact quite familiar. The quest for meaning is never finished. It is open-ended. It is shaped by the imperfections of human perception. Seeking the truth about Jesus can lead to mistakes about Jesus. Our most well-intended efforts are marked by a propensity for error and—most dramatically, as this story will show—by impulses to run from danger. Equally, on the positive side, these efforts are marked by our enduring capacity as humans to surpass ourselves. Once we have tasted the delight of meaning discovered or invented, our thirst will not be quenched. A personal Jesus is never enough. As much as he beckons, so he withdraws at our approach. Such contingencies, for better and worse, drove the faith forward into history, and still do.
Christ actually was like us in all of this, yet for him the lasting anguish would have been, perhaps, in how his elevation as meaning itself, from Word of God to “God from God,”23 ultimately drew attention away from the only One to whom he ever wanted to point. That was his Abba, the God of Love who—this must be emphasized—always was and always will be neither an “Old Testament God” nor a “New Testament God,” but the God of the Jews, pure and simple.
Our images of God, man, and the moral order have been permanently impaired. No Jewish theology will possess even a remote degree of relevance to contemporary Jewish life if it ignores the question of God and the death camps.
—Richard Rubenstein1
By what logic is the claim sustained that the Holocaust provokes a major re-envisioning of Jesus Christ? Among other reasons, because, startlingly enough, a version of this catastrophe happened before, with just such re-envisioning a consequence.
The Nazi genocide against the Jewish people is unique. More than six million were murdered, not merely in the normal progress of the German death machine that mauled tens of millions of others. No, Jews were singled out, hounded, rounded up, transported, bludgeoned, gassed, and cremated expressly and only for beings Jews. The murdered included more than a million children. Nothing they could have done—no conversion, no betrayal, no bribe, no willingness to support the war effort, no embrace of Aryan ideology, no renunciation of Yahweh—would have led to their being spared. Their offense consisted in having been born. This sets what Hitler ordered apart from any other tyrant’s bloody decree. Other genocides have occurred, both before and since (and Joseph Stalin engaged in genocidal spasms of killing even as Hitler did), but no moral scale exists on which one group’s suffering can be measured against another’s. Nor is there a competition in victimhood. Every genocide is unique, and each one is a mortal crime. Yet what happened to Jews as Jews in the heart of twentieth-century Europe, at the hands of members of the most highly sophisticated culture in history carrying to an extreme basic tenets of Western civilization itself, remains a watershed of horror.
But the Jewish people, as a people, were previously the target not just of perennial discrimination and periodic violence but—once before—of an effectively eliminationist assault that also might have succeeded: the long-ago Roman War against the Jews, which was ignited not long after the lifetime of Jesus.2
What the Romans called Bellum Judaicum, “the Jewish War,” unfolded in three phases: first between the years 66 and 73, then between 115 and 117, and, finally, between 132 and 136. The scale of destruction—with perhaps millions of Jews killed,3 with Judea and Galilee laid to waste, and with Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean attacked—is alone enough to bear comparison to the twentieth-century barbarity. The pre-industrial Romans accomplished the killing man by man, woman by woman, child by child, not in mechanized mass-destruction factories. The mayhem, therefore, was, if anything, even more cold-blooded than what the bureaucratically minded Germans did. Yet it is true that the Romans were not motivated, as the Nazis were, by what moderns would regard as racial anti-Semitism. Romans were not operating out of an ontological or theological enmity, as twentieth-century Europe was in abetting—or ignoring—the “transport” of Jews. For Rome, the matter was one of simple imperial control, and that required submission on the part of subject peoples. Total submission, not elimination, was the purpose of total violence. A broad and consistent Jewish refusal to yield prompted levels of killing that were genocidal in effect, whatever the intent.4 Yet viewed from below, the carnage would surely have looked the same—from the point of view of the many thousands of men hung on crosses, the untold numbers of women raped and forced into slavery, the multitude of infants whose bodies were torn apart, the experience was no doubt comparable. On the ground, annihilation is annihilation.
Rome was just being Rome. Yahweh’s people were just being Yahweh’s people. Unlike most others under the yoke of the empire, the people of Israel found it impossible to sustain a spirit of submission, because the impositions were simply blasphemous, grotesque insults to the Lord: the ubiquitous offering of sacrifices to gods; requirements to acknowledge the emperor as divine; the intrusions of legionaries into sanctuaries; ultimately, the occupation by pagans of Eretz Yisrael—the Land. The territory of Israel had been given as the sign of the covenant, and therefore was itself sacred. The Roman heel set loose in that land was trampling upon God.
The rule for populations conquered by Rome, however, was straightforward: Submit or die. What motivated the refusal to yield mattered not at all. In the Christian memory, Jews have always brought trouble down upon themselves, a malign trait that would show itself across the centuries as stiff-necked stubbornness. Yet “stubbornness” fails to credit the true—and heroic—distinctiveness of this resistance. Jews were motivated not only by a religious self-understanding that set them apart, but also by the conviction that the liberation of Israel from Rome was willed by none other than the God of Israel. More than that, God could reliably be counted upon to bring that liberation about—and soon.
To the modern imagination, such an expectation seems cracked. Neither its genesis nor its urgency can be grasped—yet this holy political assurance was defining for all Jews, able to be reduced to neither mere fantasy nor mad enthusiasm. Messianic hope, more than any other single factor, set this people apart. It accounts both for the
