The depressing news (via LGF) that Notre Dame has been “Hit With Anti-Semitic Graffiti” created a sad echo for me:
Anti-Semitic graffiti, including a sign saying “death to Jews,” was found Saturday scrawled on the grounds of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.
From Toni Kamins’ excellent Jewish Guide to France:
Other than the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame is Paris’ most identifiable landmark. This symbol of French Catholicism also is emblematic of the centuries old conflict between Christianity and Judaism. On either side of the central portal, in tall niches, are two female figures, Ecclesia and Synagoga. On the left as you face it is Ecclesia, a beautiful woman wearing a crown. She represents the Roman Church. On the right is Synagoga, a woman blinded by a serpent around her eyes, with her head bowed, and her staff shattered; the tablets of the law slip from her hand. She represents Judaism. Variations of these figures are common in church architecture all over Europe and in medieval art as well.
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17 Comments
1. asher813@aol.com:Chilling.
Aug 16, 2004 - 8:52 am 2. evariste:Roger, how ugly, but typical. I’m not surprised, but I am disgusted…While I found this encouraging at the time
it does not appear to be powerful enough to start wiping away thousands of years of institutionalized Catholic antisemitism. Of this kind of thing:
Aug 16, 2004 - 8:58 am 3. ricpic:I think it is no accident that America, which has remained relatively infertile ground to anti-semitism, has a high percentage of genuinely believing and practicing Christians.
Lived Christianity is totally incompatible with hatred of any group qua group.
Although this should comes as no news, the great modern outbreaks of anti-semitism in Europe have come in totally or nearly totally secularized societies that were once part of “Christendom.”
This is not to excuse the anti-semitism fostered by the clerisy within the Christian Church. But that was, and is, always a falling away from the gospel, not its fulfillment.
The problem in France is not Christianity, it is “the triumph” of the secular.
Aug 16, 2004 - 9:21 am 4. Mike Silverman:Most of the anti-Semitism in France is caused by Muslims.
Aug 16, 2004 - 9:29 am 5. jerry:Mike:
Were Muslims the cause of anti-Semitism in France at the turn of the 19th Century? How about during the 30s and 40s? Perhaps that was all the Germans fault.
Aug 16, 2004 - 9:33 am 6. evariste:ricpic: the problem is that France was antisemitic in her Catholic days, and is antisemitic today in her secular humanist days, and will be antisemitic in her muslim future.
Secularism can’t be blamed for this, Europe’s oldest moral leprosy.
Aug 16, 2004 - 9:37 am 7. WichitaBoy:France has a long regrettable history of anti-semitism. I’m particularly bothered by the lack of accountability after World War II for the collaborations with the Nazis. Still, this is after all one incident by one person. We should be very chary of reading too much into it.
To understand the traditional American attitude, I wanted to share this passage I found in U.S. Grant’s memoirs which confirms the quotation posted by evariste somewhat.
There you have it: just one of three standard denominations.
I agree with ricpic that a lot of the problem is the new secularism. It is hostile to the traditional religions, Christianity and Judaism, and seems to be allying itself with fundamentalist Islamism.
Aug 16, 2004 - 10:01 am 8. marc:At the tip of the Ile de la Cite is movingly designed memorial to the deported French. Of course missing from the memorial is any mention that during the 40s the vast majority of the deported weren’t considered French, as they were Jewish. Now of course in the present day because they were martyrs they weren’t Jewish, they were French.
Aug 16, 2004 - 10:39 am 9. Mike Silverman:Were Muslims the cause of anti-Semitism in France at the turn of the 19th Century? How about during the 30s and 40s? Perhaps that was all the Germans fault.
I was referring to recent anti-Semitism in France.
Going back through history, though, anti-Semitism is pretty much 100% the fault of historic Christian teachings meshing with prevalant social attitudes.
Now, I want to recognize that the modern Church, and modern Christianity has made remarkable and by all account deep-seated and honest changes in how Jews and Judaism are viewed, and the historic fact of the Christian origin of anti-Semitism in no way is a reflection on the CURRENT state of Christendom.
In other words, I do not want to bash Christianity as it is currently practiced and taught.
Aug 16, 2004 - 12:19 pm 10. Terrye:I can understand such ignorance in the dark ages, after all they were the dark ages and pagans were targets as well as Jews. However, today such behavior is without excuse.
Aug 16, 2004 - 2:12 pm 11. Howard:Oh, that Notre Dame. For a second I thought you were talking about the real one and that their football season might be ruined.
Aug 17, 2004 - 4:09 am 12. John Mendenhall:I’m not Jewish. I’m Christian. Among the assumptions I must make and the obligations I must undertake is accepting the literal truth and critical importance of “I am the Way, and the Truth…etc.”
In no way, as a Christian, am I called to be content that souls are to be lost as a result of disbelief or disregard of Christianity’s claims for itself, by Jews, atheists, Muslims, or Episcopalians.
I am not offended, therefore, that there is a piece of sculpture that shows Christianity in a more positive light than Judaism. I would certainly not expect to see a crucifix at synagogue, or a menorah at mosque.
I do believe that the many mainstream churches whose bosses and members have ended evangelism in order to be “tolerant”–who believe, in practice, that “one religion is as good as another”– have become social clubs, not churches, irrelevant to the point of Christianity, which is the soul in eternity with, or without, God. They, too, are unbelievers, which others have mentioned as “secularists.”
I suppose it may be argued that it was technology that enabled the murder of the six million by post-Christian Europeans in a very short six years or so, and that such murder was always in the Christian European heart as well, if only they’d had the tools.
But it would be hard to convince me. Religious murder in Christianity has, in truth, been an aberration; the Gospel does not call for it or support it. Religious murder by Muslims is a central tenet of that demonic “faith.”
Maybe French hoodlums put up the graffiti; maybe Muslim demon-worshippers; maybe French politicians. But I’ll bet fifty cents it wasn’t priests from the cathedral.
Aug 17, 2004 - 12:43 pm 13. John Mendenhall:Evariste
Your quotation from the 1583 source specifies many types of unbelievers, including Jews, apostates, infidels, schismatics, and others–mainly what us Baptists would call backsliding Christians. They are not to be allowed to take Communion. And, why would they want to?
Your quote from the Vatican diplomat is not, I repeat not, Christian doctrine.
It’s ok that you quote both sources, but I think you’re a little contextually challenged. “No one can enter Heaven except through [Christ]” is what Christianity says about itself. The words of a diplomat priest are the words of a diplomat, while the words of Scripture are Scripture, if you see what I’m saying!
Aug 17, 2004 - 12:56 pm 14. John Mendenhall:And, though I must apologize for excess bandwitdh use, there is this one other thing to consider regarding anti-Semitism, or any other sort of contemptible behavior in Europe: Europeans, consistently, throughout history, since the world started, have been horses’ asses, hypocrites, effete snobs, girlymen, exploiters, bullies, pimps,cowards, blowhards, and consummate evaders of responsibility whenever they possibly could. How in the hell any of us came to be descended from them is beyond me.
The latest example can be found at this link:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39998
It’s hard to say if this reflects both anti-Semitism and anti-Russo/Ukraino/White Russianism, or just the general tendency of Europeans to act like buttheads. Thank heavens they did whatever it was to run my poor old white trash ancestors out of the old country they did.
Aug 17, 2004 - 1:30 pm 15. Knucklehead:John Mendenhall:
You shouldn’t keep your feelings bottled up. Tell us how you really feel about the Euros.
I saw some reference to the the Euros having some idea of building a wall and hiring the Israelis to do it and I didn’t bother to follow the link – I figured it had to be The Onion or somesuch doing satire.
Holy Freakin Bleep! Put aside the sheer arrogant hypocrasy of the very idea following their never ending condemnation of Israel for building its wall, just stop and realise – They want to rebuild the Iron Curtain!
There really is no hope for Europe. None.
Aug 17, 2004 - 1:49 pm 16. Assistant Village Idiot:I have two Romanian sons, and have spent much time in Transylvania and Hungary. To someone raised in America, the fragmentation of the peoples, and the lack of awareness of their own history is simply boggling. Highschool history textbooks make no mention that Jews ever lived there, nor that Gypsies still do. That there remains a king in exile was suppressed for obvious reasons, but there is also no mention of King Carol or Queen Marie (probably the only good rulers in the history of Romania). Each group divides against the others, and this is treated as the most natural thing in the world. Hungary is Catholic, minority Calvinist. The Reform congregations of different stripe have nothing to do with each other. Romania is Orthodox, with the state church having absorbed the Uniates and Greek Catholics. The minority churches of Baptists, Pentecostals, Adventists, Reformed, not only have nothing to do with the Orthodox, they have nothing to do with each other, even when neighbors both persecuted by the collaborationist Orthodox. They have nothing good to say about each other.
The ethnic Hungarians complain, the ethnic Germans have left but are still vilified, pockets of Serbs are treated as foreigners after five generations.
This is the area that gave up half a million Jews in two months at the end of WWII: a triangle from Budapest to Cluj to Transcarpathia in Ukraine. They gave them up without hatred, but with a shrug. Oppressed peoples do not band together (except in America), as we expect they might.
I had always thought of Western Europe in counterpoint to this — as a typical product of an eastcoast university education, I thought of western europe as a dependable bastion of tolerance and progressiveness. London has taught me otherwise, and acquaintances from Italy, France, and Austria have confirmed it. It is not just Muslims and closet fascists in Europe who hate Jews. If the Klan spoke with the right accents to disguise their Americanness, they would be well-accepted in Austria and France. On the Left.
Aug 17, 2004 - 6:39 pm 17. Bostonian:There is nothing about anti-Semitism that I understand.
Aug 17, 2004 - 8:18 pm