Interfaith or Bad Faith? Dialogue with Jews Rachael Kohn
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2024/04/interfaith-or-bad-faith-dialogue-with-jews/
“..That would explain why there is currently no basis for Jewish–Muslim relations in Australia, for without acknowledging that Israel is legitimate, sovereign and Jewish, and that its right to exist will be defended against any threat to its existence and its people, then interfaith dialogue is nothing more than a pious lie.”
The resignation of the current and past presidents of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim Association (JCMA), both rabbis, and the suspension of participation by the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, speaks volumes about the nature of Muslim–Jewish relations in Australia. The stated reason given was Muslim leaders’ “failure to recognise the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas”.
Speaking at a pro-Palestinian rally in Broadmeadows, Victoria, the President of the Islamic Council of Victoria, Adel Salman, defended as “legitimate acts of resistance” the October 7 attacks in which 1200 Israeli men, women and children were tortured, slaughtered and raped and more than 253 civilians at a music festival were taken hostage. Clearly, nothing has changed in the six months since the Australian Muslim Times jubilantly reported news of the attack, which was followed soon after by footage of rallies in Lakemba where Muslim sheiks were in celebration mode. Sheik Dadoun (see the video below) punched the sky with his fists as he cheered, calling it “a day of courage, it’s a day of happiness, it’s a day of pride, it’s a day of victory. This is the day we’ve been waiting for.” The failure of the Muslim leadership to denounce and remove preachers who had a reputation for calling on Muslims to kill Jews, such as Wassam Hadad (also known as Abu Ousayd) of the Madina Dawah Centre in Blacktown, Western Sydney, has underlined how artificial the Jewish–Muslim interfaith relationship has been.
In striking contrast, leaders of the Christian community including Rev Sandy Grant from St Andrew’s Cathedral, Michelle Pearse, Director of the Australian Christian Lobby, and Anglican Senior Minister Mark Leach led a rally in Sydney’s Domain on Sunday, February 18, under the banner “Never Again Is Now” (NAIN), attracting an estimated 10,000 people over two and a half hours. They responded to the 738 per cent surge in anti-Semitic incidents since the Hamas attack on Israel, including the recent “doxing” of over 600 Jewish Australians—writers, professionals, business people and academics—by anti-Israel activists.
The speakers at NAIN started with the Christian former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who addressed the crowd saying, “Instead of support, we have seen those living under the freedom of democracy in this country calling for the extinction of the State of Israel from the river to the sea.” He said, “people were ignorant of the real meaning of the words” and the “violent and anti-Semitic nature of those statements”. Former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson also spoke at the event, along with senators Jacquie Lambie and Hollie Hughes, as well as indigenous affairs activist and devout Catholic Warren Mundine.
The enormous difference between the Muslim and Christian responses has deep roots in the origins of interfaith dialogue. Christians were at the forefront of engaging with the reality of anti-Semitism before the Holocaust when it was clear that the Jews of Europe were in profound danger. As early as 1938, the French philosopher and Protestant convert to Catholicism, Jacques Maritain, lectured on anti-Semitism, condemning in unambiguous terms this form of race hatred and describing in frightful detail the pogroms, expulsions and mass murders of Jews taking place in Russia, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Poland. In his book Antisemitism, published in 1939, Maritain did not shrink from acknowledging Christianity’s role in fostering Jew hatred, most especially in deploying conspiracies, such as the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a favourite of Hitler’s propaganda machine. Although it pained him to admit it, Maritain also acknowledged that “the Catholic Press has all too often been an accomplice”.
Far from being an “outlier” for speaking out against Jew hatred, Maritain expressed a view articulated by the then Pope, Pius XI, to the directors of the Belgian Catholic Radio Agency, namely that anti-Semitism is antithetical to the Christian faith. Indeed, Maritain’s outspoken repudiation of anti-Semitism foreshadowed a marked change in the theology of the Catholic Church, which resulted in Nostra Aetate (In Our Time), the Vatican’s 1965 declaration on relations with the Jews and other non-Christian faiths. It stated that anti-Semitism was a sin, and that the death of Christ could “not be charged against all the Jews without distinction then alive or against the Jews of today”. Nostra Aetate catalysed a change in clerical formation and a commitment to Jewish Christian dialogue that proclaimed the common patrimony of Jews and Christians.
The American Roman Catholic priest and author of The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-three Centuries of Antisemitism (1965), Father Edward Flannery, was the first director of Catholic Jewish Relations at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and became Associate Director of the Institute of Judeo-Christian Studies at Seton Hall University, New Jersey. His searing analysis identified the pagan, the Christian, the pseudo-scientific and the totalitarian communist manifestations of anti-Semitism, but it was the numerous ordinary Christians who were ignorant of what the Jews had endured over centuries whom he felt most compelled to educate.
Described by Rabbi James Rudin as “one of this century’s spiritual giants”, Flannery was awarded an honorary doctorate by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institution of Religion, Cincinnati, and was the recipient of many awards and honours from Christian and Jewish organisations. The honours flowed both ways in the realm of Jewish–Christian relations when some of the most outstanding rabbis involved in dialogue, such as Rabbi Leon Klinecki, Rabbi James Rudin, as well as Rabbi David Rosen in Jerusalem, were bestowed with papal knighthoods.
Fr Flannery’s most eminent successor in the field of Christian Jewish relations, Eugene J. Fisher, is deeply invested in combating anti-Semitism. Fisher, who was invited in 1990 by the Jewish communal organisation B’nai B’rith Australia to give the annual Human Rights Oration, an illustrious affair with senior clerics and Cardinal Clancy present, was interviewed in 2020 about anti-Semitism:
Central to anti-Semitism is a rejection of Christianity. The Bible of the Jews, the Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament, was inspired by God and written by Jews, for Jews. The authors of the New Testament were also Jews, writing about the Jew, Jesus/Yeshua, primarily for their fellow Jews, but through Paul open to gentile converts (as Judaism was and is, of course). To hate Jews as a “race” is to hate Jesus, Joseph, Mary, and their faith, first-century Judaism. So a rejection of Christian as well as Jewish faith is a central factor in anti-Semitism, both in Europe and in the US.
In Britain, Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks was a champion of interfaith relations, on which he wrote for the Credo column in the Times and in his more than twenty-five books, especially The Dignity of Difference (2002). Rabbi Sacks became Knight Bachelor in the 2005 Birthday Honours, specifically for his services to the community and inter-faith relations. After his death in November 2020, at the end of the thirty-day mourning period, Prince Charles, now King and the titular head of the Church of England, spoke of Rabbi Lord Sacks as “a light unto this nation”:
Through his writings, sermons and broadcasts, Rabbi Sacks touched the lives of countless people with his unfailing wisdom, with his profound sanity and with a moral conviction which, in a confused and confusing world, was all too rare.
The extent of Rabbi Sacks’s public reach both in the UK and in the wider Anglican community was due in no small measure to the brilliant work of the Anglican priest and historian James Parkes (1896–1981). A driving force in the founding of the Council of Christians and Jews, Parkes was a young activist in the Student Christian Movement in Europe for twelve years, when he observed the brutality of Nazism against the Jews. He dedicated his scholarship and personal life to combating anti-Semitism. He railed against the Church’s missions to Jews seeking their conversion, which had increased in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and instead advanced the study of the unique history and biblical faith that bound Judaism and Christianity together and also forced them apart. His meticulous analysis of the conflicts between the two faiths, and in particular the blight of anti-Semitism, for which he blamed “the obduracy and wrong headedness of Christianity”, resulted in the Parkes Library at the University of Southampton, one of the largest documentation centres on Jewish–Christian relations. Among his many works, The Conflict of the Church and Synagogue: The Origins of Antisemitism (1934, reprinted in 1961) was his magnum opus, although he continued to write books and pamphlets, journal articles and voluminous letters on this theme well into the 1960s.
America also had its Protestant champions of Jewish–Christian relations in the pre-war era, but they increased significantly after the Holocaust. The Methodist minister and past president of the American Academy of Religion, Arthur Roy Eckardt (1918–1997) was the most dedicated scholar and promoter of Christian–Jewish relations in the post-Holocaust era. In Christianity and the Children of Israel (1948) and in his most influential work, co-written with his wife, Alice, Elder and Younger Brothers: The Encounter of Jews and Christians (1967), the origins and perpetuation of anti-Semitism are understood as a pagan’s war against “Jesus the Jew”. Like Parkes before him, the Eckardts’ insistence on the nascent theological and historic bond of Christians to Jews, which is often denied by anti-Semites, also extends to Israel:
In Jesus the Jew, the covenant is opened to the world, but not in any way that annuls the election of the original Israel. Because the Christian has been brought into the family of Jews, the fate of Israel, including the State of Israel, is also his fate.
In Encounter with Israel: A Challenge to Conscience (1970), the Eckardts document the Jews’ majority presence in Israel until the sixth century and their continued existence as a substantial minority until the nineteenth century when more than 100,000 Jews and later an additional 200,000 fleeing from Nazi Europe settled there. Rebutting the distortion of facts relating to Israel, the Eckardts regarded the demand by Muslims and the international Left for the “de-Zionisation” of Israel as nothing but a euphemism for the annihilation of the Jewish state, the denial of Israel’s right to exist and support for genocide.
The Eckardts travelled the world promoting Christian understanding of Jews, Judaism and Israel, and at home Alice founded the Jewish Studies program at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, originally affiliated with the Episcopal (Anglican) Church. Alice Eckardt, Professor of Religious Studies and special adviser to the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, was presented with the Human Relations Award by the American Jewish Committee.
These are but a few of the leaders in Jewish–Christian dialogue who contributed to and benefited from Jewish and Christian scholarship, which was often in collaboration, particularly in the more recent study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The most influential was Geza Vermes, whose translation of the complete Scrolls into English, the first of its kind, was eclipsed by his ground-breaking books on Jesus the Jew (1973), Jesus and the World of Judaism (1983), The Religion of Jesus the Jew (1993), Jesus in his Jewish Context (2003) and many more on a similar theme. These have had an enormous impact on how Christians have re-connected to their Jewish roots.
Vermes, who escaped the Holocaust by becoming a Catholic priest in the French order Fathers of Our Lady of Sion, turned the order’s mission to convert Jews into its opposite, the repudiation of anti-Semitism and teaching Christians about Jews and Judaism. It is a calling that still characterises the Order in Australia, who were among the first participants in the Council of Christians and Jews, Victoria.
Jewish–Christian dialogue is deeply grounded in a mutual relationship, which recognises that Jews were unjustly cast as villains both theologically and historically, but, after the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel, foregrounded the importance and legitimacy of their respective faiths. It accepts that the concept of a “Judeo-Christian” foundation of Western civilisation is crucial to its survival and defence against an often atheist-driven “progressive Left” that is on a course to dismantle it under the guise of an anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist agenda.
This confluence of anti-Western ideologies, and particularly the rejection of Judeo-Christian civilisation, has attracted large numbers of the Muslim community and leadership, which is happy to make common cause with groups that are implacably opposed to Israel and Christians supporting Israel. They openly label the only democratic country in the Middle East as colonialist, apartheid, fascist and a menace, as Muslim community leader and convert to Islam, Bilal Cleland, has done. Not once is the despicable attack by Hamas on October 7 denounced as the Iranian-backed terrorism it was, not once is blame sheeted home to Hamas for not returning the hostages, not once are the extensive militarised tunnels under Gaza condemned as the launching pad for terrorism against the State of Israel, not once is the culpability of Hamas acknowledged for the destruction of its own people by using them as shields and refusing them shelter in its mass of tunnels, not once is the hatred of Jews which is central to the Hamas charter and is taught in the UNRWA schools in Gaza criticised by Muslim leaders and writers in Australia.
Most of all, the Muslim leadership in Australia does not acknowledge one simple and incontrovertible fact, that Israel is central to Jews and Judaism, historically and today. Israel is not a dispensable ingredient in what it means to be Jewish, despite marginal Jews who can always be found penning diatribes against it, especially for Al Jazeera. There will always be Jew haters, even among Jews themselves, but removing Israel from interfaith dialogue, which I have witnessed all too often in the interest of “peaceful conversations”, is false comfort. Indeed, the former Grand Mufti of Australia, Sheik Taj El-Din Hamid Hilaly, who publicly preached hatred of Jews and Israel and was a frequent promoter of the conspiracy beliefs contained in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was recently eulogised as “a man who reflected and embodied the spirit of the community”. That would explain why there is currently no basis for Jewish–Muslim relations in Australia, for without acknowledging that Israel is legitimate, sovereign and Jewish, and that its right to exist will be defended against any threat to its existence and its people, then interfaith dialogue is nothing more than a pious lie.
From 1992 to 2018 Rachael Kohn produced and presented programs on religion and spirituality for ABC Radio National, including The Spirit of Things from 1997 to December 2018
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