CCJR ANNUAL MEETING PROCEEDING Eschatology and The

Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations CCJR ANNUAL MEETING PROCEEDING Eschatology and the Ideology of Anti-Judaism John Connelly, University of California at Berkeley This talk grows out of a lengthy study about the path the Catholic Church took to undo the ideology of anti- Judaism.1 At its heart are a small group of Catholic intellectu- als, mostly converts, who pushed forward this change, beginning in the 1930s and extending to the Second Vatican Council, which concluded in 1965. Ideology is a coordinated system of ideas that acts to shape as well as limit thought. People adhere to ideology with- out full awareness of its elements and their interrelation.2 Ideology can develop power beyond their conscious control. I will have more to say about its precise contours below, but anti-Judaism featured a central assumption that Jews had lost touch with God and were destined to suffer a history of pun- ishment until, at the end of time, they finally turned to Christ, the “Jewish Messiah.” I am not saying that all Christians con- sciously assented to these ideas; from the little research that has been done on Catholic anti-Judaism across borders, it would seem to have varied from region to region. The idea that Jews had “killed God,” for instance appears to have been much stronger in East Central Europe in the interwar period than it was in North America. Still, as exemplified by the anti- racist Jesuit John LaFarge, when Catholics did turn their mind to the “Jewish question” in the 1930s, anti-Judaism is what 1 John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 2 For general guidance on the subject, see Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verson, 1991). SCJR 9 (2014) 1 www.bc.edu/scjr Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations they found in tradition as well as interpretations of scripture.3 And that severely limited engagement in favor of Jews by those guided by Christian thought. I want to start my discussion of the power of this ideology in Nazi-occupied Lithuania at the end of the winter of 1943, just before the liquidation of a ghetto the occupiers had created at the small town of Swiecany, a place with mixed population: Jewish, Polish, Lithuanian. The Jew Batya Weksler pleaded with the Christian Pole Emilia Waszkiniel to take her infant son Jakub and raise him as her own. Waszkiniel was afraid. After all, people giving shelter to Jews faced the death penalty. Also, she and her hus- band were very poor. They did not even have their own apartment. But Weksler insisted. “You are a Christian,” she said. “You believe in Jesus. Jesus was a Jew. Rescue this Jewish infant in the name of the Jew in whom you believe.” Waszkiniel agreed and one night received the child huddled in a blanket. She explained why thirty-six years later in a conversation with this child now grown into a man, her son Romuald, a Catholic priest: “I couldn’t not take you. That would have been like renouncing my faith. I said to myself: if you believe in Jesus Emilia, then you have to save this child.”4 Emilia Waszkiniel was a pious woman. Pious women, pious Christians, are not so rare in Eastern Europe. Why did not more see the Jew Christ in the Jews being taken to their deaths? Why did not more see a special relation between their savior and Jews facing extinction? 3 Thus Lafarge, presumably otherwise well-meaning, found himself in thrall of key components of anti-Judaism, ironically and tragically, in the midst of composing an encyclical against racism (it was never released). See Connelly, From Enemy to Brother, 98-101. 4 Dariusz Rosiak, Człowiek o twardym karku. Historia księdza Romualda Jakuba Wekslera-Waszkinela (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2013), 34-35. 2 SCJR 9 (2014) Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations In fact what we often see and hear in reminiscences of Jews who survived is indifference, callousness and occasional hostility on the part of Christians. Not only did they not see Christ in Jews, often they hardly saw a neighbor, a neighbor toward whom the most basic Christian teaching should have applied: Teacher which commandment in the law is the greatest? He said to him, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mt 22: 37-39 NAB). In the story in which Jesus speaks to the question: who is my neighbor, the answer is that “neighbors” are ethnic others. Returning to wartime Europe. Consider the recollection of Jehoszua Zoberman, town councilor and head of a sporting club in Sandomierz in Southeastern Poland. Here is what struck him in reminiscing in 1946 the attack upon Jews in the ghetto in Sandomierz perpetrated on 17 November 1942 by the SS as well as Ukrainian and Polish police: “Three thousand living beings murdered by a few hundred ruffians in clear sight of the entire non-Jewish population, and no one tries to stop it, no one stands up for us, all of us unfortunate, alone, condemned to death—that is our fate. That is our fate.”5 Poles feel justifiably aggrieved when people treat Chris- tian antisemitism as simply a Polish story. It was not simply a Polish story. Memoirs from places as different as Hungary, Bosnia, and Bohemia reveal this same sort of indifference that we see in Sandomierz. Jews were lowest on any scale of 5 Michał Grynberg and Maria Kotowska, eds., Życie i zagłada Żydów polskich 1939-1945. Relacje świadków (Warsaw: Oficyna Naukowa, 2003), 229. SCJR 9 (2014) 3 www.bc.edu/scjr Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations obligation that people felt toward neighbors. They faced great- er indifference than any other population in Europe. Here is a recollection from the acclaimed Hungarian dissident and au- thor, George Konrád, of his return in 1945 to Berettyóújfalu, the small Eastern Hungarian town from which the other Jews (including two hundred classmates) had been taken to Ausch- witz the previous summer. “The townspeople,” he recalled, “had generally made no comment about the Jews being carted off. Some had even laughed at the sight of old people strug- gling with their bags, and indeed they were laughable, thinking they would have need of their things, their familiar pillows and blankets, when what was awaiting them was the crematorium. The fact that they were loaded onto trains was met with the same indifference as news from the front or draft notices or the appearance of bombers over the town on a sunny morn- ing: they were all so many historical events over which one had no control. It was the indifference that comes of an acceptance of fate mingled with fear and perhaps relief.”6 We hear very similar sentiments from the Czech Jewish survivor Heda Ko- valy, who went back to the village where her grandmother had lived: I did not visit the farm. It had been taken over by strangers after the war. My grandmother’s cottage looked neglected. Everything in it seemed even smaller than before. A kind old neighbor let me in and showed me where everything had happened. “See?” she said. “Here’s where your grandmother set down her cup of coffee just before the Germans came. And here she sat with me for a while and I told her, ‘Mrs. Bloch, don’t be afraid…’” I know there was nothing anyone could do. But they were taking away an 86-year old grandmother to a hor- rible death, and the village where she had lived all her 6 George Konrád, A Guest in My Own Country. A Hungarian Life, translated by Jim Tucker and edited by Michael Henry Heim (New York: Other Press, 2007), 103. 4 SCJR 9 (2014) Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations life, where everybody loved her, had just looked on. The only thing anyone had had to say was, “Mrs. Bloch, don’t be afraid…”7 During the war the citizens of Sarajevo, Bosnia (part of the fascist Independent State of Croatia) banded together to protect each other: Muslims, Catholic Croats, and Orthodox Serbs. The Serbs were under grave threat and faced genocidal policies in many other places under Ustasha rule. However, the city’s ten thousand Jews perished almost entirely.8 My thesis is that this indifference rested upon a deep substratum of belief, shared even by people who had become “post-Christian,” but which was exceptionally strong in in places like Poland and Lithuania. In many cases, Christians agreed with Joshua Zoberman: Suffering was the Jews’ fate. Why? Because they had killed God. This widespread belief among Christians was never made formal by the Church’s teaching authority, but still, it was widely accepted from the early days of the Church, and over the centuries grew into a formidable ideology. My book details the path taken by Catholic (and more generally Christian) theology to break with this ideology, with this history of anti-Judaism, with the idea that the fate of Jews was suffering. The break took place two decades after the end of World War II in the fall of 1965, when Catholic bishops approved the declaration Nostra Aetate, which was among the documents promulgated at the Second Vatican Council, an event meant to bring the church “up to date” in the modern age. 7 Heda Margolius Kovaly, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941- 1968, translated by Helen Epstein (London: Holmes and Meier, 1989), 66.

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