Rabbi Walter Homolka. Israel Affairs. Volume 16, Issue 4, October 2010.
Until well into the twentieth century, Jews and Christians had no mutual basis for discourse. The Christian-Jewish dialogue and the rapprochement between the Holy See and the State of Israel are owed in essence to feelings of shame regarding the Shoah. The Second Vatican Council and the pontificate of John Paul II signified substantial breakthroughs. Since then, though, the sense of guilt has eased, and the Roman Catholic Church’s awareness of the injustice of its role as fellow traveller to, and henchman of, the Third Reich has diminished. Under the current Pope, Benedict XVI, the relationship between Jews and Catholics has noticeably deteriorated. After five years of his pontificate, Joseph Ratzinger has lost a great deal of trust, and not only among Jews.
After the death of Pope John Paul II, a central question arose pertaining to whether his successor would continue along the brave path of opening towards the ‘older brothers and sisters in faith’, the Jews. Several years of Benedict XVI’s pontificate have provided us with a sobering answer. The dogmatic image of Christ as surpassing everything Jewish has been affirmed in a way that seems to make the rift between Jews and Christians significantly larger than before. If we look at the period directly prior to the Shoah, then we can determine quite well the point of origin of Jewish-Christian relations. In 1930, the Verband der Deutschen Juden (Union of German Jews) completed a large publishing project. With its Lehren des Judentums nach den Quellen (The Teachings of Judaism. From its Sources), this five-part work was created with the intent to provide for an intellectual profile of Judaism.
In the work’s fifth and last part, prominent representatives of German-Jewish thought—including Leo Baeck, Seligmann Pick, Michael Holzman, Julius Lewkowitz, and Felix Makower—address Judaism in its relation to its surroundings. Over 300 pages are devoted to exploring the differences between Judaism and the ‘Christian religions’ with regard to their ‘basic ideas’ and ‘manifestations’.
Written shortly before the brachial caesura of the Holocaust, The Teachings of Judaism. From its Sources gives us a comprehensive understanding of the Jewish relationship to Christianity, and it precisely describes the lines of demarcation between the two. Hence, this work is especially well-suited to provide us with insight into the distanced relationship between Judaism and Christianity in the first half of the twentieth century.
It was Leo Baeck (1873-1956) who recognized Pauline theology and mission as the decisive turning point in the history of Christianity with regard to its relation to Judaism and the early Christian community before Paul. Baeck writes that
out of the Jewish messianic belief, as conceived by the old Christian community as belief in the messianity of Jesus, came, in Pauline theology, as influenced by oriental-Hellenistic beliefs of mystery, a completely different belief: the myth of Christ. Here, as well, Jesus remains central. However, this Jesus to whom [in Pauline theology] all thoughts and hopes are addressed is no longer the Jesus who admonished, taught, supported, and made promises, as well as of whom his companions and students spoke. Here is someone completely different, only his name remains the same.
Leo Baeck criticizes the belief in a mythic redeemer of the world, i.e. one who has been present since the beginning of time, which forces God into the background: ‘God’s significance is merely that He sent this saviour into the world.’ Only by turning toward this redeemer can one become a member of the community. Only through the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist can one participate in these mysteries in a real and tangible manner. Only those who bind themselves to Christ through these mysteries will partake in the miracle of grace, i.e. in eternal life and the freeing from sin.
As the emerging church turned away from its pre-Pauline and Jewish origins, Judaism had to turn against the church. Against the claim of Christ, Judaism was pushed to emphasize its insistence on strict monotheism and its rejection of any intermediary between God and man. Baeck writes that ‘through its struggles with the church, the Jewish religion of the time became increasingly conscious of its own self’. Baeck interprets the fundamental difference between Christianity and Judaism not as stemming from Christology, but rather from their different teachings of man. For him, the church abandoned the biblical view that ‘man is created in the image of God’ and thus endowed with the creative power to fulfil the moral tasks that God sets before him in accordance with his free will and his autonomy of decision. According to the church, man is viewed as in need of redemption and reliant on God’s power per se. With this shift, the central role that ethics play in Judaism was lost, for the miraculous salvation solely through grace took the place of the judiciary in the Bible. Moreover, Jesus divides God and humankind. Seligmann Pick summarizes the Jewish position as follows: ‘the Christian teaching of the “son of God” has always been viewed by Judaism as an irreconcilable contradiction to monotheism’. He cites chapter 31 of the Aggadat Bereshit:
foolish is the heart of the liars who say that the Holy One has a son. Now concerning the son of Abraham: when he saw that he came to slaughter him, he could not see him in pain, but immediately cried: Do not lay your hand on the boy (Gen. 22:12). Had he had a son, would he have abandoned him, and would he not have overturned the world and turned it into chaos? Therefore Solomon says: There is one and there is no second, he does not have a son or brother (Eccl. 4:8).
Pick examines the teachings of the Holy Ghost and the Trinity and demonstrates their incompatibility with Judaism. In doing so, he refers to Joseph Albo, Hasdai Crescas, Yehuda ha-Levi, and others when he states that the doctrine of the Trinity allows ‘no room for reason (Kuzari I, 5)’.
Moreover, the concept of original sin is thoroughly rejected by Pick. He writes that
Judaism does not deny that man brings with him a certain inclination to sin, so to speak, and that man later burdens himself with sin. However, every human soul is originally pure (tehora) because it is created by God, the eternally pure. According to Jewish thought, where this purity is denied, the ethical in man is ultimately doomed to powerlessness.
Michael Holzman explains the contrasting Jewish position to justification through faith
That man is burdened with original sin is justified by Paul and Luther through belief in Christ, by Calvin through the grasping of Christ’s justice in faith and, by Augustine and the Council of Trent through the infusion of grace. Jewish doctrine is quite different. It knows not the concept of original sin and holds to the idea that all men are created in the image of God. Every soul—even after Adam’s disobedience—is pure.
Every human being is capable of choosing good and turning from evil. One can return to God through repentance, without intermediation. In this sense, belief in God is not demanded, but rather presupposed. In contrast to Pauline teachings, Judaism is centred exclusively on righteous and just deeds, i.e. on moral and ethical actions. Julius Lewkowitz continues this thought by differentiating between the virtues of action and suffering. In contrast to the Jewish affirmation of a world in which man actively participates, Christianity teaches disdain for life on earth and demands abnegation of its fruits; all engagement on earth is viewed as meaningless, for all activity should be directed towards the coming kingdom of God. Whereas Judaism encourages man to struggle against misery, Christianity glorifies suffering in itself. Lewkowitz writes that ‘the suffering messiah is the supreme example of human devoutness’. Baeck subsequently emphasizes the primacy of individual belief: ‘without dogmatic adherence and ecclesiastical coherence, the entire community of Jews has continuously lived, in existence and in awareness, with a degree of intellectual diversity and of individual freedom of teaching that other religious communities in history have hardly expressed’. In this sense, Pick highlights the absence of dogma and confessional writings in Judaism. The devotion to Mary and the veneration of saints is also critically addressed, as is the primacy of the clergy, especially in the Roman Catholic Church, in contrast to the equality of all members of the Jewish congregation. The autonomy of the Jewish congregations is praised, contrasting a central doctrinal body and high church authorities. Prior to this work, such a comprehensive systematic attempt to analyze Judaism in contradistinction to Christianity had not been undertaken. Even as late as the 1930s, one can say that Judaism’s position with regard to the core messages of the Roman Catholic faith was distanced and marked by contrast. This is the background from which we must view all current disputes. It is by no means self-evident that Judaism and the Roman Catholic Church have become so engaged with one another and have built so much trust between each other in the decades following the end of the Second World War. The publication of the Lehren des Judentums nach den Quellen coincided with the end of Weimar Germany and its intellectual freedom. What followed was an unprecedented reign of terror, the murder of millions of Jews, and the destruction of European Jewry. The Christian churches failed to intervene effectively to prevent the Holocaust. This was nothing truly new. Anyone who remembers the martyrdom of Jews in Europe cannot avoid considering Christianity’s role herein. In its efforts to develop itself independently from Judaism, Christianity—the younger brother—often used radical methods to distance itself from its older brother. Due to various social, societal, and economic factors, this distancing from Judaism on religious grounds resulted in the hatred and persecution of Jews. Based upon this hatred and persecution, a radical anti-Semitism was able to emerge that went so far as to attempt the complete annihilation of Judaism—since the Roman Emperor Theodosius (379-95 CE) declared Christianity to be the state religion, Jews have been cognizant of the fact that faithfully keeping God’s commandments could entail risk to life and limb. Even before the beginning of the crusades, there is evidence of suicides to avoid forced baptism. One mother in medieval Mainz (Mayence) chose to kill her children rather than to have them taken from her, baptized, and raised as Christians. Too often in history, Jews have had no alternative but to sacrifice themselves like an olah temimah, a ‘flawless burnt offering’, in order to remain true to God. Since Isabella the Catholic ended the ‘golden age’ of co-existence among Muslims, Christians, and Jews on the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, the Jews of Spain—and even their forcibly converted descendants—suffered the fires and torments of inquisitions and tribunals. The crusaders’ and inquisitors’ zeal ensured that ‘sanctification of the name of God’, Kiddush Hashem, in Judaism was often only possible through the loss of life. The mission to the Jews included forced baptism, physical and psychological pressure to accept the Christian faith, contempt for the Jewish way of life, and the denial of the Jews’ right to live according to their own tradition. Similar plights awaited the Jews in the sphere of influence of the Eastern churches. The bitter history of the persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe is endless. Luther in the later years of his life was also no friend to the Jews. He preached oppression, hatred, and death in a clear and stark language. In On the Jews and Their Lies from 1543, he writes:
God has struck [the Jews] with ‘madness and blindness and confusion of mind.’ So we are even at fault in not avenging all this innocent blood of our Lord and of the Christians which they shed for three hundred years after the destruction of Jerusalem, and the blood of the children they have shed since then (which still shines forth from their eyes and their skin). We are at fault in not slaying them. Rather we allow them to live freely in our midst despite all their murdering, cursing, blaspheming, lying, and defaming; we protect and shield their synagogues, houses, life, and property. In this way we make them lazy and secure and encourage them to fleece us boldly of our money and goods, as well as to mock and deride us, with a view to finally overcoming us, killing us all for such a great sin, and robbing us of all our property (as they daily pray and hope). Now tell me whether they do not have every reason to be the enemies of us accursed Goyim, to curse us and to strive for our final, complete, and eternal ruin!
Even after the Josephine edicts of tolerance and the enlightenment movement, Jews could only achieve civil equality if they were willing to use baptism as a billet d’entrée into society. Here, one could recall the many martyrs who preferred societal death and unhappiness to renouncing their Jewish existence. After Napoleon’s defeat, decades passed until perspectives for equal rights opened upon the dawning of the separation of throne and altar around the turn of the twentieth century. This hope was shattered by the Holocaust.
The outbreak of this infinite hatred finally brought about an extreme radicalization in Christianity’s attitudes towards Judaism. This new relationship includes remorse on the part of the Christians and the recognition of their responsibility for the past transgressions against Jews. Anyone versed in church history cannot ignore the seminal changes that have occurred in recent decades. Promulgated on 28 October 1965, Nostra Aetate, the conciliar declaration pertaining to the Roman Catholic Church’s relationship to non-Christian religions, rejected the practice of assigning the Jewish people blanket responsibility for Jesus’ death. The redefinition of the church’s relationship to the Jewish community is closely linked to the pontificate of John Paul II. In a meeting with rabbis in Mainz in 1980, he stated that ‘Jews and Christians, as children of Abraham, are called to be a blessing for the world’. This insight led to the formulation of the Notes on the Correct Way to Present the Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis in 1985. When John Paul II visited the Great Synagogue of Rome in 1986, he declared that ‘the Church of Christ discovers her “bond” with Judaism by “searching into her own mystery”. The Jewish religion is not “extrinsic” to us, but in a certain way is “intrinsic” to our own religion’. In 1993, the Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and the State of Israel was signed. In March 2000, Pope John Paul II and leading cardinals led a comprehensive prayer for forgiveness for the wrongs of the church and its believers in the past. Later, the Pope made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, during which he renewed his prayer for forgiveness before the Western Wall. In 2001, the Pontifical Biblical Commission formulated new exegetical insights in The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible, wherein for the first time the Jewish ‘no’ to the messianity of Jesus of Nazareth was acknowledged by Christians as fidelity to their own sacred scriptures as the source of Jewish tradition. Nonetheless, other moments during the pontificate of John Paul II accentuated continuing ambivalence. Acts of sanctification were of special importance. Not necessarily the number of persons sanctified, but rather the selection and combination thereof is significant, as they seem to function as a navigation system through contemporary church politics. On 9 August 1942, the Carmelite nun Teresa Benedicta of the Cross was murdered as Edith Stein, the Jew, in Auschwitz. In 1987, Pope John II beatified her as a martyr. She was canonized by him in 1998, and the church named her patroness of Europe in 1999. The objections formulated by Jews were substantial because her canonization was viewed as an unnecessary obstacle to Christian-Jewish dialogue. Was the church presenting her as a role model for Jews? Or was it an attempt to generalize the Holocaust, thereby obscuring the church’s responsibility? The canonization of the anti-Semitic friar Maximilian Kolbe in 1982 was similarly criticized. Jews feared that the emphasis placed on the suffering of Christians in the death machinery of the Nazis would distract from the fact that this horror was intrinsically geared towards the annihilation of the Jewish people. Unlike others, Jews had no chance of escaping their fate. There were several further strains, including the establishment of a Carmelite convent in Auschwitz in 1984 and the papal audience for Kurt Waldheim in 1987. The concurrent beatifications of Pius IX (1846-78) and John XXIII (1958-63), two very different conciliar popes in terms of church politics, on 3 September 2000 appears, at the very least, to serve two conflicting tendencies within the church. While the Second Vatican Council and its historical Nostra Aetate occurred during the tenure of John XXIII, Pius IX must be criticized for his anti-Semitic statements and actions. In the Mortara Affair in 1858, for instance, Edgardo Mortara, the son of a Jewish family, was baptized by a Catholic servant as a small boy. As a result, he was forcefully taken from his parents by papal officials and raised in the Roman Catholic faith. This incident reminds us of current charges against Pius XII, who, according to documents, was against returning baptized Jewish children after 1945. The Spanish clergy’s wishes for the beatification of Isabella the Catholic raises similar unpleasant suspicions. All of these incidents occurred in a comparatively short period of time and will only be more fully understood over time, maybe even over decades. Today, the following questions must be asked. Which of these accents are indicative of the Roman Catholic Church’s current position towards Judaism? What is the state of Jewish-Catholic relations after several years of the pontificate of Benedict XVI? At the first meeting between the Deutsche Rabbinerkonferenz (the German Rabbinical Conference) and the Deutsche Bischofskonferenz (the German Bishops’ Conference) on 9 March 2006, Walter Cardinal Kasper, president of the Commission of the Holy See for Religious Relations with the Jews between 1999 and 2010, made a crucial statement:
Right away, the question arises concerning how the old and the new covenant—or as some say, the first and the second covenant—stand in relation to one-another. Does it concern two covenants or one, or is this alternative not sufficient to describe the complex relationship between them? Behind this question, there is the fundamental problem of how the continuing validity of the old covenant can be reconciled with the role of Jesus Christ as the universal saviour in the new covenant (cf. Romans 3:21-31). If one holds fast to Jesus Christ as universal saviour, then one is immediately faced with the very sensitive problem of the mission to the Jews. As opposed to some evangelical groups, the Catholic and the official Protestant positions do not recognize an organized mission to the Jews. Nonetheless, we are still far from an answer that would be satisfying for all. Despite all good beginnings, there is not yet a comprehensive and convincing Christian theology of Judaism.
Rabbi Henry G. Brandt, chairman of the Allgemeine Rabbinerkonferenz (the General Rabbinical Conference in Germany), understood quite well which question the Catholic side was submitting for discussion. Must the Jewish people also recognize the claim of universal redemption that the Roman Catholic Church poses in Jesus as the Christ? He answers Cardinal Kasper:
We have registered with satisfaction that the Catholic Church has determined that God’s gracious gifts and promises are unchanging and his loyalty eternal. In this sense, God stands by His covenant and to His choosing of Israel, even if He—according to Christian teachings—has taken in Christians in light of their faith. Please do not be offended that I do not give thanks for this, for one not should be thankful for the obvious. Nevertheless, I do express satisfaction that this correction in teachings and belief has finally occurred. For us, it has always been perfectly clear that the covenant has never been broken. Even in the worst of times, we have always continued to feel in covenant with God. Never broken, sometimes hard to bear, yet always present. That we now both see it this way gives us, I believe, mutual strength and courage for the future. We have also taken note of the confession of sins that has now been articulated a number of times. And, as a Jew, one should respond with acceptance. For does not Judaism teach, and do we not always say on the High Holy Days of repentance, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, that repentance, prayer, and good deeds can alter a negative judgment? We can only hope that this development, this almost revolutionary shift in direction, will be lasting and someday considered epochal. Hopefully, the history books of the future will describe it in such terms.
You have addressed the topic of the mission to the Jews. I do not wish to further explore this topic here, but it must be brought to mind that—especially here in Germany—the mission to the Jews is like a red rag to a bull for the Jews. Especially here, any idea or any semblance of the possibility of a mission to the Jews must be seen as a quasi hostile act, as a continuation of the atrocities perpetrated by Hitler against the Jews on another level. This may be harsh, but we must perceive it in these terms. It is therefore necessary that the mission to the Jews be radically and unconditionally rejected. Certainly, this does not mean that both Christians and Jews, under the conditions of freedom, are not obliged to bear witness to their own faith. This inevitably includes the risk that life and this witness might motivate one to switch sides, so to speak. In a free society, this risk must be accepted. The fact is that there is such movement in both directions. Proselytizing Jews—actively ‘wanting to convert’ Jews—is an altogether different thing, especially when it is linked to material incentives. This mission to the Jews is not an option at all, and especially not in Germany due to the aforementioned circumstances.
One year later, in March 2007, the German Bishops’ Conference visited Israel. There was much disgruntlement regarding this visit. Indeed, Karl Cardinal Lehmann acknowledged at the time that the ‘situationally-pointed comments’ of some bishops were ‘surely not appropriate’. The president of the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (Central Council of Jews in Germany), Charlotte Knobloch, declared as ‘awful and completely unacceptable’, for instance, the comments made by Gregor Maria Hanke, the Bishop of Eichstätt, who compared the ‘ghetto in Ramallah’ with actions perpetrated by the Nazis. Knobloch condemned Bishop Hanke’s statements because, according to her, they used clichés that were ‘bordering closely on anti-Semitism’.
In the theological sphere, the shaping of relations has proven even more difficult. The re-admittance of the Tridentine mass as an ‘extraordinary form’ in July 2007 has given rise to profound questions for Jews. Nothing can allay the fear that the old ecclesiology and the old claims of the Roman Catholic Church could be re-awakened along with the old mass. The result of the re-admittance is a lasting irritation in the relationship between Judaism and the church. After demanding clarification during a visit to the Vatican, Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone replied that these fears were unfounded and that the matter was misunderstood. Nevertheless, Pope Benedict XVI felt induced to personally revise the Good Friday Prayer for the Jews. This caught my attention. Since then, I sense that perhaps not much at all has actually changed among the church hierarchy, despite Nostra Aetate or the Rhineland synod’s Zur Erneuerung des Verhältnisses von Christen und Juden (Towards a Renewal of the Relationship of Christians and Jews) of 1980. As a Jew with personal experience of Jewish-Christian dialogue, I found it incredible that, on 4 February 2008, Pope Benedict XVI issued a revision of the Good Friday Prayer for the Jews on the basis of the Roman missal of 1962. After the re-admittance of the old mass as an ‘extraordinary form’ in July 2007, representatives of Judaism worldwide advocated for a revision of the old form of this prayer. Many Christian organizations also asked for clarification regarding whether the covenant between God and His people of Israel exists without Jesus. The back and forth in this debate concerning whether, or how, one should pray for the Jews on Good Friday is indicative of more than simply a failure of communication on part of the Vatican. The most recent prayer is harshly clear:
Let us also pray for the Jews: That our God and Lord may illuminate their hearts, that they acknowledge Jesus Christ as the Saviour of all men. … Almighty and eternal God, who wants that all men be saved and come to the recognition of the truth, propitiously grant that even as the fullness of the peoples enters Thy Church, all Israel be saved.
Is the recognition of Jesus as the saviour ultimately the only way for Jews to reach redemption? The post-Vatican Good Friday Prayer for the Jews from 1970 sends quite a different message. ‘Let us pray for the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant.’ Through the 2008 revision of the re-admitted ‘extraordinary form’ of the Latin mass, the ordinary form has been devalued. The prayer revised by Benedict XVI is the most recent form and is thus the form that we must approach critically. It is, as the official lex orandi, also lex credendi! Had the Pope wanted to emphasize the meaning of the ordinary form, it would have been easy for him to have merely instructed the use of its Latin wording for the Tridentine mass. Walter Cardinal Kasper played down the issue by stating that the prayer for the conversion of the Jews represents only an ‘eschatological hope’ that the Roman Catholic Church does not want a mission to the Jews in this world, and that the revisions merely entail a quotation from the Letter to the Romans. According to him, when the Pope speaks of the conversion of the Jews, then it must be properly understood. I think that I do understand the Pope properly. Benedict XVI’s revision of the Good Friday Prayer underscores his advances toward the conservative Society of St. Pius X, in which deep-seated anti-Jewish sentiments are held and which is led by Bishop Richard Williamson, a known extreme right-wing demagogue. The papal attempts to reintegrate are by no means just an embarrassing occupational hazard. I shall leave undecided whether or not it is more palpable for Jews to first hear at the end of times that their religion was lacking. All of this is why the climate of understanding and mutual trust has dissipated. We are now witnesses to how the Pope’s criticism of relativism has led to an absolutist church. One rabbinic colleague of mine has described his state of being as ‘astonished with regard to content and emotionally disgruntled’. Someone else was even clearer: Jews of all denominations have been rejecting every form of appropriation and proselytization on the part of Christianity. Sixteen hundred years after Constantine and Theodosius, 1000 years after the crusades, 900 years after the Lateran Councils, and 63 years after the Shoah, Jews must be granted respect as a necessary first step towards true dialogue between Judaism and the church. For Jews, the point is that we must see eye-to-eye, that we must retain our self-respect in the face of a church that was not willing to teach a doctrine of belief that man is created in God’s image in a way that would have brought more than just a small handful of devout Roman Catholics to make a stand against the crimes of National Socialism. Wherein lies the value of a church that was unable to uphold God’s fundamental teachings during the Holocaust, but after which still claims absolute truth, a claim which cannot be justified? It was Leo Baeck who first asked this poignant question. In spite of the bankruptcy of the 1940s, an unprecedented rapprochement has been possible, carried in part by the seemingly honest efforts of the church both to recognize ‘God’s first love’ (Friedrich Heer) and to trace its own roots accordingly. Especially against the backdrop of the painful and unforgivable Christian past in terms of its relationship to Judaism, it has become especially important for Jewish theologians to seek dialogue with Christianity. The spiritual component in this dialogue is very important; we are brought together not only by humanitarian considerations. Indeed, for the sake of God we are bound together. It is not enough that Christians draw their Jewish roots from biblical times. Dialogue demands contemporariness, i.e. dialogue between today’s Christians and today’s Jews. The oft-repeated phrase of the ‘Judeo-Christian occident’, for example, obscures the fact that Judaism is more than simply a precursor to Christianity. Why should one not enter into a discourse with contemporary Judaism with room to recognize that we often position ourselves differently than the Roman Catholic Church regarding some of the most important fundamental questions of our times? These include contraception, stem cell research, divorce, decision-making processes regarding teachings and doctrine, abortion, women’s equality, and the ordination of homosexuals. In Judaism’s three non-Orthodox movements, for instance, over half of the newly ordained rabbis worldwide are women. Perhaps it is time to courageously address such striking differences. Above all, it is important that our rapprochement leads to mutual responsibility for the future of our endangered world. It has been 25 years since I began my engagement in Jewish-Christian dialogue. It is unfortunate that in recent years I have increasingly felt that the Roman Catholic leadership is only interacting with Judaism out of a sense of ceremonial duty. Benedict XVI’s speech at Yad Vashem during his 2009 visit to Israel is symptomatic of this. The Pontiff appeared strangely serene in his regret, and attendees heard no genuine admission of guilt regarding the oft-deadly anti-Semitism deeply rooted in Christianity. One gets a sneaking suspicion that our Christian counterparts believe that they have said all there is to say on this matter. They have affirmed the intrinsic value of Judaism, recognized the church’s wrongs done to the Jewish people, and institutionally supported the dialogue through the Commission of the Holy See for Religious Relations with the Jews. It is as if they are saying: for what more can one ask? From the Roman Catholic perspective, the question of the validity of God’s promise of redemption to the Jewish people obviously remains an open wound. Jews must feel scorned when—especially on Good Friday and Easter—the Roman Catholic Church has resumed its prayers for the illumination of the Jews, that we may recognize Jesus as the saviour. Such theological statements are made in a socio-historical context closely linked to discrimination, persecution, and death—in the end in the name of ‘saving our souls’. After the guilt that the Roman Catholic Church has amassed throughout its history in its dealings with Judaism and ultimately during the era of the Third Reich, such prayers are entirely inappropriate and must be sharply rejected. Pope Benedict XVI has made his position very clear in past years. It will surely remain unchanged in the future. Contrary to his own self-perception, there are more than enough examples which show how insensitive he truly is when he addresses topics related to Judaism. These range from his curious interpretation of history at Auschwitz, where he reduced the phenomenon of National Socialism to a few corrupt individuals in order to portray his church as a victim, to his speech in Regensburg in 2006, which was so offensive that it had to be spin-doctored away afterward. The reactions among Jews against this further vilification of Islam were hardly noticed by the church. We felt quite uncomfortable when the Pope baptized a prominent Italian Muslim, Magdi Allam, amid great publicity during the Easter vigil in Rome in 2008. We asked ourselves whether maybe next year’s baptism would be that of a Jew. Right through the continuing, rather unfortunate, debate regarding the beatification of Pius XII, it seems as if there is no end in sight to these developments. For some Jewish representatives, this also means that gradual change in the right direction could still be possible. But, for me, Benedict XVI’s letter to his bishops on 10 March 2009 proves again the lack of visible efforts on the part of those in the corridors of power in the Vatican to take our concerns into serious consideration. That, at the end of his letter, the Pope went as far as to justify his convergence towards the Society of St. Pius X clearly illustrates that his detractors cannot be all that wrong in their criticism. It borders on deception that Benedict XVI thanks ‘all the more our Jewish friends, who quickly helped to clear up the misunderstanding and to restore the atmosphere of friendship and trust which … has also existed throughout my pontificate and, thank God, continues to exist’. This must be a very select group of Jews. Such naïve statements from Rome have caused lasting damage to Jewish-Catholic relations, among other reasons because the Vatican has attempted again and again to make empty gestures of appeasement toward Jews and Judaism in order to avoid promulgating a clear message. This hardly sits well with the Jewish community as a whole. The exculpatory invitation of very select groups or individual representatives to appear together before the cameras does not suffice. The non-Jewish public may think that this signifies that we are once again getting along with one another. Inside the Jewish community, though, we can identify very well how much or little authority the various ‘representatives’ actually have. If the Roman Catholic Church continues to forcefully assert its position of breaking taboo after taboo—from the beatification of Pius XII to the re-acceptance of the Society of St. Pius X into the fold—then there should be no surprise that the church’s relationship with Judaism continues to worsen as a result. The fundamental rejection of proselytizing in general does mean that one should not respect individual decisions to change one’s faith. On the occasion of the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate on 27 October 2005 in Rome, Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, the late archbishop of Paris of Jewish origin, was invited to speak. The Chief Rabbi of Rome, Riccardo di Segni, deemed this choice inappropriate and did not attend, arguing that there is no dialogue if it means giving up one’s own identity by switching to the ‘other side’. Together with other rabbis I demonstratively took part in the celebration in order to honour Lustiger and his life’s work, also because he had been born a Jew. Today, I must ask myself how it would be if the situation were reversed. Is the Roman Catholic Church able to come to terms with the fact that a number of rabbis were originally born into Christianity before they switched to the other side of the brotherhood? In June 2007, a bishop of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), Maria Jepsen, delivered a message of greetings, also in the name of the then chairperson of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany, Bishop Wolfgang Huber, to Gesa Ederberg, originally of protestant faith, upon her installation as a rabbi in Berlin. Could the Roman Catholic Church accept that baptizing a child does not carry more weight than the free decision of a youth or an adult to take another path with God, a path that has been determined to be ‘brotherly’? It could be that herewith all fraternal feelings would dissipate rather quickly. Today, Jews must continue to clearly defend the elements of the church’s new doctrinal insights regarding its relationship to Judaism, that God’s covenant with Israel ‘has never been revoked’. The Jewish people remain bound to the irrevocable calling and are whom the adoption of the promises of God pertains (cf. Romans 9:4). It is the ‘people of the covenant’, who, according to the Bible, have a universal mission as a ‘light unto nations’. Jesus is a true son of Israel. His Jewishness and the fact that he was from a Jewish milieu, according to Pope John Paul II, belong to the incarnation of the son of God. These are not simply cultural coincidences. Those who wish to remove Jesus’ bond to the Jewish people and replace it with another religious tradition do harm to the identity of Jesus of Nazareth, the man. These statements may appear irritating to many Christians with a traditional understanding of their faith. Nonetheless, they correspond to the position of the Second Vatican Council regarding Christian identity. Both pray to the same God. Both draw on the same book, the Hebrew Bible. Both recognize the moral principles of the Torah, and both harbour the view of common responsibility for this world as God’s creation. Our fear is that these insights based on the Second Vatican Council could be fading into oblivion. Our hope is that the ecclesia triumphans of the old rite does not experience a lasting revival. Unfortunately, reality looks quite different. Due to the hostile acts of the revised Good Friday Prayer and the Vatican’s obvious shift towards the right, relations between the Jewish community and the Roman Catholic Church have been strained almost to the point of breaking in a way that we have not seen for decades. It behoves us to engage in further theological discussion, in which the Jewish ‘no’ to Jesus as the Messiah is seen by all as an act of Jewish loyalty to our own calling and as a prerequisite for the formation of the church. The painstakingly developed relationship between Judaism and the Roman Catholic Church is not yet consolidated; indeed, we sense almost daily how threatened it is.