Christianity and Judaism

Not least because I promised in a comment over on Harry’s Place that I would do this nearer to Christmas, herewith a little of the reams that could be, have been and are being written about the Christian impact on the development of Judaism.

The seminal text here is very much Rabbi Michael Hilton’s The Christian Effect on Jewish Life (London: SCM Press, 1994). As Rabbi Hilton puts it, “it is hardly surprising that Jewish communities living for centuries in Christian society should be influenced by the surrounding culture”.

There is a most seasonal example. As is well known, the modern celebration of Chanukah is modelled on Christmas. In fact, one might add, it is only thanks to the Church that Chanukah happens at all, the earliest reference to it being II Maccabees (10:1-8), cut out of the Canon by the rabbis because, like a number of other works, it was rightly deemed likely to lead people into Christianity. (The early Protestants then erroneously followed suit, on the mistaken ground that the polemically anti-Christian Canon of Judaism was somehow “the Bible of Jesus”.)

There are many, many, many other examples that could be cited. These range from the Mediaeval adoption for Jewish funeral use of the Psalm numbered 23 in Jewish and Protestant editions, to the new centrality within Judaism that the rise of Christianity gave to Messianic expectations (the Sadducees, for example, had not believed in the Messiah at all) or to the purification of women after childbirth, to the identification in later parts of the Zohar of four senses of Scripture technically different from but effectively very similar to those of Catholicism, to Mediaeval rabbis’ explicit and unembarrassed use of Christian stories in their sermons.

Many a midrash – such as “to you the Sabbath is handed over, but you are not handed over to the Sabbath” – is easily late enough to be an example of the direct influence of Christianity, yet Jewish and Christian scholars alike tend to announce an unidentified common, usually Pharisaic, root, although they rarely go off on any wild goose chase to find that root. I think we all know why not.

But the real point is something far deeper, arising from the definition of the Jewish Canon in explicitly anti-Christian terms, and from the anti-Christian polemic in the Talmud. Judaism hardly uses the Hebrew Bible directly rather than its own, defining and anti-Christian, commentaries on it and on each other. Jews doubting this should ask themselves when they last heard of an animal sacrifice, or which of their relatives is a polygamist.

Judaism is not some sort of mother-religion. Rather, it is a reaction against Christianity, specifically (like Islam) a Semitic reaction against the recapitulation in Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire; there are also, of course, culturally European reactions against that recapitulation by reference to Classical sources, as there always have been, although Boris Johnson’s recent television series indicates that they are increasingly allied to Islam, not least because that programme was presented by Boris Johnson.

Thus constructed, Judaism became, and remains, an organising principle (again like Classically-based reactions) for all sorts of people discontented for whatever reason by the rise of Christianity in general and the Christianisation of the Roman Empire in particular (including all the historical consequences of that up to the present day), without any realistic suggestion of a common ethnic background. Have Sephardim just been out in the sun longer than Ethiopian Jews, but not as long as Ashkenazim?

Above all, Judaism’s unresolved Messianic hope and expectation has issued in all sorts of earthly utopianisms: Freudian, Marxist (and then Trotskyist, and then Shachtmanite), monetarist, Zionist, Straussian, neoconservative by reference to all of these, and so forth. They are all expressions of Judaism’s repudiation of Original Sin, Christianity’s great bulwark against the rationally and empirically falsifiable notions of inevitable historical progress and of the perfectibility of human nature in this life alone and by human efforts alone.

It is Christianity that refers constantly to the Biblical text. It is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that has a Temple (Jesus Christ, Who prophesied both the destruction of the Temple and its replacement in His own Person), a Priesthood, and a Sacrifice (the Mass). It is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that is the religion of the Hebrew Scriptures.