Ironically, Hamas’s gruesome attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, instead of unleashing a flood of criticism of jihadist Muslims, has turned up the fire under the apparently ever-simmering cauldron of anti-Semitism.
Everyone seems focused on the Jews — even obsessed with them. But the loudest voices are those raised in condemnation of the Israelis, their supporters, and worldwide Jewry.
There are a number of tropes that Jew-haters dredge up on such occasions: the debunked but widely disseminated Soviet psy-op pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the Jews as Christ-killers; the popular trope that the Jews “own the banks”; claims they’re out to control the world as “Greater Israel”; claims they’re Satanists; and the old blood libel, that they make Passover matzahs from the blood of Gentile children.
I’ll return to the “Christ-killer” charge shortly, but first let’s consider a few things one can reasonably blame the Jews for: one being Monotheism, another being the Bible — both the Old Testament and the New. Another being the moral code established in the Ten Commandments that has served as the cornerstone of Western Civilization.
Said another way, without those selfsame Jews so roundly denounced, hated, and not infrequently massacred throughout history, there would be no Bible, no Judaism, no Jesus, no Christianity, and no Western Civilization.
There’s a reason we have the phrase “the Judeo-Christian tradition.” It’s the foundation of the West and all the first-world nations, including the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States. Especially in America, we have the Jews and the Bible to thank for our experimental government based on what Thomas Jefferson inscribed in the Declaration of Independence as our God-given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And these rights are “endowed by their Creator” — i.e. God, as revealed in the Bible — not Gaia, not Buddha, and most emphatically, not Allah.
Returning to the “Christ-killers” accusation: In fact, it was the Romans — with their barbarously excruciating and deadly punishment of crucifixion — who killed Jesus. But yes, the Sanhedrin, the Jewish leadership at that time, did seek it. So let’s parse that.
First and foremost, the Sanhedrin didn’t speak for all the Jews. We know this for a fact from the New Testament and other historical records of the time. Christ’s disciples were...wait for it...Jews! And they clearly disagreed with the Sanhedrin’s charges against Christ.
So when anyone accuses “the Jews” of being “Christ-killers,” he means the Jewish government and leadership of the day.
Let me ask you a question: how many of us in America today agree with all of our government’s decisions? How many oppose much of what our government decrees? So why isn’t the charge against the Jews in the first century made factually: “The Jewish leadership condemned Jesus by charging him with blasphemy, and of claiming to be King of the Jews,” rather than “the Jews killed Christ”?
One of the charges the Sanhedrin brought against Jesus was that of working on Shabbat, after Jesus famously healed people on the Sabbath. Instead of saying, “My bad! You’re right! I won’t do it again,” Jesus pointed out that healing is a loving and compassionate act and not the sort of “work” that should be subjected to that law. This made the leadership see red. They themselves were caught up in the lawyerly minutiae of dos and don’ts that rabbis had enumerated with regard to this law, which Jesus openly challenged. Furthermore, they’d likely not dare to disobey the law, and certainly, had they done so, they would never argue that they answered to a higher power than the written law — i.e., the Torah.
So one can understand their reluctance to believe that this young rabbi was actually acting on a higher moral authority than theirs, and than that of the Torah itself. He would have seemed quite an upstart to them, so one can comprehend their fears as they saw that he was attracting a following.
We can debate the Jewish leaders’ motive for wanting Jesus’s death. They may well have believed he was an impostor who was committing blasphemy. They may have worried that he’d overturn the Torah — the Jewish law recorded in the first five books of the Bible, the law they were responsible for upholding. They may have feared losing their own power and position. Their decision may have had elements of all the above, though it’s doubtful they truly believed that Jesus was the Messiah, because we can assume they’d know better than to mess with God’s will.
But did they mess with it — or did they help to fulfill it, regardless of their own intentions? Recall Joseph’s message to his brothers, who’d sold him into slavery: “But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good.”
Speaking of God’s will, consider this: for the gift of salvation through belief in Christ to be offered, Jesus would have to first die as the ultimate Passover Lamb of God, taking on the sins of mankind while suffering on the Cross. Only then could He rise in a miraculous resurrection, defeating death itself in a prefiguring of salvation, and finally taking His place at the right hand of God in heaven.
What does this mean? It means that we can blame the Jews for Christ’s substitutionary death for sinners — i.e., human beings — and Christ’s resurrection and offer of salvation to those who follow Him.
So Christians and Jewish followers of Christ have the Jews to “blame” for their salvation!
Suppose the Sanhedrin leadership had said, “Free Jesus, and crucify the thief Barabbas instead!” What would have been the result? No sacrificial death of Jesus on the Cross means everyone carries his own sins on his back — the wages of sin being death. It means no salvation by grace through faith. It means no eternal life in heaven. Not to put too fine a point upon it: According to the New Testament, it means damnation.
In other words, from the Christian point of view, it was God’s plan all along that Jesus, the most famous Jewish rabbi in history, suffer death on the Cross on Passover, as the Lamb of God who died for the sins of everyone else.
So before you “blame the Jews” for ancient and modern tropes that demonize the Lord’s chosen people, remember you’re simultaneously scourging them for their divinely appointed role of introducing God and the Bible to the world; fulfilling prophecy; and, as Christians and Messianic Jews believe, providing the world with the Messiah, whose birth we only just celebrated.
Cherie Zaslawsky is a columnist for NewsWithViews and a private high school English teacher/writing coach. See more at her Substack: “Cherie Z’s Truth Be Told!”
Image: hendricjabs via Pixabay, Pixabay License.
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