Here’s a question as we continue from where we left off in Part One. How did anti-Jewish feelings arise in the Western world? You can be forgiven if you think it is futile to try to answer this question in a short space like this!
Some of the answer lies in the events recorded in the records of Jesus and his earliest followers, a quite large number of people. The Jewish authorities took issue with them. They ensured that Jesus and his followers were persecuted for trying to take the Jewish faith and community in a direction they themselves saw as a betrayal of that faith. This was decidedly an ominous start. But it was not unusual for Jewish factions to take issue with each other. After all, their faith was important to them. Hostilities between the groups sometimes flared up.
During the next few centuries, Christians continued to be persecuted from time to time. Even when they were not, the threat was always there. However, the oppressors were less and less Jewish. Increasingly it was the authorities of the Roman Empire that harassed them.
Then in 313, Christianity was recognized by a new Roman emperor as legitimate. This resulted in the evolution of Christianity as the state-sponsored faith of the people. And it resulted in the state as the church-sponsored government of the people. That evolution is rich with bright moments, but it is also freighted with tragedy. Notably, it is tainted with catastrophic betrayals of Jesus Christ and his explicit teaching on loving the “neighbour”.
During the many centuries following 313, how did the Jewish communities fare since they were clearly minorities? Historian, Tom Holland, writes (in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, 2019, Chapter 10), that by the 13th Century, Pope Innocent III put it something like this. Although the Jews were guilty of willful refusal to accept the truth of the Christian faith, they “are not to be severely oppressed by the faithful [Christian authorities].” Jews would, after all, so it was thought, come to faith when Jesus Christ returned to set all things right.
In the meantime, Christian scholars and theologians more and more saw the Jewish Scriptures and faith as inferior. Judaism was “superseded” by Christianity. In some situations there seemed to be a “live and let live” attitude. But all too often the European authorities persecuted Jews. By the late 1200s England and France were forcing Jews out of their borders.
And yet, Holland points out, Christians remained fascinated with Jews. Jewish administrators managed the pope’s household. The famous Medieval Catholic philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, revered their scholarship. One of the students of the equally famous Peter Abelard stated, “A Jew, however poor, if he had ten sons would put them all to letters, not for gain as the Christians do, but for the understanding of God’s law – and not only his sons, but his daughters.”
Perhaps if such considerations had had a stronger influence, the contradictory and cruel legacy of anti-Semitism would not be what it became. And the St. Louis would have been taken into the Halifax harbour. Or better yet, there would have been no reason for it to sail in the first place.