“Vatican II released Nostra Aetate in 1965, which condemned antisemitism and absolved the Jewish people as a group of the charge of deicide.”
(from "Disenchantment: George Steiner and Meaning of Western Civilization
After 2000 years of unrelenting hatred, contumely, denigration, inquisitions and pogroms, and the moral monstrosity of collective guilt, the Catholic Church starts to make amends in 1965.
Did the Church not know that Jesus was born a Jew, lived a Jew, and died a Jew? Did the Church not know that Mary, and Joseph, and vast majority Jesus’s followers were all Jews?
This was a very small step, but, nonetheless, an important step, I am happy to see it.
I’m not aware of any Protestant Churches making any similar overtures.
Yes. Maybe it has made a difference, for the better.
It is notable that many (most?) American Evangelicals support Israel. They have mixed motives, no doubt, but whatever their reasons, they are right to do so.
… in a 1967 article on Sylvia Plath, George Steiner wrote:
“Are these final poems entirely legitimate? In what sense does anyone, himself uninvolved and long after the event, commit a subtle larceny when he invokes the echoes and trappings of Auschwitz and appropriates an enormity of ready emotion to his own private design? Was there latent in Sylvia Plath’s sensibility, as in that of many of us who remember only by fiat of imagination, a fearful envy, a dim resentment at not having been there, of having missed the rendezvous with hell?”
Whether or not there was “a fearful envy” in Plath’s “sensibility”, he is telling us that there was such a thing in his own. Can he be believed, or is this an example of envy of suffering as affectation, of sentimentality? Such an envy must surely be shallow, pretentious, and insincere as sentimentality essentially is.
Yes, Christian attitudes to Jews is a complex issue, and worth exploring more. It’s a telling point that in its 2999 year history, anti-Semitism only became a sin in the Catholic Church a mere 58 years ago,
I have come across Steiner’s writings from time to time and have found them very often to be impenetrable. Nonetheless, despite evident psychopathology, he does, at times, have interesting ideas to offer.
I have gone off at a tangent in my outburst against George Steiner. Of course it is nothing to do with the Catholic and Protestant churches’ antisemitism. It’s just that the mere mention of him re-arouses my intense irritation with the man and his works. Not all of which I’ve read. I could endure just so much. I doubt that he ever rid himself of his typical Mittel European posturing obscurity.
Can you recall an idea of Steiner’s that is genuinely interesting? I am open to persuasion that he was capable of original thought. But I don’t want to send you looking for an example!
They actually believe that a Jewish man was the creator of the universe, “God” omnipotent and immortal, whom some other Jews could and did “kill”. After thousands of years they are so kind as to stop holding all Jews guilty of causing his death-which-was-not-a-death. For which however - they also believe - the god deliberately got himself born in order to “redeem” all humankind from a sin committed by a mythical first man and woman at the beginning of the world.
Of the charge of gullibility they can never be absolved.
