Anti-Semitism: Grave Sin and Civic Cancer 

Editors’ Note: On September 10, the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder sponsored a symposium, The Fire This Time: America and the Boulder Attacks, in response to the fire-bombing of peaceful Jewish marchers seeking the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza this past June, in the aftermath of which a Holocaust survivor died of burns. After an introduction by Dr. Joseph Bottum, the following address was delivered by George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center.  

Travel back in your mind’s eye some twenty-five years, to the holy city of Jerusalem. There, on March 26, 2000, an eighty-year-old Polish priest, dressed in the traditional white cassock of the Bishop of Rome and leaning heavily on a cane, walked eighty-six slow and difficult steps to the Western Wall of Herod’s Temple. After a moment of silent reflection, he did something that millions of believers in the God of Abraham had done before him: he left a prayer, which read as follows:

God of our forefathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your name to the nations. We are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who, in the course of history, have caused these children of yours to suffer. And asking your forgiveness, we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the covenant. Amen. 

Three days before, on March 23, 2000, that same Polish priest, Pope John Paul II (now Pope Saint John Paul II) had gone to lay a memorial wreath at the eternal flame that honors the martyrs of the Shoah at Yad Vashem. His press spokesman, the Spanish layman Joaquín Navarro-Valls, once asked John Paul II if he ever cried. “Not outside,” the Pope replied. No one who saw John Paul walking toward that eternal flame could doubt that he was crying inside, as he spoke of the “great need for silence” in this place: silence in which to remember the dead; silence in which to try to make sense of the memories that kept flooding back; silence because there were no words sufficient to condemn the Shoah. Later that evening, my oldest Israeli friend, a distinguished soldier, scholar, and statesman who had seen a lot in his life, called me at my hotel. “I just had to tell you,” he said, “that my wife and I cried throughout the Pope’s visit to Yad Vashem. This was wisdom, humaneness, and integrity personified. Nothing was missing; nothing more needed to be said.” 

How did this happen? And what does it mean for us today? 

John Paul II would have been the first to insist that he was not acting in an idiosyncratic way when he went to Yad Vashem and the Western Wall. There, as elsewhere in his remarkable twenty-six-and-a-half-year pontificate, he saw himself as the heir of the Second Vatican Council and its teaching on the filial debt that Christianity owes its parent, Judaism. And it’s important to underscore this: for if John Paul II was acting idiosyncratically, then he was not bringing the full weight of the Catholic Church and its settled conviction to bear on what he said at Yad Vashem and what he prayed at the Western Wall. Still, as his biographer, I have to say that there was something intensely personal about the way he brought the conviction of the Catholic Church to bear at those two places so highly charged with symbolism, with emotion: and, Jews and Christians believe, highly charged with the truth of the world. 

The first of those personal experiences involved his hometown and his father. Wadowice, the Austro-Hungarian Army garrison town where Karol Wojtyła was born and lived until he completed high school, was 20 percent Jewish in its population, and had a long history, nurtured by its Catholic pastors and the senior military officers living there, of tolerance and mutual respect. Thus, young Karol Wojtyła lived in an apartment in a building owned by the Jewish merchant Chaim Balmuth, in whose small dairy store the future pope and his father often took their meals. Young Karol had many Jewish friends as a boy and a teenager. Some of them remained his friends for life; others perished in the Shoah. 

He also had the example of his father, a man of granite-like integrity, a retired military officer, who taught his son respect for others, tolerance, and a belief in a free Poland in which minority communities played a full role in civic life while retaining their own cultural integrity. Throughout a long life, the son’s convictions about human fraternity and the moral requisites of decent societies mirrored the father’s. 

The second personal element in John Paul II’s understanding of Jews and Judaism involved his experience of the Second World War. This cauldron of hatred and violence was the most formative experience of Karol Wojtyła’s life: five years in which, as one of his contemporaries put it to me, “It was not a question of not knowing whether you would be alive on your next birthday; it was a question of not knowing whether you would be alive tomorrow night.” In 1997, I asked John Paul II over his dinner table what he had learned from his wartime years. He was silent for a moment, and then, in a steady voice tinged with sadness, looked at me and said, “I learned the experience of my contemporaries: humiliation at the hands of evil.” And it was through that experience that Karol Wojtyła came to the decision to dedicate himself to the defense of human dignity and freedom through the priesthood of the Catholic Church.  

Human reactions to the five-year killing ground that was “Gestapoland” (historian Norman Davies’s name for occupied Poland) differed. Some who shared that experience went mad; others gave their lives to the worldly utopia of Communism; others tried to make themselves as obscure and unnoticeable as possible; still others took up armed resistance and often perished as a result. Karol Wojtyła, member of an underground cultural resistance group that fought Nazi tyranny by keeping alive the idea of a free, open, and tolerant Poland, came through those five and a half searing years with a specific commitment: a commitment to defend the dignity and value of every human life. 

There are terrible forces at work beneath the crust of the Earth. They sometimes erupt in earthquakes, tsunamis, or, as volcanic explosions, spew forth violently as lava, which consumes everything in its path. But something else forms under that intense heat and pressure beneath the surface of things: diamonds, the hardest substance known in nature, gems that are capable of cutting through what seems impossible to penetrate; gems that reflect light in uniquely beautiful ways. The years between 1939 and 1945 made Karol Wojtyła into a kind of human diamond, whose cutting edge could break through the seemingly impermeable—like the Berlin Wall; a kind of human diamond who reflected the light of God’s self-revelation to the world: first, through the people of Israel; then through the person, teaching, and work of Jesus of Nazareth, a faithful Jew who, in his dying, invoked, in citing the beginning of Psalm 22, the words of the Psalmist about the final vindication of God’s purposes: “Yea, to him shall all the proud of the earth bow down. … All posterity will serve him … and proclaim his deliverance.”   

John Paul II’s approach to Jews and Judaism was also shaped by a conviction that I hope will enrich our reflection. Karol Wojtyła was a distinguished professional philosopher, but he was also a man of the Bible. And he brought to his papal ministry a settled conviction that the world’s story and the biblical story are not stories running on parallel tracks. Rather, the biblical story—the story whose chapter headings in the Hebrew Bible are Creation, Fall, Promise, and Prophecy; the story Christians believe continues in the New Testament under chapters titled Incarnation, Redemption, Sanctification, and the Kingdom of God—is the world’s story: the story whose surface features are conventionally labeled Ancient Civilizations, Greece and Rome, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, the Age of Reason, the Age of Science, the Age of Democracy, and so forth. The biblical story is the world’s story rightly understood. The biblical story is the world’s story read in its deepest dimension and against its most ample horizon. The biblical story is, if you will, the story inside the conventional historical storyline: the depth story that gives the surface story its narratability and, ultimately, its coherence.    

Let me put this another way: John Paul II believed that the human story is not the story of man’s search for God, but rather the story of God’s search for us, and our learning to take the same path through history that God takes. That is what the biblical story teaches, beginning with the divine summons to Abram to leave Ur of the Chaldees and journey to a land of promise. And that, John Paul II was convinced, is the story the world must learn anew (or, in some instances, for the first time), if the world is to recover a sense of its nobility and possibility. In that conviction, John Paul II became a pilgrim to the world: a biblical pilgrim, telling the world its true story—the story of Abraham, the story of Moses, the story of Jesus—so that, as he put it at the United Nations in 1995, “a century of tears might give birth to a new springtime of the human spirit.” John Paul II’s fervent wish that Jews and Christians be a “blessing to one another” was not a reflection on the pain of the past but was focused on the possibilities of the future. 

To what end, then, were we to be a blessing to one another? So that the world, in learning its true story, might recover its moral sanity. So that the peoples whose basic moral code comes from Sinai might be lights to the nations, witnesses to human dignity, and defenders of human freedom. So that, together, Jews and Christians might remind the world that history is His-story, God’s story, and that our human dignity is ennobled, not diminished, by our taking the same path through history taken by the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus. 

On April 6, 2005, four days day after John Paul II died, Rabbi Michael Schudrich, the American-born Chief Rabbi of Poland, wrote the following in the Polish newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny [Universal Weekly], to which the late pope had once contributed signed essays and pseudonymous poems and plays: 

For the past two thousand years, no one did so much for Jewish-Catholic dialogue and reconciliation as John Paul II. He taught us, in a very special way, what it means to love all people—all God’s creatures. His fight against antisemitism and racism was unequalled. … 

… He taught us to appeal to [the] holiness that is well embedded in each one of us. He showed us not only how to live but also how to die. The world [has] lost an important moral authority—his moral compass. Poland has lost its greatest teacher and hero. The Jews [have] lost their best friend and defender. 

We are bereaved and yet we will always be embraced with the blessing of John Paul II’s life and teachings. May his memory be a blessing for all of us. 

On his historic visit to the Synagogue of Rome in 1986, John Paul II called Jews and Christians to “a collaboration in favor of man,” a collaboration in defense of human life and human dignity. That summons speaks to us. 

For the plague of anti-Semitism is abroad in the land yet again—and by “the land,” I mean across the globe. Throughout modern political history, rising anti-Semitism has been an infallible marker of cultural decay. And as politics is always downstream from culture, the public and political effects of that cultural decay can be draconian, as history teaches us—from the passions unleashed during the Dreyfus Affair in the French Third Republic, through the cultural meltdown of Weimar Germany and its genocidal political outcome, to the maniacal barbarism of Hamas on October 7, 2023. And if we in the contemporary West imagine ourselves immune to the toxic political effects of the new anti-Semitism in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and elsewhere, we are deluding ourselves in a morally and politically irresponsible way. 

Given this academic setting for our reflection tonight, permit me to make three more points briefly. 

First: Anti-Semitism—Jew-hatred, Jew-baiting, Jew-stigmatizing—is a betrayal of our civilizational patrimony. 

What we know as Western civilization is the product of the fruitful interaction of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. Athens—classical Greek philosophy from the pre-Socratics through Aristotle—taught the West that there are truths built into the world and into us, truths that we can know by exercising the arts and disciplines of reason. From Rome, Western civilization learned the superiority of the rule of law over the rule of brute force. And Jerusalem?  

Biblical religion gave Western civilization its unique future orientation. Biblical religion taught the West that life is pilgrimage, journey, adventure: neither the purposeless repetition of life cycles nor one damn thing after another. And the primary metaphor for that Western understanding of history as purposeful and teleological—history as going somewhere—is of course the Exodus of Israel from Egypt.  

Moreover, biblical religion taught the West that the dignity of the human person is not something ascribed to the privileged by the state, or by whatever potentate happens to be in charge at any given moment. No, biblical religion taught the West that human dignity is innate and inalienable because, as Genesis proclaims, we are not congealed stardust, but creatures—creations—made in the image of the Creator. There was, to be sure, a long and often stony historical path to be trod before that biblical teaching came to public expression in the modern human rights revolution. But let there be no doubt where that path began: it began when Jewish conviction, born of Abram’s encounter with the God who changed his name to Abraham, was given literary form in the first chapter of Genesis.  

Second: Anti-Semitism is a betrayal of Christianity, for Jew-hatred is Christ-hatred. Jesus of Nazareth makes no sense without understanding him as he understood himself: as an heir, a son, of God’s covenant with the Jewish people. And Christianity makes no sense without its Jewish parent, as the Christian New Testament makes no sense without the Hebrew Bible. Absent its tether to Judaism, Christianity would be another mystery cult from the ancient world, and Jesus of Nazareth would be a miracle-working Galilean version of the first-century miracle-working neo-Pythagorean, Apollonius of Tyana. Thus, even in its childhood, historically speaking, Catholicism rejected the heresy of Marcionism, which rejected the Hebrew Bible.  

And that is why in the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration Nostra Aetate, the sixtieth anniversary of which we will mark in a few months, the Catholic Church condemned anti-Semitism and confessed its spiritual debt to what the Council fathers called the “stock of Abraham” in these terms: 

The Church of Christ acknowledges that … the beginning of her faith and election is to be found in the patriarchs, Moses, and the prophets. … The Church cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament by way of the people with whom God in his inexpressible mercy established the ancient covenant. … 

Likewise, the Church keeps ever before her mind the words of the apostle Paul about his kinsmen: “They are Israelites, and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. …” She is mindful, moreover, that the apostles, the pillars on which the Church stands, are of Jewish decent, as are many of those early disciples who proclaimed the Gospel of Christ to the world. … 

Together with the prophets and [St. Paul], the Church awaits the day, known to God alone, when all peoples will call on God with one voice. … 

If I may speak for a brief moment in the language of moral theology: Anti-Semitism is a grave sin. All forms of hatred are sinful. Anti-Semitism is an especially grave form of sin—of life-distorting and culture-corroding moral depravity—because it is a betrayal of Christianity and a betrayal of Jesus Christ.  

Third: Some forms of twenty-first-century anti-Semitism—those emerging from the radical left in global political life—mirror the rejection of the God of the Bible found in what the mid-twentieth-century French theologian Henri de Lubac called “atheist humanism.” This cultural phenomenon, which Father de Lubac associated with such figures as Comte, Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche, taught that the God of the Bible was the enemy of human maturation and liberation and thus had to be rejected. Yet as the French scholar observed, this was a complete (and indeed rather absurd) inversion of humanity’s historical experience. For through the people of Israel, the God of the Bible came into history as a liberator who called humanity to a new and morally responsible maturity.  

Unlike the ancient Canaanite gods, the God of the Bible did not demand, and get, child sacrifice, a heinous practice against which the Jewish prophets railed for centuries. Unlike the gods of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the God of the Bible did not treat men and women as playthings on a cosmic gaming board, against whose whims the strongest men like Achilles were finally powerless. Unlike the gods of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, the God of the Bible did not require for appeasement the vivisection of living human beings. 

The rise of atheist humanism did not, as its prophets confidently anticipated, lead to a newly matured humanity, tutored by natural science, liberated from religious delusion, and living in a harmony of nations. Rather, de Lubac argued, atheist humanism created the cultural conditions for political disaster and the greatest bloodlettings in history: from the First World War through the Ukrainian Holodomor to the Gulag camps and, finally, to Kristallnacht and then Auschwitz, Treblinka, and the rest of the Nazi death factories. That is an analysis worth considering as we parse the different forms of ant-Semitism today.  

As my children will happily confirm, I am something of an ignoramus when it comes to popular culture, which means I am something of an ignoramus when it comes to the swift changes that our ever-malleable English language undergoes. Thus, it took me the better part of six months to finally get what “woke” means. And it was only a few weeks ago that I finally understood the image of moving or opening the “Overton Window”: an image for expanding the range of acceptable political language and ideas in order to advance a particular agenda. With my new knowledge of Overton Windows at hand, let me conclude by saying this: The Overton Window with respect to anti-Semitic language, tropes, images, and concepts has been opened far too wide over the past several years and it is our solemn duty to slam it shut. 

It is our patriotic duty to our country, whose already-fragile civic culture is being further weakened by the Jew-haters, who are also making true learning difficult if not impossible in many institutions of higher learning.  

It is our civic duty to our fellow citizens of the stock of Abraham, who, not without difficulty, have nonetheless been fully participant in the American democratic experiment for centuries, as witnessed by George Washington’s 1790 “Letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island,” in which the first president affirmed (in a reference to Micah 4:4) that, in the new nation, “every one shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”       

And for the Christians among us, it is our religious duty to those whom John Paul II called, at the Grand Synagogue of Rome, our “elder brothers” in faith. 

Let us do our duty. Let us slam shut and then nail shut the Overton Window on anti-Semitism and thereby help give our country a new birth of freedom rightly understood.  

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