1926 After Attending a Jewish-Christian Conference

Fellowship with peoples of other religious groups always results in the grateful experience of discovering unsuspected treasuries of common sentiment and conviction. More contact between enlightened Jews and Christians would change the emphasis in many a Christian homily. This conference was rewarding in many ways. But at one point I fail absolutely to understand my Jewish friends. All of them, high and low, intelligent and those who are less so, insist that the story of the crucifixion is the real root of all or of most antisemitism, and they seem to have some vain hope that broadminded Christians will be able and willing to erase the story of the cross from the gospel record. The least they expect is that the odium of the cross be placed upon the Romans rather than the Jews.

I can see that there would be some advantage in ascribing a historic sin to a people who live only in history and who can therefore not be victimized by belated vindictive prejudices. But would that be history? The record is pretty plain and the fact that the Jewish elders rather than Roman soldiers were the real crucifiers is supported not only by evidence but by logic. The prophets of religion are always martyred by the religious rather than by the irreligious. The Romans, being irreligious, were not sufficiently fanatical to initiate the crucifixion.

It must be admitted that the phraseology of the Fourth Gospel may easily incite the prejudices of the ignorant. But the enlightened will find a better method to allay any antisemitic feeling which may result from the record than to ascribe the crucifixion to the Romans. They need only ascribe it to the general limitations of human nature and society. Jews are not the only people who martyr and who have martyred their prophets. The history of every nation and every people makes the crucifixion a perennial and a universal historical fact.

That is the very reason why Christians can no more afford to eliminate the cross than they can ascribe it to the fortunately extinct Romans. Anyone who incarnates the strategy of love as Jesus did meets the resistance and incites the passions of human society. The respectabilities of any human society are based upon moral compromises and every community is as anxious to defend these compromises against the prophet who presents some higher moral logic as against the criminal who imperils the structure from below.

The cross is central in the Christian religion, moreover, because it symbolizes a cosmic as well as an historic truth. Love conquers the world, but its victory is not an easy one. The price of all creativity and redemption is pain. Most modern religionists who understand the God of creation and not the God of redemption fail in understanding the latter precisely because they do not see how closely related creation and redemption are. Which simply means that they don’t understand that creation is a painful process in which the old does not give way to the new without trying to overcome it.

The cross of Jesus is truly the most adequate symbol of both the strategy and the destiny of love not only in history but in the universe. We may grant our Jewish brethren that it is not the only possible symbol of eternal verities, but it is a true one, and it cannot therefore be sacrificed.

Incidentally, I believe that Jewish people have a tendency to overestimate the religious bases of antisemitism. Racial rather than religious prejudice is the dominant factor in this social disease. All ignorant people hate or fear those who deviate from their type. Religious divergences may be as important as cultural and physical differences, but they are not dominant. The Jews could accept our religion and if they maintained their racial integrity they would still suffer from various types of social ostracism. After all the Negroes are Christian, but that hasn’t helped them much. Some Jews dislike this comparison very much. They do not like to be put upon the same basis with the Negroes. But that reveals unrealistic social analysis. The majority group is intolerant of minorities whether their culture is inferior, superior or equal.