Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

QUARTERLY REVIEW, WINTER 1984
redemption, Christianity has brought a whole new sum of evil and
cruelty into the world. That is the best proof Christianity is not a true
religion.
Third, Christians claim to supersede Jewry. Christians themselves
say that if Christianity is true faith, then Judaism does not exist or has
no right to exist. But Jewry knows that it is alive and vital. Obviously,
Christianity must be false. If your truth means that I am not valid, but
I know my own validity, then you must be false.
The fourth Jewish response was that Christianity triumphed among
the Gentiles. No Jew would fall for that fairy tale of a virgin mother. If
you were pregnant from someone else, what would you tell your
husband? This is fundamentally how medieval Jews handled
Christianity. Joseph was a fool enough to believe. With one Jew, you
never can tell. But the Jews as a whole would not buy it. That a whole
world would buy it proves that Gentile heads can be filled with
anything. This understanding bred contempt for Gentiles rather than
appreciation for their joining in the work of achieving total
redemption, i.e., both worldly and spiritual. Of course, the contempt
was earned and reinforced by Christian mistreatment of Jews.
Just as Christians were tempted to step out of history because the
messiah had come already and the ongoing suffering was a problem,
so the answer was that history did not matter. Jews were also tempted
to step out of history because in that arena, Christianity had won. To
which the Jewish answer was that what happened in history was now
unimportant. Christianity had triumphed—temporarily. When the
final redemption comes, all these huge statues and towers will come
crashing down, and humanity will know the truth. Jewry, this small,
pitiful people which had no political clout has really been the heart of
the world. All the rest has been just a big, flashy show, up
front—temporarily. Therefore, Judaism also stepped out of history to
wait for its final redemption.
The one thing the rabbis would give Christianity, then, is that Jesus
was a messiah—a false messiah. This negative view conceded very
little. Jesus was not the only false messiah in Jewish history; he was
neither the first nor the last. In the seventeenth century, Shabbetai
Tsvi, one of the great false messiahs of Jewish history, swept the
Jewish world. The Jews are still looking for a messiah. So, if a few Jews
followed Jesus, it proved nothing. The rabbis concluded that
Christianity was an alien growth, developed by those who followed a
false messiah.
The rabbis perhaps erred here. Understandably, they did not do
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