As Mark Oppenheimer writes in his critique of David Brooks, “For the Jew, Christianity is a heresy, an elevation of a false messiah.” While Judaism plays a significant role within Christianity, which views itself as the fulfillment of Judaism’s theological promises, for Jews, writes Oppenheimer, the two religions “contradict each other.” Oppenheimer is right. To be both a Jew and a Christian, as Brooks suggests in his affirmation of the Sermon on the Mount, is a Christian fantasy, one with deep roots.
After all, Jesus, Paul, and the early apostles were Jews—or were they Christians? Jesus practiced Judaism, preached Jewish ideas, engaged with Jewish leaders and plain folk in the synagogue, in the Temple, and on the streets. When did he become a Christian? The ambiguity of his identity became a great concern to modern Christian theologians in their search for the historical Jesus. Seeking a way to distinguish Jesus from Judaism, they denigrated Judaism and claimed Jesus’ message was a repudiation of Judaism.
When Jewish scholars joined the fray and demonstrated that Jesus’ message was the same as that preached by other rabbis of his day, some Christian theologians, especially in Germany, turned to racial theory, arguing that resemblances between Jesus and Judaism were superficial, and racially he was not a Jew but an Aryan. Paintings of Jesus with dark eyes and hair were rejected; artists had to paint him with blond hair and blue eyes. A best-selling novel claimed Jesus may have been born in Schleswig-Holstein. At the very least, he stemmed from Galilee, a region devoid of Jews and populated with Assyrians, Iranians, and Aryan Indians. The dejudaization of Christianity reached a peak during the Third Reich, when the dominant German Christian Movement, a Protestant group that supported Hitler, threw the Old Testament out of the Christian Bible and revised the New Testament to eliminate all Jewish references.
The dejudaization of Christianity reached a peak during the Third Reich.
For centuries, Jews viewed Christianity with a double lens, condemning it as idol worship while being fascinated by some of its traditions. Christian symbols permeate medieval Kabbalah, as the Shekhinah, the divine immanence, is given imagery that mirrors Catholic adoration of the Virgin Mary. In the modern period, Jews have claimed Jesus as a liberalizing Pharisee and Paul as the founder of the religion about Jesus. Judaism, some argued, is closer to the teachings of Jesus than the church, with its dogma and doctrines about Christ. Implied was that those seeking the faith of Jesus rather than the religion about Jesus ought to become Reform Jews!
Yet no matter how Jewish Jesus really was, a Jewish “reclamation” of Jesus is not in the cards, just as Unitarianism is not Judaism. Our religions are more than the Scriptures on which they are based; we have a history and a theology to accept. Christian theology is built on an appropriation of the Hebrew Bible and its central theological principles, declaring that Judaism is the “old Israel,” Israel of the flesh, whereas Christianity has replaced it as the “new Israel,” Israel of the spirit. Without Judaism, there would be no Christianity. Yet the reverse is not true: Judaism may at times be influenced by Christian ideas and images, but if Christianity had never come into existence, Judaism would remain theologically essentially the same—though Jews would have escaped most of the persecution of the past two thousand years.
Precisely that persecution makes the Jewish taboo on Christianity remain strong. Christians may hold a Passover Seder at their church, but Jews will never hold a Eucharist in a synagogue—the very idea seems absurd, since the Eucharist is an appropriation of the biblical blessing of bread and wine offered by the priests in the Jerusalem Temple.
Religion has always involved performance, with priests in elegant garb, for instance. But faith has long held itself aloof from performance. Faith defined itself as honest and unpretentious, while performance is an external spectacle. What Oppenheimer criticizes in Brooks is the reduction of faith to performance—“the whole shebang.” Yes, there is great beauty in the Beatitudes, and there is great beauty in the Talmud, too; have a look at the last Mishnah in Tractate Sotah, for example. Declaring oneself a Christian because of a few verses in Matthew hardly seems much of a faith commitment. What is Brooks performing? Is this a performance of ecumenical embrace? Or is this an old-fashioned supersessionism, the claim that Judaism has no separate existence because it is incorporated in the hegemonic Christianity?
To be clear, I am not arguing that people cannot absorb elements from other religions into their practice, or slide between and amongst religions. Syncretism is real; faith journeys are messy. And people can get inspired when they least expect it. After joining Friday prayers at a mosque in Cairo, the great Hungarian Jewish scholar of Islam, Ignaz Goldziher, wrote in his diary, “In the midst of the thousands of the pious I rubbed my forehead against the floor of the mosque. Never in my life was I more devout, more truly devout, than on that exalted Friday…. I only wish I could elevate my Judaism to the same rational level as Islam.”
Goldziher, one of the most renowned modern European scholars of Islam, remained an observant Jew, but his expression of admiration for Islam is striking and points to the classic distinction in Jewish thought between Islam and Christianity. The inspiration Goldziher found in the 1870s, praying in a mosque, did not lead him to conversion; Islam and Judaism felt like siblings rather than rivals.
But Christianity, by contrast, carried a different connotation; had Goldziher praised the inspiration of a church service, the implication would have been quite different—as one might expect, given the history of the two religions in relation to Judaism. Islam is a religion of monotheism and makes no demands on its believers that constitute heresy for Jews. Christianity, by contrast, demands belief in a Trinity and an incarnate God, Jesus, violating the distinction between God and human beings and constituting polytheism and idolatry in Jewish eyes. Thus, Maimonides’ return to Judaism, after his coerced conversion to Islam, was easy and without hindrance; he had not violated the strict Jewish prohibition against idolatrous worship. By contrast, conversos—Jews who had converted to Christianity in fourteenth-century Spain—who wanted to return to Judaism encountered hostility, obstacles, and punishment from the rabbis.
These distinctions, these nuances, don’t invalidate Brooks’s project, which is his own and should be respected. But they suggest that he has only begun to think about how different religions conflict with, and contradict, each other. At the moment, the only religiosity that he is an expert on is his own.