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have in mind a group of people whose forbearers did something terribly
wrong. These persons, living today, themselves may never have committed
any crimes, but still we hold them responsible for what was done
many years ago."
If somebody
said a thing like this to you, would you think he was an anti-Semitic
Christian speaking about an act committed by Jewish people in the
year 33 — turning Jesus over to the Romans for execution —
for which the race of "Christ-killers" stills bears guilt?
Or would you think he was a Jew speaking about Christians? If you
thought he was a celebrated Jewish historian, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,
you'd be on the right track. The words I've quote aren't his, but
the sentiment is.
Thanks to the
success of his 1996 book Hitler's
Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,
whatever Goldhagen says is taken with grave seriousness. So controversy
still swirls around his recent 25-page New Republic article
"What Would Jesus Have Done? Pope Pius XII, the Vatican, and
the Holocaust." The article turns upon the question of whether
the today's Catholic Church bears responsibility for the deeds of
Catholics in the past. Goldhagen feels it does.
This issue
will be revisited in the fall, to great adulation, when Goldhagen's
big book on the subject comes out, joining nine other newish books
dealing with the same topic: the apparent villainy of the Pope during
World War II, Pius XII, who Goldhagen thinks viciously declined
to protest or otherwise counteract the Holocaust.
I say "apparent"
villainy because Pius's guilt is disputed. Rabbi David Dalin has
written powerfully in his defense in The Weekly Standard,
calling Pius "a righteous gentile."
However something
important gets lost in the academic debate about what Pius did or
didn't do. It is that Goldhagen and other critics of the Roman Catholic
Church are pressing on us a notion of collective, inherited guilt
for non-Jews. Goldhagen writes damningly of the postwar Church's
refusal to "confront the facts," to "come to terms
with its greatest failure." He feels that Catholics have yet
to do penance for their sins. This would entail confessing those
sins by exposing all archived records from the days of Pius.
Goldhagen's
is an odd way of thinking, evidently imported from the way we Jews
understand ourselves. Critics who blame modern Christianity in general
for the crimes of anti-Semites centuries ago make the same error.
For in Jewish
eyes, our Jewish ancestors may indeed pass down their guilt to us
— as the Talmud says, for instance, about the sin of the Golden
Calf, committed in 1312 B.C.E. at the foot of Mt. Sinai, for which
we still pay the price today. But that's not true of Judaism's view
of Christians. When Goldhagen & Co. ask that Catholics take
responsibility for what their spiritual forbearers did, they attribute
to Catholicism the same generations-transcending mystic unity that
we attribute to the People Israel.
Catholics have
a similar self-understanding. They call their church the "Body
of Christ." But their understanding of themselves is not ours
of them. In the authentic Jewish perspective, the Torah's
perspective, Christians have no corporate unity across all time.
We should see only individual non-Jews. This would rule out expecting
the current pope, John Paul II, to repent for Pius's deeds.
Anyone who
doubts this is how the Hebrew Bible would see it should look at
Genesis 21, where the patriarch Abraham meets with the Philistine
king Abimelech. Abimelech demands a unilateral agreement from Abraham
that the latter's descendants won't mistreat Abimelech's descendants:
"Now swear to me here by God that you will not deal falsely
with me nor with my son nor with my grandson." Says Abraham,
"I will swear."
The great sage
Rabbi S. R. Hirsch noted how strange it seems that Abraham did not
demand a reciprocal agreement. His explanation: that Abraham is
one with his children's children. Thus he can accept moral responsibilities
on our behalf. The same isn't true of Abimelech and his descendants.
My earlier
allusion to an ancient Christian charge, that all Jews should "confront
the fact" that we're Christ-killers, is germane. It's not only
the Christian Gospels that link Jesus' death to Jewish leaders of
the time. Maimonides frankly admitted the same thing in his famous
"Epistle to Yemen." Yet everyone, including the Catholic
Church, now agrees that later Jews bear no responsibility for that
event.
Similarly,
the Jewish moral perspective would hold individual Christians responsible
only for whatever they personally have done — and leave
it at that. Though he gives an impression that he speaks for the
Jews, Goldhagen's moral perspective isn't Jewish at all.
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