About ten years ago 1 had a conversation with a Jewish-American couple in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. All of a sudden, the wife confessed that she had been brought up with the idea that Christians were the natural enemies of the Jews, that their religion was utterly wrong, but here in the Holy City, she had begun to realize that Christianity, after all, stemmed from Judaism, that it was—she looked at me apologetically—a “Jewish religion.”
“You are right,” 1 admitted, “as Pius XI told us, we are all Semites spiritually and we have always known that the synagogue was the mother of the Church.” The husband became irritated, even rude to his wife. She had tears in her eyes. I sympathized with her, but 1 could also understand his reactions.
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