Abraham Kenmore
Contributing writer
In the wake of the Holocaust, the French Jewish historian Jules Isaac wrote about the 2,000-year history of contempt for Jewish people from the Catholic Church.
The Vatican, reeling from its failure to condemn — and in many cases even actively supporting — the Nazis did something remarkable: it began to review those millennia of history. The result, said Rabbi Joshua Stanton at Thursday’s Interfaith Lecture in the Hall of Philosophy, was the 1965 “Nostra Aetate,” which reshaped the Vatican’s approach to Judaism.
“Jules Isaac died the year before that document was promulgated, officially making it church doctrine,” Stanton said. “But the largest systematically anti-Semitic institution in the world became the largest systematically philo-Semitic institution in the world because of him.”
The challenge now, he said, is not with the relationship between Jews and Catholics, or evangelicals, or Muslims or Hindus or atheists — the challenge is the still unreconciled anti-Semitism in the mainline Protestant church.
Stanton, who spoke as part of the Week One theme “Potluck Nation: Why We Need Each Other to Thrive — In Partnership with Interfaith America,” has worked at the intersection of Judaism and other faiths for a long time. He serves as the associate vice president for Interfaith and Intergroup Initiatives of the Jewish Federations of North America and on the board of governors of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations.
He has seen how the Catholic Church has continued its evolution even in recent years — in 2015, the Vatican made explicit that Catholics are not to actively try to convert Jews.
“By contrast to Catholic leaders, Protestant leaders have done a great job of saying, ‘We are not against the Jewish faith,’ ” Stanton said. “But some leaders have really struggled to say, ‘We also support the Jewish people in all of the complexity and all of the dysfunction and all of the love that we have for each other.’ ”
This trend is not new, Stanton argued, pointing to the writings of St. Augustine, which said not to kill Jews but also that Jews were scattered, fated to eternally wander as punishment for rejecting Jesus. Martin Luther, even as he launched what would become the Lutheran Church, drew on Augustine when he wrote that Jews could not be allowed to live among Christians.
“(Luther) then went on to write what became a literal handbook for the Nazis and how to torch synagogues, torment Jews and try to destroy their tradition,” Stanton said.
It took the Lutheran Church until 1994 to begin to distance itself from Luther’s writings on Jews.
“There are difficult histories connected to many different mainline Protestant denominations, and it feels to many Jews like the phone lines have gone quiet, not since Oct. 7, but since 1945,” Stanton said.
For Stanton, mainline protestant leaders are often unwilling to see the connection of Jews around the world to other Jews — including to the state of Israel.
Protestant leaders do not need to agree with Jewish perspectives — again and again Stanton stressed that there is no agreement on many issues within the Jewish community — but, he said, they need to try and see how many Jews approach the subject of Israel.
In one example, Stanton quoted an unnamed Protestant leader saying that Israel has committed deicide — the crime of killing God — during the war in Gaza, that Jesus is under the rubble. For Stanton, this is a clear throwback to the old anti-Semitic ideology that Jews were responsible for killing Christ.
“What the Vatican has done brilliantly is it has critiqued the state of Israel politically, not theologically,” he said. “And in mixing the two, we get a noxious mixture that brings back to life unholy ghosts from a very painful past.”
Stanton fully acknowledged how controversial this issue is — he even joked that if the audience wanted to throw fruit, he’d prefer they throw ones in his favorite colors of blue and green. But he feels strongly that while these issues have remained unresolved for decades, the gap has become more visible since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel.
Instead of messages of support and understanding that an attack that killed over one thousand Jews in Israel would impact all members of the Jewish community, Stanton said, there was often silence — even as Jewish communities in the United States felt increasingly isolated.
He includes in this isolation some of the language used to criticize Israel on the war in Gaza, for example, calling Israelis “white settler colonists,” even those who he said would be considered people of color in the United States.
“My job has been to figure out who among us is still willing to really be friends, to see Jews as we see ourselves … and I will relate to you that we have looked elsewhere for those friendships,” he said. “The discourse at the highest levels of the mainline Protestant traditions has been too difficult to engage with.”
Last week Stanton said he circulated a letter calling for additional government funding for security at all religious houses of worship following recent attacks that have threatened, injured and even killed Jews. The only group, he said, that did not respond at all was the National Council of Churches.
“I was not asking them to give a round of applause for (Israeli Prime Minister) Bibi Netanyahu,” he said. “I was not asking … for them to make a statement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I was asking them to join us in advocating for the government to fulfill its fundamental duty, which is to protect its citizens, and they would not even engage in respectful difference.”
During the question and answer period, Stanton elaborated on what he would like to see. He pointed out that the current government of Israel is deeply unpopular even within its own borders and that focusing criticism on the government of Israel, not the state as a whole, is more productive. He also encouraged mainline Protestants to grow their connections to Jewish communities, perhaps by studying their shared history and scriptures together.
Asked about how the war in Gaza has unified or divided American Jews, Stanton said that many of the discussions are on how Israel could have responded better in the aftermath and the extent to which the suffering of people in Gaza is a product of Israeli versus Hamas decisions. But, he said, the Israeli government has had to make difficult decisions.
“We’re caught between the woulda, coulda, shoulda, and the what can we do now?” he said.
Stanton ended with a question about what he is teaching his own 6-year-old daughter about being Jewish in America.
“What she has already observed is how differently we act when it comes to physical safety than so many of her family, friends, so many of her classmates and so many others,” he said, “and that we are a small part of the population that really doesn’t get a lot of recognition or opportunities to speak aloud to begin with.”
