Rome and Jerusalem

One of the principles that have over the years guided these columns involves what is called interfaith dialog. We’re against it. Not, to be clear, that we’re against those who engage in it or against any particular religion. It’s just that it has always struck us as an illogical exercise. Faith, though not incompatible with reason, nonetheless differs from reason. Better, we’ve long felt, to let those of other religions follow their own beliefs while one can attend to one’s own. That has struck us as the more modest way, the better route to amity.

Yet we are struck at the contrast between the statements in respect of the Jews that have surfaced in the past week or so from, on the one hand, those who are blaming the Jews for all the trouble in the world and, on the other hand, Benedict XVI. Everyone from the president of Yemen to Julian Assange seems to be blaming the Jews for their troubles. Yet the leader of the Roman Catholic Church has just issued a book in which he absolved the Jews for blame in the crucifixion of the rabbi Catholics believe to be the son of God.

Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic noted last week that Charlie Sheen set down his producer, Chuck Lorre, as “Chaim Levine,” Glenn Beck laced into the liberal politics of Reform rabbis, Dior’s famed designer John Galliano drunkenly praised Hitler, the Iranian regime complained that the 2012 Olympic logo secretly spells out the word “Zion,” and the aforementioned founder of Wikileaks alleged argued that there is a Jewish-dominated conspiracy to smear him. Mr. Goldberg joked that he ran 3,000 blogposts through his new Instamash-Bloginator3000 and the summary headline the wonder machine produced was “Jews, Jews, Jews, Jews, Jews!”

This is the climate in which the Pope’s new book is being published. What the pope wrote was that the phrase in Matthew about Jesus’s blood being on the Jews was not a curse but, as the dispatch of the Religious News Service put it, “a kind of blessing.” The person we called for a sense of it was Rabbi Jacob Neusner, a professor at Bard College, who, when we reached him, was reading the pontiff’s book. He characterized it as “very explicit” and “completely original,” an exegesis of the Christian Bible “without any Jewish engagement.”

The last point is a shrewd observation. Benedict XVI is, after all, unique among the leaders of the Roman church, in that he is a German and lived during the Holocaust. No doubt he feels more acutely than he otherwise might have the urgency of addressing this issue. Or, as one of the great editors in town put it to us, the dialog that Benedict XVI is carrying on is not so much “interfaith” as “intra-faith.” The dialog he is leading is within the church. Certainly none of this will, nor should, narrow the theological differences between Jews and Catholics.

It does, however, underscore one of our favorite themes — the tricks that history can play. Who would have thought that so soon after the Inquisition and the so many other deeds done in the name of the church and the silence of Rome during the Holocaust, that after all this history we would fetch up in a world in which the Jews could pick up a newspaper to discover that between Julian Assange and the president of Yemen and the Iranian tyrant that the leading voice in their defense is the Pope? It strikes us as a moment for both Christians and Jews to savor.