Monday, February 14, 2005
(10:39 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Paul and anti-Semitism
I'm taking a course on the New Testament Epistles; this week it's 1 Thessalonians. I've been spending a lot of time reading and re-reading, and I'm a little unsure what to do with this passage (2:13-16):We also constantly give thanks to God for this, that when you received the word of God that you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word but as what it really is, God’s word, which is also at work in you believers. For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out; they displease God and oppose everyone by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. Thus they have constantly been filling up the measure of their sins; but God’s wrath has overtaken them at last.The idea that this was a later interpolation seems a little too convenient. I'm no philologist and don't even read Greek, but from the rationales I've seen, this is supposed to be a later interpolation because of content, because it doesn't match up with what Paul says in other letters. That is perhaps a post hoc argument to reach the conclusion that a passage that appears anti-Semitic was in fact inauthentic.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that while I agree that anti-Semitism is a terrible thing, I don't actually think this passage is anti-Semitic. First of all, though Paul does dwell on his struggles with the Jewish authorities more than the context strictly demands, he does so in the context of addressing Gentile readers who are experiencing the same thing from their own people. He mentions the fact that the Jewish authorities killed Christ and other prophets, which has been used as an anti-Semitic trope, but in Paul's context, that was a vivid historical reality -- the Jewish authorities of his day collaborated with the Romans to have Jesus killed. And when it comes time for Paul to address the Roman authorities directly in his letter to Rome, he discusses it at greater length, with much stronger language.
Speaking as a Jew, he talks about the opposition his counter-cultural mission has faced from his fellow Jews, in order to draw a parallel to the opposition the Thessalonian group is experiencing from their fellow Gentiles. Presumably, had Jesus been born a Thessalonian, he would have been killed by Thessalonians -- but he was in fact born as a Jew. The point is not that Jews are somehow uniquely evil -- in fact, in the early chapters of Romans, Paul is taken up in part with explaining the fact that there are some Gentiles who act justly, thus working with the assumption that Jews naturally would be more just in their dealings. When he's talking about Jews in general, Paul is very positive; when he's talking about the ones who are explicitly opposing his mission and who opposed Jesus's mission as well, he is very negative -- just as someone today could hold Jews and Jewish culture in very high esteem, or could, like Paul, actually be a Jew, but find the actions of Jewish political authorities appalling.
The line is not difficult to draw here. There is a clear and distinct difference between (a) essentializing Jews as the sickness of the human race and as a pollution in the pure Aryan nation and (b) criticizing those Jews with considerable political power who misuse that power. It's the difference between saying, (a) "Oh, yes, the particular Jew who lives next door seems like a decent chap; it's just Jews in general who make me uncomfortable," and saying, (b) "Oh, yes, the Jews in general are an intelligent, hardworking people with a rich cultural and religious tradition; it's just the slaughter of the Palestinians that I object to." In camp (a), the point is not the specificity of Jews at all, but rather attaching an abstract, negative idea to the name "Jew." (In this sense, attempts to guard against anti-Semitism by disallowing any criticism of any Jews, e.g. of those Jews who make policy for the state of Israel, are still working within the basic logic of anti-Semitism, although such a position is of course not identical with anti-Semitism.) I would put Paul in camp (b) -- an atypical example of a camp (b) position, but still within those basic parameters.
