By John Connell
In a small, dimly lit, quiet cavern on Mount Zion in Jerusalem there are preserved some of the relics, both sacred and secular, that remained after the murder of some six million Jews in Europe between 1933 and 1945. This, Israel’s tribute and memorial, is a place steeped in the sense of the holiness of suffering. I know of no experience in the life of a Christian, of European origin and background, such as I am, sadder or more truly humbling than a pilgrimage to this place; if this indeed is an act of contrition, I am thankful to have made it.
The Nazis’ “final solution of the Jewish problem” was the biggest, most terrible and barbarous pogrom that history records. But the phenomenon of the pogrom, as this book demonstrates, has been with us a long time; and it would be irresponsibly optimistic to predict that it will not be repeated, or to assert that the fires of fury of which it is a manifestation have burned themselves out in individual men or in the communities into which men band themselves.
Father Keenan’s book seems to me, on a different plane, as valuable and as salutary as the memorial on Mount Zion. He has written it in a spirit that is as charitable as it is courageous. Its singular importance is that it treats this bleak and challenging theme from a strictly Christian standpoint, and within Christian terms of reference. Father Keenan unflinchingly faces the fact, which is hideously hard for many Christians to accept, that again and again pogroms have been launched in the name of Jesus Christ. What deeper, more wicked wound can we inflict upon Our Saviour?
There is a profound difference between the collective consciousness of Jews about the meaning of pogroms, and the collective consciousness of Christians. Persecution for Jews is part of the known, accepted pattern of history, one of the many and repeated afflictions which must be borne until the day on which the Messiah shall come and redeem His people. There is not among Jews, I am sure, any consciousness of having, by word or deed, provoked persecution. There is no sense of guilt. For Christians the pogrom is a horrible rarity, the result of a complex of causes that lie outside the control of reason—the collapse of civilised order, the unchecked onrush of disease, overwhelming defeat in war. Every recollection of it is a guilty recollection. The pogrom is neurotic in origin and neurotic in expression; in the end we rationalise our attitude to it by a neurotic act of compulsive forgetfulness.
Father Keenan cuts with clinical cleanness into this suppuration. He studies with care the processes by which hatred is built up and sustained. The first of these processes, as he points out, is the creation of the image of the evil Jew, on whom can be off-loaded the sins, as well as the misfortunes, of individuals and of a society. An essential complement is the establishment of the sense of otherness, of inalienable superiority confronted with inescapable inferiority. To uphold the claim of superiority it is necessary to deal “justly” with inferiors; what cannot and must not be conceded to them is charity, or love, or brotherhood in the sight of God.
It is at this point, it seems to me, that the evolving pattern of the neurosis implacably takes command. For at this point men regard other men as instruments. To deny the godhead in others is to attempt to murder God in oneself; and God died at men’s hands in order that all men should have life eternal. The mystery of God’s relationship to man is the only sufficient and perfect answer to the evil myths which men devise about their relationships to each other.
There has been in recent years a great deal of anthropological and sociological research into almost every facet of anti-Semitism. Father Keenan’s short, simple, undeviatingly sincere book says much utterly to the point, which many ponderous volumes have left unsaid. He compels his readers to think and feel on this issue, not in terms of liberal humanism and its elaborate apparatus of science (though he is by no means unaware of its outlook and conclusions), but as Christians. In a largely “post-Christian”—to borrow a striking phrase from Father Keenan—society, this is not a comfortable experience, but it may have, I suggest, some notable rewards.
Of the many lessons which, I hope, this book has taught me, the most valuable is an apparent paradox: “Only in a climate of total Christianity,” says Father Keenan, “can the Jew hope for any security at all.” It is, of course, not a paradox at all. God sent His Son to live on earth. A baby was born in Bethlehem in Judaea; a boy walked the green, flower-decked hills of Galilee; a man worshipped and preached in the synagogue at Capernaum on the lakeside. He was the Son of God: His birth, life, passion, death and glorious resurrection were accomplished for the sake of all men, Jew and Gentile, bond and free.
I can think of no greater honour (and I cannot believe that I am worthy of it) than to have been asked to write this brief foreword to Father Keenan’s book, which, from first page to last, is a solemn and stirring affirmation of this fundamental truth.