Between Gentiles and Jews there has always been tension. When the tension has passed a certain point the strings of tolerance snap and human relationship breaks down. Partial breakdown is expressed in anti-Semitism; total breakdown is expressed in pogrom. The literal meaning of the word is “destruction”.
It is possible to distinguish three phases in Gentile-Jewish relationship. Phase one belongs to the pre-Christian era. In that time the stereotype of the Jew in the Gentile mind was one of a contemptuous, distinctive Outsider who despised the dominant culture in which he was the unwilling guest. The Roman stereotype is described on p. 35. The Gentile stereotype in the mind of the Jew is well described in the character of Aman, the plotter of Jewish destruction, in the Old Testament Book of Esther (p. 83).
The stereotypes in the minds of both Jew and Gentile are caricatures, born of mutual prejudice, itself the product of action and reaction. In this phase the religious conviction of the Jew that he belonged to God’s chosen people and must observe God’s law made him an abscess in the imperial anatomy of Egypt and Rome.
In the second phase the Jew is outside the culture of Christian Europe. The stereotype caricatures him as the murderer of Christ, the killer of Christian boys, the profaner of the Sacred Host, the poisoner of Christian wells—in brief, as the Christian’s Shadow.
In the last post-Christian phase the Jew is the scapegoat of the new religions of Capitalism and of Socialism but still the heir of prejudices of past centuries. Prejudices, of course, are compounded of ignorance. But they also help to satisfy hidden needs. Nine pogroms are described in this book, not to shed light on Jews, but on Gentiles as they have treated Jews. In this, and in other ways, we can hope to banish stereotypes—blanket terms which take no account of individual differences in the human family and by their oversimplification pander to our prejudice and prevent us from seeing God’s image in a son of Adam.
This kind of simplification prevents us, at times, from appreciating the essential role of some Jews in the spread of Christianity. We forget that the leaders of the nation rejected Christ, with some exceptions, and that there were also exceptions to this rejection among those who were led. We attribute the same culpability to the generation of the time of Christ and to the generation which exists now. But this latter point has far less significance.
The main effect of Christianity in Western countries now is in its residues. We live on them and hardly believe the great Christian principles from which these residues sprang. For vast numbers of us, as for the Jews, it is as if Christ had never risen from the dead. With them, too, there has come religious decline, so that there is little difference between those who await the Messiah and us who have forgotten that He came.
Decline in religious belief has undoubtedly made us all more tolerant. But tolerance is really a moral virtue which belongs to the will. If a proposition is true you cannot be tolerant about it. It sweeps you along. Only when truth has ceased to be of value can you swim against the stream or tolerate the falsities of others because you have no truths of your own. Religious belief could be as firm as it was in the early Church and we would still have no excuse for intolerance. Tolerance belongs to charity, not to faith. Faith says that Judaism is incomplete. Charity bids us to love the Jews. It is precisely here where the Jew becomes an enemy, and the Christian hates him, that our attitude to the Jew sheds most light upon ourselves. It is in our hatreds, no less than in our loves, that we truly discover what we are.