CONCLUSION

The pogroms you have read are not the only pogroms but they are the most significant ones because they explain, in part, why our perception of the Jew is distorted.

The pogrom of the Peoples’ Crusade, for instance, imprinted the Demonic Image of the Jew upon the Nordic mind. It was a pogrom of frenzy which drove the discontented peasants across the barriers of a phantom world in which killing a Jew became a sign of grace.

No less than ten times, we repeat, between 1120 and 1250 successive Popes¹ reiterated and endorsed the Constitution for Jews in which violence towards them was expressly prohibited.

The pogrom of the Black Death was a pogrom of panic. During it butchering Jews acquired a ritual and protective significance. In the phantom world of panic the Nordic mind received a further imprinting. The Jew became a scapegoat.

The pogrom of Auschwitz was a pogrom of pride. In the phantom world there is no room for two Chosen Peoples. Aryan blood must not be contaminated so that the Great Outsider became the Great Rival. Sinister smog from the chimneys of crematoria was his demonic epitaph.

The Outsider, the Demonic Jew, the Scapegoat, the Rival of the Gentile—all of these subliminal impressions threaten our Christian perception of the Jew.

We have seen that in times of great crisis one or other of these impressions may become dominant when the whiplash of total misfortune drives one or more of us temporarily and reversibly across the fringes of reason.

When that happens, the Jew becomes the predestined stranger who leads us into the phantom world and the twilight of charity is upon us.

Back goes the clock, and history shows us our image in the frightened face of the Jew—an image of peasants pitchforking rats when the last sheaves are taken from the barns at the time of threshing.

Across the centuries come haunting voices. Kill the murderer of Our Lord, echoes some Crusader’s voice. Drown him and appease the anger of God, cry the ghosts of the Flagellants. How, sneers a Rosenberg, can the European God have a Jewish head?

The Jew too has his phantom world over whose frontiers he has been driven by the pogroms of the Goyim. He too has sought and found his revenge. But if he is our enemy—or if we make him so—it is we who are bound to love and to do good to those who hate us.

That is our trouble with the Jew, of course. At our best we have, like Portia, given him justice. The one thing he hardly ever gets is charity. It is probably the one untried Christian approach to which he is totally vulnerable.

If Bethlehem teaches us anything it is that. For there we see the unconditional acceptance by the Son of God of a human nature which is Jewish. The fact that He was also the True Light who illumines Gentiles rather than Jews should not take away from their glory at having produced Him.

That is only what Simeon said—a Light to the revelation of the Gentiles and the glory of His people, Israel.

None the less it was and is a tragedy that He came into His very own, shone and was not comprehended by the majority. But there was a minority who saw His glory and our debt to them is often forgotten on the larger canvas of history and of pogrom.

Again we emphasise that all through the long biography of the nation there was a faithful remnant whom strange gods never attracted. They kept alive through captivity and pogrom the luminous revelation of the oneness of God’s nature, of His sanctity, of His justice, of His Commandments and of His love.

The remnant shielded the thin clear flame of revelation so well that it never went out. And when at last the True Light shone in the stable at Bethlehem there were those who saw—the Simeons, the John the Baptists, Elizabeth, Joseph and Mary.

For them it was not too difficult to see Mount Sinai merge into the Sermon on the Mount and the supper of the Pasch merge into the feast of the Eucharist.

There were others, too, like the Apostles, who could hardly have said where the synagogue ended and the Church began, so smooth and so natural was the transition between them.

Upon their lips a psalm and a hymn meant the same thing, and there was no difference between the God of the Holy of Holies and the Christ of the Breaking of Bread.

All of these things were beginning at Bethlehem. There did lie in the cradle a God with a Jewish head, the son of a Jewish maiden, the baby who would be circumcised, the boy who would go to the Temple, the man who would weep over the capital.

And yet, because of who He was as distinct from what He was, there is in Him neither Jew nor Gentile, neither black nor white, neither bond nor free. In the glorious democracy of His Mystical Body all men are absolutely equal and all things racial disappear.

It was a little Jewess who made that democracy possible, and it was twelve Jews who preached it to the world.

Bethlehem is relevant to our time. For our time is one of Apartheid and of Little Rock. It is the hour of the Slav and the hour of the Mongol. The world no longer sets its clock by Nordic time.

The insulting myth of Nordic supremacy which talked contemptuously of Wogs, Yids, Niggers, Wops and Yellow Perils is now nearly outrun.

Over most of Europe the white populations are ageing and going into contraceptive decline.

At the cradle of Bethlehem there are no myths. Gentiles, Jews, Blacks and Whites kneel in equality. The myth of Nordic supremacy should never have begun.

In yet another sense Bethlehem is the meeting-point of Jew and Gentile, in a sense we rarely think of, that the Body of Christ is incomplete without the Jews.

This is the Baby who one day will weep as a man over the capital of his country, who would protect it as the hen protects her brood. This is the Baby who one day will die for all men—for Jew as well as for Gentile.

In the miracle of love which is Bethlehem no less than in that other which is Calvary our destiny would appear to mingle with that of the Jew. The love that passes all understanding shines through the eyes of a Jewish child and pleads to us Goyim that His blood brothers be loved and understood.