Teaching Christians about anti-semitism

[liv]

I knew my Haggadah group was going to get weird when we got to the third cup. Partly because there is almost nothing in the actual text: three verses about Divine wrath, and if you're lucky a stage direction mentioning opening the door and possibly alluding to Elijah. And, well, the explanation involves quite a lot of unpleasant history.

It turned out that the chaplain had an urgent thing to do and was out for most of that particular session. And among the other participants, the African woman hadn't heard of the blood libel at all (which is fair enough, I couldn't tell you one single fact about what was going on in Africa in the twelfth century), and the quiet and clever young man had only vaguely heard of it with no detail. So I had to start by explaining that there was a pervasive myth in Mediaeval Europe that Jews ritually murdered Christian children to make matzah. And some of the consequences of that, and the massacres that went along with the Crusades.

I explained that some of the earliest Haggadah manuscripts don't have the wrath verses (but the earliest aren't very old, only about thirteenth century), but that they are ubiquitous by the time of printing. My historically annotated Haggadah is much more interested in the first millennium, so everything after about 900 gets lumped together as "Mediaeval", and I couldn't find a more precise dating. But it seems like the wrath verses were added at some point when the blood libel was active, and Easter in particular was a common time for attacks against Jews. So we open the door to show that we are not murdering children.

That's the original tradition; it gets moved around a lot because people are (and have been from at least a the 15^th century) uncomfortable with this tradition. Some people open the door at the much more friendly place of Let all who are hungry come and eat, so it's a hospitality thing rather than a memory of anti-Jewish violence. A lot of traditions make more of a big deal about Elijah, actually talking and singing about the hope of the Messianic age and redemption, rather than just opening the door and filling a cup "for Elijah". The new Reform Haggadah (which I have worked with very little; it only came out a couple of years ago and I've spent my whole life improvising Reform seders from Orthodox books, so haven't got round to changing my habit) moves Elijah's cup to after the fourth cup, on the grounds that the putative fifth cup should come after the fourth, not between 3 and 4, which reasoning doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Lots of people just skip this bit altogether since it's too uncomfortable. I usually have a discussion about the pros and cons of including vengeance verses in the liturgy. And I like the tradition of balancing the wrath verses with equivalent sayings about God's love for all nations. It comes from an early modern German Haggadah as recounted in Dishon and Zion's amazing A different night.

But anyway, people had lots of questions about historical persecution of Jews in Christian Europe, which I answered as best as I could. And of course the conversation drifted to more modern anti-semitism. I declined to speculate about why Netanyahu is friends with Orbán, even though the Hungarian regime appears to be mired deep in classical anti-semitism. One of the participants who had visited Hungary recently described seeing lots of posters that recycle actual Nazi propaganda directed at Soros and the Jews in general. But also the learners seemed to be grappling for perhaps the first time with the idea that there's a connection between Nazi and contemporary anti-semitism, and Mediaeval mostly Christian Jew hatred. I think they'd previously to some extent conceptualized anti-semitism as mostly being based on an argument over who has the right to the land in the Middle East.

Having read the Haggadah, they could no longer imagine separating out anti-Zionism from anti-semitism, since the ideal of the promised land is so central to our liturgy. So I explained that Zionism is a specific political philosophy dating from the nineteenth century, and that there's a very wide range of views regarding how and whether that actually relates to the religious ideal of a return to "Zion". They started trying to ask questions about how people can still go on praising God for redemption after the Holocaust, which I mostly deflected, I didn't want to go into that kind of thing with that group in that situation.

I don't know, I was expecting the conversation to be a bit hard because I would have to remind people of unpleasantness in Christian history. I wasn't really expecting all the pre twentieth century persecution to be actual news to well educated and broadly historically aware people. I hope my explanations were helpful, and I think it's mostly a good thing that we covered that topic; you can't really teach about the Haggadah without it. But yeah, it was unexpectedly tough teaching.

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

Love and hugs

[ambyr]

By coincidence, I saw a fourteenth-century Spanish Haggadah on display at the Met last weekend--the oldest I've ever seen, certainly. As always with book displays, it left me wishing I could look at more than the single page exposed. (At least the Internet has pictures of more of it.)

[sonia]

I think they'd previously to some extent conceptualized anti-semitism as mostly being based on an argument over who has the right to the land in the Middle East.
... wow. That level of ignorance and erasure is distressing for me to hear at a distance. Congratulations on managing it in the context of a class!

[siderea]

I wasn't really expecting all the pre twentieth century persecution to be actual news to well educated and broadly historically aware people.

Oh, I would expect exactly that. Iiiiii have a lot of thoughts and feels about:

1) The utter wreck of what passes for history education in either of our countries,

2) especially where it comes to the Middle Ages,

3) and how history education is politicized by leaving out the unflattering bits, like ethnic cleansing,

4) and leaving out the "unimportant" people, like religious and ethnic minorities,

5) and also how the Holocaust is usually taught - if taught at all, which it wasn't in my high school in California - with absolutely zero historical context,

6) the complete, infurating failure of those who would prevent a second Shoah to understand the necessity of public consciousness raising about the history of anti-semitism before the Holocaust in that project, something about which I've been fuming since I was about ten.

Sister, I am not surprised to encounter Jews who do not know this stuff.

[rosefox]

if taught at all, which it wasn't in my high school in California

*stare*

*staaaaaare*

but

wow.

I've been reading the All-of-a-Kind family books, which are great, and I recommended them to my Mormon-raised partner as being "great Jewish kids' books that aren't about the Holocaust!" "That makes it sound like most Jewish kids' books are about the Holocaust," they said. "You have no idea," I said. And they really did not have any idea, because they grew up with no books about Jews anywhere at all. That didn't surprise or shock me. The idea of no high school education about the Holocaust at all absolutely does.

[siderea]

Yeah. The American History class sort of peetered out around the election of FDR, and then WWII was sort of mentioned in passing; the teacher alluded to the Holocaust but managed to get through the experience without mentioning Jews at any point. I wouldn't have thought that possible and was very impressed he pulled it off.

(In discussing the Korean War, instead of actually discussing the Korean War, he managed to sell a classroom of 16 year old hippy-scions in Marin County on the idea that Domino Theory is a completely reasonable and sensible foreign relations doctrine for the US. He may have been the greatest troll I've ever encountered, and witnessing that had profoundly informed my understanding of the American people.)

[rosefox]

What a shame he chose a classroom of 16-year-olds to exercise his talents on. :/

[siderea]

*shrug* Sure, it was terrible. But consequently nothing about the rise of American fascism has been surprising to me. It illustrated how youth who thought they were liberals had no idea what the underlying moral principles of the political philosophy they espoused were: they were just conforming with what they thought all good and right-thinking people thought, and had absolutely no intellectual defenses against ends-based arguments.

I've known we were fucked for a very long time.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

I don't think I learned about it at school either. If I did, it would probably have been in English class as background for some piece of literature, or maybe in RE class as background for Corrie ten Boom, but definitely not in History. We never studied any history more recent than the Industrial Revolution.

The people who took History as a GCSE option (all three of them) studied WWII, so I assume they studied the Holocaust (OTOH, another comment in this thread suggests it's possible to study WWII and briefly cover the Holocaust but not mention the Jews). IDK whether this was just random or a deliberate decision on the school's part to shield under-13s from the distressing topics.

[independence1776]

There are fewer than ten states in the US that mandate Holocaust education and some of those laws are fairly recent. I don't remember if I learned about it in school or not (and it wouldn't have been in detail if I did), but I read nonfiction books about it as a kid on my own, so it's likely anything covered in school was things I already knew.

[lilacsigil]

The Holocaust wasn't taught at all in my Australian high school, either. History entirely stopped after WWI and the ANZACs, apparently! I just had a look at the current curriculum, and it is part of the WWII optional unit which schools can choose to offer in the last two years of school. Or not.

[ewt]

...wow.

Anti-semitism was definitely something we were taught about in my Canadian highschool education, including the blood libel stuff and mediaeval context, the many pogroms, and so on.

We also got taught that WWII happened in part because the end of WWI was handled really badly. And we got taught that disabled people, gay people, travellers (well, we were told "Gypsies" but I don't use that word now that I know it's a slur) and other groups were also targetted by the Nazis but that Jews bore the brunt of it.

We also got taught a bunch of warning signs about fascism, and some of how it is that people succumb to going along with it, and had an actual class debate on the "tolerance of intolerance" problem of people who want to be liberal and inclusive extending the benefit of the doubt (and freedom of speech etc etc) to Nazis and why that is so risky.

We also got taught that there are Holocaust-deniers out there, and some of the forms that can take, and that such people are, in short, fucking dangerous.

I mean, I'm not saying it was perfect, but it's definitely at a level where when someone says "this was added in the context of mediaeval blood libel stuff" I go "oh yeah, of course" rather than needing the basic definition.

(Other things we studied in more detail than it turns out seems standard: McCarthyism and the Cold War, the Japanese Internment, some (but not all) of the crappy Canadian colonialism involving residential schools. I think it might be that the year allocated for twentieth-century history and politics in Social Studies was also a year I had a pretty good teacher, but before highschool I moved around a fair bit and definitely encountered at least some of this stuff.)

[siderea]

...? So? Is your point that this doesn't happen? Or doesn't happen in Canada?

I spent the 1990s in a medieval history organization, in which the utterly deplorable state of education about medieval history education was taken for granted as cultural background radiation we had to work against. And not one of my Canadian fellow travelers ever suggested that things were better in the north.

(Disclosure: my social contacts were anglophone, don't know for francophone education, which might well be better.)

[ewt]

Oh, I believe you and certainly didn't intend to contradict your report of the state of things.

I do sometimes struggle with the idea that the education I received was so unusual, but I suppose it does explain a lot. :-(

[ewt]

(And based on the n=1 sample I am working with, I would probably agree that in general, mediaeval history education was pretty bad. I don't remember a lot of it beyond "nation states weren't really a thing in the way we think of them now, there was feudalism, something something Black Death, also really bad anti-Semitism," which is... not exactly thorough.)

[mc776]

then n++, because your description both in your original comment and wrt middle ages matches my own (also Canadian, GVRD, area with fairly diverse population) experience pretty well.

[rosefox]

That sounds very challenging, and I'm glad they at least reacted appropriately to learning about historical anti-Semitism.

I didn't grow up with "Pour out Your wrath" as part of the Seder service, but I learned about it a few years ago while building the latest iteration of the Haggadah, so I included this in the Hallel section of this year's edition (between cups 3 and 4):

During the Crusades, when Jews faced many threats and dangers, a prayer called “Pour out Your wrath” was added to the haggadah. In the present time, we have more safety and power; as we rage against injustice, we can channel our own wrath into righteous action.*

Now we open the door to welcome the prophets Elijah and Miriam. While anger fuels us, visions of the possible give us direction. Let us make space for imagination and hope in our everyday lives.


* Oppression breeds anger to which we must attend. Once, we recited this text out of powerlessness. We asked God to pour forth wrath because we were unable to express our own. But in today’s world, where we enjoy agency to an unprecedented degree, we must resist the temptations of perennial victimhood and yearning for revenge.

And yet we know that rage, unexpressed, will fester. Let us therefore acknowledge our communal pain. Let us recognize the intersecting systems of oppression which ensnare our world, from antisemitism to xenophobia, and feel appropriate anger in response. And let us recommit ourselves to honing our anger so that it might fuel us to create change, so that our wrath may lead us to redemption.

—Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

I feel like that strikes a reasonable balance without erasing the history—or the present.

[lethargic_man]

My non-Jewish German teacher has expressed an interest in attending my seder next year; I've never been at a seder with non-Jews present before, so thanks for the heads-up on what to expect.

Incidentally, do you have any idea where the idea of "Miriam, return and dance for us" (or whatever the words are) comes from? I am not aware of any tradition in which Miriam is not dead and destined to remain in her grave (until we all get resurrected in the end of days, if that's what you believe in).

[rosefox]

Do you mean Rabbi Leila Gal Berner's "Miriam Ha-Neviah"? It doesn't exactly say she'll return; it says she'll "bring us to the waters of redemption", which can be interpreted any number of ways.

There's an article on the emergence of Miriam as a major 20th/21st-century figure here that theorizes it has to do with the emergence of women as spiritual leaders who see Miriam as, essentially, a role model. Again, I don't know that resurrection is specifically part of that, but I think ideas and mythology around Miriam are generally changing quite rapidly, especially when she's set alongside Elijah.

[lethargic_man]

That's the one. (Without having (yet) read the article), my quibble is not with the emergence of Miriam as a role model or the need to include women in liturgy; my quibble is with the wholesale invention of an aspiration that she will return, in the form of doing anything at a future time.

[ewt]

That sounds really difficult and I am sorry your class knew so little.

[naath]

I like to think I'm less ignorant than your average European of Christian heritage about the middle ages and our (Christian, English) persecution of the Jews; but for a Very Long Time I had 'blood libel' tied in my head to 'Jews killed Jesus' which, lies, but different lies and mostly what I have read is more about arguments about money lending and deporting people as if none of that could ever have been violent. This was not a thing ever taught to me in school, although the Shoah was in excrutiating detail (for 14 year olds).

[melannen]

Same here - I assumed the "blood libel" was the "Jews killed Jesus" story for a very long time, despite being fairly extensively self-educated in history (and having gone through a public school curriculum that frankly *over*did the Holocaust - twelve-year-olds can only get through about three or four holocaust narratives in one year before they stop caring out of self-defense.....)

We *might* have covered Medieval antisemitism to that level of detail in my 10th grade AP European History Class, but I'm not sure; and the kids who didn't do AP almost certainly never even got close.

[smhwpf]

Well done. Sounds really interesting (as well as difficult). I'm not, sadly, greatly surprised about well-educated people not knowing about the blood libel, I probably know about it mostly because my dad is (non-religious) Jewish and, after I became a Christian, liked to tell me all the reasons why Christians are bad.

Where I work, we had a very good anti-anti-Semitism training session from a guy from Jewdas; Lev, a trainee rabbi. They specifically gear it towards left-oriented groups to draw out the sorts of anti-Semitism that often crops up in leftist circles. It included a potted history of anti-Semitism; I was probably more aware of most of it than most, but there was still stuff I didn't know about. Also analysis (from the sort of left perspective you'd expect from Jewdas) of the role anti-semitism plays in sustaining dominant power structures; Jews being used as part of an 'intermediary' class against whom popular anger can be directed when it suits the powerful. A consequence of which being that Jewish safety can never be taken for granted because the position of Jews in a particular country is fairly good at the moment. And then going over a whole load of images: cartoons, slogans on banners, etc., asking us to rate on a scale of 'totally fine' to 'outright vile anti-semitism', with discussion, which of course draws out a lot of the fine lines on Israel and Zionism.

Anyway, really useful. I think there's a lot of Labour Party branches, for example, as well as Palestine Solidarity groups, that could do with having such a session.

So I explained that Zionism is a specific political philosophy dating from the nineteenth century, and that there's a very wide range of views regarding how and whether that actually relates to the religious ideal of a return to "Zion".

See, what a lot of leftists get wrong is in many ways the flip-side of this; they think that, since Zionism is a political philosophy, that they can go all out on condemning and demonizing Zionism and Zionists, using 'Zionist' as a term of abuse, and generally attributing all manner of evil to "The Zionists", and they're not being anti-semitic because it's a political philosophy. Which, no, for all sorts of reasons.

[sporky_rat]

I wasn't really expecting all the pre twentieth century persecution to be actual news to well educated and broadly historically aware people.

Okay, granted I went to a reasonably good school system in a very rural state (Mississippi) but we covered WWI and how it lead to WWII, the Holocaust, and how a good bit of the European ...uh, antipathy? I think that's the word I'm looking for? towards the beginnings of the anti-Jewish and other minority laws had come from the antisemitism of the medieval era.

When we covered this in elementary and junior high history classes, with a thorough grounding in high school to go more in-depth in Mississippi, I am distressed to hear that other places do not.

(We did also have state history, world geography [I can still recite the nations of Africa, South America, Most of Asia, and I think a quarter of Oceania at the date of 1994, I can usually correct the ones that have changed, but it takes me a moment], world history and a serious grounding in world religions - we had non-Christian religious leaders come in and give lectures to our classes. I really enjoyed the discussion on Zoroastrianism. My school district was serious in giving us a grounding in knowing history so we didn't repeat it.)

[chickenfeet]

There was some seriously batshit insane stuff from Orban in a recent interview. Apparently it's only Hungarian Jews that are a problem. Israeli Jews are fine. This apparently is because the Hungarian Jews had a covenant with the Magyars which they broke by supporting the (cosmopolitan) Bela Kun in 1919. And that's aside from any daddy issues that Orban might have with Soros.