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

[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.