Teaching Christians about anti-semitism
Jun. 18th, 2019 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI 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 15th century) uncomfortable with this tradition. Some people open the door at the much more friendly place of
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.
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 15th 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.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-19 07:39 am (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-19 08:00 am (UTC)