The Passion readings that are used in our churches during Lent sometimes excite a charge of anti-Semitism — because in earlier generations they were, on occasion, used to place all the guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus onto the Jews.
Doubtless, some Jews — along with the gentile Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, and his legionaries — were complicit in the events that lead us again this week along the Via Dolorosa to Calvary. But Jesus, the Man we Christians follow and love, was a Jew. His mother and his apostles likewise.
For people who profess to be Christian, anti-Semitic behavior is oxymoronic; it is to be hateful of the culture and the identity of Jesus Himself.
That such anti-Semitism persists is self evident.
A few weeks back, at a public lecture which I chaired, a teacher fulminated against a Jewish speaker, and seemed to identify all the ills of the world with Israel and the Jewish people. He got up and left when later I gently pointed out that Israel had a right to feel threatened while men like the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, say they want to develop a nuclear capability in order to obliterate Israel and its people. Only days earlier the Iranian leader had been in Khartoum repeating his obnoxious comment that the Holocaust is a propaganda myth which never happened.
I have always supported the proposition that the Palestinian people are entitled to an autonomous homeland, and I do not think that Israel's future will be secured by building a wall between them and the Palestinians; or by using Israeli fire-power.
But only when you have stood on the Golan Heights and looked down on the tiny country that is Israel can you fully appreciate its fragile vulnerability. Israel remains a vibrant democracy with a free press, surrounded by countries governed by dictators or oligarchs. Its very existence is constantly threatened by a whole host of enemies.
If, daily, suicide bombers were blowing themselves up on our British buses or walking in to our shopping malls, doubtless we, too, would react in ways which from a safe distance could be criticised.
The Middle East needs peace and it needs co-existence; it doesn't need one-sided anti-Israeli diatribes which frequently degenerate into anti-Semitism.
Pope John Paul II's experience of being brought up in a Polish town, where anti-Semitism was rife in his childhood, what he saw happen to his Jewish friends, and his first-hand knowledge of Auschwitz, led him to challenge deep-rooted prejudices, memorably describing the relationship between Jews and Christians as the relationship of an older and younger brother.
Brotherly love, however, has to be worked at and is much harder to achieve than fratricide. It requires us to always be sensitive to the other's perspective; putting ourselves in his shoes; trying to see things from his point of view.
I admit surprise that I was recently challenged by a Jewish friend, challenged about the story of a 10 year old boy who died in Prague 300 years ago. Does it still matter? Answer, yes.
The 300-year-old story is that Simon Abeles was killed after he converted from Judaism to Christianity. It appears in the Czech tourist guides. But Jewish people have always refuted the story as a blood libel. Still doing the rounds, the story is used to attack Jews as child killers — most recently surfacing in the Arab world.
I was told that the last time an attempt was made to correct an old anti-Jewish slur — involving a baroque anti-Judaic statue on Prague's Charles Bridge — the only result was an outpouring of popular anti-Semitism. Why, they demanded to know, should anybody care what the Jews felt or wanted? They didn't protest when the statue was erected in the eighteenth century so why didn't they just pack up and leave?
Well, we should care. We have a duty to enter fully into one another's history, discovering the things that are hateful and hurtful to each other.
The famous Jewish leader, Hillel, who lived in Jerusalem during the time of King Herod said "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn." Not a bad thought as we re-enact the greeting of Jesus at the gates of Jerusalem, clutching our palms and singing our Hosannas.
