Follow Up

Anti-Semitic Echoes Fade Away

We published recently upon an incident in Wellington City Council, (New Zealand) which implied latent anti-semitism was at work.  The piece can be read here.  

The matter has had two downstream consequences.  The first was a press release from the Jewish Council to The Wellington City Council.

Don’t close the door on kids’ singing by censoring Jewish history

The Wellington Regional Jewish Council has asked Artsplash Co-ordinator Mary Prichard to (in her words) “keep life simple” by reinstating three songs from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat into its programme for the September festival, using the correct words.

An apology for changing one word without permission has been made to the librettist, Sir Tim Rice, and he has accepted the apology, so there is no reason why the performance of the song with the correct words shouldn’t go ahead, Zwartz said.  “As we see it, the ‘trouble’ Mary Prichard refers to is an attempt to censor without explanation an event in Jewish history that took place about three-and-a-half thousand years ago.

“It is wrong to indicate to primary school children that something in the Jewish Torah – also included in the Christian Old Testament, and the Koran – needs to be altered, or avoided altogether,” Zwartz stated.  “It also undermines a strong move in New Zealand society for better understanding of every religion, as shown by the National Statement on Religious Diversity and the work of the Human Rights Commission.

The Tradition of Philosemitism

Taking Up an Honourable Cause

Gertrude Himmelfarb has written an engaging book on the history of philosemitism in England.  It "began" with Oliver Cromwell who encouraged Jews to return to England, which had been the first country to expel them during medieval times.  Gradually, over two and a half centuries not only were Jews migrating to England, but gradually they were winning or being granted an increasing list of civil and political rights--during centuries when such rights were not universal by any means.

The Christian Church, particularly through the influence of the Great Awakening, played a positive role.  At the end of the eighteenth century, for example, a Jewish financier and philanthropist, Abraham Goldsmid raised a fund to help and assist the Jewish poor throughout England.  Himmelfarb tells us that "of the eighty-seven initial subscribers, forty-one were Christians".   [Gertrude Himmelfarb, The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England, From Cromwell to Churchill (New York: Encounter Books, 2011), p. 56.]

In the mid-nineteenth century, Conservative leader,  Benjamin Disraeli was arguing that the Church was the key instrument for the "renovation of the national spirit".  But he went on to address the origin of the Church.

The Call of Philosemitism

Following Apostolic Teaching

We have just finished reading an interesting volume on the Jewish Question--about the place and position of Jewish people upon the earth.  In the West, anti-semitism is making a "comeback" it would seem.  This is taking place, in part because of the influence of Islam in general and the attitudes and activities of  some Islamic refugees in Europe, on the one hand, and because of the recent tendency of the Left sympathetically to embrace Islam, and Islam's prejudices.  Anti-semitism is one such.

How refreshing it has been, then, to read Gertrude Himmelfarb's The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England, From Cromwell to Churchill (London: Encounter Books, 2011). The historical, gradual re-acceptance of Jewish people into the United Kingdom is fascinating in part because of the cast of actors involved over a three hundred year period, from Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans onward.  This cast begins with Cromwell, of course, who was staunchly philosemitic (that is, a lover of the Jewish people).  The Jews had been expelled from England: Cromwell began the reversal of that position.  But it also includes luminaries such as philosopher, John Locke, scientist, Isaac Newton, and notables such as Edmund Burke, William Macaulay, author and politician, Benjamin Disraeli, Gladstone and Winston Churchill, as well as literary figures such as Walter Scott, George Eliot and Charles Dickens.

This political and literary tradition, coupled with the attempt by Hitler to exorcise the Jewish people from the human race and the reaction that was part of World War II has left the English speaking world largely philosemitic--at least up to our generation, when things have begun to change.

Himmelfarb documents the connection between a love of the Old Testament amongst Christians--one of the great consequences of the Reformation--and a sense of kinship and respect for the Jewish people that was one of its fruits, particularly in England.  Puritan scholarship with respect to the Old Testament, to the Hebrew language, and to traditional rabbinic teaching was legendary.  Out of it came an abiding theme of philosemitism that flowed through to the wider culture of learning, the arts, and politics.  It did not win Jewish people full civil and political rights immediately--but the leaven was at work, and in the end the "revolution" was bloodless and a consequence of the "natural acceptance" of higher and deeper truths.  It represents a particular high water mark of Christian civilisation.

With the attenuation and decline of the Christian faith in the English speaking world--already well under way by the end of the nineteenth century, and gathering pace throughout the twentieth, it was inevitable that the Jewish Question would arise again.  And so it has come to pass.