Was St. John Chrysostom Anti-Semitic?
What follows is the major portion of a letter written by an Orthodox
scholar who will remain anonymous to someone asking for information about how to answer
the title question. I came across the text and was given permission to post it.
Anti-Semitism is a complex issue in the Fathers,
since the position of the Jews, over the centuries, has changed from that of a sometimes
violently anti-Christian religious and social force to that of a victimized people. The
same Jews who mistreated and victimized the early Christians, something often overlooked
in contemporary historical sources, have in our times been the victims of mistreatment
themselves. This observation must be seen, of course, through the prism of the Zionist
policies pursued in the establishment of the Israeli State and the subsequent violence
against the Palestinian people, many of them Orthodox; but certainly, as civilized people,
we must recognize and loudly decry the atrocities visited on the Jews (and many other
peoples, of course) during WW II. Ultimately, then, as I shall emphasize below, we should
not glorify or vilify the Jewish people, but understand them in historical context:
sometimes as persecutors themselves, sometimes as the persecuted. A controversial but, I
think, very fair book by Bernard Lazare, Antisemitism: Its History and Causes
(Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), makes precisely my point: that to call
anti-Semitism a single thing and to discuss it outside of historical context is to deal
wrongly with the historical record. He also rightly points out that anti-Semitism often
stems from intolerance within Judaism itself.
As well, it must be remembered that the Fathers
of the Church view Jews as the adherents of a religion, as a spiritual entity, not merely
as a race. And even when they use the word race, they also mean it in a spiritual way, not
simply as we use it today. (Thus "Judaizers" was an accusation made against
non-Jews as well as Jews. And sinners are sometimes called a "race.") These
distinctions are lost on contemporary dilettantes, who think that the curse on the Jewish
race applies exclusively to people of a single blood line, rather than to any person who,
like the hypocrites of the Jewish establishment of Christ's time, perpetuate
anti-Christian sentiments. A "Jew" can, once more, be a Gentile who makes a
mockery of Christianity within the Christian Church. It is obvious, then, that the term
"Jew" is used in a number of very special ways in Patristic literature. (We True
Christians, in fact, are called, by the Fathers, the "New Israel" and
"Israelites," in the sense of remaining loyal to the whole Covenant of God's
Providence which the Jewish religious leaders violated and defiled.)
(One can perhaps compare the use of the term
"Jew" by the Fathers to references to "Ethiopians" in the desert
Fathers. This term is frequently used to describe dark spirits and demons. That the
Ethiopians as a race were, at the same time, Orthodox, and that their race was adorned
with Saints [prior to Chalcedon], this was a recognized fact in the Early Church. The word
is used in a way that transcends race alone.)
Calling any Church Father anti-Semitic on the
basis of ostensibly denigrating references to Jews, therefore, is to fall to intellectual
and historiographical simple-mindedness. Applying modern sensitivities and terms regarding
race to ancient times, as though there were a direct parallel between modern and ancient
circumstances, is inane. This abuse of history is usually advocated by unthinking
observers who simply cannot function outside the cognitive dimensions of modernity. My
remarks in this regard apply not only to those who find literal anti-Semitism in the
Fathers, but also to women, in our times, who, deviating from a true vision of femininity
and a Christian understanding of the lofty place of the female in the Church, are quick to
characterize statements in the Fathers about the FALLEN nature of women (which are often
quite harsh) as symptomatic of a general denigration of females (as though fallen males
are not also brutally portrayed in the Fathers). Post-Lapsarian and unrestored nature,
whatever the gender of the individual, is corrupt and cannot be described in positive
ways. (Restored men and women are another matter, and here equality in Christ prevails,
whether as regards race or gender.) A clinical diagnosis of human spiritual ills is not
the same thing as prescriptive racism or intolerance. To suggest this is unfair. It is not
so much that the Fathers were misogynists or racists as it that those who find misogyny
and racism in their writings are possessed by small minds, perplexed spirits, and the
whimsical concerns of our age. I am loath to loathe anything; however, such smallness is
something that I abhor!
With regard to St. John Chrysostomos, there are
certainly very harsh condemnations of the Jews in his writings. In the most commonly cited
of these, he calls the Jews "pigs" and associates them with drunkenness. I would
never use such language today, at a time when Christian-Jewish relations and the course of
history have brought about a different reality than that which St. John confronted. (Who
in America, today, for example, would refer to "Japs" when speaking of the
Japanese? Nonetheless, during WW II this was a perfectly acceptable public expression, on
account of the reality of the hostilities which existed, then, between the U.S. and
Japan.) As I have said, these things must be put in the context of the hostility which
Jews themselves had against Christians and the fact that the Christian Fathers found
abhorrent the rejection of the Messiah by the Jews. St. John's statements are expressions
of theological and "ideological" (if I may use this somewhat inappropriate
modern term) outrage, not of racism. It speaks for itself that he also praised the Jewish
Prophets, those Jews (including the Apostles) who accepted Christianity, and even
preached, like all of the Church Fathers, against the wrong or violent treatment of Jews.
These things, of course, are seldom mentioned by those who want to make a racist of him.
One exception, by the way, is an April 27, 1998, editorial in "Christianity
Today" (Vol. XL, No. 5, p. 12), which makes some of the same points that I do in
defending Christians against a film presented at the National Holocaust Museum in
Washington, DC, a documentary that holds Christianity responsible for Nazism (an outrage
which even some Jews have decried). Finally, the Divine Chrysostomos was a great
rhetorician. Much of his language reflects the rhetorical devices of his time, not the
personal antipathy which a reader jaundiced by the "nicety" of modern discourse
might attribute to him. This must be remembered at all times when reading him and other
Church Fathers.
There is an excellent study by Robert L. Welken, John
Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century. It is an
essential work. It very convincingly demonstrates not only that St. John Chrysostomos was
not an anti-Semite, but that his supposed writings against the Jews are actually against
the "Judaizers," a terrible mistranslation which convicts him unfairly of racism, when in fact his words
are addressed to a theological element in the Christian Church. This work was published in
1983 and is a "must" for anyone wishing to understand the issue at hand.
I would also direct you to a study, History,
Religion, and Antisemitism (I could be wrong about the title, but it is close to
this), by Stanford Professor Gavin Langmuir, a prominent historian of anti-Semitism, which
was published in Berkeley, in 1990, by the University of California Press. This work
approaches the history of anti-Semitism with a sophistication, based on good historical
research, that puts an end to that unenlightened and artless theory, first put forth in
the last century by eccentric (though admittedly trained) scholars and passed about today
by coffee shop "scholars" whose greatest skills lie in classifying toilet tissue
by gradations of softness; namely, that there is a chain of thought connecting St. John
Chrysostomos, Luther, and Hitler, and that its links are cemented together by
anti-Semitism. In so doing, he offers peripheral support (amidst some ideas about
Christian thought that I would question) for many of the points that I have made about our
contemporary ignorance of the historical image of Jews in the ancient world, their
anti-Christian sentiments and their violence against Christians, and the many ways that
the Fathers of the Church used the word "Jew" in their writings and the diverse
images that this usage entailed. It is important not only that you understand the context
in which charges of anti-Semitism are usually raised against the Fathers (the
Chrysostomos-Luther-Hitler link), but that you reply to such ignorance by pointing out the
complex nature of anti-Semitism, its enigmatic history, and its various forms in Christian
writings (for example, early Christian anti-Jewish polemics are something quite different
from Medieval Western anti-Semitism, the latter more often than not the product of actual
racism).
If you are confronting someone who has accused
St. John Chrysostomos of anti-Semitism, enlightening such a person may be a difficult
thing. You will face endless citations from his writings that most simply refuse to put in
context. Moreover, there are people who simply refuse to relinquish the idea that
anti-Semitism links Christianity, the Reformation, and The Third Reich. This comfortable
view of history helps them to avoid that complexity that characterizes the true course of
human experience. It also allows them to attribute to the Fathers of the Church a meanness
of spirit by which they can separate themselves from the Patristic witness and thus the
compelling force of Orthodox Christianity. The only thing that one can say about such
tenacious anti-Patristic polemicists is that there is a definite link, in them, between
the hippocampi and the glutei maximi, and this link is cemented in place by
utter stupidity. Forgive my harshness and strong language, but blasphemy which is
supported by ignorance, and which gains social acceptance, is one of the most destructive
forces in society.
It must never be tolerated, however vogue it becomes.
I do not deny, by the way, that there is much
naive, unthinking, and un-Christian anti-Semitism among some Orthodox Christians, whose
wrong views are, nonetheless, supported by certain truthful memories, embedded as they are
in the historical consciousness of our Church, of the harsh and undeniable mistreatment of
Christians in the Early Church by the Jews: a consciousness which we do not hold in common
with Western Christians, who are separated from the Apostolic Church and their original
Christian roots and who therefore lack such memories. The naked anti-Semitism of some
Orthodox people (which I do not endorse, and for which reason I have been ridiculed),
however, pales, as I said above, before the putrid bigotry of those who, steeped in the
hypocrisy of the modern world and its widespread historiographical disdain for the beauty
of the age of the ancient Fathers, attribute to the Patristic witness the filthy racism
and human denigration of human beings that belong as much, if not more, to our times and
to the heterodox than to the ancient world and our Orthodox forefathers. And whereas
modern man lays claim to supposed enlightenment, yet still practices racial genocide and
is beset by the worst forms of bigotry, at least ancient man had his alleged social
"primitiveness" to justify whatever injustices he may or may not have in fact
embraced.
I would avoid people who like to dismiss the
Patristic witness because of flaws in the character of the Fathers, whether real or
imagined. I befriended at Princeton a brilliant philosopher (Rose Rand), then an old
woman, who was one of Wittgenstein's few female students. She was a rabid anti-Semite. But
this did not make her philosophy inadequate. It did not invalidate her brilliant insight
into some very intricate theories about human thought and language. The same could be said
of the Fathers. If perchance some were anti-Semitic (and again, to say this unreservedly
and without a clear definition of terms is to nullify the meaning of intellectual history
and to use language wrongly), does this mean that the Truth which they taught was tainted
by their anti-Semitism? I think not. To say so is, again, simple-mindedness and ultimately
constitutes an anti-intellectual stand. And anti-intellectualism, despite its moldy and
revolting presence in some Orthodox circles, is inimical to the Patristic spirit.
The matter at hand is, once more, complex. It should not be discussed with people who
lack an appreciation for that intelligent shade of gray that lies between the antipodes of
white naivete and lack ignorance. As a case in point, Dr. Rand, my aformentioned, virulently
anti-Semitic friend, was a Polish Jew!
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