c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)

(UNDATED) France’s World War I premier, Georges Clemenceau warned, “War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military.” Similarly, some religious issues are too serious to be entrusted solely to professional theologians and scholars whose main concerns are frequently the number of footnotes and the length of the bibliography.

But Judith Civan’s new book, “Abraham’s Knife: the Mythology of the Deicide in Antisemitism” (Exlibris) is different. Although Civan holds a graduate degree from Columbia University and is knowledgeable about Christianity and Judaism, her book was not written to score academic debating points.

Instead, Civan directly confronts an issue that has plagued Western culture and civilization for centuries: the deicide or “Christ-killer” charge.

The belief that the Jews murdered Jesus, and because of their infamous actions are forever condemned by God to be a cursed people provided theological justification for centuries of physical assaults. During the Nazi regime, two bishops confronted Adolf Hitler on his virulent anti-Semitism. In response, the German dictator told his clerical visitors he was only putting into effect what Christianity had taught and practiced for 2,000 years.

Civan is dismayed that the deicide charge still remains embedded in the hearts and minds of many Christians today despite the best efforts of church authorities, especially the Second Vatican Council, to eradicate it.

Ironically, it was another Clemenceau quote that sparked Civan’s interest in the deicide charge.

In 1919 the French premier met the Jewish leader Hayim Weizmann, who 30 years later would become Israel’s first president. Weizmann sought Clemenceau’s support for the Zionist effort, but was rebuffed. Clemenceau remarked: “We Christians can never forgive the Jews for crucifying Christ.” Weizmann quickly replied: “Monsieur Clemenceau, you know perfectly well that if Jesus of Nazareth were to apply for a visa to enter France, it would be refused on the grounds that he was a political agitator.”

Civan was stunned that Clemenceau had used the “Christ-killer” epithet. After all, Clemenceau had battled two decades earlier in behalf of the falsely accused French Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus, and the same Clemenceau had fought reactionary and anti-Semitic elements within the Catholic Church and the French Army.

Civan wondered if Clemenceau, a “rational person,” truly believed the deicide charge. But if people like Clemenceau accepted the ancient anti-Jewish calumny, Civan was forced “to begin afresh … to revise my worldview … it would all be turned inside out.”

In her closely reasoned 352-page book, Civan plumbs the depth of the “Christ-killer” canard, reaching back to the origins of the church. She asserts that in the “early Christian centuries Jesus was represented not only as a living but also a youthful figure.” However, by the time of the murderous Crusades in the 11th and 12th centuries, Jesus was transformed into a bearded, suffering and bloody figure familiar to us in medieval paintings.

Civan believes that along with this profound change in the Christian perception of Jesus, also came an escalation of anti-Jewish teachings and increased physical attacks on the people who, it was believed, forced Jesus to endure intense pain and suffering on the cross. She believes the failure of Jesus to return to Earth in the millennium year 1000 created new Christian emphasis on his anguish.

Civan’s book concludes with a comparison of two Jerusalem holy sites: Moriah and Golgotha. Moriah was where Abraham raised his knife to kill his beloved bound son, Isaac, before God intervened and stopped the sacrifice of a child. Golgotha was where another “child,” Jesus, was killed this time without God intervening.

Was the Crucifixion the completion of Abraham’s aborted attempt to sacrifice Isaac or was the death of Jesus part of God’s plan? Civan believes the Crucifixion was a form of child sacrifice so traumatic that it required a scapegoat, an entire guilty people, to blame for such an abhorrent act. Civan is unblinking in her radical conclusion: Christians were taught, “the sacrificer (of Jesus) was actually not God Himself, but the Jews, the descendants of that Abraham who almost wielded his knife at the near sacrifice of Isaac. The love could be ascribed to God and the anger and blood to the Jews.”

“Abraham’s Knife” is sure to create controversy because it compels Christians and Jews to re-examine long-held beliefs about child sacrifice, the Crucifixion, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and Christian-Jewish relations.

Finally, scholars of religion: not to worry. There are 25 pages of footnotes and nine pages of bibliography in “Abraham’s Knife.”

DEA/JL END RUDIN