Essay #4: Antisemitism is the Devil's Flagpole

There’s One Jew They Hate Most of All

One of my favorite Hollywood stories comes from Scott Eyman’s biography John Wayne: The Life and Legend.

When Wayne was lying on his death bed, a group of friends came to visit him. One friend, named Al, was Jewish. Knowing the Duke was forever being accused of bigotry, Wayne’s son joked, “The reason Duke didn’t want to see you was because Al is a Jew.”

The ailing Wayne smiled and pointed at the ceiling. “It’s the other Jew I don’t want to see,” he said.

As the saying goes: It’s funny because it’s true.

Antisemitism is the Devil’s Flagpole. It always marks the place where evil dwells. It adheres to no one political party, no particular race or nation. But wherever and whenever it appears, it is a signal that something is going very badly wrong in that place and time.

There’s a simple reason this is true. The antisemites think they hate the Jew in front of them, but it’s that other Jew they really hate.

Because the soul of the West was indelibly shaped by Christianity, the God of the West is the Jewish God, the God of Abraham made incarnate in Jesus Christ. Western ideas about God — that he made both men and women in his image, that he identifies with the least among us, that his personality is centered on forgiveness and love — these ideas were all gifts of I AM to his Chosen People. So too were the laws carved on the stones of Sinai and etched over slow centuries into the animate substance of the Jewish heart. Ultimately, the ideas underpinning these laws became the ideas of everyone who followed Jesus Christ.

That is why Saint John Paul II, in his 1986 speech at the synagogue of Rome, said the Jewish religion was “intrinsic” to Christianity. He added to his Jewish audience: “You are our dearly beloved brothers.”

The process by which this natural brotherhood metamorphosed into the long and shameful history of Christian Jew hatred is too long and complex to reconstruct fully here. It had its beginning in history. The hostility of a sclerotic first century Jewish priesthood to Jesus’s preaching, their attempts to suppress the upstart Christian cult, St. Paul’s mission to universalize Christian beliefs, and the destruction of the Jewish state by Rome in 70 AD, which made it dangerous for Christians to identify too closely with their origins — all these played a part. All served to drown out St. Paul’s reminder that Christians were branches grafted onto the root of Judaism and they should therefore “remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you.”

In most cases, history moves on, and old rifts are mended over time. But in this instance, a different and more enduring hatred attached itself to the ancient disputes.

With the fall of the Roman empire, the Christian religion spread among the barbarian tribes that swept the old Latin world away. These went on to form Western Christendom, which eventually became the nations of Europe. We’ve all noted that certain tribal traditions were Christianized during this process. Our Christmas tree, for instance, might well be the old Yule Tree repurposed for the new religion.

But of course, Christianization went far deeper than that. The primacy of love, the rights of women, the holiness of charity only gradually infiltrated the pagan mindset. The struggle between the values of the old gods and the demands of the new one became internalized in the converted heart. This struggle was then projected onto the old division between Christians and Jews. Antisemites caricatured Jews as the reflection of their own hidden selves: merciless, corrupt, the murderers of God.

There followed centuries of anti-Jewish brutality. Throughout Christian Europe, Jews suffered oppression, expulsion, ghettoization, hateful libels, and murderous pogroms. These left a wound on Jewish memory that has been difficult to heal. When I, born and raised a Jew, began to acknowledge Christ as my Lord and Savior, this blood-soaked history made me hesitate before I approached the baptismal font. I had to learn to separate the cruelties of Christian men from the love and forgiveness of the Christian God.

Today, twenty years after my baptism, when my relationship with Christ has become the radiant center of my life, Jew hatred is on the rise again throughout the West. I am shocked, but not at all surprised. As long ago as 1980, I wrote a novel in which I referred to my generation as “holiday Jews.” For decades, Western shame at the satanic evil of the Holocaust had made even the hint of antisemitism socially unacceptable. But I always knew that holiday would end.

Why? Because it seemed obvious to me even then that there was one Jew the Jew-haters hated most of all — that other Jew the dying John Wayne was in no hurry to see. The atavistic habits of some of the converted were at war with the Jewish God who had colonized their hearts and culture through Jesus Christ. That inconvenient deity who demands care for the weak, forgiveness for the sinful and sexual decency and fidelity for all does not settle easily into the toxic soul of fallen man.

This explanation of antisemitism remains valid when others fail. Some claim that antisemitism is a reaction to Jewish exceptionalism. But the Jews of pre-Nazi Germany wanted nothing but to assimilate into a nation they loved. Others say that Jew hatred grows out of envy of Jewish success. But many of the Jews of Russia were dirt poor when the Cossacks burned their villages in orgies of rape and murder. And of course, the antisemites pretend the problem is not with them but with the Jews themselves. In the twisted fantasies of the hateful, every Jewish bad guy from Judas to Harvey Weinstein represents “The Jews.” This enables them conveniently to overlook the Jewish saints who wrote the Bible and the countless Jews who made beneficial contributions to science, medicine, industry, and culture wherever their people were allowed to thrive.

No, the source of Christian Jew hatred must be as enduring as the hatred itself and as “intrinsic” as Judaism is to Christianity.

The hidden truth rose to the surface as Christianity began to lose its grip on the European mind. It was only then that it became acceptable for antisemitic thinkers openly to turn their hostility on their real enemies: Christ and Christianity.

Nowhere was this more apparent than during the late formation of the German nation in the 1800’s. It was in this period that German thinkers and artists became obsessed with trying to define the true nature of German identity.

Arthur Schopenhauer believed Judaism had polluted Jesus’s wisdom with religious dogma. “It is to be regarded generally as a great misfortune that the people whose former culture was to serve mainly as the basis of our own were not, say, the Indians or the Greeks, or even the Romans, but just these Jews,” he wrote. Friedrich Nietzsche rejected Christian values as a “slave morality” that reversed the natural order in which the strong and successful wrote the rules. It was the slavish Jews, Nietzsche said, who “performed the miracle of the inversion of valuations, by means of which life on earth obtained a new and dangerous charm for a couple of millenniums.” The composer Richard Wagner sought to revive the old Germanic gods and became an obsessively virulent hater of the intrusive race of Christ.

This sort of thinking was still in play decades later, when Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Church Affairs Hans Kerrl said the idea that Christianity “consists of faith in Christ… makes me laugh.” He decreed, “God’s will reveals itself in German blood,” and “True Christianity is represented by the [Nazi] party and especially by the Fuhrer.”

It is no coincidence that Hitler, in attempting to exterminate the Jewish people, destroyed instead the great European culture that had blossomed out of Christendom. He had stopped its heart.

Today, we are living through another recession of Christian faith — though I suspect that tide is already turning. But in the moment, it does not surprise me that Jewish Americans must walk in fear on left-wing campuses, and suffer taunts and slurs from far right-wing posters on X. The left has turned from Christian charity to a perverse, racist, unforgiving funhouse reflection, which they call Woke. The far right has abandoned Christ’s preachments of love for a graceless Pharisaical orthodoxy about as Christian as burning a cross on a man’s lawn. The left chants genocidal slogans against Israel. The far right tweets “Christ is King!” at Jewish users with a venom that shows they mean the very opposite.

Left and right, they are giving themselves away. It is not Israel they hate. It is not the Jews they hate.

It is that other Jew — incarnate in Jesus Christ — whom they are desperately trying to expel from their sinful hearts and minds.