Jewish scholars: It's time to rethink Christianity
By Laurie Goodstein
The New York Times
Saturday, September 9, 2000
BALTIMORE -- A group of Jewish scholars will issue a sweeping statement about Jewish-Christian relations this weekend calling on Jews to relinquish their fear and mistrust of Christianity and to acknowledge church efforts in the decades since the Holocaust to amend Christian teaching about Judaism.
The statement, called "Dabru Emet" -- which means "speak truth" in Hebrew -- was signed by nearly 170 Jewish thinkers and leaders from all four branches of Judaism -- Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist, including heads of theological schools.
The effort is being coordinated by the Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies, a secular organization based in Baltimore. The statement will appear Sunday in full-page advertisements in The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun.
In what is probably the most controversial point, the document says that "Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon."
The document also claims major commonalities between the faiths, saying that Jews and Christians worship the same God; seek authority from the same book, the Bible; and accept the moral principles of the Torah.
A result of a scholarly dialogue started five years ago, the statement was the idea of Dr. Michael Signer of the University of Notre Dame, who wrote it with Dr. Tikva Fryer-Kensky of the University of Chicago Divinity School, Dr. Peter Ochs of the University of Virginia and Dr. David Novak of the University of Toronto.
"Some of the ingrained ways that Jews think and relate to Christians are based on an image of the Christian world that no longer matches reality," said Rabbi David Sandmel, who oversaw the study.
"In history and in contemporary times there are reasons for Jews to be very wary of Christians,"� said Sandmel.� 'But the Christian world today is very different than it was 50 or 100 or 500 years ago."
Concerning Nazis and the Holocaust, the document also says that "without the long history of Christian anti-Judaism and Christian violence against Jews, Nazi ideology could not have taken hold," but that "Nazism itself was not an inevitable outcome of Christianity."
It asserts that if the Nazis had succeeded in exterminating all the Jews, Christians would have been the next targets.
"There is a tendency among some in the Jewish community to identify Christianity and Nazism, to lump them together and say they are all anti-Semites," said Sandmel. "It's an understandable reaction, but I don't think it is good for the Jewish community."
The statement, according to the authors, breaks a long period of silence by Jewish scholars on their relationship with Christians, despite several outreach attempts by several Christian sects.
Ochs said many Christian groups have revised their texts in recent years to eliminate anti-Semitic references.
About 30 people refused to sign the document, many because they disagreed with the section on the Holocaust, Sandmel said.
Rabbi James Rudin, senior interreligious advisor at the American Jewish Committee, said he objected because "Christianity and Christian teachings over the centuries created the seedbed for Nazism to grow in."
"This document lets Christian teaching off too easily," he said.
This article includes material from The Associated Press.
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