Fr. Andrew of Orthodox England responded to a question in the current issue of his excellent journal (Orthodox England,Volume 12, Number 4) to an matter which tends to linger especially with a faith that for most of us Americans has been obscured by our more Western European heritage and allegiances. Almost three years ago now, I had started an inquiry of a similar vein on the excellent forum over on monachos.net and it is always surprising both the direction a discussion can take and how it expands in untold ways to inform our understanding.
The topic of course is Anti-Semitism, but more fully rounds out to discussion of the relationship between Orthodox Christians and other faiths. In some measure, one of the acid tests of our faith may be found in terms of how we approach those outside it as we find them – whether in suffering, or causing our own suffering, or in some other (hopefully happier) state. The stories in the Gospel are full of these examples. Many of our modernist Protestant bretheren unfortunately take them to support the thesis that Christianity is all about making good men better rather than turning within to reflect on our relationship with the god-man Christ, but I think we are mistaken ourselves if we fail to seize on the whole of these lessons in an of themselves. Our world is not so confined as to be wholly Orthodox, nor are we supposed to insulate ourselves, or respond perhaps as much of the misguided in our Old Testament texts accounts of ancient Israel reflect as shunning or assaulting the outsiders. Indeed, though there are many loving stories of a relationship within the Body, there are many (shorter) of sound relationships beyond.
I understand the anti-Ecumenist, anti-Kumbaya movement. I also understand the Rodney King “We’re all in this together” sensibility that seems to be “the next thing” for dealing with the atheism of the European Union. Personally, I’m not working to fix my church, fix my jurisdiction or the people in it, or fix the world… I tend to think there is much to the old Buddhist adage that we begin to fix the world by beginning with ourselves, and anyone at all vaguely familiar with my scribblings can attest that in some cases, this is a full-time job, or at least if we shelve the project (consciously or unconsciously makes little difference) for a few decades, the catch-up work can be consuming. But the consumption with self is less a matter of principle than a recognition of my need for preparation. I’m not sure where it ends, but have always thought that the three years that it took St. Paul (according to one account somewhere) was probably a good indicator of what a younger and holier man could accomplish… though I’m not sure how this translates or what it means to a backslider like me… other than a plea for “more time”.
So with my background attesting to how uncertainty can be as much a mire as a virtue, I would turn you instead to the virtues of Fr. Andrews response to a common, but thorny issue. As with much in his excellent journal, I find it illuminating, and with his permission, have quoted it in its entirety:
What would you reply to those who say that Orthodox are anti-Semitic? After all it was Orthodox who carried out the pogroms. (L., Pennsylvania)These pogroms should not be viewed in a religious context, but a cultural one. They should be seen in the context of economic jealousy on the part of nominal and decadent Christians, not on the part of practising Christians. It is a fact that most Jews were often hardworking (more than many Orthodox) and successful. Some of them, the non-practising Jews, used their economic success to exploit others – both Jews and Non-Jews. (Karl Marx should be seen as one of these – he exploited the naïve with his absurd ideology, which he reckoned to be ‘scientific’).
This exploitation caused jealousy, especially in poor parts of Europe, like Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine and Romania. (It should be noted that Jews were only living in large numbers in these areas of Central and Eastern Europe, because they has been expelled by the mediæval anti-semitism of Catholic Western Europe, especially in countries like Spain, France and England, whereas in Central and Eastern Europe they enjoyed complete religious freedom and prospered there). So it is pure hypocrisy on the part of Western Europe to talk about their persecution there. They were only there because of Western persecution and in Central and Eastern Europe they had complete religious freedom, unlike in Western Europe.
Thus Orthodox who were involved with the attacks on Jews, in which dozens, perhaps hundreds of innocent Jews were killed (not tens of thousands, as some people claim) were only nominal, not practising. These attacks were condemned time and again by Orthodox. For example, by the future Metropolitan Antony Khrapovitsky, then bishop of the strongly Jewish town of Zhitomir, or St John of Kronstadt who wrote of the Kishenev pogrom: ‘What are you doing? Why have you turned into barbarians – destroying and robbing people who live in the same country as yourselves?’ (My thoughts on the violence of Christians towards Jews in Kishinev).
St. Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, wrote: ‘We have heard reports of Jewish pogroms … Orthodox Russia! May this disgrace pass you by. May this curse not affect you. May your hand not turn crimson in the blood that calls out to heaven … Remember the pogroms – this is dishonour for you’. (Message of 8 July 1919). In other words, I think we need to see the pogroms (like the tens of thousands of times worse Jewish genocide carried out by the Western European Nazis who received the co-operation of the ‘Catholic’ French, Lithuanians, Croats, Slovaks and many other peoples) in the context of the de-Christianisation of Europe, which process sped ahead from the mid-nineteenth century on and led to two great European Wars.
We cannot forget how the Jews lived in Constantinople, much to the scandal of the late 11th and 12th century. Crusaders, who performed the first pogroms in the Rhineland in 1095, which marked the beginning of ‘Anti-Semitism’ in Europe, were astonished by this. Indeed, the fourteenth century Patriarch Philotheus was racially a Jew. (Can you imagine a Pope of Rome at the time being racially a Jew?). Some sources say that Emperor Michael II was also a Jew, as were many other saints, for example St Romanus the Melodist. Some100,000 Jews joined the Russian Orthodox Church in the nineteenth century alone. Of course, this is no different from the case of the Apostles – racially Jews – and the Mother of God and the human nature of Christ.
(By the way, the word anti-Semitism is incorrect, for the Arabs are also racially Semites. To call the Arab Palestinians anti-Semitic, as some do, is absurd. The term should surely be anti-Jewish).
jamesthethickheaded