Looking deeper into how Christian supersessionism helped make Jew-hatred inevitable ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Sunday, March 23, 2025

Looking deeper into how Christian supersessionism helped make Jew-hatred inevitable

Last week I wrote A Unified Field Theory of Antisemitism, a way to understand why hatred of Jews (and, today, of Israel) goes way beyond the more prosaic hate that is usually directed at "the Other."

My theory is that all the major strains of today's antisemitism - Muslim/Arab, progressive, and others I plan to examine - point back to updated twists of Christian supersessionism. In short, all major antisemitic groups feel that they are the rightful heirs to the Jewish people, but the actual reality and continued success of the Jews is not just an obstacle to their success but a personal challenge to their worldview. This dissonance causes hate.

Let's dive deeper into this theory, starting with the original supersessionists.

We described how the figures of Ecclesia and Sinagoga, prominent in many European cathedrals, symbolize the Church replacing Israel as God's chosen people. Where does this idea come from?

The very name New Testament implies that the old one is no longer relevant. The authors of the New Testament refer to the Torah by its literal translation, the "Law." To them, Jesus' death makes the Law no longer relevant as a means to salvation. Paul in Galatians 3 says, "Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed," saying that faith supersedes adherence to the Torah and the Torah's laws were a temporary but insufficient means to gain salvation.

There is a clear tension here between the idea that the Hebrew Scripture is the Word of God and that it is being superseded by a new Word. Why would God create something that He knew would become irrelevant? Why would he create laws that man could not fulfill, that would be a yoke that people would be unable to bear? Jesus quotes the Shema prayer (Mark 29-30), which says how central the laws are to everyday life - how could Christianity say that faith by itself replaces the laws?

That tension is not enough to explain Jew-hatred. But two other verses can.

In Acts 15, Peter participates in a debate as to whether Gentile converts to Christianity require circumcision, and he describes the Torah as "a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear.” Here, Peter is claiming that the laws are too onerous for even Jews. In context, he was trying to attract the largest numbers of believers to the new religion, and practically speaking circumcision is not a great selling point. But Peter is couching this sales pitch that the laws no longer apply as a theological fact.

Yet Jews did manage to keep the Laws. Their existence, and continued success, threw a wrench into the truthfulness of Peter's words.

Far more starkly, we have Hebrews 8, the cornerstone of supersessionism. It describes how belief in Jesus makes the Jewish laws, especially the laws of sacrifice in the Temple, outdated. It culminates with a prediction: "By calling this covenant 'new,' he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear."

The Christians of the Middle Ages saw that the Jews and their practice of the Law did not disappear. They were not obsolete. They lived and thrived in their own communities. The words of the New Testament were proven to be untrue every time there was interaction with Jews.

That is what changes a mere theological difference of opinion into hate. If Jews continue to exist and succeed while (and by) living under the rules of the "old" covenant a thousand years after they were supposed to disappear according to the new one, the new covenant seems flawed.

Not only that, but the existence of Jewish communities following the law in the midst of a hostile gentile population supported the supposedly obsolete scriptures. "The Torah of the Lord is perfect, renewing life; the decrees of the Lord are enduring, making the simple wise (Psalms 19:8.) " The Hebrew Scriptures directly say the Laws are eternal and a source of happiness; saying that God didn't want them to be permanent is calling God a liar.

Faith is intensely personal, and the Jews' success looked like nothing less than a stab in the heart of the Christian faithful of the era. And this is what transformed Jews into objects of hate and envy.

The irony is that the Hebrew Scriptures were not written as a message to the entire world. It was written for the Jewish people. The laws are meant only for the Jewish people. Jews don't expect, or want, anyone else to follow the laws. The Torah's commandments create a high bar for the Jewish people alone. It might be a yoke for others, but Psalms 1:2 says that the Torah is not a burden but a delight (Psalms 1:2). The Jews following the Laws survived and thrived - not in spite of the Law but because of it.

Christianity adopted the "Old Testament" as theirs. They claimed the mantle of being the new Jews. Yet their adoption of the scriptures never meant for them caused a constant friction, parts of the "Old Testament" are foundational and others discarded. The Ten Commandments are important, but the Sabbath one - nah, not so much. Real Jews who manage to keep the entire set of laws were a constant rebuke to the fundamental sense of self of the medieval Christians. The contradictions between the "Old Testament" being relevant to Jews while irrelevant to the Christians who say they transcended it caused a kind of identity crisis.

That's why they created Ecclesia and Sinagoga; a way to reassure themselves that they are right. Yet the fact that they were forced to enshrine this fable is itself proof of their own discomfort at the existence of Jews.

The Christian love-hate relationship with the Hebrew Scriptures became an important part of the modern Western world. The Ralphe Bunche Park near the UN in New York has Isaiah 2:4 engraved: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares." A Hebrew Biblical reference is part of the logo of Yale University. Hebrew Biblical references abound in scholarly 18th and 19th century writings.

The Law, far from being irrelevant and obsolete, is integral to modern legal practice. John Selden, one of the most important legal theorists of the West, based his writings not only on the Torah, but on the Talmud of the hated Pharisees. Jesus taught (Matthew 5) that he extended the laws to make lust equivalent to adultery and anger equivalent to murder, but no Western court ever adopted those innovations. The Jewish legal codes are what have stood the test of time.

This underpinning of Hebrew law into the fabric of the modern West is part of the reason supersessionism has become a driving factor of today's secular, progressive antisemitism. It claims to have inherited the mantle of morality, and those morals come squarely from Jewish law and philosophy. This is a topic for future essays.