Anti-Semitism

The European Union voted yesterday for delegates to their parliament and while it was good to see a healthy turnout, it was also disturbing to see that so many parties with official anti-Semitic policies made a healthy showing at the polls.  One would think that the horrific events of the twentieth century would have brought an end to anti-Semitism full stop.  It is of course an eye opener to review the Stalinist years in the Crimea and the Ukraine and the Nazi interventions in the latter to realize that the American present day official and commonplace horror at the Holocaust does not necessarily  translate to these places.  It was a surprise to us while visiting Budapest last year to find a very healthy hostility to Jews, alongside the equally vigorous opposition to gay persons, and of course to the Roma (which group we used to call 'gypsies.')  Russia, as I read frequently, is still a very anti-Semitic country, and as we know its President has vigorously cultivated ties with the Orthodox Christian Church which is dominate through Russia as well as publicly spoken out against any official acceptance of the validity of gay persons, gay unions, and gay identity.  The European rise of anti-Semitism is, I am sure tied up with the increase of Muslim immigrants many of whom nurse hatreds toward Israel which easily translate into more generalized hatred of Jews as it is to conservative Christian people who equate modernity with Jews as though they alone were responsible for contemporary cinema, fiction, art, and all the other features of modern culture which such people fear and resist.  Then there is the history of the Holocaust.  The late Tony Judt in his masterful history  entitled Postwar, in his last chapter of summation, talks about the remaining bonds that tie European peoples together now that the region as a whole is what one would call post-Christian, and he identifies the deep seated guilt throughout Europe for their common surrender to the murderous program of Nazi Germany, most of the other nations never having after the collapse of Germany in the Second World War, acknowledged their role in surrendering their Jewish populations to the murder camps of Eastern Europe.  It is an interesting idea, and one might identify resurgent anti-Semtism as less a protest against modernity as a means to purge this guilt by actively taking on its cause.  Whatever it is, it seems to me that one very very important element in our present day American-European world view is an active role for the Christian churches of all denominations to work actively to resist and root out this anti-Semitism.  They must acknowledge all of them their historic role in creating and favoring anti-Semitism over the centuries. It seems that active hostility toward the Jews was an essential ingredient in establishing the otherness and validity of Christians as something other, a not unusual behavior in forming new groups, but here with disastrous consequences stretching down through the millenia perverting and rotting Christianity from within.