The Cincinnati Enquirer, one of this city’s leading daily newspapers, was under fire here today for presenting a lengthy report on a talk by the president of the Cincinnati Bar Association, which revived the ancient canard that the Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Christ. The Enquirer devoted almost half a page to a condensation of the talk by Francis L.Dale, with the comment that Mr. Dale has given the tall “almost 600 times.”
Mr. Dale was quoted as declaring: “If our Lord’s enemies were to succeed in their plans to destroy Him, they had to gain His conviction before both the Jewish and Roman authorities. ” The attorney was quoted as adding that “in one, He was convicted of blasphemy by the Great Sanhedrin and sentenced to death. In the second, He was charged before Pontius Pilate with treason and acquitted.”
The American Israelite, Jewish weekly published here, declared that it was “shocked beyond words that a newspaper enjoying the tradition long attributed to the Enquirer would lend its columns to the dissemination of these historic inaccuracies, which have caused thousands upon thousands of innocent Jewish men, women and children to be slain by zealots–religious and political.”
The Israelite cited Dr. Samuel Sandmel, provost of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, as declaring that the Enquirer article was guilty of “a complete lack of academic approach.” Dr. Sandmel added that crucifixion was a Roman form of punishment and that, “for those Christians for whom there is meaning or satisfaction in blaming Jews of 2,000 years ago for something which transpired, and who enjoy exacting from Jews of our day, or from their children, some penalty for the transmitted guilt, the recourse to historical scholarship is totally useless. So too is the appeal to conscience, or to Jesus’ summary of the Golden Rule, or to any standard of ethics or justice.”
Dr. Sandmel added that there were also Christians “in abundance who recognize the circumstances that the anti-Jewish tone of the New Testament is the product of an age and a set of conditions” and that “these Christians deny that anti-Jewish sentiment is a necessity for the Christian faith. “
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
