The Bishop of Birmingham, England’s most prominent Jewish convert to Christianity, has acknowledged that Christian anti-Semitism makes it “quite unrealistic” to expect Jews ever to want to become Christians, except in rare cases like his own.
Dr. Hugh Montefiore, who became an Anglican while a pupil at Rugby public school, said the roots of Christian anti-Semitism lay in the words of Christ himself as quoted in the Gospels.
“This virulent anti-Semitism, like all forms of racial hatred, needs to be resolutely opposed and shown up for the lies and filth that it is,” he said in a lent lecture to Anglican clergy in the East London parish of Stepney.
Montefiore is a member of the eminent Sephardi family whose greatest figure was Sir Moses Montefiore, the 19th century philanthropist and defender of oppressed Jewry.
‘AN ATMOSPHERE OF HATRED’
Referring to “an atmosphere of hatred” in the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. John, Bishop Montefiore said: “It is here, right at the heart and center of the New Testament writings that we find the beginnings of anti-Semitism which has been so rampant in the church.”
Writings of some of the church fathers and of Martin Luther were “not very far from the attitudes of Der Sturmer, the Nazi anti-Semitic newspaper,” he said. The image of the Jew in the minds of Christians was that of “a deformed monster,” that was the folk memory about the Jews on which Nazism drew, resulting in cruelty and indescribable bestiality,Montefiore said.
The Bishop also defended the right of Jews to be faithful to their own religion. Jews who lived by their beliefs could be regarded as “anonymous Christians,” he said, adding:
“The Jews are not to be judged for remaining as Jews: and indeed their experience of suffering down the ages bring them very close to the central mystery of our faith, the passion, death and resurrection of Christ.” Yet no Christian church, had yet adequately repudiated its anti-Semitic history, he said.
EXHIBITION OF HOLOCAUST MATERIAL
Montefiore was preaching at a church which is staging an exhibition of Holocaust material on loan from the official Auschwitz Museum in Poland. The six weeks exhibition, which has the support of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, is intended to show youngsters aged 13 and over the implications of intolerance and racism, It will later be taken to Manchester and Newcastle.
The exhibits include photographs, documents and railway tickets bought by unsuspecting Greek Jews for trains that transported them to the gas chambers, instrument of torture, cloth made of human hair and pairs of young children shoes.
St. George in the East Church, whose crypt houses the exhibition, is in the heart of what was once the most heavily Jewish populated area of London. Before the war. It was the stamping ground of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Today, the Jews have been largely replaced by Asian and West Indian immigrants, but racism lingers on.
The Bishop of Stepney, who authorized the exhibition in his diocese, has received letters accusing him of being “A Jew lover” and reminding him of the anti-British activities of Jewish terrorists in Palestine.
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