Scholars outline history of the Pharisees and roots of harmful anti-Jewish stereotypes
Despite Nostra Aetate's goal, absolving Jews of deicide was only the tip of an iceberg of vilification that would need to be dismantled if the church were to free itself from antisemitism.
Scholars outline history of the Pharisees and roots of harmful anti-Jewish stereotypes CULTURE BOOK REVIEWS "Christ Among the Pharisees" by Jacob Jordaens, circa 1660 (Wikimedia Commons/Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille) BY CHRIS SEEMAN View Author Profile Join the Conversation Send your thoughts to Letters to the Editor. Learn more November 19, 2022 Share on Bluesky Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Email to a friend Print Every religion has its demonology. When Malcolm X made this observation to Alex Haley as they collaborated on what was to become his posthumous autobiography, his immediate target was the antisemitic teaching promoted by Elijah Muhammed, from whose sect he had recently broken. His refusal to exempt any faith from the tendency to demonize others in order to validate itself remains as painfully relevant today as it was in 1965. The Pharisees Edited by Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine 482 pages; Eerdmans $54.95 A mere eight months after Malcolm X's assassination, the Catholic Church promulgated Nostra Aetate, repudiating two millennia of Christian demonization of Jews and Judaism. The main focus of that declaration was replacement theology (the claim that the church had replaced Israel as God's covenant people) and its justifying myth of the blood libel (the claim that the entire Jewish people were and are uniquely responsible for the death of Jesus). As the task of implementing Nostra Aetate got underway, it became evident that absolving Jews of deicide was only the tip of an iceberg of vilification that would need to be dismantled if the church were to free itself from antisemitism. In 1974, the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews flagged problematic portrayals of the Pharisees as an urgent topic. Subsequent curial documents repeated the call for an historically balanced appraisal of the Pharisees. In 2019, marking the 110th anniversary of its founding, Rome's Pontifical Biblical Institute hosted an international conference to consider what we know — and do not know — about the Pharisees, their place in the Jewish and Christian imagination, and the damaging effects of reproducing erroneous notions about them in contemporary Christian preaching and teaching. With the publication of the proceedings of this conference in a volume titled The Pharisees, we now have a powerful resource for countering these harmful misconceptions. "The Tribute Money" by Martino Rota, circa 1560 (Metropolitan Museum of Art/Bequest of Phyllis Massar, 2011) Most Catholics, unless they identify with a retrograde fringe group, are unlikely to regard Jews as especially hypocritical, legalistic, xenophobic, misogynistic or complicit in whatever other ill they deplore. With the recent resurgence of antisemitic violence, the validity of this assumption may be eroding. Still, most North American Catholics would probably not think of themselves as anti-Jewish, much less antisemitic. This is testimony to the rhetorical success of Nostra Aetate. So far as we know, the Pharisaic sect did not survive the first century. Even if elements of their philosophy and practice were absorbed into the rabbinic movement that eventually became the mainstream of Judaism, there are no "card-carrying" Pharisees alive today. Why should it matter to the common good what people think and say about them? Each of the 27 contributors to this collection explores a different facet of this question. Susannah Heschel and Deborah Forger put it most succinctly: In the Christian mind, Pharisees have become a "metonym" for Judaism; that is, whatever is said about the Pharisees Christians assume to be true — or at least typical — of all Jews. When this assumption is combined with Christian ignorance of actual Jews and Judaism, anything, however false or misleading, is more readily believed. To the extent that Christian stereotypes of Jews become intimately bound up with Christian self-understanding, attempts at correction may be perceived as a challenge to Christianity itself and tend to be met with knee-jerk deflection or denial. Rather than confront uncomfortable truths, Christians prefer the comforting reassurances of their own echo chamber. Amy-Jill Levine, one of the volume's editors, instructively compares this to the dynamic of white privilege and white fragility: Like racism, Jew-hatred persists because Christians continue to enable it, if not through direct preaching and teaching then through inaction. How did the Pharisees become Judaism's demonic essence in Christian eyes? As several of the contributors document, the process began with the Gospels, which regularly use the Pharisees as negative foils for Jesus and his followers. Sometimes the evangelists anchor this unflattering contrast in disagreements over historically specific practices; on other occasions, the Pharisees' antagonism is left unexplained or is ahistorically lumped together with that of other unrelated groups. "Christ Accused by the Pharisees" by Duccio di...