European Judaism

One of the regular features of this journal is to reflect on the current state of interfaith relations, particularly amongst Jews, Christians and Muslims. These articles are largely based on lectures delivered at the annual Jewish–Christian– Muslim Student Conference (JCM) held for thirty years at the Hedwig Dransfeld Haus (HDH) in Bendorf, Germany. Several of the shorter articles in this issue come from this source, representing three years of the programme. The theme of the 2001 conference was ‘Education within our faith communities: what do we learn and what do we teach about ourselves and about others?’, and is addressed by Laura Janner-Klausner, Jacobus Schoneveld and Halima Krausen. The theme for 2002 was ‘The religious challenge of living between cultures’ and is addressed by Michael Pertz, Rainer Irmgedruth and Humera Khan. The theme for 2003 was ‘Interreligious dialogue in conflict situations’ and is addressed by Harvey Hames, Marten Marquardt and Hamideh Mohagheghi. What is missing is the lively debate sparked off by them that takes place in many contexts within the conference – discussion groups, workshops, religious services and informal encounters.

At present, the air is vibrating with negative religious energies, which the shocking events of September 11 released. Whether it is Djerba (Tunisia), Bali (Indonesia) or Moscow, criminal terrorists abused and abuse a religion such as Islam to legitimize mass murder and to glorify suicide. Week after week, Israelis and Palestinians add new victims to the horrifying list of murder and counter murder. Muslims all over the world experience attacks as never before, with claims that they belong to a religion of violence and enemy destruction. In a first reaction, the American president speaks of a ‘crusade’, and afterwards he has to visit a mosque in order to show clearly that America is not fighting against a religion but rather against terrorists. Prime Minister Blair speaks of a battle against ‘evil’ and uses apocalyptic – dualistic models of interpretation: either – or, for us – against us, now – never. There is no question: the air is vibrating with religiously charged political energies. A second Gulf War seems immanent – with disquieting consequences for the Western and the Islamic world.

I do not think that I had the best introduction to interfaith dialogue. I studied Christianity at school and at university. I was overprotected at the first and overexposed at the second. At school, our wonderful Catholic teacher avoided the so called ‘difficult’ chapters in the Gospels so as to protect her five students (three of whom were Jewish) – or maybe herself. On the other hand, my university lecturers taught the ‘Old Testament’ with assertions such as ‘Judaism is morally invalid’. These experiences strengthened in me a destructive understanding of the religious world as consisting of only Christians (the Faculty was then a Protestant-only zone) and Jews (as Christ-killers). You will not be surprised to know that after receiving my Divinity degree, I did not go anywhere near Christian studies for another thirteen years!

I was asked to give a lecture with the emphasis on my personal experiences in growing up into what in German is called a Christenmensch (Christian human being) and my growing into Christian faith and into Christian value notions – and this within the framework of the overall theme of this year’s and next year’s conferences: ‘Education within our faith communities’, with the emphasis on the question ‘What do we learn and what do we teach about ourselves and about others?’

When I was a little girl, years before I went to school, I taught myself reading and writing by asking about the meaning of letters and words that I found around me. One day I asked my mother about the meaning of that circular sign in ‘OMO’ (a soap powder) and she said it was a letter O. Later on I asked my father, a scientist, and he said it was a zero. I was thrilled to find out that, each in its own context, both were right. The impact of this discovery never left me.

Over the centuries it has become harder and harder to isolate aspects of Judaism that might be termed cultural, religious or even national. But before I start to generalize and talk about Judaism and the world, I think it best to start with myself. I was born in South Africa and grew up in a small farming town some seventy miles from Johannesburg. The South Africa of my youth, as you may know, chose to follow a racial route of attempting to separate people, not just on cultural, but on ethnic, racial and religious grounds. And yet we all know, it was a smokescreen for discrimination and hatred.

For the past five years I have been the pastor in charge of two communities in Mettingen in the northern part of the Muensterland (North Rhine–Westphalia). My predecessor spent thirty-two years there and in the area in which I carry out my pastoral duties there are 10,000 Catholic Christians as compared to 2,500 Protestants. We have barely one hundred Muslims, and Jews never settled in this area. 350 years ago the violent clashes between Catholic and Protestant Christians finally came to an end (the Peace of Westphalia) and 110 years ago legal discrimination against Catholics by a liberal Protestant state (the Kulturkampf, the phase of the struggle between church and state under Bismarck) was abolished.

The subject of this conference is one that has occupied me for perhaps longer than I wish to remember, and I do appreciate being given the opportunity to share some of my deliberations with you today. There are many tangents to this story; therefore, for the sake of coherence I have focussed on areas that hopefully will be of some interest to this conference.

In the few years of great optimism leading up to the start of the second intifada in October 2000, I was charged with organizing a large conference which was to be held at my university, the theme of which was to be perceptions of the ‘other’ in the Middle East. The conference was supposed to involve members of all three monotheistic faiths, men of the cloth, as well as politicians, diplomats, people involved in education, in mass media from the region and from further afield.

Christianity arose out of a conflict situation, and to this day it bears the characteristics of this original conflict. It begins with individuals, families and groups of Jewish sectarians who want to assert themselves in competition with other Jewish sectarians. They withdraw from one another. They outdo one another in part rhetorically, in part in their practice and then sometimes also politically, tactically and – on the side of the Christians – eventually with acts of violence.

‘Clash of civilizations’, ‘discord between the religions’: terms that, in different variations, have constantly accompanied us in recent times. Some believe that conflicts between cultures and religions are unavoidable; others claim that it is only the religions that can guarantee or prevent peace on earth. At the moment, the fact that there could possibly be causes for conflict other than religion seems not to be noticed or to be purposely ignored.

Muslims believe that the Qur’an, the Holy book of Islam, is literally, the word of God. Hence, the Word was made book. The Qur’an in Islamic thought is comparable to the Torah in the Jewish tradition and to Jesus in the Christian tradition, in the sense that each is perceived by its followers as the central revelation of God. The Qur’an is neither a book of legal codes, nor systematic theology, nor a book on ethical morality per se. The Qur’an is basically a book of faith from which we, as Muslims, should derive laws, ethics and the theology we need in order to define the type of human and society God wants us to be. From the Qur’an we should be able to define the ethical theology which would hopefully explain the meaning and purpose of this life. As such, the Qur’an for Muslims is the primary means of encountering God.

‘Dialogue’ is a spoken exchange between two persons who exchange their viewpoints. In the dictionary of the ‘good person’ this concept has the highest rank which one can basically only confirm. Fundamentally, it must be better to talk with one another instead of immersing oneself in evil silence or in turning to aggressive attacks. Why, then, did the organizer of this forum present me with the title ‘Dialogue: Thank You, No!’ How can one be against dialogue? It is rooted in an honourable philosophic tradition which has been primarily established by Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas within the centre of modern thought. Since then, the waters of diplomacy have washed over it and softened it, and overuse has killed it.

In 1947, at the Second Conference of the International Council of Christians and Jews, the Christian participants published a document known as ‘The Ten Points of Seelisberg’. This document was addressed to the churches, as a result of having ‘recently witnessed an outburst of antisemitism, which has led to the persecution, and extermination of millions of Jews’ (ICCJ 1947). This can be considered the first Christian statement on Judaism prompted by the Holocaust, and as such one of the triggers in the development of Jewish–Christian relations that has taken place since that tragedy. As David Fox Sandmel has noted, ‘The Shoah…has provided a moral imperative for Jews and Christians to move beyond traditional antagonisms’ (Frymer-Kensky, Novak, Ochs, Sandmel and Signer 2000: 367). Since the Holocaust, there has been increased dialogue between Jews and Christians, as well as increased scholarship in the field, and many statements relating to it.

I am grateful to the World Jewish Congress for inviting me to share my thoughts with this most distinguished gathering on the issues of Islamophobia and antisemitism. I would like to pay tribute to the Maimonides Foundation and Lord Janner for organizing this, my second visit, to the holy city of Jerusalem. I am acutely aware of the honour given to me, the first European Muslim ever to be invited to address the World Jewish Congress.

When you are a public figure, you have to be very careful about what you say – someone might just be listening. Jenny Tonge, a Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament, is just the latest in a long series of gaffers extraordinaire, with her outrageous remarks in support of suicide bombers. But unlike most of those whose problematic statements have hit the headlines in recent years, she stands by what she said.

In six weeks this Shabbat, the Christian world will commemorate the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ. It really does not matter that Jesus was most likely born, according to the historians, in 4 B.C.E. It does not really matter that the mathematical start of the new millennium will be 2001. 1 January 2000 is the day of focus. Millennial madness is sweeping the world.

Very clearly, we are at present at a phase in which, on the one hand, countless new research projects with an abundance of sources on events in the Third Reich, on the policies of expropriation and annihilation are being pursued and published; and on the other hand, questions are being raised concerning the postwar culture of remembering and commemorating, on the way history has been written and society has dealt with what happened in the process that we have grown accustomed to calling ‘Auschwitz’ for short. This is happening above all based on Peter Novick’s study of how the Holocaust has been received in the U.S.A., and it is pointed out how remembrance after 1945 has been instrumentalized. The opposite pole to this is seen in a supposedly authentic remembering and coming to terms with the past.

‘Kammah la ˙allei ve-la margish gavra de-mareih sayeih’ [How healthy (not sick) and immune (not affected) is a man whose master favours (supports) him!]. This sentence is attributed to Rav Huna in Talmud Yoma 22b, but Rav Huna is probably not its author. It was probably a commonly known proverb, since the same sentence is also employed in Bava Kamma 20b by another amora (rabbi of the post-mishnaic period) in a different context. However, Rav Huna adds an elucidation to this proverb: ‘Saul [sinned] once and [it] cost him, David [sinned] twice and [it] did not cost him’, implying that David was ‘a man whose master favours him’. The Gemara proceeds with questioning which sins are being alluded to by Rav Huna.

Dorothee Soelle was scheduled to speak at four events at the 2003 Ecumenical Kirchentag in Berlin. Sadly, she died shortly beforehand, in the midst of a lecture. It was hard to come to terms with a conference that did not include this Socratic gadfly who challenged all her contemporaries. In my London study, I collected books written by her from the various subject shelves – sixteen books, moving across theology, philosophy, social ethics, poetry and other categories. On occasions, she permitted me to publish (and translate) some of her writings in European Judaism. At the Leo Baeck College – Centre for Jewish Education, I find some of her books indispensable for the instruction of rabbis: Suffering, The Onward Journey, Dialogues of the Night in the Church, In the House of the Man-eater, Sympathy and others. But at least the books are here, in my library. Dorothee is not here, and that is a great loss in our lives.

Ibergekummene Tsuris The Good Book

The Ninth of Av

An Elderly Jewish Man Confronting Alzheimer’s

Vila

The Cemetery at St. Martin Ghetto Blaster

Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany, New York and London, W.W. Norton and Company, 1996, 386 pp., ISBN 0-393-03904-8.

Shalva Weil (ed.), India’s Jewish Heritage: Ritual, Art, and Life-Cycle, Mumbai, Marg Publications, 2002, 124 pp., 120 colour, 20 black and white plates, ISBN 81-85026-58-0 (hb).

Josh Cohen, Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, New York and London, Continuum Press, 2003, 166 pp., ISBN 0-8264-5552-0 (pb).

Doris L. Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, Lanham, MD, Rowman and Littlefield, 2002, 280 pp., ISBN 0-8476-9630-8 (hb).

Jody Myers, Seeking Zion: Modernity and Messianic Activism in the Writings of Tsevi Hirsch Kalischer, Oxford, Littman Library, 2003, 256 pp., ISBN 1-874774-90-7.

Joseph Davis, Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller: Portrait of a Seventeenth-Century Rabbi, Oxford, Littman Library, 2004, 302 pp., ISBN 1-874774-86-2.