Rabbi Prof. Daniel Sperber, Ph.D

The Revolutionary Vision of Nostra aetate

Rabbi Prof. Daniel Sperber, Ph.D.

Daniel Sperber is a Rabbi in Jerusalem and Professor Emeritus of Talmudic Studies at the Faculty of Jewish Studies, Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He studied at Yeshivat Kol Torah (1958–1959) and Yeshivat Hevron (1959–1962) in Jerusalem. Subsequently, he completed undergraduate studies in Art in England (1965) and earned a doctorate from University College London in Ancient History and Hebrew Studies (1968). He was invited to Bar-Ilan University where he has been working since. He is currently President of the Institute of Advanced Torah Studies and Professor of Talmud. He is an expert in a number of fields of Jewish Studies such as history of Jewish customs, education and art. In 1992, he was awarded the distinguished Prize in Jewish Studies for his dedicated work. He has authored more than 40 books and 300 articles.

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Firstly, I would like to express my deep gratitude and appreciation to those various institutions and their leaders who have accorded me the privilege of speaking at this very august event. I would like to begin with two timelines. Many of the events that I will mention have already been mentioned in passing in the previous speakers’ talks, but these timelines will, I think, accentuate the remarkable revolution, theological and political, of Nostra aetate and its, as it were, descendants.

Obviously, we are beginning with Nostra aetate, which is from 1965, which actually had its precursors over three preliminary years of very heated discussions by hundreds of bishops, archbishops and cardinals from all over the world, who went through a number of different versions of what was finally published at the end of 1965. The original impetus came, of course, from Pope John XXIII, a very saintly pope, who obviously was deeply traumatised by the events of the Shoah, the Holocaust, and who thought to bring about some sort of reconciliation, atonement, to mend the unacceptable events of the past. He originally wanted this event to relate to Judeo-Christian relations at the theological level. But there were very conservative elements in the Council that discussed this issue, and in the course of the discussions, the whole nature of this encyclical underwent changes and it began to develop other sections, so that only the fourth and final section, related to Jewish-Christian relations. And this section also introduced Jewish-Islamic relations, and even the discussion of Hinduism, and Eastern religions. So, in a sense, it sought to minimize what had been meant to be the central theme of the original discussion. Thus, for example, the term ‘deicide’, which had been one of the central terms, i.e. themes, that had been included in earlier versions, was taken out of the final version of Nostra aetate. Unfortunately, and tragically, Pope John XXIII never lived to actually see the final promulgation of the Second Vatican Council, for he passed away in 1963, and only in 1965 was it finally published. And it truly was a turning point, as was mentioned by His Excellency the Ambassador of the State of Israel, and others. It was followed by a memorandum in 1968 by the Jewish-Christian Coordination Committee of Vienna, and in 1969 by reflections and suggestions for the application of the fourth chapter of Nostra aetate. But I should mention the fact that although these were theological, and not political discussions referring to the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people, not the State of Israel, there were tentative attempts to bring about some sort of discussion on a recognition of a political nature. And, as was pointed out by the Ambassador, in 1973 when Golda Meir visited the Vatican, on January 15, she visited Pope Paul VI and the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra played the second movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. This apparently was a symphony very beloved of the Pope but here was also a gentle hint. Because that particular movement, the allegretto of the second movement of the 7th symphony, is one of the first examples of what is called homophony. Homophony means you have two different melodies which are in different registers which do not vie with one another, which do not contradict one another, but which form a harmonious whole without actually limiting the individual identity of each particular melody. So this was obviously a gentle hint to the Holy See on how the relationship between the political entity of the State of Israel might relate to the Vatican and to the Catholic Church as a homophonic form of harmony, where each individual element preserves its individuality, and nonetheless functions in complementary harmony with one another.

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However, this hint was not really taken up. And in 1982 Pope John Paul II in Otranto makes mention for the first time of the State of Israel, as was indicated by His Excellency. In 1984, there was promulgated the papal letter, Redemptionis anno, while in 1992 Israel and the Holy See agreed on the agenda for negotiation, and in 1993, on 30 of December, the Fundamental Agreement, which was mentioned a number of times, led to the recognition of the State of Israel by the Vatican, and at the same time, in that same year, the international Council of Christians and Jews published an important document called Jews and Christians in Search of a Common Religious Basis for Contributing towards a Better World. So, things were moving forward, as it were, from both directions, both from the Catholic Church, as well as from various Jewish institutions – groups of rabbis, who were signatories, 50 leading Jewish thinkers, on such dialogue. In 1994, on 28 September, Rome opened a nunciature in Israel and Israel had its first Israeli Ambassador to the Holy See, Shmuel Hadas, whom I knew very well to be a wonderful person. In 1997, interestingly enough, if we talk about history, the Jews of Rome dissolved the ban on passing through the arch of Titus, that Roman emperor who destroyed the Second Temple. This is also significant because it shows a new relationship between those who were once enemies towards one another. For the Italians were seen as the descendants of the Romans.

In 1998, on 16 March, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, and in 2000, Pope John Paul II visits the State of Israel. He meets the chief rabbis, and in that same year, a group of American rabbis publish a very important document called Dabru emet which means ‘speak the truth’, which stresses the importance of the new relationship between the Jewish people, in this case in the diaspora and the Christian world. It is not a political statement, but a deeply religious one. In 2001, on 24 May, the Pontifical Biblical Commission publishes The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible. In 2002, a bilateral commission was established between the Israeli Chief Rabbinate and the Vatican. My good friend and colleague, Norbert Hofmann, who is a very active member of this Commission, and I, and, of course my dear friend and colleague Rabbi David Rosen, have been working for the last decade together on this issue in theological discussions. In 2013, a sort of a summary of our activities was published, which was called the Joint Statement of the Bilateral Commission. In 2015, the 50th anniversary of Nostra aetate brought out The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable. I was privileged to speak on the last occasion in Rome at that particular event, and in that same year, the Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation praised Nostra aetate. You can understand that it was not easy for many conservative Jewish thinkers and rabbis to come to terms with the fact that a change had come about between Catholicism, and Christianity in general, and Judaism. And as was mentioned, in 2016, Pope Francis in Sant’Egidio, pointed to the “thirst for peace, religion and culture in dialogue”. And now we come to the 25th anniversary of the recognition of the State of Israel. That is one timeline from the 20th and the early 21st century. Now let us look at yet a different timeline.

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Let us go back, almost 2000 years, to the year 140 of the Common Era. The Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord by Papias is to my understanding, the first, overt expression of anti-Semitism in the description of Judas, whose swollen genitals and blood is mixed with worms. And as we continue through the early Church Fathers, we come to the Crusades, the First Crusade takes place in 1096, with the destruction of the Jewish Communities of Rhineland: Shpira (Speyer), Warmaisa (Worms), Magenza (Mainz), and Colonia (Cologne today). Each of these Jewish communities were completely wiped out by the Christian Crusades. This was followed by the various calumnies such as, the story of Simon of Trent in 1474, a young Christian whom the Jews were accused of murdering cutting up and using his blood for the Passover ceremonies; William of Norwich, and the desecration of the host, moving on to the Spanish inquisition in 1492, which continued into Mexico for the following two to three hundred years. Various blood libels plagued Jews in Europe throughout the generations and Jews were constantly being accused of using Christian blood to drink at the Seder, the Passover ceremony. A new myth was promulgated called a wandering Jew, a Jew who was present at the crucifixion and lives on for ever wandering from country to country, without any home, in order to serve as a permanent witness to the terrible crimes of Judaism. The wandering Jew is a sort of a new version of the Biblical Cain who also has no home and wandered around from place to place. The Judensau, which was an illustration that was published in hundreds of antisemitic documents, showed Jews sucking from a Sau, a female pig. In 1648–1649, came the Khmelnytsky massacres in the Ukraine, where it is estimated that 100,000 Jews were murdered in over 200 Jewish communities. And as a result of that, in 1661, Jewish communities decreed that no weddings or joyful occasions should take place on a certain date as a memorial of the Khmelnytsky massacres. I want to mention something more personal. My father of blessed memory, who was born in Transylvania, which was once Hungary, then Romania, changing its political affiliation, in 1932 left Braşov, in Romania where my grandfather was the Chief Rabbi, because he met someone called Kuze in Yassi, a leading anti-Semite, who slapped his face and said: “Bloody Jew, you do not belong here.” He then left for England. And my mother’s earliest memories at the age of five was hiding under the bed during a pogrom in the small village of Hotzales in the Ukraine in 1905. And later on while in Odessa in the Ukraine – now Russia – she had known of Symon Petliura, who instigated the death of tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews in the years 1919 to 1921, and was assassinated (in Paris) by a Jew called Sholom Schwartzbard. And so, this story of anti-Semitism over the last 2000 years up to the present period is something that has been deeply ingrained in our psyche. And that is why for us, Nostra aetate is such a remarkable event. After the description of Jews as ‘infamous murders’, ‘a detestable nation’, ‘abhorred by man’, ‘everywhere rejected’, or ‘demons escaped from hell’, ‘race of Jews’, ‘detestable men’, ‘more accused than Lucifer’, ‘more wicked than all the devils’,- and these are all exact quotations,- Nostra aetate said that God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of the Fathers. It took a long line of Jewish rabbis and thinkers to fully appreciate the remarkable extent of the theological revolution that enabled the promulgation of the fourth chapter of Nostra aetate. But Nostra aetate had precursors. The House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church already in 1964 had stated that “The poison of anti-Semitism has causes of a political, national, psychological, social, and economic nature. It has often sought

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religious justification in the events springing from the crucifixion of Jesus. Anti-Semitism is in direct contradiction to Christian doctrine. Jesus was a Jew, and since the Christian Church is rooted in Israel, spiritually we are Semites. The charge of deicide against the Jews is a tragic misunderstanding of the inner significance of the crucifixion. To be sure, Jesus was crucified by some soldiers at the instigation of some Jews. But, this cannot be construed as imputing corporate guilt to every Jew in Jesus’ day, much less to the Jewish people in subsequent generations. Simple justice alone proclaims the charge of a corporate or inherited curse on the Jewish people to be false.” I could quote numerous texts from medieval plays which describe Jews as devils. I will not go into this here. But, Nostra aetate instituted a process, which was supported by other such organisations and events which brought about a closer understanding of Judeo-Christian relations. Not long ago I spoke at a certain event, where I said: “We should no longer speak so much of dialogue, which is dia-logos, talking one to the other, but rather we should speak of dia-akousis, a new word, which I invented, which means listening to one another.” The question has been raised: why did it take so long for the Catholic Church, and the Holy See, to recognise the State of Israel. Many suggestions have been put forward: changes have the tendency to move slowly, the Church had to take into account the various Christian communities found in the surrounding Arab lands of the Middle East. At that time, Lebanon had a Christian majority, which now it does not have, and there were large Christian communities in Syria, in Aleppo, in Iraq, and it was probably felt that if diplomatic relations were cemented between Israel and the Holy See, this would endanger these communities. There were, no doubt, other reasons taken into account, but when finally the state of affairs in the Middle East underwent political changes and with the ascendancy of Khomeini in 1979, radical Islam raised its ugly features, it was understood that the Christian communities in the Middle East were now also in danger, and that the State of Israel constituted a protective element so that the recognition of the State of Israel might well help those Christian communities, rather than endangering them. So, to summarize what is actually a highly complex issue, which has many more strands which need to be analysed and melded together; we, the Jewish people, and we, citizens of the State of Israel, are two distinct notions, the one is a theological one, the other is a political one. The Accord between the Holy See and the State of Israel was not exactly a balanced accord: For the Holy See, it began primarily as a theological process of reconciliation, while for Israel, it was political and diplomatic recognition which of course, embodied various elements such as recognition of Catholic institutions in the State of Israel, taxation issues, educational questions, and others. But all in all, I think that now, finally, both for the Catholic world, and for the Jewish world, we have to realise that we are in a totally new era, an era, where we are no longer, engaged in dialogue, which is a discussion between two different antagonistic elements, but a conversation between brothers, who have a joint heritage, and who have joint aspirations for what in Hebrew is called tikkun olam, the reparation of all the evils in this world, to bring good and welfare to the whole world. Thank you.