I blog therefore I think.

Thought for the Day

Figures recently released by the Israeli Government reveal a marked rise in anti-Semitic attacks in Britain. Sixty years after the holocaust, the greatest crime of the twentieth century, the curse of anti-Semitism continues to haunt us.

Christians often engage with the holocaust by celebrating the courage of other Christians who resisted the Nazis: Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoller, Edith Stein. But the truth is, they were rare exceptions.

For centuries, many Christians have stoked the fires of anti-Semitism with lies and slander. Jews were blamed for the death of Christ. Some believed that Jews practiced child sacrifice. The 4th century saint and theologian Gregory of Nyssa called the Jews "companions of the devil, accursed, detested, enemies of all that is beautiful".

Martin Luther went even further: "We are at fault in not slaying them," he said "Rather we allow them to live freely in our midst despite all their murdering, cursing, blaspheming, lying." He went on to advise Christians to "set fire to their synagogues and schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn."

These days, Christians are ashamed by such words. But it's still terribly important to remember them.

For mostly, when we recall the Holocaust, we are invited to identify ourselves with the victims. My worry about this is that it protects many of us from the much more disturbing thought that we may have something in common with the perpetrators. Placing oneself alongside the victim may leave intact a fundamental complacency about our own potential for violence and hatred. The idea that we might catch a glimpse of our own reflection in the face of a Nazi guard is a terrifying thought - but one that is more likely to lead to genuine transformation than a cheap identification with the victim, which, too often, is more about telegraphing our own compassion for others to see.

Often, of course, we protect ourselves from the thought our own capacity for wickedness by describing wickedness as something foreign and alien. That's the problem with our tendency always to use the Nazis as the default example of human evil. It encourages the thought that evil is done by people with funny accents and sinister uniforms, people who lived in the past, people very different from us. But as Eric Fromm once put it: 'As long as one believes that the evil man wears horns, one will not discover an evil man'.

The most terrifying message of European anti-Semitism is that evil is perpetrated by ordinary, apparently respectable men and women with nice families and good taste in wine and music. In other words: by people like you and me. Those who refuse to face it are often the most dangerous people of all.