| |
From the Editor
Christianity was born of Judaism and despite their theological differences, the two religions share a fundamental common belief in one sole, supreme being. Christians, irrespective of denomination, worship two Jews, Jesus Christ and his mother, Mary, and view the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, as the cornerstone of their religion just as they do the writings of the apostles and followers of Jesus that together make up the New Testament. They share also an affinity and attachment to the Holy Land the Land of Israel. For over 3,000 years, Jews have recognized and prayed for Israel as their homeland, firm in their conviction that the land was divinely assigned to them. For Christians, this land is forever associated with the life, death and ministry of Jesus. For people of both religions, then, this land is the fundamental rock, cynosure and inspiration of their most deeply-held beliefs. Moslems too, the followers of the third great monotheistic religion, draw much of their religious inspiration from the same wellspring, but the forces of Islam that burst out of Mecca and Medina did not seriously impinge on the Jewish and Christian world until half a millennium later, with the Arab conquest of the Holy Land in 638 ce. The history and fate of adherents of Christianity and Judaism have thus been inextricably intertwined for two thousand years.
And yet these have been two millennia of turbulent history. Jewish-Christian relations have too often been marked by rapine and ravage, by the militant cross and the sword, by unspeakable cruelty and persecution, that have included the brutalities of the Crusades, when Jews and Moslems were slaughtered indiscriminately by the rampaging knights; the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the tortures of Torquemada and the Inquisition, and in the past 100 years, the pogroms and persecutions of Czarist Russia and the unimaginable horrors of the Shoah, the Nazi Holocaust.
But for all the historical baggage, there were always Christians who sought to correct the iniquities of the past and called for tolerance towards Jews. Many Christians were and remain among the main proponents and supporters of Zionism, and the national movement that called for the return of the Jews to their historic homeland sparked the imagination of a number of prominent Christians: statesmen, soldiers, philosophers and theologians among them. Others were spurred by a desire to understand their own deeply-rooted religious beliefs and to discover their source in the Bible. To this we owe much of the early archaeological explorations of the Holy Land, the identification of holy sites and vivid descriptions of life here over the past 150 years.
As we enter the last year of the Millennium and approach the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Christianity, it is appropriate to take a glance, albeit a very fleeting one, at some aspects of the relationship between Israel and the Christian world. Libraries have been written on the subject, but we hope that our small contribution will be of some interest.
Asher Weill
Jerusalem, February 1999
|
|