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Touching the Apple of God’s Eye


Ho there! Flee from the land of the north,” declares the Lord, “for I have dis- persed you as the four winds of the heavens,” declares the Lord. “Ho, Zion! Escape, you who are living with the daughter of Babylon.” For thus says the Lord of hosts, “After glory He has sent me against the nations which plunder you, for he who touches you, touches the apple of His eye.” BY JOHN D. GARR, PH.D., TH.D.


BY JAMES W. GOLL


wall in the Nazi death cap at Auschwitz quot- ing the philosopher Santayana: “He who does not learn from the lessons


T of history is


doomed to repeat them.” This statement could qualify as a prophecy for the Church. Virtually everyone has heard about the Holocaust of World War II in which Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich murdered six mil- lion Jewish people in cold blood. Few people know that professed Christians, as has hap- pened many times throughout history, helped birth and carry out that organized murder! In fact, Hitler modeled some of his most hei- nous anti-Semitic schemes on official policies drafted centuries earlier by Roman Catholic and Protestant leaders. Even though most Christians in Europe did not pull a trigger, release poison gas or burn the crime evidence, nearly all of them looked the other way. A few believers aided the Jewish people, and some shared concen- tration camp cells and died alongside their Jewish brethren—but most did not. In his book Our Hands Are Stained With


Blood, Dr. Michael Brown, a theologian and Jewish disciple of the Messiah, quotes Eliezer Berkovitz, a respected Jewish thinker, about the “moral and spiritual


bankruptcy” of


Christian religion and civilization: “After nineteen centuries of Christianity, the extermination of six million Jews, among them one-and-a-half million children, carried out in cold blood in the very heart of Christian Europe, encouraged by the criminal silence of


14 | Jewish Voice Today JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011


om Hess, an international prayer leader and a modern-day fisherman of God, remembers seeing an inscription on the


—Zechariah 2:6-8 NASB


virtually all Christendom, including that of an infallible Holy Father in Rome, was the natu- ral culmination of this bankruptcy. A straight line leads from the first act of oppression against the Jews and Judaism in the fourth century to the Holocaust in the twentieth.” At the time of this writing, the beginning


of the 21st century, survivors of the Holocaust still live among us. They give vivid testimony to the horrors of modern anti-Semitism gone mad in many of the world’s most “enlight- ened” European nations. To our shame, some of the greatest Church leaders helped pave the way to death camps in places such as Auschwitz and Ber- gen. They did it through anti-Semitic writing and teaching. They underscored it by the sheer force of their influence from the pulpit. Everyone must join Jewish people today in remembering the Holocaust with the words “Never again!”


Church Edict Against the Jewish People When Berkovitz mentioned the “first act of oppression” against the Jewish people by Christians in the fourth century, he was refer- ring to an edict issued by the Roman Catholic Church in response to the doctrines of Saint John Chrysostom (347-407). This early Church father was the patriarch of Constanti- nople, yet he described the Jewish synagogue as “a place of meeting for the assassins of Christ…a den of thieves; a house of ill fame, a dwelling of iniquity, the refuge of devils, a gulf and abyss of perdition.” Many scholars consider Chrysostom to be one of the greatest and most compassionate


Church fathers. Yet the writings of this renowned saint reveal at least one dangerous flaw. He said, “As for me, I hate the synagogue…I hate the Jews.” Ironically, Chrysostom’s name literally means “golden- mouthed.” He used his gifts of persuasion to birth the Christian doctrine (popular even in this century) that anyone who persecuted the Jews was acting as an “instrument of Divine wrath.”


Anti-Semitic Rhetoric Spreads A who’s who of Church leaders and thinkers echoed Chrysostom’s sentiments in an avalanche of anti-Semitic rhetoric. These leaders included Eusebius of Caesarea, Grego- ry of Nyssa, Augustine and Jerome. During the dark years that followed, many Jewish people living under the shadow of the Christian Church of that day were forced to be baptized as Christians or face one of three dim choices: expulsion, torture or death.


In A.D. 327, the Church Council of Nicea declared that for the benefit of Christianity, Jewish people could exist only “in seclusion and humiliation.” Fourteen years later Con- stantine II prohibited marriage between Christians and Jewish people. In 1095, Pope Urban II decided to help Emperor Alexius I of Byzantine recruit knights from the West to battle the Turkish Empire. While presiding over a church council at the Cathedral of Clermont in France (the nation of his birth) in 1095, Pope Urban preached a fiery sermon to crowds outside of the cathe- dral and, on November 27, launched the First Crusade. He urged his listeners to liberate the


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