Welcome to the Church Times

 

To explore the Church Times website fully, please sign in or subscribe.

Non-subscribers can read four articles for free each month. (You will need to register.)

Loading...
*** DEBUG START ***
*** DEBUG END ***

‘Rescuing’ of Jesus

12 April 2013

Anthony Phillips sees how Jewish views of Jesus have changed

ISRAEL TOURISM

Twentieth-century development: the flag of Israel is seen in this photo that prefaces the section on Tel Aviv in Volume II, Centre, in the trilogy Israel: The hidden gems, a tourist guide that can be requested or downloaded from the Israeli Government Tourist Office for the UK and Ireland at ott.travel (or phone 020 7299 1100)

Other and Brother: Jesus in the 20th-century Jewish literary landscape
Neta Stahl
OUP £45
(978-0-19-976000-8)
Church Times Bookshop £40.50 (Use code CT344 )

I DOUBT whether many readers of the Church Times have asked themselves the question with which Stahl introduces her work: "how, at the beginning of the 21st century, an Israeli Jew can write a poem in the first person in which Jesus is the speaker". The answer, as she shows in this fascinating work, marks the profound changes and tensions that underlie the formation of the modern Jewish Self.

Stahl argues that, for Jewish writers growing up in Europe, Jesus was associated with anti-Semitism. But, for later authors raised in Palestine/Israel, the figure traditionally identified with the menacing god of Christianity comes to be embraced as brother. It is not the Holocaust, but the creation of the State of Israel, which is the catalyst for this modern Jewish fascination with the figure of Jesus.

It was the Zionist project that enabled writers in the first half of the 20th century to use the figure of Jesus as a Jewish pioneer in the land of Israel, seeing him no longer as the threatening Other, but as Jewish son or brother, so negating the long history of hostility between Christianity and Judaism. In Yiddish and Hebrew works, Jesus becomes the main icon for Jewish victimhood. Even in art, Jesus is portrayed as the eternal Jewish martyr.

While pre-Holocaust modern Hebrew literature is ambivalent towards Jesus, exhibiting both attraction and rejection, identification and alienation, post-Holocaust writing adopted the figure of Jesus and completely identified with him as brother rather than Other, embraced for his humanity. Further, more recent Israeli literature perceived Jesus not as a Christian or indeed a real historical figure, but rather as a representative of Western art and culture, associated with an exotic aesthetic world that posed no threat. Indeed, it is his foreignness that makes him attractive.

Stahl analyses in depth the works of three writers whose own background inevitably influenced their approach to Jesus, a central image in their writing. Uri Zvi Greenberg contrasts the Jewish Jesus with the European Christian Jesus, who, like Greenberg himself, needs to be "rescued" from Christian Europe in order to become part of his own people. Indeed, Greenberg's return to Israel and his subsequent isolation caused by his extreme views is pivotal to his writing. So he identifies with Jesus as a brother in suffering, similarly rejected by his own. For Yoel Hoffmann, prepared to engage with the Holocaust, a hitherto off-limits subject, Jesus functions more as a metaphor than as a real character.

Abandonment is the great theme of Avot Yeshurum's writing, the author plagued by his guilt at leaving his family in Europe, all of whom perished. The poet can become Jesus himself, a victim who cries out in vain. Indeed, for many 20th-century Jewish writers, the figure of Jesus functioned as a kind of mirror reflecting the image - and in many cases the desired self - of the author.

Changing gear in her final chapter, Stahl notes that irony has provided Jewish writers with the freedom to take a stand on the question of Jesus's metaphysical nature. Indeed, in many modern Yiddish poems, Jesus is openly mocked. She contrasts the work of Shmuel Yosef Agnon and Itzik Manger, the former finding the attraction to Christianity an imminent threat to modern Judaism, while Manger sees no reason for not embracing the cross as a symbol of suffering.

Stahl herself concludes that Jesus serves "as the ultimate Other - whom, for a century, many Jewish writers have struggled to bring back home and transform into a brother". This is not an easy book, but it deserves serious study by anyone interested in Jewish-Christian dialogue.

Canon Anthony Phillips is a former headmaster of The King's School, Canterbury.

Browse Church and Charity jobs on the Church Times jobsite

Church Times Bookshop

Save money on books reviewed or featured in the Church Times. To get your reader discount:

> Click on the “Church Times Bookshop” link at the end of the review.

> Call 0845 017 6965 (Mon-Fri, 9.30am-5pm).

The reader discount is valid for two months after the review publication date. E&OE

Forthcoming Events

Women Mystics: Female Theologians through Christian History

13 January - 19 May 2025

An online evening lecture series, run jointly by Sarum College and The Church Times

tickets available

 

Festival of Faith and Literature

28 February - 2 March 2025

tickets available

 

Visit our Events page for upcoming and past events 

The Church Times Archive

Read reports from issues stretching back to 1863, search for your parish or see if any of the clergy you know get a mention.

FREE for Church Times subscribers.

Explore the archive