‘A sin against the Lord himself:’ Christians can’t love Christ and hate Jews.

For the past several weeks I’ve been mulling over something I normally have no call to think about: antisemitism.

I’m a Christian. I live in a small rural county where there are few, if any, Jews.

Prejudice against Jews, then, usually isn’t at the forefront of my mind. It’s something I assume belongs to some distant era. I don’t think much about Studebakers or Francisco Franco, either.

Yet it invariably turns out antisemitism isn’t a relic of the past. It’s an ugly manifestation of the present.

In Lexington in mid-December, a member of Chabad of the Bluegrass was injured when a driver shouting slurs against Jews dragged and ran over him outside the Jewish Student Center near the University of Kentucky. The assault happened as people were gathered at the center to prepare for the lighting of a menorah for the third night of Chanukah.

Police said the incident may have begun as road rage more than a hate crime. The driver apparently became incensed because the Chanukah celebration was blocking his path, and an argument broke out.

Still, his anger devolved into antisemitic insults and a violent attack.

Soon afterward, Rabbi Shlomo Litvin, writing in a Herald-Leader op-ed, mentioned several other antisemitic incidents over the previous six months, ranging from “repeated neo-Nazi flyers to threats against Jewish leaders … (stories of) anti-Semitic training seminars by law enforcement and acts of vandalism against the Chabad at UK Jewish Student Center.”

Of course, prejudice of any kind—racial, religious, national—makes little sense.

It results not just from malice, but also from lazy and irrational thinking that extrapolates from the specific to the universal.

It takes the crimes or quirks of a few members of a group and applies those shortcomings to everyone in the group. It creates guilt by association. It traffics in stereotypes.

This is cockeyed, obviously, as it denies humans their uniqueness and complexity. It also reveals an unwillingness to stop hating for five minutes to actually look at real people in all their diversity and complexity.

That same reasoning underlies bigotry no matter which group it’s aimed against: blacks, gays, women, men, Muslims, immigrants, Appalachians, Jews, you name it.

But the bigotry that makes least sense is the hatred of Jews by self-proclaimed Christians—of which there is a long and shameful history dating back centuries.

Police didn’t publicly identify the religion or race of the person responsible for the assault at Chabad of the Bluegrass.

Still, around the nation, much of the bile and violence against Jews today is perpetrated by self-described Christian identity and nationalist groups.

Not only does Christian antisemitism include the hostility and lack of logic inherent in all bigotry, but there’s an added irony to it: no one owes more to the Jews than Christians do.

Because the New Testament tells us that hostile Jewish leaders pressured Roman authorities to crucify Jesus, antisemites within Christianity historically have slandered Jews as “Christ killers.”

That narrative, however, omits an equally clear part of the New Testament accounts.

Jesus was himself a Jew, descended from Abraham, the father of the Jewish faith. Jesus’ Jewish genealogy is included prominently in the scriptures. He quotes the Hebrew Bible. Most of his teachings come directly from Jewish traditions.

Mary was a Jew. Joseph was a Jew. The 12 original apostles were Jews. St. Paul was a Jew. All the early followers of Jesus were Jews, thousands of them. In its early years, what later came to be called Christianity was considered not a separate religion, but a sect within Judaism. The apostles seem to have believed initially that to become a disciple of Jesus you had to have been born a Jew or else must convert to that faith.

If you maintain that the people partly responsible for killing Jesus were Jewish, then you also must recognize that so were the mother who birthed, raised and loved him, the crowds who followed him and the leaders who took up his mantle after the resurrection.

For many Christians today, Jesus’ prophesied return to Earth revolves around modern Israel and the Jews, and some Christians expect Jesus to eventually reign from Jerusalem.

How then can a person who claims to be a Christian justify hating Jews?

Without Jews we don’t have our Bible as we know and love it. Without Jews there would be no Jesus. Without Jews there would be no Christianity. To hate Jews is to hate your own spiritual forbears. And your savior.

It’s beyond absurd.

No Jew should be despised by anyone for being Jewish, any more than any person should be despised for being brown, black, white, yellow, red, male, female, Muslim or atheist. People of all stripes are individuals who must be treated with respect.

But for someone to call himself by the name of Christ and hate Jews is uniquely repugnant. It’s a sin against the Lord himself.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.