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The crucifixion of Jesus and persecution of the Jews

My dear Gauri,

I had told you that Jesus was born of Jewish parents, except that his was a virgin birth. As a child he went to the synagogues and prayed like any Jewish child. Of course, as the years passed by, he sought to give new and fresh meaning to the sayings of the Hebraic prophets but he died as a Jew. It was only many years after his death – and resurrection (which, incidentally, is a point central to Christian theology) – that Christianity became a separate religion much as, you might say, Jainism or Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism or the Vedic Way of Life.
But Jesus had offended the priesthood and they did not like it at all. And they sought revenge. In the synagogues the priests would question Jesus intensely, hoping to catch him in the wrong. They never could. Jesus knew what he was saying.
Nevertheless, they felt challenged. Jesus would not spare them. To let him continue to preach meant that their own power would be sapped. Among the priesthood there were the Sadduces (the meaning of the word is not clear) who accepted only the written laws of the Jews. They formed the majority in the Sanhedrin (the Jewish Parliament’s Judicial Council) and they did not like the ferment in the country caused by the teachings of Jesus.
In the end, as we know, Jesus was arrested. It is not clear on what grounds that arrest was made. All that we can gather from the story of Jesus is that the Sadduces were determined to silence him at all costs. They took him to the Roman Viceroy, a man called Pontius Pilate and though he seemed willing to let Jesus go, the Jewish priesthood demanded the death sentence, which was reluctantly granted.
Now there are several interesting aspects about this. When the Jews carried out a death sentence, the practice was to stone the criminal to death. The Roman way was crucifixion. Many scholars now believe that, whatever the Gospels may say, perhaps the Roman Viceroy was really willing to see Jesus crucified, so that he did not pose a political challenge to Roman authority, and that the Jewish priesthood was less guilty.
But over the centuries the Jews came to be blamed for the crucifixion of Jesus. Not even the belief that Jesus rose from the dead (a central theme in Christianity) would shake the further belief among Christians that the physical doing away of Jesus was the work of Jews. The Christians never forgave the Jews for what they considered was a crime-or something more than a crime. It is strange that this is so despite Christ’s own teachings that one must love one’s enemy and turn the right cheek if smitten on the left. Though in recent years the Christian Church has taken a more enlightened view of the role of Jews, the suspicion, if not the active dislike of Jews, has persisted among Christians.
In the centuries that followed, the Jews have paid a grievous price for whatever their ancestors in Jerusalem did. In medieval Europe the Jews were hated and persecuted as if every Jew was an enemy of Jesus Christ. Stringent laws were passed against Jews. They were compelled to live in their own quarters called ghettoes, insulted from the rest of the population. They were not allowed to own land. They had therefore to turn to other professions like money lending. If you read Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice, Gauri, you will remember that the villain in the play is a Jewish money-lender called Shylock. To this day, the word Shylock has come to mean a vicious money-lender who would stop at nothing. That is very unfair. Shakespeare’s characterisation of Jews is very unfair, too, though, at one stage, the dramatist puts the following words in the mouth of Shylock.
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
No other people in the world have been so wronged over so long a time as the Jews, despite the fact that some of the greatest men of our times, whether doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists, philosophers or writers, were Jews. During the Nazi regime in Germany in the nineteen thirties and forties, Jews were persecuted. According to one account, as many as five million Jews were slaughtered in gas chambers. Thousands had to flee from Europe to the United States of America. And yet this was the race that gave to the world a Freud and an Einstein, a Spinoza and a Marx. The world would have been infinitely poorer without such talented men.
In my next letter to you, Gauri, I will tell you about cultural developments in India in the years before Christ.
Yours loving
Ajja