Have you ever heard of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion? No? Allow me to enlighten you.
I had no idea what they were until last Friday. The teams in Arad have been meeting at the center where Ted (name changed) and his wife live, and we’ve been having educational sessions with him. Last Friday, he showed us two videos on the global history of antisemitism, one of which was about a fictional publication written as a factual document, called the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. The Protocols were presented as a documentation of minutes from a meeting of a council of Jewish elders, called the Learned Elders of Zion, describing their plans for the Jews to take over the world. It sounds like a bad episode of Adam West’s Batman, but the document was treated as factual for years before (and after) it was first discredited by Times of London journalist Philip Graves in the 1930s.
The document, which was lifted almost word for word from a French play written in the mid-nineteenth century (with the addition of the names of real ministers and government officials), was probably written in pre-Revolution Russia in 1897, most likely by the head of the Russian secret police in an effort to discredit the Czar’s ministers, many of whom were Bolsheviks and Jewish. By 1903, the Protocols had been published in a Russian newspaper as fact, and the Protocols reached the Czar himself in 1905. After the October Revolution in 1917 and the execution of the Russian royal family the following year, the royalists searched for somewhere to blame for the communist aftermath. The Protocols allowed them to find an easy scapegoat with the Russian Jews.
After World War I destroyed half of Germany (and humiliated what was left), the Germans were also eager to accept the Protocols as fact. With the country’s history of antisemitic literature, the Protocols became an instant best-seller, and had a profound influence on one Adolf Hitler. You know the rest of that story.
Even after the document was proven to be a hoax on at least ten different occasions, including an official denunciation by the US Senate, it still runs in some circles as truth. It’s currently enjoying a great deal of popularity in east Asia and the Middle East, and given the history of the Middle East since WWII, Ted has expressed anxiousness about a second Holocaust.
All this talk about antisemitism and the Holocaust got me thinking. Why the Jews? What if Hitler had targeted a different group? What would have happened if someone else had risen to power in Germany? What was it that made the Jews less human to the Germans in the first place? What would have happened if Hitler had risen to power in a different country, like Spain or Poland, or even England? After all, antisemitism was not new by any means to European culture, as much as we may try to deny it or gloss over it in history books. Even the great Christian thinkers and philosophers had antisemitic feelings: Deitrich Bonhoeffer and the founder of Protestantism himself, Martin Luther, were hardly known for their sympathy towards the Jews.
It’s easy to get up in arms about antisemitism and condemn it as hateful, intolerant, racist (even though Jews don’t self-identify as a race), and ignorant. And it is all of those things, don’t get me wrong. But here’s the thing about being a Christian confronted with antisemitism: we’re supposed to hate the sin, but love the sinner. That includes the racists. That includes the bigots. That includes the antisemites. Try telling me to love the writers of the Protocols after seeing that film. Try telling the persecuted Christians in Burma to love the soldiers who execute their families. Try telling a Holocaust survivor to love Hitler. Being a Christian becomes much more challenging when you think about it that way.
I might get a lot of flack for this (stay with me here), but I kind of hope that one day I will want a friend who is racist or prejudiced. Take a quick second to think about that. I’m not advocating racism or antisemitism. But here’s the thing: the day that that happens will be the day that I know I’m up for the challenge of loving one of the most unlovable people in all of society. And when you think about it, that’s one of the biggest and most echoed calls that God places on our lives.
I’m not saying that I know how to do it (because I promise you, I have no idea). But in a country where antisemitism is a way of life for half of the population, learning to truly love the hateful is a far more relevant challenge than it ever was in the States.
Sofia is moving into Jerusalem tomorrow, and we’ll be there until the 23rd. Also, everyone should wish my mom a happy birthday tomorrow, because she’s great and I love her. That’s all.
