Flashback to 2008: "Why Don’t Jews Like the Christians Who Like Them?"

James Q. Wilson asks and answers the question in his 2008 article at City Journal. He begins by noting the basic issue:

In the United States, the two groups that most ardently support Israel are Jews and evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. Jewish support is easy to explain, but why should certain Christians, most of them politically quite conservative, be so devoted to Israel? There is a second puzzle: despite their support for a Jewish state, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians are disliked by many Jews. And a third: a large fraction of African-Americans are hostile to Israel and critical of Jews, yet Jewish voters regard blacks as their natural allies.

I'm not an expert on Jewish-Christian relations, but Wilson paints a picture of most Christians (including Catholics) as being ambivalent toward Jews and Zionism. The exception to this, he observes, are Evangelicals. 

    The reason for Evangelicals being so supportive of Zionism and Israel is fundamentally theological: they believe that Jews are still "the chosen people" and that Israel will play a uniquely significant role in the events of the Last Days including building the Millennium Temple. Thus, Evangelicals, as Wilson describes, have long been supportive of re-establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. 

    The reasons that Jews particularly dislike Evangelical Christians even more than Christians generally is not due to any particular religious or theological stance (they believe all Christians to be beasts in human form, lacking a divine soul). Rather, it is political:

    But why do so many Jewish groups and voters abhor their Christian evangelical allies? ... Most Jews are political liberals, devoted to the Democratic Party and liberal causes generally. As Milton Himmelfarb once put it, “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.” Such voting habits are not hard to explain in a population that historically includes victims of discrimination, oppression, and mass murder. By contrast, evangelicals tend to be conservatives to whom politics seems less important than their dispensationalist beliefs.

    That liberal politics trumps other considerations—including worries about anti-Semitism—for many American Jews becomes clearer in light of other data. The most anti-Semitic group in America is African-Americans. This wasn’t always the case. ... Nowadays, according to several polls, about one-third of U.S. blacks have very anti-Semitic attitudes, and this hasn’t changed since at least 1964, when the first such poll was conducted. And it has been African-American leaders, not white evangelicals, who have made anti-Semitic remarks most conspicuously. Everyone recalls Jesse Jackson’s reference to New York as “Hymietown,” to say nothing of Louis Farrakhan, a great admirer of Hitler, who has called Jews “bloodsuckers.”

    Yet African-American voters are liberals, and so often get a pass from their Jewish allies. To Jews, blacks are friends and evangelicals enemies, whatever their respective dispositions toward Jews and Israel.

But, he adds, there is another reason: projection. Wilson doesn't use that term, but he argues that Jews fear that Evangelicals will impose a type of Christian theocracy in the United States notwithstanding polls and surveys indicating that Evangelicals support a separation of Church and State. I use the term projection because a soft theocracy is what Jews have created in Israel and it will only become more theocratic and nationalistic over time.  

    You can see it how Israeli Jews seem to have been ramping up their persecution of Christians:

"Jewish settler hate crime in Israel increasingly targets Christians"

Euronews (3 min.) (from 9 years ago)

"Jewish hatred towards Christianity" by professor Israel Shahak. From the article:

Dishonouring Christian religious symbols is an old religious duty in Judaism. Spitting on the cross, an especially on the Crucifix, and spitting when a Jew passes a church, havebeen obligatory from around AD 200 for pious Jews. In the past, when the danger of anti-Semitic hostility was a real one, the pious Jews were commanded by their rabbis either to spit so that the reason for doing so would be unknown, or to spit onto their chests, not actually on the cross or openly before the church. The increasing strength of the Jewish state has caused these customs to become more open again but there should be no mistake: The spitting on the cross for converts from Christianity to Judaism , organized in Kibbutz Sa'ad and financed by the Israeli government is a an act of traditional Jewish piety. It does not seize to be barbaric, horrifying and wicked because of this! On the contrary, it is worse because it is so traditional, and much more dangerous as well, just as the renewed anti-Semitism of the Nazis was dangerous, because in part, it played on the traditional anti-Semitic past.

• "How Israeli Jews’ Fear of Christianity Turned Into Christian Hatred"--Israel-Palestine News (2/16/2021). The article begins:

    During the reception ceremony for the new Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, this past December, we heard the news: a religious Jew had tried to set fire to the church at Gethsemane, at the foot of the Mount of Olives. Once again a religious-Zionist Israeli Jew had acted with violence against Christians in the Holy Land. This time, guards at the church caught the offender while he was in the act. Those attending the ceremony could guess the future course of events: He would be diagnosed as mentally disturbed. Indeed, in the vast majority of cases of violence against Christians in Israel, the offenders are absolved of responsibility by way of a psychiatric diagnosis.

    Hasn’t the time come to examine the way enmity toward Christians is inculcated and nurtured among the Jewish population in Israel?

    “‘Jesus Was a Jew,’” by Orit Ramon, Inés Gabel, and Varda Wasserman analyzes the way that Christians and Christianity are depicted in the Israeli education system, in both the regular and the religious streams. The authors, faculty members of the Open University of Israel, offer a fine description of the tragic historical situation of the Jews in Christian Europe over the past centuries, and of the State of Israel’s sensitive geopolitical situation. But alongside this, they describe how Christians living in the Jewish state as a small, marginal community experience relentlessly the consequences of a majority that has received an education that emphasizes time and again negative stereotypes of Christianity.

• "Is ‘Jewish supremacy’ translating into anti-Christian violence in Jerusalem?"--Religion News (2/2/2023). From the lede:

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is seen by many as largely a conflict between Israeli Jews and Arab Muslims. But the events of the last month in Jerusalem suggest a new element has emerged for those closely watching the situation. In the past few weeks, five anti-Christian violent incidents took place in Jerusalem at the hands of Jewish radicals, provoking the Franciscans who are custodians of the Christian holy sites in the city to issue a statement detailing some of these acts.

• "Christians in the Holy Land say they’re under attack as Israeli-Palestinian violence soars"--NBC News (4/20/2023).

    But church officials and Christian leaders in Israel say this was far from an isolated incident. As tensions over Jewish and Muslim holy sites have erupted in recent weeks, spiraling into violence between Israelis and Palestinians, Christians in the Holy Land say they’re under attack, too.

    Although they blame a minority of Jewish extremists for the attacks, they say Israel’s far-right government has fostered a culture of impunity for attacks on non-Jews, emboldening the nation’s most extreme elements. 

    In January, ultra-Orthodox Jewish lawmakers allied with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed imposing jail time for Christian proselytizing, although after a global outcry, Netanyahu said he would block the bill.

    Dimitri Diliani, head of the Palestinian National Christian Coalition, said he felt “more threatened” now by “Israeli policies than any other time.”

    “Staying here and protecting our heritage is becoming more difficult,” he said.

    In Christianity’s holiest city, churches have been graffitied and clergy who live and work here report being frequently spit on, harassed and even physically attacked by extremist Jews. Christian leaders say most incidents are never thoroughly investigated. 

    Exact numbers for anti-Christian incidents are hard to come by. But data compiled by Tag Meir, a Jewish group that opposes racism and violence against Israel’s minorities, suggest that there has been a dramatic rise in attacks by Jewish civilians on cemeteries, churches, monasteries and mosques in Israel and the occupied West Bank. The group has documented six such incidents in the first three months of 2023 alone, compared to just two in all of 2022 and three in 2021.

• "Israel's Christians horrified by hate crimes in Jerusalem"--Al Monitor (6/19/2023). An excerpt:

    Why did two young Jews spit at a disabled priest upon leaving the Greek Orthodox monastery in Jerusalem’s Old City? Why did they threaten another priest who was trying to help their victim with pepper spray? What caused a young Jew to enter the Tomb of the Virgin Mary on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives with an iron bar and to threaten worshippers with it?

    Tag Meir, an anti-racism organization, documented the two events that took place just days apart in March. The group’s chair Gadi Gvaryahu is convinced that these attacks can be attributed to the current rightwing-religious coalition.

    Gvaryahu, who documents hate crimes against Christians and Muslims and tracks the authorities’ responses to them, told Al-Monitor he believes that this influence can explain why this year and especially over the last few weeks there has been a disturbing rise in the number of violent attacks and incidents of vandalism targeting Christian clergy, pilgrims and institutions. Victims have been jostled and spat at, religious symbols and icons were defaced and inflammatory graffiti appeared near Christian institutions. Most of these attacks have taken place in Jerusalem’s Old City, near churches and monasteries.

    Tag Meir was founded to combat racism perpetrated by Jews against members of other faith groups, explained Gvaryahu. It's very concerned about the uptick in violence. Over the last few months, the list of incidents appearing on his desk has grown long.

    Gvaryahu told Al-Monitor that most Knesset members from the Jewish Power party, headed by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, advocate for the segregation of Jewish and Arab mothers in maternity wards. They believe that Jews are forbidden from renting or selling apartments to Arabs and that there is no such thing as Jewish terrorists.

    He identifies Jewish Power as a party that believes in “Jewish superiority,” an idea that endorses hate crimes and so-called “price tag” attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank and against Christians in Israel, especially Jerusalem. 

    “The far right considers Christians to be ‘idolaters,’ while surprisingly, Muslims pose less of a problem, at least religiously. This explains the dramatic rise in hate crimes against Christians in Jerusalem and Israel in general since January 2023. The current coalition also explains a similarly dramatic rise in the number of attacks against Palestinians in Judea and Samaria at the same time,” says Gvaryahu.

• "The Ancient Jewish Hatred of Christianity"--Occidental Observer (October 5, 2023). Quoting from the Jerusalem Post: 

    “The custom of spitting near churches or monasteries is an ancient Jewish tradition,” far-right activist Elisha Yered wrote on Monday in response to a video of Orthodox Jews spitting on Christian pilgrims. … 

 

    “The custom of spitting near churches or monasteries is an ancient Jewish tradition,” far-right activist Elisha Yered wrote on Monday in response to a video of Orthodox Jews spitting on Christian pilgrims.

    The former spokesperson for MK Limor Son Har-Melech, of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, said that there is an even a blessing that Jews are supposed to say when seeing a church: “Blessed is He who has patience for those who violate His will,” which Yered described as a “blessing that praises God for not immediately punishing idol worshipers for their wicked deeds.” …

It also quotes from a book about how the anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union largely arose because Jewish Bolsheviks were the most ardent about desecrating Russian Orthodox churches.