Holocaust as vicarious Past

32,790,364 articles and books Periodicals Literature Search Keyword Title Author Topic The Holocaust as vicarious past: Restoring the voices of memory to history. Link/Page Citation Some people want to forget where they've been; other people want to remember where they've never been. Eli Cohen and Gila Almagor, from their film, Under the Domim Tree HOW IS A POST-HOLOCAUST GENERATION OF ARTISTS supposed "to remember" events they never experienced directly? Born after Holocaust history into the time of its memory only, a new, media-savvy generation of artists rarely presumes to represent these events outside the ways they have vicariously known and experienced them. This post-war generation, after all, cannot remember the Holocaust as it actually occurred. All they remember, all they know of the Holocaust, is what the victims have passed down to them in their diaries, what the survivors have remembered to them in their memoirs. They remember not actual events, but the countless histories, novels, and poems of the Holocaust they have read, the photographs, movies, and video testimonies they have seen over the years. They remember long days and nights in the company of survivors, listening to their harrowing tales, until their lives, loves, and losses seem grafted onto their own life stories. Coming of age after--but indelibly shaped by-the Holocaust, this generation of artists, writers, architects, and even composers does not attempt to represent events they never knew immediately but instead portray their own, necessarily hyper-mediated experiences of memory. It is a generation no longer willing, or able, to recall the Holocaust separately from the ways it has been passed down to them. By portraying the Holocaust as a "vicarious past," these artists insist on maintaining a distinct boundary between their work and the testimony of their parents' generation. Such work recognizes their parents' need to testify to their experiences on the one hand, even to put the Holocaust "behind them." But by calling attention to their vicarious relationship to events, the next generation ensures that their "post-memory" of events remains an unfinished, ephemeral process, not a means toward definitive answers to impossible questions. Moreover, what further distinguishes these artists from their parents' generation is their categorical rejection of art's traditional redemptory function in the face of catastrophe. For these artists, the notion that such suffering might be redeemed by its aesthetic reflection, or that the terrible void left behind by the murder of Europe's Jews might be compensated by a nation's memorial forms is simply intolerable on both ethical and historical grounds. At the ethical level, this generation believes that squeezing beauty or pleasure from such events afterwards is not so much a benign reflection of the crime as it is an extension of it. At the historical level, these artists find that the aesthetic, religious, and political linking of destruction and redemption may actually have justified such terror in the killers' minds. Not only does this generation of artists intuitively grasp their inability to know the history of the Holocaust outside of the ways it has been passed down to them, but they also see history itself as a composite record of both events and these events' transmission to the next generation. This doesn't mean that their vicarious memory of the past thereby usurps the authority of history itself, or that of the historians and their research; after all, as they are the first to acknowledge, they inevitably rely on hard historical research for their knowledge of what happened, how and why. But in addition to the facts of Holocaust history, they recognize the further facts surrounding this history's transmission to them, that its history is being passed down to them in particular times and places. These are not mutually exclusive claims, or competing sets of facts, but both part of history's reality. Neither history nor memory is regarded by these artists as a zero-sum game in which one kind of history or memory ta kes away from another; nor is it a contest between kinds of knowledge, between what we know and how we know it; nor is it a contest between scholars and students of the Holocaust and the survivors themselves. For these artists know that the facts of history never "stand" on their own-but are always supported by the reasons for recalling such facts in the first place. For American artists like Art Spiegelman, David Levinthal, and Shimon Attie whose work I explore here, their subject is not the Holocaust so much as how they came to know it and how it has shaped their inner lives. Theirs is an unabashed terrain of memory, not of history, but no less worthy of exploration. When they go to represent this "vicarious past," they do so in the artistic forms and media they have already long practiced. When commix-artist Art Spiegelman remembers the Holocaust, therefore, he recalls both his father's harrowing story of survival and the circumstances under which he heard it. In his "comixture" of images and narrative, he is able to tell both stories simultaneously, turning them into a single, double-stranded narrative. When photographer David Levinthal was asked by his art teacher at Yale why he took photographs of toys in historical tableaux instead of historical reality itself, he answered simply that the vintage Nazi figurines he collected and photographed were his historical reality, the only remnants of the past he personally experienced. By photographing his imagined recreations of Nazi pageantry, their war-machine, and murder of the Jews, Levinthal would limit his representations to an exploration of that which he knows from history books, photographs, and mass-media images. Similarly, in his European environmental installations, artist Shimon Attie has projected archival photographic images of the past--his memory--back onto the otherwise amnesiac sites of history in order to reanimate these sites with his "memory" of what happened there. Haunted by what he regarded as the specter of missing Jews in Berlin's Scheunenviertel, Attie projected photographs of Jews from this quarter taken in the 1920s and 1930s back ont o their original sites. Here he has literally projected the "after-images" in his mind back onto otherwise indifferent landscapes. Spiegelman's Maus As becomes clear, especially to the author himself, Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale is not about the Holocaust so much as about the survivor's tale itself and the artist-son's recovery of it. In Spiegelman's own words, 'Maus is not what happened in the past, but rather what the son understands of the father's story.... It is an autobiographical history of my relationship with my father, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, cast with cartoon animals." (2) As his father recalled what happened to him at the hands of the Nazis, his son, Art, recalls what happened to him at the hands of his father and his father's stories. As his father told his experiences to Art, in all their painful immediacy, Art tells his experiences of the storytelling sessions themselves-in all of their somewhat less painful mediacy. That Spiegelman has chosen to represent the survivor's tale, as passed down to him in what he calls the "commix," is neither surprising nor controversial. After all, as a commix-artist and founder of Raw Magazine, Spiegelman has only turned to what has always been his working artistic medium. That the "commix" would serve such a story so well, however, is what I would like to explore here. On the one hand, Spiegelman seems to have realized that in order to remain true to both his father's story and his own experience of it, he would have to remain true to his medium. But in addition, he has also cultivated the unique capacity in the "commix-ture" of image and narrative for telling the double-stranded tale of his father's story and his own recording of it. While Spiegelman acknowledges that the very word comics "brings to mind the notion that they have to be funny ... humor itself is not an intrinsic component of the medium. Rather than comics," he continues, "I prefer the word commix, to mix together, because to talk about comics is to talk about mixing together words and pictures to tell a story." (3) Moreover, Spiegelman explains, "The strength of commix lies in [its] synthetic ability to approximate a 'mental language' that is closer to actual human thought than either words or pictures alone." (4) Here he also cites the words of what he calls the patron saint of commix, Swiss educational theorist and author Rodolphe Topffer (1799--1846): "The drawings without their text would have only a vague meaning; the text without the drawings would have no meaning at all. The combination makes up a kind of novel--all the more unique in that it is no more like a novel than it is like anything else." (5) For unlike a more linear historical narrative, the "comix-ture" o f words and images generates a triangulation of meaning--a kind of three-dimensional narrative--in the movement between words, images, and the reader's eye. Moreover, the box-panels convey information in both vertical and horizontal movements of the eye, as well as in the analog of images implied by the entire page appearing in the background of any single panel. The narrative sequence of his boxes, with some ambiguity as to the order in which they are to be read, combines with and then challenges the narrative of his father's story--itself constantly interrupted by Art's questions and own neurotic preoccupations, his father's pill-taking, the rancorous father-son relationship, his father's new and sour marriage. As a result, Spiegelman's narrative is constantly interrupted by--and integrative of--life itself, with all its dislocutions, associations, and paralyzing self-reflections. It is a narrative echoing with the ambient noise and issues surrounding its telling. The roundabout method of memory-telling is captured here in ways unavailable to more linear narrative. It is a narrative that tells both the story of events and its own unfolding as narrative. Other aspects of Spiegelman's specific form and technique further incorporate the process of drawing Maus into its finished version. By drawing his panels in a 1:1 ratio, for example, instead of drawing large panels and then shrinking them down to page size, Spiegelman reproduces his hand's movement in scale--its shakiness, the thickness of his drawing pencil line, the limits of miniaturization, all to put a cap on detail and fine line, and so keep the pictures underdetermined. This would be the equivalent of the historian's voice, not as it interrupts the narrative, however, but as it constitutes it. Written over a 13-year period between 1972 and 1985, the first volume of Maus thus integrated both narrative and anti-narrative elements of the comics, embedding the father's altogether coherent story in a medium ever threatening to fly apart at the seams. The result is a continuous narrative rife with the discontinuities of its reception and production, the absolutely authentic voice of his father counterposed to the fabular images of cartoon animals. In its self-negating logic, Spiegelman's commix also suggests itself as a pointedly anti-redemptory medium that simultaneously makes and unmakes meaning as it unfolds. Words tell one story, images another. Past events are not redeemed in their telling but are here exposed as a continuing cause of the artist's inability to find meaning anywhere. Meaning is not negated altogether, but, created in the father's telling, is immediately challenged in the son's reception and visualization of it. In fact, the "story" is not a single story at all but two stories being told simultaneously: the father's story and Spiegelman's imaginative record of it. It is double-stranded and includes the competing stories of what his father says and what Artie hears, what happened during the Holocaust and what happens now in Artie's mind. As a process, it makes visible the space between what gets told and what gets heard, what gets heard and what gets seen. The father says one thing as we see him doing something else. Artie promises not to betray certain details only to show us both the promise and betrayal together. Indeed, it may be Artie's unreliability as a son that makes his own narrative so reliable. The story now includes not just "what happened," but how what happened is made sense of by father and son in the telling. At the same time, it highlights both the inseparability of his father's story from its effect on Artie and the story's own necessarily contingent coming into being. All of which might be lost to either images or narrative alone, or even to a reception that did not remark its own unfolding. David Levinthal's "Mein Kampf" Like other children of his generation, or like all who were blessedly removed from Europe during the war, David Levinthal's memory of the Holocaust was only and always a composite pastiche of television images, toys, and the stories he made up during years of war play. The reality of war and Holocaust was necessarily reduced to the miniature reality of his playthings, the intensely felt reality of his romper-room simulations. It cannot be surprising, therefore, that when photographer and toy-collector David Levinthal began to re-examine his memory of the Holocaust, he found himself reflecting once again on the toys by which he had first grasped history. But when he began to photograph these toys in 1972, one of his M.F.A. photography teachers at Yale asked him, "Why don't you take pictures of the real world, of reality?" Levinthal answered, perhaps a little too honestly, that "These toys are my reality!" Rather than forgetting that his relationship to the Holocaust would always be an imagined, make-believe one, he chose to make his vicarious past-as embodied in these simulations-the subject of his photographs. For when an artist like David Levinthal sets out "to remember" the Holocaust, all he can actually remember are the numberless images passed down to him in books, films, and photographs. When he sets out "to photograph" the Holocaust, therefore, he takes pictures of his Holocaust experiences-i.e., recirculated images of the Holocaust. Indeed, the visual reality of the Holocaust for Levinthal and his generation is forever only the record of photographs and documentary film. The physical reality of the Holocaust exists now only in its consequences, its effects and simulations: the rest is memory, itself increasingly shaped by the reality of our simulations. This memory" is not the animate memory of one who was there, but is rather as static and inert as the photos themselves, the images already small and toy-like. As a late-twentieth-century photographer, David Levinthal is hardly alone in his fascination with the ready-made simulacrum. "One of my favorite [Eugene Atget] photographs is a shop window full of hats on [mannequin] heads," Levinthal tells us. (6) Like Atget's photographs of mannequins, or Hans Bellmer's surreal photographs of recomposed dolls in process, or Jorge Ribalta's more recent portraiture of sculpted busts, or Laurie Simmons's photographs of mock-domestic doll tableaux, or Cindy Sherman's disturbing mutilated doll images, Levinthal's photographs have always taken the imitations of reality, not reality itself, as their subject. (7) For Levinthal's media-saturated generation, it could even be said that these ready-made simulations have become the primary reality of events to which they refer. Because historical events constantly pass into the ether of time, they remain "present" only in memory, imagination, and their material representations. The artists of the photo-conceptual vanguard have thus turned their interrogating eye to the simulations of reality as relentlessly as a prior generation of photographers once explored what they regarded as a natural and unmediated world. In the process, Levinthal et al. continue to reveal the ways the world is constantly packaged and repackaged for us in a commodity culture. By taking as their subject ready-made simulations only, such photographs mock the culture with the reductive banality of its simulations, even as they leave us hungry for the "real thing," for a real world constantly displaced by its media product. In the hands of photo-conceptual artists, toys and their reflected images evoke not only memories of childhood and private inner lives, but also embody the realities and preoccupations of adult life, as well as larger public issues of history and our vicarious relationship to it through art. Finally, through their "fabricated photography," these artists also ask to what extent reality itself is always a kind of ongoing fabrication--not as a kind of fiction, but more literally as that which is constantly being improvised, moment by moment. (8) In the case of Mein Kampf, the artist's second foray into memory of the wartime, the result is a disturbing and provocative series of over-sized Polaroid photographs depicting the artist's own dramatically staged tableaux of toy Nazi soldiers and their figurine victims. As Levinthal is quick to clarify, these images do not capture Holocaust history so much as they do the artist's struggle to capture his own hyper-mediated reality of the Holocaust. Moreover, Levinthal's carefully choreographed and staged photo-tableaux have their own history, their own process, which are as much a part of their significance as the content of the glossy images themselves. Levinthal's "toyland of Holocaust history," like much contemporary art, was not meant to stand by or for themselves. But rather, they are necessarily part of the artist's larger oeuvre, a life's work dedicated to exploring the fuzzy line between the photograph's traditional function as documentary record of external reality and its more recently acknowledged role in revealing the inner realities of the mind's eye. (9) It is David Levinthal's struggle between what he knows and how he has known it, between Holocaust history and how it has been passed down to him in the popular, all too mythologized icons of television and photographs. For whether we like it or not, once icons of the Holocaust enter the popular imagination, they also turn mythic, hard and impenetrable. Levinthal insists that these new mini-spectacles are as object-driven as his earlier projects: the little Nazi drummer corps is set before something resembling the Brandenburg Gate; a soldier and dog patrol outside guard tower and wire fence; a woman holding a child whirls away from a German soldier aiming a rifle at her from inches away. But it is also clear that each of these toys has sparked a particular visual association in the artist's mind, the memory of an image, which the artist then brings into physical relief. And because they are meant to evoke, not mime, and to stimulate the imagination but not simulate actual historical realities, these photographs are shot in what Levinthal terms a "narrative style": what the artist has characterized as "intentionally ambiguous to draw the viewer in so that you make your own story." (10) Or as he elaborates in another interview, "I think I create a window that allows the viewer to come into an image that appears to be more complete than it really is. It become s complete when the viewer becomes a participant and fills in the missing details."(11) That is, added to the artist's story as he constructed the tableaux are the stories viewers tell themselves about what they see. These pieces depend on narrative for their lives, animated by the stories we tell about them. Levinthal accomplishes this ambiguity by shooting these tableaux at Polaroid's New York studio with a 20x24 Land Camera, its aperture set wide open, to create an extremely shallow focal plane-hence, the blurry fore- and backgrounds. The more ambiguous, under-determined, and oblique the image, the more it seems to invite the viewer's own narrative. The sharper the image, the more repellent it is of multiple-readings, for it crowds out the reader's projected story with the clutter of its own detail. The essential tension in Levinthal's particular medium is that between the toy's fixedness and the camera's seeming liquification of its material hardness. In this way, he turns the traditional assumption of photographic precision against itself, extending the range of the camera inward to include the mind's eye and imagination. Depending on the particular image, the focal plane in Levinthal's work lies just before or behind the toy objects, never on them. Rather than concentrating the mind on the toy-object, the focal plane takes us into the space between the object and its once-worldly referent, into the space between it and us--where the mind is forced to imagine and thereby collaborate. The indistinct lines don't absorb the eye as sharp images might, but instead the soft focus deflects the mind's eye away from the object and inward, back into itself. In the seemingly iconic image of guard tower, fence, soldier and dog, it is the rich black and blues tints of the sky that absorb the eye, pulling the mind through the figures into the space behind them. This is a kind of reverse reality effect: I stare and realize that the darker and less discernible the dog and soldier, the more real they become in my mind. In almost every one of the images from Levinthal's Mein Kampf series, many more questions-aesthetic, personal, and historical-are raised than answered: What is the relationship of the artist to events? Does such a medium trivialize memory even as it interrogates it? What of the history itself is understood through such images? And what do such images tell us about our relationship to the Holocaust now, 50 years later? The cool and studied polish of these images constantly reminds us of their aesthetic intervention between then and now. They are staged to look deliberately staged, choreographed to show their choreography. All rawness is gone, all innocence put to flight. Resonant with our own corrupted memory traces, these photographs show us how far away from actual events the icons of our culture have already taken us. (12) To this day, many people insist that there are some scenes from the Holocaust that cannot ethically be represented. Since no one survived the gas chambers to describe the terror there, its darkness has remained absolute. Other areas on which artists are practically forbidden to tread include the sexuality of victims, the possible sad o-sexuality of the killers. When I objected to what seemed to be a deliberate eroticization of the murder process and tried to talk the artist into eliding from the exhibition several images, the artist responded that Art Spiegelman had also tried to talk him out of showing those. "But nowhere in the literature have I found anything to suggest an erotic component to the killing process," I said, "only in the imaginations of those who weren't there, like D. M. Thomas in his novel, The White Hotel." To which Levinthal replied that whether or not there was actually a sexual, erotic component to the murder process, it remains certainly-if unfortunately-true that in many of its popular representations, the Holocaust has been eroticized, whether we like it or not. Since his subject is the readymade simulation of the Holocaust, he was only showing a Holocaust pornokitsch already at play in the cultural transformations of these terrible scenes. In popular movies like Schindler's List or Sophie's Choice, or novels like The White Hotel, for example, Eros and Thanatos are twinned as constituent elements of Holocaust victimization, projected reflexively onto victims by a culture obsessed with both, a culture that has long linked the two as fatally interconnected, a culture that has eventually grown dependent on their union for commercial and entertainment value. (13) Moreover, he believes that both killers and victims understood that part of the dehumanization of the Jews included their sexual degradation in the moments before death. As women have been objectified in these toys and the Jews were objectified by the Nazis, the victims would here be presented as objectified twice over. Designed as sexual objects to begin with, the dolls are used to recapitulate not only the relationship between killers and victims but also, if more implicitly, that between contemporary viewers and these very images. Here Levinthal suggests that with every representation of their murder, the Jews are in some sense murdered again and again. Robbed of life by the Nazi gunmen, the victims are robbed of their dignity by the observing photographer--and then again with the recirculation of such images. Only now we are the passive bystanders, and not so innocent at that. The complicated role such images play in the public sphere came into especially sharp relief in a slightly different context a few years ago in Jerusalem. When confronted by leaders of the ultra-Orthodox community in Jerusalem, the curators at Israel's national Holocaust memorial museum, Yad Vashem, refused to remove wall-sized photographs taken by the Nazis of naked Jewish women on their way to the gas chambers at Treblinka (many of them orthodox and so violated unequivocably by the S.S. photographer at the moment). The museum replied that because this degradation, too, was part of the reality of the Holocaust, it had to be shown as part of the historical record--whether or not it offended the religious community's own rigorous sense of modesty. In the eyes of the religious community, however, the humiliation and violation of these women's modesty was as much a part of the crime as their eventual murder. That their modesty would be violated yet again by the viewers now may even suggest not so much a repetit ion of the crime as an extension of it. At the same time, despite the curators' stated aim of maintaining the exhibit's historical integrity, the museum may have refused to acknowledge another historical reality: the possibility of their visitors' pornographic gaze. Will we ever know all the reasons why people are transfixed by these images? Is the historical record of past travesties enough to blind us to the possibility of present travesties on the parts of viewers? Can we say with certainty that every museum visitor's gaze is as pure as the curators' historical intent? For the fine line between exhibition and exhibitionistic remains as fragile as it is necessary, even in the hands of scrupulous historians and curators. At least part of what makes these images so unnerving for viewers is their suggestion that we, as viewers, may be no less complicit in the continuing degradation of the victim than the original Nazi photographer. For Levinthal, the question was never whether to show such images, but rather how to ask in them: to what extent do we always re-objectify a victim by reproducing images of the victim as victim? To what extent do we participate in this degradation by reproducing and then viewing it? To what extent do these images ironize and thereby repudiate such representations? Or to what extent do these images feed on the same prurient energy they purportedly expose? Or as Saul Friedlander has already asked, "Is such attention fixed on the past only a gratuitous reverie, the attraction of spectacle, exorcism, or the result of a need to understand; or is it, again and still, an expression of profound fears and, on the part of some, mute yearnings as well? (14) By leaving these questions unanswered, Levinthal confronts us with our own role in the representation of mass murder, the ways we cover our eyes and peek through our fingers at the same time. Shimon Attie's "Writing on the Wall" In "Sites Unseen," Shimon Attie's series of European installations between 1991 and 1996, the artist has not only projected his necessarily mediated memory of a now lost Jewish past onto otherwise forgetful sites. But in so doing, he has also attempted a simultaneous critique of his own hyper-mediated relationship to the past. By literally bathing the sites of a now invisible Jewish past in the photographic images of their historical pasts, he simulataneously looks outward and inward for memory: for he hopes that once seen, the images of these projections will always haunt these sites by haunting those who have seen his projections. The sites of a lost Jewish past in Europe would thus retain traces of this past, if now only in the eyes of those who have seen Attie's installations. When Shimon Attie moved to Berlin in 1991, he found a city haunted by the absence of its murdered and deported Jews. Like many Jewish Americans preoccupied by the Holocaust and steeped in its seemingly ubiquitous images, he saw Jewish ghosts in Europe's every nook and cranny: from the Scheunenviertel in Berlin to the central train station in Dresden; from the canals of Copenhagen to those of Amsterdam; from Cologne's annual art fair to Krakow's Kazimierz neighborhood. For Attie, however, private acts of remembrance in which he alone saw the faces and forms of now absent Jews in their former neighborhoods were not enough. He chose, therefore, to actualize these inner visions, to externalize them, and in so doing to make them part of a larger public's memory. Once thus actualized, he hoped, these images would continue to haunt the sites even when no longer visible, and enter the inner worlds of all who saw them. He hoped that once others had become witnesses to his memorial projections, the installations themse lves would no longer be necessary. "After finishing art school in San Francisco, I came to Berlin in the summer of 1991," Shimon Attie writes in his introduction to a book for "The Writing on the Wall." "Walking the streets of the city that summer, I felt myself asking over and over again, Where are all the missing people? What has become of the Jewish culture and community which had once been at home here? I felt the presence of this lost community very strongly, even though so few visible traces of it remained." (5) Strangely enough, it was not the absence of Berlin's lost Jews that Attie felt so strongly, but their presence. For in fact, though they may have been invisible to others walking those same streets, Attie's memory and imagination had already begun to repopulate the Scheunenviertel district in Berlin with the Jews of his mind. After several weeks of photographic research in Berlin's archives, Attie had found dozens of images from the Scheunenviertel of the 1920s and 1930s and was able to pinpoint nearly one-quarter of their precise locations in the current neighborhood just east of Berlin's Alexanderplatz, formerly in the eastern sector of the city. That September, only three months after moving to Berlin, Attie began projecting slides of these photographs onto the same or nearby addresses where they had been taken earlier in the century. "'The Writing on the Wall' grew out of my response to the discrepancy between what I felt and what I did not see," Attie explains. "I wanted to give this invisible past a voice, to bring it to light, if only for some brief moments" (9). And so for the next year, weather permitting, Attie projected these images of Jewish life from the Scheunenviertel before the Holocaust back into present-day Berlin. Each installation ran for one or two evenings, visible to local residents, street traffic, and pas sersby. During these projections, the artist also photographed the installations themselves in time exposures lasting from three to four minutes. The resulting photographs of the installations have been exhibited widely in galleries and museums, works of fine art in their own right, the only remaining traces of the original installations. Once projected onto the peeling and mottled building facades of this quarter, these archival images seem less the reflections of light than illuminations of figures emerging from the shadows. In his own words, Attie says he wanted "to peel back the wallpaper of today and reveal the history buried underneath."(16) From the doorways, in particular, former Jewish residents seem to be stepping out of a third dimension. Some, like the resident standing in the doorway at Joachimstrasse 2, are caught unaware by both the original photographer and now, it seems, by us. Others, like the religious book salesman at the corner of what was formerly the corner of Grenadierstrasse and Schendelgasse, seems to have been interrupted by the photographer, and has turned his head sideways to gaze impassively back at us. Because the streets of the dilapidated Scheunenoiertel (called the Finstere Medine, or "dark quarter" by its Yiddish-speaking denizens) are still largely run down, as were many parts of the formerly East Berlin wh en the wall came down, the projected images added a life to these streets that they appeared otherwise not to have. Ironically, of course, the "voice" Attie gave these absentJews was at times also the voice of residents objecting to the project itself. 'While Attie was installing the Buchhandler slide projection, for example, a 50-year-old man suddenly came running out of the building shouting that his father had bought the building "fair and square" from Mr. Jacobs in 1938. "And what happened to this Mr. Jacobs?" Attie asked the man. "Why, of course, he was a multi-millionaire and moved to New York." (17) Of course. All of which was captured by German television cameras who broadcast the confrontation that night on national news. Attie couldn't have scripted this particular projection any more powerfully. Another resident called the police to complain angrily that Attie's projections of Jews onto his building would make his neighbors think that he was Jewish. Make him stop, he pleaded. The response is as much a part of these works as the installations themselves, the artist says. The installation thus included both the projections of Attie's inner obsessions, as well as the counter-projections of the neighborhood residents' own obsessions. Without these responses, the installations, like the buildings themselves, remain inert, inanimate, dead. Indeed, even though these images may have disappeared from sight as soon as Attie turned off the high-intensity projector, their after-image lived on in the minds of those who had seen them once. From this point on, the images of these Jews "live" only as their subjects lived before them: in the photographs of these installations. These are quite literally photographs of photographs we are seeing here, just as the local burghers now walk their neighborhoods haunted by their memory of Attie's memory-installation. They are now haunted not by the Jews who had once lived here, or even by their absence, but by the images of Jews haunting the artist's mind. As Michael Andre Bernstein has made so painfully clear, photography is always about loss, about the absence of what was once real in front of the lens: hence, the essential melancholia at the heart of the photograph. "To look at a photograph," Bernstein writes, "is to experience a certain sorrow at the sheer fact of loss and separation, curiously mingled with the pleasure of recognizing that what no longer exists, has been, if not restored to us, then at least memorialized for us, fixed in the stasis of an image now forever available to our gaze." (18) Insofar as this bitter-sweet mixture of sorrow and pleasure necessarily haunts our experience of all photographs, its extremes seem wildly exaggerated in these wall projections. For it's true, they are beautiful and chilling, slightly exhilarating and depressing; they inspire longing and fear, hope and despair. By keeping the mixture between sorrow and pleasure in balance, they can also keep their potential for redemption in check, never allowing the pain of s uch loss to be redeemed by the beauty of the image itself. In this way, these installations have served as a somewhat literal metaphor for the artist's projection of his own inner desires onto the walls around him. All of us wish we could bring the victims back to life, to repair the terrible wound. But "The Writing on the Wall" is no such reparation or bringing back to life; it is, rather, the reminder of what was lost, not what was. At the same time, it is clear in Attie's mind, as he means for it to be in ours, that these projections are simulations, not historical reconstructions. Their immense value lies not in showing us literally what was lost but in showing that loss itself is part of this neighborhood's history, an invisible but essential feature of its landscape. No doubt, some will see the work of these artists as a supremely evasive, even self-indulgent art by a generation more absorbed in their own vicarious experiences of memory than by the survivors' actual experiences of real events. (19) Others will say that if the second or third generation want to make art out of the Holocaust, then let it be about the Holocaust itself and not about themselves. The problem for much of these artists' generation, of course, is that they are unable to remember the Holocaust outside of the ways it has been passed down to them, outside of the ways it is meaningful to them fifty years after the fact. As the survivors have testified to their experiences of the Holocaust, their children and children's children will now testify to their experiences of the Holocaust. And what are their experiences of the Holocaust? Photographs, film, histories, novels, poems, plays, survivors' testimony. It is necessarily mediated experience, the after-life of memory, represented in history's after-ima ges: the impressions retained in the mind's eye of a vivid sensation long after the original, external cause has been removed. Why represent all that? Because for those in Spiegelman's, Levinthal's, and Attie's generation, to leave out the truth of how they came to know the Holocaust would be to ignore half of what actually happened: we would know what happened to Spiegelman's father but miss what happened to the artistson. But isn't the important story what happened to the father at Auschwitz? Yes, but without exploring why it's important, we leave out part of the story itself. Is it self-indulgent or self-aggrandizing to make the listener's story part of the teller's story? This generation doubts that it can be done otherwise. They can no more neglect the circumstances surrounding a story's telling than they can ignore the circumstances surrounding the actual events' unfolding. Neither the events nor the memory of them take place in avoid. In the end, these artists ask us to consider which is the more truthful account: that narrative or art which ignores its own coming into being, or that which paints this fact, too, into its canva s of history? For artists at home in their respective media, whether it is the "commix" of Spiegelman or the vanguard photography of Levinthal, questions about the appropriateness of their forms seem irrelevant. These artists remain as true to their forms and chosen media as they do to their "memory" of events. But for those less at home in the languages of contemporary art, the possibility that form--especially the strange and new-might overwhelm the content of such memory-work leads some to suspect the artists' motives. Historian Omer Bartov, for example, has expressed his sense of "unease" with what he describes as the "cool aesthetic pleasure" that derives from the more "highly stylized" of postmodern Holocaust representations. (20) Part of what troubles Bartov is that such work seems more preoccupied with being stimulating and interesting in and of itself than it is with exploring events and the artist's relationship to them afterward. Also implied here is an understandable leeriness on Bartov's part of the possibilit y that such art draws on the power of the Holocaust merely to energize itself and its forms. Even more disturbing for Bartov, however, is the question Saul Friedlander raised several years ago in his own profound meditations on "fascinating fascism," in which Friedlander wonders whether an aesthetic obsession with Fascism may be less a reflection on Fascism than it is an extension of it. Here Friedlander asks whether a brazen new generation of artists bent on examining their own obsession with Nazism adds to our understanding of the Third Reich or only recapitulates a fatal attraction to it. "Nazism has disappeared," Friedlander writes, but the obsession it represents for the contemporary imagination-as well as the birth of a new discourse that ceaselessly elaborates and reinterprets it- necessarily confronts us with this ultimate question: Is such attention fixed on the past only a gratuitous reverie, the attraction of spectacle, exorcism, or the result of a need to understand; or is it, again and still, an expression of profound fears and, on the part of some, mute yearnings as well? (21) As the artists whose work I explore here suggest, the question remains open. Not because every aesthetic interrogation of the Holocaust also contains some yearning for "fascinating fascism." But because they believe that neither artist nor historian can positively answer yes or no to this question. NOTES (1.) This essay has been adapted from my full-length study, At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000) for presentation at "The Future of the Holocaust," a symposium at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, 25 February 2001. (2.) From author's interview with Art Spiegelman, as well as from Art Spiegelman, "Commix: An Idiosyncratic Historical and Aesthetic Overview," Print (November/December 1988): 61. (3.) Art Spiegelman, "Commix: An Idiosyncratic Historical and Aesthetic Overview": 61. (4.) From Jane Kalir, "The Road to Maus," at Galerie St. Etienne, November 17, 1992 through January 9, 1993: 2. (5.) Art Spiegelman 61. (6.) Quotedin The Wild West: Photographs by David Levinthal (Washington, DC/London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), p. 5. (7.) In an eye-opening essay on the work of Hans Bellmer, Herbert Lust wrote that "Any artist interested in the female body's endless possibilities or 'forbidden' mental states must reckon with [Hans] Bellmer" ("For Women Are Endless Forms: Hans Bellmer's Dark Art," Sulfur (Spring 1990): 47). While this is undoubtedly so, it maybe equally true that neither can viewers today see any of these contemporary artists' work without recalling Bellmer's early conceptual photographs of his violently reconstituted doll. Moreover, when we recall that Bellmer made and photographed this doll in 1934 Germany as an explicit protest, dissent and challenge to the unyielding absolutism of the Nazis, Levinthal's images of erotic dolls as Holocaust victims begin to resonate as a kind of protest art and further breaking of cultural taboos. (8.) For a fuller elaboration of both Levinthal's place among the "photo-conceptual vanguard" and the place of his Mein Kampfseries in his larger corpus of work, see Charles Stainback and Richard B. Woodward, David Levinthal: Work from 7975-7996 (New York: The International Center of Photography, 1997), a catalogue for a retrospective exhibition of the artist's work. (9.) This chapter is adapted from my catalogue essay, "David Levinthal's Mein Kampf Memory, Toys, and the Play of History," in David Levinthal, Mein Kampf (Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 1996), pp. 67-83. (10.) From The Wild West: Photographs by David Levinthal, p. 7. (11.) From interview with Richard B. Woodward in David Levinthal Workfrom 1975-1976, p. 153. (12.) Reviews of Levinthal's Mein Kampf were generally, if warily, positive. In almost every case, reviewers were moved by the power of the images on the one hand, even as they were made intensely uncomfortable by their subject-and its relentlessly cool treatment. "Lovely to look at, horrific to behold" was how Robin Cembalist put it in her review of Mein Kampf in the Forward ("Levinthal's Disturbing Photos of Nazis in Toyland," Forward [11 November 1994]: 9). Others, like Sarah Boxer, wonder whether Levinthal can't help but become part of the pornographic culture he proposes to be exploring ("Hardly Child's Play: Shoving Toys Into Darkest Corners," New York Times [24 January 1997]: C--7). (13.) For an elaboration of the ways women's corpses, in particular, have been represented as emblematic in our culture, see Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Rody: Configurations of Femininity, Death & the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge Press, 1992). (14.) Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), p. 19. (15.) Shimon Attie, "The Writing on the Wall Project," in The Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin's Jewish Quarter (Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 1994), p.9. (16.) Quoted in Guy Chazan, "Ghosts of the Ghettos," London Times (25 January 1995). (17.) As related by the artist to the author in an interview. This exchange is also described by Attie in The Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin's Jewish Quarter, 12. (18.) Michael Andre Bernstein, "Shimon Attie: Images as Memory-Memory of Images," in Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin's Jewish Quarter, p. 6. (19.) In responding to my call for interweaving a history of events with a reflection on how Holocaust history comes to be told, for example, a well-respected historian, Peter Hayes, suggested that such a study, "as well as Saul Friedlander's recent work, lavishes talents on a project not quite worthy of [Young and Friedlander]. Their preoccupations reflect a sort of scholasticism now quite rampant in the academy in which commonplace problems of technique are mistaken for profound matters of substance, in which how we learn and relate what we know becomes as intellectually significant and preoccupying as the knowledge itself, and in which-in self-flattering fashion-the scholars who interpret and the students who learn become the subject of inquiry, inevitably displacing the participants themselves." Here I am grateful to Peter Hayes for sending me his "Comment in Response" to an early version of "Toward a Received History of the Holocaust," both delivered as parts of a panel on "Contemporary Interpretations of the Holocaust," at the annual Social Science History Association Conference, New Orleans, 12 October 1996. (20.) Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation(Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 116. (21.) Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, p. 19. JAMES E. YOUNG, a Contributing Editor, is Professor of English and Chair of Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the author of At Memory's Edge (2000), The Texture of Memory (1993), and Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (1988). His article, "Germany's Vanishing Holocaust Monuments," appeared in the Fall 1994 issue. COPYRIGHT 2002 American Jewish Congress No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder. Copyright 2002 Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. Please bookmark with social media, your votes are noticed and appreciated: Article Details Printer friendly Cite/link Email Feedback Author: Young, James E. Publication: Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought Article Type: Excerpt Geographic Code: 1USA Date: Jan 1, 2002 Words: 7614 Previous Article: The future of the Holocaust: Storytelling, oppression, and identity; See under: "apocalypse". Next Article: B'reshit. Related Articles In the shadow of history: second generation writers and artists and the shaping of Holocaust memory in Israel and America. CAMP HUMOUR OR SUBLIME HORROR? Experiencing Explaining, and Exploiting the Holocaust. New Holocaust curriculum in Israel. The topographies of memory in Berlin: The Neue Wache and the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. Thinking about the Holocaust and its Visual Culture. Integrity and relevance: shaping Holocaust memory at the Sydney Jewish Museum. Millicent Marcus. Italian Film In the Shadow of Auschwitz. Bibliography for work in Holocaust studies. Trajectories of memory; intergenerational representations of the Holocaust in history and the arts. 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The Pride in the Cross

32,790,364 articles and books Periodicals Literature Search Keyword Title Author Topic The pride in the Cross signaling the New Creation. Link/Page Citation As for the impact of the epilogue, "we should begin it by saying that we have kept our promise, then we will develop what we have said and why" (Aristotle 1898: III, 19. 5). Between the beginning and the epilogue there must be a close connection. In the beginning we have to establish the topic lest the issue we need to decide upon should remain unnoticed, in the epilogue we should give a summary of the arguments and evidence. (Aristotle 1898: III, 19. 3-4) In the line of Aristotle, one could say that in Galatians, between 1: 6-10 (beginning) and 6: 11-18 (epilogue) there is a connection: Semantically, these two paragraphs indicate a world in which Paul, teaching the true gospel, expects the blessing of God, but instead he suffers from physical persecution, while the other teachers, promoting the bogus gospel, avoid persecution, and incur the wrath of God. Between these two alternatives, the Galatians are hesitating. (Parunak 1992: 221) In 6: 11-18, Paul's intended rhetoric is to summarize its message in the style of "peroratio, whose main purpose is precisely to give the lawyer or the rhetorician the opportunity to briefly summarize the main points of the discourse and inspire the audience with strong emotional impressions." (Buscemi 2004: 603) While Paul presented his epilogue in Galatians 6: 11-18 in forensic terms, in front of the lawyer (Betz 1979: 313), the same epilogue gives him the opportunity to present a summary of the message of the Letter to Galatians, in epideictic terms. (Buscemi 2004: 600) The second rhetorical line implies that in the beginning (Galatians 1: 6-10) Paul explains the theme of the gospel in a kind of prooimion ("preamble"), in order to make kind and careful recipients through the explanation of speech. In fact, all through the Letter, he blames the recipients (3: 1-5) because they wanted to move to a different gospel through circumcision (5: 1-12), with a view to returning to the pagan mentality (4: 3, 9; 5: 19-21). The Galatians have been so changeable because of Judaizer agitators, against whom Paul had pronounced anathema (1: 8-9), so now, in the epilogue, he wishes upon them peace and mercy, if they follow the rule of the gospel. (6: 16) Paul has noticed this hesitation of the Galatians, and that is why he insists on the gospel received through revelation from Christ, which has as its central idea the pride in the Cross. We will focus on the manner the New Creation comes, in Paul's concept, from a way of relating to the Cross of the Lord, by taking the example of the Apostle. His considerations become a new canon to the Galatians, as well as for the Christians of all times. In this sense, I will construct my argument along three lines: 1) In praise of the Cross; 2) The New Creation; 3) The canon of the New Creation. In praise of the Cross The Letter to the Galatians, summarized in the epilogue of 6: 1-18, shows the pride in the Cross as a sign of the New Creation, of which Paul is a genuine witness. The verbal root "estaur" in Galatians 3: 1; 5: 24; 6: 14, as well as the noun root "staur" in Galatians 5: 11; 6: 12, 14, show the theological significance that Paul has already highlighted in Galatians 1 to 4 and now means to synthesize in the epilogue (Galatians 6: 11-18). These occurrences lead to the belief that the pride of Paul is based on Christ, who was described as crucified before the eyes of the Galatians, as in Galatians 3: 1. Moreover, it is the image of the crucified Christ on which the life of faith and ethics of Paul and believers is founded, a sign of belonging to the New Creation (Galatians 6: 15). Indeed, belonging to Christ makes Paul consider a source of pride to be persecuted for the Cross (Galatians 5: 11; 6: 14), and persuades the believers to crucify the flesh with its passions and lusts. (Galatians 5: 24) By the prominent "emoi de" of Galatians 6: 14, Paul stands in contrast to the Judaizers (Galatians 6: 13), regardless of the reason of pride, trying to attract the attention of Galatians to his behavior towards the Cross (Tolmie 2005: 223). While the Judaizers boast in circumcision, Paul takes pride in the Cross of the Lord Jesus (Galatians 6: 14), which has become a "cosmic event" (Bultmann 1984: 303), and to be sure shows a link with the Apostle's life. The reason for the separation is not the Greek or Jewish origin (Galatians 3: 28), but the Cross of Jesus Christ (Galatians 1: 4). If the Cross is a credit to Paul, it also becomes a confirmation that he is not trying to gain the favor of men (Galatians 1: 10); on the contrary, it draws upon their persecution (Galatians 4: 29; 5: 11), which leaves marks of his acceptance of faith in his body. (Galatians 6: 17) The Judaizers did not get into the logic of the Cross (Galatians 6: 12), because they do not want to kill their own "selves," their way of looking at the law and the world. This is why they mean to establish their own pride on the meat of Galatians, through circumcision (Galatians 6: 13). Avoiding the scandal of the Cross, the Judaizers have moved off to another gospel, which does not exist (Galatians 1: 6-7), disregarding that the true gospel "frees only those who accept the reality of the crucifixion of this world." (Minear 1979: 399) That is precisely the attitude of Paul who, unlike the Judaizers, is taking pride in the Cross of Jesus, by which he was crucified for the world and the world for him. (Galatians 6: 14) In Galatians 2: 19 Paul already claims to have been crucified with Christ, while in Galatians 5: 24 he states that the believers in Christ Jesus have crucified flesh with its desires and passions. Echoing such statements in Galatians 6: 14, Paul reveals that the freedom of the Gospel comes from the Cross, hence from Christ (Galatians 2: 4), who "loved me and gave Himself for me." (Galatians 2: 20) The mediation of the Cross "concerns not only the theological basis of the transformation, but also the ethical contents of the new life" (Lategan 1988: 429-430). Aware that the Cross of Christ is the most sublime evidence of God's love for man, Paul is not ashamed to found his pride on the paradox of the Cross, that for the Judaizers could be a shame, not only a cause of persecution. Saying that one is dead to the law (Galatians 2: 19) means that one is freed from the obligations of the law, as dead men are no longer obliged to observe the law (Strack & Billerbeck 1922-1928: III, 233). Between death for the law and death for the world there is a similarity which consists in the Cross (Galatians 6: 14), that is being concrucified with Christ (Galatians 2: 19). However, the law cannot and should not be identified with the "world," which should rather be identified with the current evil eon, dominated by sin (Galatians 1: 4) and stoicheia (lit. "elements" / "elemental things" / "basic principles") (Galatians 4: 3, 9). These aspects keep man in bondage, they are lurking in his flesh, sharing in both mutual destruction (Galatians 5: 15) and vainglory (Galatians 5: 26). They become works of the flesh (Galatians 5: 19-21), which can occur even in the glory of circumcision (Galatians 6: 13). However, Paul does not explicitly identify stoicheia with law in Galatians 4: 3, 9, the way he identified it with "pedagogue" in Galatians 3: 24-25. (Clinton 1996: 55-76) That law should not be identified with the world is clear from what Paul says: "when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods" (Galatians 4: 8). The law, however, led the Jews to the knowledge of God, as attested in Exodus 18: 16, "When they have a matter, they come to me, and I judge between one and another, and I make them know the statutes of God and His laws." In addition, through the observance of the law, the Jews were trying to serve their God, and Paul once exceeded his compatriots in this zeal (Galatians 1: 14), according to the example of Josiah who "removed all the abominations from all the territories belonging to the Israelites and forced those who were in Israel to serve the Lord their God" (2 Chronicles 34: 32-33). Therefore, one cannot attribute to Paul the association of the Torah with the stoicheia of Galatians 4: 3 and less so the Torah with sin. (Galatians 1: 4) Then, if the law had led to the knowledge of God and His service, one cannot say that slavery under the elements of the world is identical to slavery under the law. The law sought to keep the elements of the world out of it all, but proved powerless to the slavery of sin and this current evil eon (Galatians 1: 4), which refers to the stoicheia of Galatians 4: 3, 9, wherein God could liberate man through Christ, not through the law (Galatians 5: 1). Hence the impotence of the law which has given way to the power of the Cross. (Rinaldi 1972: 16-47) The believers of Gentile origin did not know God through the law, so they were not under the obligations of the law, they were slaves to the elements of the world (Galatians 4: 3), in which this current evil eon has been reigning (Galatians 1: 4). Their access to the knowledge of God has been through the behavior of Christ crucified before their eyes (Galatians 3: 1), an event that becomes an incentive (Galatians 5: 1) not to return under the past slavery. When he hears of the liberating effect of the Cross, Paul exclaims with joy: Christ gave Himself for our sins, according to the will of God, "to whom be glory for ever and ever" (Galatians 1: 4-5). Paul feels himself to be dead for the law (Galatians 2: 19), which puts an end to his role as educator, leading to Christ, the Son of God (Galatians 3: 24). Therefore, dying for "one's self" and the "world" will not exempt us from our allegiance to the law. In other words, using the verb estaurotai (lit. "is/has been crucified") of Galatians 6: 14, applied to the world and the ego, "Paul emphasizes the instrumentality of the Cross, in this complete annihilation of every relationship that may have taken place outside of Christ" (Moule 1970: 374). From the crucifixion of the "I" and the "world" comes "a new salvific situation of freedom." (Mell 1989: 297) The death of Christ had an effect both on the Jews, whose law has led them right to Christ, and on the pagan Galatians, it made up for the difference between them (Galatians 3: 28). Moreover, both of them have been freed from what kept them slaves (Galatians 5: 1), from the curse of the law (Galatians 3: 13) by stoicheia (Galatians 4: 3, 9) and from the power of sin (Galatians 1: 4). Paul takes pride precisely in this liberating action occurring through the Cross of Christ. (Galatians 6: 14) In other words, there is no conflict between a theology of the Cross and a cosmology of the Cross. Both are expressions of a "more comprehensive ontology that makes intelligible the crucifix world and a New Creation. With this ontology one cannot so carelessly or so readily betray the bond of Christian freedom" (Minear 1979: 407). Rather than denying the implementation of the existential crucifixion in life (Cosgrove 1988: 193), we had better contend that Paul's text, by an indication of ontological freedom through Christ's death on the Cross, means to persuade recipients to accept unreservedly the selfcrucifixion and their world. Such action does not need any law, but faith--hence the pragmatic value of the Cross, whose function becomes a communicative device by which "Paul seeks to restore the truth of the Gospel, presenting a rhetoric of the Cross rather than a rhetoric of glory." (Kern 2011: 135) The New Creation Against the previously elaborated theology of the Cross, Paul founded the evangelical novelty of the "New Creation," making Galatians 6: 15 the core not only for the epilogue, but also for the whole Letter. The message focusing on Galatians 6: 15 resumes what Paul has long targeted, the argument of Galatians: the conviction of the recipients about the fundamental values of the Gospel, to make them participants in the "New Creation," thus becoming new creatures. While Galatians 6: 14 had said that through the Cross the "I" and the "world" were crucified, now it takes up the discourse through the explanatory and progressive "gar" of Galatians 6: 15, implying that the Cross of Christ has ended the era of division between Jews and the rest of the world (Galatians 3: 28), inaugurating the time of the "New Creation," in which everyone is invited to participate through faith. (Galatians 5: 6) For some, it is through baptism that the believer has access to the "New Creation" (Schlier 1949: 172-174; Stuhlmacher 1967: 29). Although there is no denying the value of baptism (Galatians 3: 27), we consider that there is "a prior relationship with Christ that determines the membership of the New Creation and the same reception of Baptism" (Pitta 1996: 403). This relationship is based on faith. A different conclusion is summarized in the sentence: "Not the man you call 'New Creation' in Galatians 6: 15, but the world" (Mell 1989: 317). If from the concept kaine ktisis (lit. "new creation," "new creature," "new act of creation") one cannot exclude the cosmicsoteriological aspect, one cannot exclude the anthropological aspect either. Paul is not exclusive, as far as he is concerned, this drawing up age is over (Galatians 3: 28). It is no longer a matter to separate the Jews from the rest of the world, but to cancel both ethnic (Galatians 3: 28) and anthropological (5: 16) antagonisms, so as to enter the novelty brought by Christ, which includes soteriological universalism covering Jewish and pagans alike. In the words of Paul, "neither circumcision nor uncircumcision"--"but faith that works by love"--"the New Creation." (Galatians 5: 6; 6: 15) It is now clear that the death of Jesus Christ on the Cross is effective only for those who have faith in Him. For Paul, Christ's law is a law of faith, whose "essence is recognized in the commandment" that is summed up in Leviticus 19: 18. When a person is a new creature in Christ, he lives from a faith that becomes active in love, and "that is what really matters." (Furnish 1972: 97) The canon of the New Creation The canon of which Paul speaks in Galatians 6: 16 relies upon the "New Creation," (Galatians 6: 15) which evolved from the Cross of Jesus Christ (Galatians 6: 14), by which the "I" and the "world" are crucified. In this sense, a New Creation is the offspring of Chirist's love and death, whilst the norm is to live no longer for oneself, neither for the world, but for Jesus, a rule that gives peace to those who follow it. The verb stoichesousin (lit. "walk," "will walk") of Galatians 6: 16, with the stoiche root (lit. "march" in rank, "keep step"; "walk"; fig. "conform"; cf. Strong 1997: 445), recalls the stoicheia from whose bondage the believers were released, and now no longer have to submit to it (Galatians 4: 3, 9). On the other hand, it points to Galatians 5: 25, which presents an alternative way of living, according to the norm in which we must also walk: pneumati kai stoichomen (lit. "keeping in step with the Spirit"; cf. Moo 2013: 372; more commonly, the phrase is translated as "walking by the Spirit"/"being led by the Spirit"). In order to be truly a new creature it is thus necessary not only to crucify the "I" and the "world," but also to walk in the Spirit. The fact that stoichesousin in Galatians 6: 16 is a future verb falls into the category of hope, with its sententious and gnomic appearance (Mateos 1977: 207, 266, 366), that almost becomes a condition: "And to those who walk according to this rule, peace on them and mercy also on 'Israel of God'" (Galatians 6: 16). Hence, it is clear that the second part of the wish is dependent on the first: walk according to the canon established in the Galatians 6: 14-15, which refers to Galatians 5: 25. The question still under debate is whether eleos refers to those who walk according to the prescribed canon, including Israel, or only to Israel tou Theou (lit. "Israel of God"). The interpretation is twofold. Some argue for the former, considering the second kai "copulative with light nuance, intensive and progressive" (Buscemi 2004: 627; Lagrange 1918: 166); they believe that Paul wishes "peace and mercy be upon those who follow the canon and not only on them but even upon the whole 'Israel of God'" passing from the small community of Galatians to the universal community, the church of God. The "Israel of God" consequently means "just Christians, for whom circumcision is not worthy but only the New Creation" (Ebeling 1989: 295). This interpretation is twice in defect. It does not see the need to add "even upon the Israel of God," though earlier he had said of those who follow this canon, "which should already include all members of the Church of God." Then mercy, in general, appears prior to peace (as in 1 Timothy 1: 2; 2 Timothy 1: 16; 2 John 1: 3; Jude 1: 2), and not the other way round, as in Galatians 6: 16 in the concept of the universal church. Those who favor the second choice consider the second kai to be disjunctive and not copulative, distinguishing between those who take the canon and "those who are part of the Israel of God, even among those who share membership in the 'New Creation and Israel.'" (Pitta 1998: 174-175; Mell 1989: 319) Both choices are defensible, but while deciding upon which is more in keeping with Paul's thought, we must have recourse to the context of the Letter. Paul stated that for those rooted in Christ through baptism (Galatians 3: 27), the ethnic distinction is outdated: "there is neither Jew nor Greek." (Galatians 3: 28) Galatians 5: 6 and Galatians 6: 15 incorporate the concept, highlighting the end of this distinction in the form of "neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything," suggesting that in Galatians 6: 16 there should be no more distinction between those who take the canon of the "New Creation" and the Israel tou Theou. This, however, remains a pragmatic appeal, at the level of desire, the truth of the matter being that those designated under the name of "Israel" did not take the offer of evangelical values. Furthermore, neither in 3: 28 nor in 5: 6 and 6: 15 shall we find the concept of Israel tou Theou, which otherwise is a hapax legomenon [lit. "once said" = one time occurrence]. As for Paul, Israel remains the "chosen people of God" (Pitta 1996: 404-405; Mell 1989: 320), because through His law we have arrived in Christ (Galatians 3: 24). If those who take the norm of the "New Creation" are no longer based on law, but on the Cross, it does not necessarily mean that Israel has lost its identity. On the contrary, even those who are grafted in Christ come as an offshoot from the root of Israel tou Theou, and the law of Christ (Galatians 6: 2) is nothing but a fulfillment of the Jewish law, by concentrating on a single precept, that of love for the neighbor. (Leviticus 19: 18--Galatians 5: 14) Paul held the identity of Israel in full respect though the truth of the Gospel, showing that faith in Christ excludes all soteriological significance of the Torah, as in Galatians 5: 4. Instead, the Judaizer agitators considered that in addition to the faith in Christ Jesus, the Risen Crucified, the pagans would have to integrate into the chosen people of God and, as a sign of integration, they had to be circumcised. (Wilckens 1976: 68) If in Galatians 6: 16 "those who will walk by this canon" appear before Israel tou Theou, it is because Paul was first sent as Apostle of the Gentiles (Galatians 2: 8-9), whom he called for peace, if they walked according to the established canon. As for the Israel tou Theou, Paul asked them for mercy, avoiding to be the judge of the people of God. In this sense, Galatians 6: 16 can be translated as: "And as many as walk according to this canon peace be upon them, and mercy also on Israel of God." (Mell 1989: 322) Now we understand why Paul calls those who walk according to this canon for peace, since peace is conditioned by walking in a certain way, that in Galatians 5: 25 is considered pneumati (lit. "spiritual"). Moreover, those who walk pneumati (lit. "spiritually") make the offspring of the Spirit, in which peace is the third element (Galatians 5: 22). If part of Israel tou Theou will not walk according to this canon, they have no share in the grace of Christ (Galatians 5: 2, 4). They are still bound to "do all the law" (Galatians 5: 3) and by doing so "will live in them," that is within the precepts of the law (Galatians 3: 12), under the mercy of God (Galatians 6: 16). On this line of interpretation, meaning to avoid the risk of exclusivity, according to the new canon, Paul "invokes on Israel the mercy of God." From a pragmatic point of view, Paul intends to lead the recipients and, along with them, the readers and the listeners, to be persuaded by the values of the Gospel, to become new creatures, and so be part of the "New Creation." With this purpose in mind, "those who will walk by this rule" and the Israel tou Theou, are both invited to join, so the two concepts are being found together in Galatians 6: 16. Paul would not like to get into any discomfort on the part of the two parties, on the ground that he is also physically conformed to Jesus (Galatians 6: 17). Verse 17 might well aim "at all those who follow the 'canon' since the Apostle cannot have hoped that after this letter of fire, his opponents will leave him in peace." If Paul speaks to those who follow the "canon," asking them not to cause him any more trouble, one cannot see why the opponents to this possibility are involved. Indeed, Paul appeals to both groups, as specified in Galatians 6: 16 and refers them to Galatians 3: 28, where the ethnic distinction is canceled for those who are in Christ. In the same way, Galatians 5: 6 and Galatians 6: 15 lose importance of the distinction between circumcised and uncircumcised, the believers being waited for justification (Galatians 5: 5), within the canon of the New Creation, based on the crucifixion of "I" and the "world." (Galatians 6: 14) "True Christian freedom, therefore, is the subjective experience of restoration of God's image, through union with Christ, so that God's holiness and justification can be expressed in ethical conduct" (Loubser 2005: 327). In Galatians 1: 10, Paul declared himself a slave (doulos) of Christ. The traces left on the body of Paul, received from injuries during the apostolate (2 Corinthians 6: 4-5; 11: 23-25), speak of his indubitable enslavement to Jesus (Barrier 2008: 357-358). Through this seal, Paul invited us to consider "what kind of traces of the Crucifix there are in the appearance of Judaizers and which traces Christ has carved even in the corporeality of Paul." (Ebeling 1989: 295) The confirmation that the stigmata of Jesus imprinted on Paul's body are the scars of his apostolate is also given by the verb "bastazo," which means "I am carrying," and refers to Galatians 6: 2, where it makes reference to the mutual weight to carry, to fulfill the law of Christ. Following the law of Christ, Paul now bears the consequences in his body, which are signs of life, not death, as stated in Galatians 2: 19-20: "I have been crucified with Christ. I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me." After presenting the new canon, sealed by the stigmata he holds in his body, Paul concludes in Galatians 6: 18 with a wish: "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers, amen!," that asks for inclusion with Galatians 1: 3: "Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ," such an inclusion showing the direction Paul has sent its recipients to, i.e. to God and to Christ, from whose grace rises his apostolate as well. In this manner Paul refers to the Gospel received by revelation, described in the main proposition (Galatians 1: 11-12). In addition, the use of "brothers" in Galatians 6: 18 shows its objective rhetoric, which was not only to attract the Galatians towards him and end the Letter in a polite manner, but rather to educate in a spirit of fraternity (Matera 1992: 227), which was confirmed by the liturgical "amen." The importance of fraternity is based on an anthropological renewal, confirmed by the words "with your spirit," wherefrom emerges a new way of life, according to the values given in Galatians 5: 1 to 6: 18, which require an ethical commitment second to the Spirit's guidance (Galatians 5: 16, 18, 25). The anthropologically renovated belief is thus able to overcome the desires of flesh (Galatians 5: 19-21), producing the fruit of the Spirit in his life (Galatians 5: 22-23), which leads to the fulfillment of the law, as indicated in Galatians 5: 14. (Kruse 2006: 129) Paul's considerations are sometimes thought to go one way, directed against obedience to the Mosaic law, as in Thuren's thesis, for whom law and faith are mutually and permanently exclusive. The word "law" would be "accepted only in a metaphorical sense (Galatians 6: 2), its main meaning being fulfilled by new connotations, as in Galatians 5: 14-18." (Thuren 2000: 93) But one must say that Paul did not write against obedience to the law, on the contrary, he insisted on the observance of all its precepts (Galatians 3: 10; 5: 3). Then, if the Christian is free from law, he is not without the law of Christ, which is not a metaphor, but the fulfillment of the Mosaic law. Paul did not intend to demolish the law, but to "highlight two different styles of life according to the flesh and according to the Spirit" (Lategan 1992: 265), where flesh is associated with law when used as a source of pride, because of the circumcision, without its observance. (Galatians 6: 13) In Galatians 6: 11-18, Paul sums up these values, meaning to arouse positive feelings in favor of the freedom of the Gospel. Concurrently it provides freedom from circumcision (Galatians 6: 12-13), of which he himself became an example, being crucified for all the other values, which do not belong to the Gospel (Galatians 6: 14). The Galatians are once again invited to be like Paul, i.e., new creatures, to whom neither membership of circumcision, nor of noncircumcision should matter (Galatians 6: 15). Therefore, the epilogue of Galatians 6: 11-18 fits perfectly into the anthropological and ethical demonstration, and integrates well with the rest of the whole Letter. The epideictic genus, though not exclusive, proves to be a rather more adequate interpretation of Galatians. If freedom is a gift, freely received from Christ (Galatians 1: 4 and 5: 1), it becomes a value for the believer, to preserve and promote through appropriate ethical commitment (Galatians 5: 13-14; 5: 25; 6: 1-10). The commitment must be good enough for a gift, education for the faith that acts through charity. (Galatians 5: 6) The persuasive element of this argument has been the pride in the Cross, as a canon of the New Creation. And this was the intended prefix in this research: to highlight the theological aspects in the epilogue of Galatians 6: 11-18, in order to understand the beauty of the Cross and the invitation to join its values. References Aristotle (1898) Ars Rhetorica. Lipsiae: Bibliotheca Teubneriana. Barrier JW (2008) Marks of oppression: a postcolonial reading of Paul's stigmata in Galatians 6: 17. Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches 16 (4): 336-362. Betz HD (1979) A commentary on Paul's Letter to the Churches in Galatia. Philadelphia: Fortress. Bultmann RK (1984) Theologie des Neuen Testaments. Tubingen: MohrSiebeck. Buscemi AM (2004) Lettera ai Galati. Commentario esegetico. Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press. Clinton EA (1996) Returning to the domain of the powers: Stoicheia as evil spirits in Galatians 4: 3, 9. Novum Testamentum 38 (1): 55-76. Cosgrove CH (1988) The Cross and the Spirit. A study in the argument and theology of Galatians. Macon GA: Mercer. Furnish VP (1972) The Love command in the New Testament. Nashville: Zondervan. Kern P (2011) The cultural context of Paul's Gospel: The Cross and Suffering in Galatians. Reformed Theological Review 70 (2): 135-154. Lagrange MJ (1918) Saint Paul. Epitre aux Galates. Paris: Etudes Bibliques. Lategan BC (1988) Is Paul defending his Apostleship in Galatians? The Function of Galatians 1: 11-12 and 2: 19-20 in the development of Paul's argument. New Testament Studies 34: 411-430. Lategan BC (1992) The argumentative situation of Galatians. Neotestamentica 26: 257-277. Loubser GMH (2005) Paul's ethic of freedom: no flash in the Galatian Pan. Neotestamentica 39 (2): 313-337. Mateos J (1977) El aspecto verbal en el Nuevo Testamento. Madrid: Ediciones Cristiandad. Matera FJ (1992) Galatians. Collegeville: Liturgical Press. Mell U (1989) Neue Schopfung: Eine traditionsgeschichtliche und exegetische Studie zu einem soteriologischen Grundsatz paulinischer Theologie. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 56. Berlin: De Gruyter. Minear P (1979) The Crucified world: the enigma of Galatians 6: 14. Andersen C, Klein G, eds. Theologia crucis, signum cruces, pp 395-407. Tubingen: Mohr. Moo DJ (2013) Galatians. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic. Moule CFD (1970) Death "To Sin," "To Law," and "To the World": a note on certain datives. Melanges bibliques en hommage au R.P. Beda Rigaux, pp 367-376. Descamps AL, DeHalleux A, eds. Gembloux: Duculot. Parunak H Van Dyke (1992) Dimensions of discourse structure: a multidimensional analysis of the components and transitions of Paul's Epistle to the Galatians. Linguistics and New Testament interpretation. Essays on Discourse Analysis, pp 207-239. Black DA, ed. Nashville: Zondervan. Pitta A (1996) Lettera ai Galati. Introduzione, versione e commento. Bologna: Dehoniane. Pitta A (1998) Il paradosso della croce. Saggi di teologia paolina. Casale Monferrato: Piemme. Rinaldi B (1972) La presenza della croce nell'Epist. ai Galati. Milano: Scuola Cattolica 100: 16-47. Schlier H (1949) Der Brief an die Galater. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Strack HL, Billerbeck P (1922-1928) Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud undMidrash I-IV. Munchen: Beck. Strong J (1997) Greek dictionary of the New Testament. Albany, Oregon: Books for the Ages. Stuhlmacher P (1967) Erwagungen zum ontologischen Charakter der kaine ktisis bei Paulus. Evangelische Theologie 27: 1-35. Tolmie DF (2005) Persuading the Galatians: a text-centred rhetorical analysis of a Pauline Letter. Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck. Thuren L (2000) Derhetorizing Paul: A dynamic perspective on Pauline theology and the law. Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck. Wilckens U (1976) Christologie und Anthropologie. Zeitschrift fur die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 67: 64-82. Mihai Afrentoae, PhD; Professor of Catholic Theology, Theological Franciscan Institute; Roman, Romania; meluferent7 0@yahoo. it. 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The Christian Reclamation of Judaism

32,790,364 articles and books Periodicals Literature Search Keyword Title Author Topic The Christian reclamation of Judaism. Link/Page Citation JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY ARE INEXORABLY LINKED WITH one another. We share a common scripture, we believe in the same God, we have similar moral values, Jesus was Jewish, and, for better or for worse, we have lived together for almost 2000 years. During these years, the way that Christians have viewed Judaism has varied greatly. Christianity's relationship to Judaism falls into three broad categories. At the very beginning, during the life and ministry of Jesus and for some time thereafter, what came to be known as Christianity saw itself as part of, or at least closely related to, Judaism. For a period, the boundary between Judaism and Christianity was either non-existent or very poorly defined. As time went on, Christianity first sought to differentiate itself from Judaism and then came to see itself as quite distinct from Judaism. At its extremes, it considered Judaism to be, for all intents and purposes, the antithesis of Christianity. Some Christians and some forms of Christianity went so far as to reject any connection with Judaism and even denied that Jesus himself was Jewish. More recently, however, in many parts of the Christian world there has been a rediscovery and new appreciation by Christians both of their Jewish roots and of the Jewishness of Jesus that is instructive as a historical phenomenon and has significant implications, both positive and negative, for Jewish-Christian relations. Jesus and almost all of both his admirers and detractors as portrayed in the Gospels are Jewish and fit quite comfortably into what we know about the Jewish religious world of first-century Palestine. We learn from the Gospels that Jesus is an observant individual: he attends the synagogue, where he reads and interprets scripture. He participates in the worship of the God of Israel administered by the priesthood in the Temple in Jerusalem. His concern with concepts like the kingdom of God or sin and repentance was the concern of many of the Jewish groups of his day. It is probably fair to say that among Jesus' primary concerns were his fellow Jews and the fate of the people of Israel. The Gospel accounts present Jesus arguing with other Jews over how, not whether, to be Jewish. He argues with the Pharisees not over the validity of the law, but rather the interpretation of the law. He has very little contact with those outside the Jewish community until his activities bring him to the attention of the Roman authorities, who see him as a threat to civil order. It is only after the death of Jesus, when the followers of Jesus begin to spread their new beliefs in the Greco-Roman world, that Christianity starts to emerge as something separate and different from Judaism. This process of separation was not easy and took a long time--indeed, scholars now suggest that the process took much longer than had previously been thought, stretching in some places into the fourth century or later. Evidence of the beginning of the separation is found in the New Testament itself. The so-called Jerusalem church, centered around the figures of James, the "brother" of Jesus, and Peter, was committed to maintaining adherence to Jewish law and practice. It continued to participate in the worship at the Temple and specifically required circumcision for proselytes. Paul, who never denied his Jewish origins, saw the emerging church as eternally connected to Israel--in his words, a wild olive shoot grafted onto the tree that is Israel--even while he questioned the necessity and utility of the law, at least for Gentiles. As time went on, several factors led Judaism and Christianity to become distinct religions. The early followers of Jesus believed that he had promised that he was going to return and establish the reign of the Son of God. As time went on and that prediction was not fulfilled, they had to come to grips with that fact and explain the delay in its emerging theology. It is at about that time (70 C.E.) that the Temple in Jerusalem is destroyed by Rome as part of its effort to quell the Jewish rebellion that began in Judea in 66 C.E. In the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple, the nascent rabbinic movement had to respond to the tragic consequences of the loss of the Temple. Not only did the rabbis have to answer the question of how God could have allowed his house to be destroyed, they also had to answer the question of how Jews were to uphold the ancient covenant when the proper worship of God, the atonement of sin, and many other central aspects of Jewish life required a Temple. The rabbis began a process of recreating and redefining a Judaism that could exist without a Temple and its sacrificial rites. Before the Temple was destroyed, sectarianism was the rule. Groups like the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and others could co-exist, as long as the Temple served as their unifying focus. The rabbis, on the other hand, were much more committed to a unified view of Judaism. As it defined itself and its boundaries, there was certainly no room for Gentile Christians, who were neither ethnically nor religiously Jewish, and, eventually, there was no room for Jewish followers of Jesus, whose proclamation of Jesus as the promised Messiah and redeemer of Israel was unfathomable to a people whose world seemed anything but redeemed. At the same time that Judaism was distancing itself from Christianity, Christians increasingly did not want to be identified with Judaism. In the first place, the Jewish revolt that led to the destruction of the Temple did not make the Jews very popular with the Roman authorities. The Roman empire tended to take a dim view of "new religions," so Christianity had enough problems with the government that being identified with, or confused with, those rebellious Jews, was not in its best interest. Furthermore, at least in the first couple of centuries, during its period of initial growth, Christianity was "competing" with Judaism for Gentile converts. If you will pardon the marketing analogy, Christianity had to establish its "brand" so that it would not be confused with Judaism. Observing the Sabbath on Sunday rather than Saturday, opting for the Greek rather than the Hebrew scriptures, and using a codex format, that is, a book, rather than a scroll, for the public reading of scripture all served to differentiate Christianity from Judaism, even if there were other practical or theological reasons for these choices. One of the most challenging questions that the early Church had to answer was just how much of the Jewish roots of Christianity was it going to preserve? A fateful turning point was reached in the middle of the second century with a church leader named Marcion. Marcion believed that the God who had sent Jesus was different from the God who had given the law through Moses. Jesus was sent by the God of goodness, whereas the law came from the God of justice. Salvation came through faith in God of goodness, not through obeying the law of the God of justice. Marcion believed that Christianity had to sever itself from all things Jewish. For our purposes, the most important thing about Marcion was his notion of sacred scripture. Marcion's entire canon consisted of the following: one gospel (a shortened version of Luke), ten letters of Paul (not including the Pastorals and Hebrews), and his only original work, called the "Antitheses," in which he pointed out all the contradictions between the teaching of Jesus and that of the Hebrew Bible, known to Christianity as the Old Testament. He omitted the entire Old Testament, as well as those Gospel accounts that most closely connect Jesus to Judaism. Marcion's form of Christianity was very popular in the second century, with some scholars suggesting that for a short while there may have been almost as many Marcionite as non-Marcionite Christians. However, Marcion's view did not prevail; it eventually came to be considered a heresy, and his followers slowly disappeared. Partly in response to Marcion, the Church that emerged as the dominant form of Christianity included the Old Testament in its canon of sacred scripture. It also included four gospel accounts that preserve a portrait of a fully Jewish Jesus. This Church also maintained the unity and continuity of the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament--they were one and the same. Had Marcionism prevailed, Christianity would have largely been cut off from its Jewish roots, and therefore would have had little interest in Jews and Judaism. By preserving these connections to Judaism, the Church put itself in the position of continually having to contend with both Jews and Judaism. In the early centuries, some Christians found Jewish practice attractive, prompting church fathers like Ignatius (early second century) to write: "Be not deceived with strange doctrines, 'nor give heed to fables and endless genealogies,' and things in which the Jews make their boast. 'Old things are passed away: behold, all things have become new.' For if we still live according to the Jewish law, and the circumcision of the flesh, we deny that we have received grace" (Letter to the Magnesians 8:1). He continues: "It is absurd to speak of Jesus Christ with the tongue, and to cherish in the mind a Judaism that has now come to an end. For where there is Christianity there cannot be Judaism" (Magnesians 10:3). Aspects of Jewish practice remained attractive enough to some Christians for the council of Laodicea in 363 to proclaim: "Christians must not judaize by resting on the Sabbath, but must work on that day, rather honoring the Lord's Day; and, if they can, resting then as Christians. But if any shall be found to be judaizers, let them be anathema from Christ" (Canon 29). Even where Jewish practice itself was not a temptation to Christians, the Church still had to respond to Jews and Judaism, whose very existence challenged the teachings of Christianity. The Church claimed that Jesus was the messiah promised in the Old Testament, yet the Jews, on whose scripture Christianity was based, rejected Christian interpretation in general and the claims about Jesus in particular. The response to this challenge is seen in the writings of many early Church fathers, including Justin, Tertullian, and Chrysostom. According to John Pawlikowski, Justin's Dialogue with Trypho the Jew "became a model for discussions about Judaism in the ancient church. Justin's writings were the first real expression of the idea that Jewish social misfortunes are the consequence of divine punishment for the death of Jesus. As a result, Jews will never be able to escape suffering in human society. Having made references to the expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem, their desolate lands and burned out cities, Justin assures his rabbinic dialogue partner that these sufferings were justly imposed by God in light of Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus. Here we have the seeds of an attitude that would come to dominate the thinking of the church by the fourth century and greatly contribute to the spread of anti-Semitism." (1) As this tradition developed within the church, it led to an increasingly negative view of Jews and Judaism that the twentieth-century French scholar Jules Isaac called "the teaching of contempt." But this teaching contained its own problem: how could Jesus come from this despised people and its dead tradition? The answer was to oppose Judaism and Jesus. At the time of Jesus, the church taught, Judaism was a petrified, lifeless religion controlled by a corrupt priesthood and obsessed with the minutiae of a legal system that was an obstacle rather than an aide to salvation. Jesus, on the other hand, represented the antithesis of this Judaism. Jesus stood for God and good, while Judaism represented evil, eventually becoming associated with the Devil and the anti-Christ. Because they had rejected and killed Jesus, God had in turn rejected the Jews. The Church replaced the Jews as God's chosen people, as the new Israel, a belief that came to be known as replacement theology or supersessionism. It is this view--of the Jew as other--that characterized the Christian attitude to Judaism for centuries. The social consequences of this ranged from segregation, persecution, and death to a comparatively high degree of tolerance and integration for Jews in different places and at different times. But at its core, the Christian world saw the Jews and Judaism as other, as foreign. When some of the harshest aspects of this tendency were combined with the pseudo-scientific racial science of late nineteenth century, it resulted in the Nazi Final Solution. A very different direction, however, emerged from the intellectual and social changes in Europe of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the intellectual arena first Christians, and eventually Jews, began to apply the methodology of critical scholarship to the study of the Bible and the history of both Judaism and Christianity. Instead of interpretations based on traditional assumptions about the sanctity of the text and the truth of received tradition, critical scholars applied scientific methods that were defining the disciplines of philology, archaeology, and comparative literature to the study of religion. As early as the middle of the eighteenth century, Christian scholars attempted to separate the Jesus of history from the Jesus of tradition. This quest for the historical Jesus, as it came to be known, demanded a re-examination of the history and literature of Judaism at the time of Jesus and began a process of reintegrating Jesus in the context of the Judaism of his time. Scholarship began to rediscover not only the Jewishness of Jesus, but also Jewish influence on the development of Christianity that had been overlooked or denied because of Christian antipathy to Judaism. In the social arena, the American and French revolutions established democracy and individual rights as the cornerstones of the modern nation-state. Jews particularly benefited from these changes, as the ghetto gates were opened and discriminatory legislation rescinded. Humanistic concepts such as freedom of conscience started to reshape Christian attitudes toward Jews in some sectors of European society. Greater social openness and acceptance and an increasingly sophisticated understanding of history set the stage for what has emerged most dramatically in the last 60 years: a Christian world that, after centuries of turning away and denying its Jewish roots, is now acknowledging and indeed embracing the Jewishness of Jesus and celebrating its Jewish roots. This trend began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and progressed slowly through the early twentieth century. The great catalyst, however, in propelling this movement forward, was the Shoah, the Holocaust. The reality of the Holocaust provoked a crisis for some Christian historians and theologians. They were forced to face the fact that the Holocaust occurred in the heart of Christian Europe, and that Christianity had, at the very least, helped create the environment in which this could take place. The historical challenge was to learn how this had happened. The theological challenge was to develop an authentic expression of Christianity that preserved the fundamentals of Christian faith and belief while eliminating supersessionism and the teaching of contempt. This kind of theological innovation has come to be known as Post-Holocaust Christian theology. At the very same time, there has been a veritable explosion of biblical scholarship, for which the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls were an important catalyst. The combination of these theological and historical trends have produced within Roman Catholic and some Protestant churches a revolution of both understanding and attitude that can be seen in official church statements like the Vatican's Nostra Aetate, whose fortieth anniversary was observed this October, and the many Protestant statements, such as, to give but one example from among many, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's 1994 "Declaration of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to the Jewish Community." This new appreciation for the Jewish community is predicated on an understanding that Christianity and Judaism are intimately related, that Jews are not "other" but Jesus's own people, a people who have a special relationship with God. Theologians are still struggling to articulate the nature of that relationship, as, for example, Mary Boys has demonstrated in her book, Has God Only One Blessing? Another expression of this comes from George Lindbeck, one of the foremost theologians involved in Jewish-Christian dialogue. He explored the relationship of Christianity to Judaism in an essay that appeared in Christianity in Jewish Terms, a volume I helped edit. Lindbeck discusses Christian attitudes toward Judaism in terms of appropriation and expropriation. Expropriation is based on supersessionism, the belief that Christianity has replaced Judaism as God's covenantal partner. In this view, Christianity has expropriated Israel's identity as God's chosen partner, and is "the sole heir to the entirety of Israel's heritage." Appropriation, on the other hand, begins with the affirmation that the Jews continue to be in covenant with God and that Christianity somehow shares "Israelhood" with the Jewish people. From this perspective, there is a great deal that Christianity can learn from Judaism, while at the same time being respectful of Jewish sensitivities. Lindbeck puts this in these terms: "... what Christians can gain from understanding the church as Israel in non-supersessionist terms is that it frees them to hear God speak not only through Old Testament Israelites, but also through post-Biblical Jews; this freedom follows from the belief that the covenant with Israel has not been revoked. The Jews remain God's chosen people and thus are a primary source for Christian understandings of God's intentions." A similar sense is found in the recent Vatican document, "The Jewish People and their Sacred Scripture in the Christian Bible," which states that the Jewish reading of the Bible is a possible one, in continuity with the Jewish Scriptures of the Second Temple period, a reading analogous to the Christian reading, which developed in parallel fashion" (no. 22). It adds that Christians can learn a great deal from a Jewish exegesis practised for more than 2000 years. This reclaiming of the Jewish roots of Christianity on the part of theologians and biblical scholars has had its effect on the life of day-to-day Christians as well. Here are just a few examples of how this new relationship to Judaism is found in the contemporary American Christian scene. Have you seen the bumper sticker that says: my boss is a Jewish carpenter? This contemporary expression of piety is really quite amazing. It not only assumes that others will understand the reference, but actually accepts and celebrates the Jewishness of Jesus. The Christian who puts this on his/her car may not be well-informed about Jewish-Christian relations, but takes the Jewishness of Jesus for granted and is not at all embarrassed about identifying at least on some level with that Jewishness. Another example is the ease with which many Christians (and for that matter Jews) accept the notion that Jesus was a rabbi. I have heard numerous Christians, both clergy and lay people, refer to Jesus as a rabbi. It is, in fact, anachronistic to refer to Jesus as rabbi--he may have been called "rabbi" as a term of respect whose meaning is "my teacher" or "my master," but he was not an ordained rabbi, since the ordination of rabbis postdates the time of Jesus. Nonetheless, the fact that this is so widespread again demonstrates that the suggestion itself is not outrageous as it once would have been. I was once invited to participate in an interfaith event at the Newman House, the Catholic student center, at a university near Baltimore. There was lunch before the meeting, and as we gathered around the table, the priest in charge got everyone's attention for a grace before eating and then, in perfect Hebrew, intoned the motzi, the blessing Jews recite before eating a formal meal. On another occasion, I participated in a retreat for Episcopalian clergy. The theme for the retreat was Jewish-Christian relations. At the conclusion of the morning worship, the priest who was officiating announced that the closing hymn would be shalom chaverim, and then announced the page in the Episcopal hymnal on which that song, in transliterated Hebrew appears. I have noticed other uses of the Hebrew language in Christian churches, especially the use of the Hebrew word Shalom, on banners and the like. Some Christians are also using the phrase tikkun olam, which describes the Jewish obligation to better our world. And most significantly, some Christians use the Hebrew word tshuvah, meaning repentance specifically in referring to their sense that Christians need to repent for centuries during which they oppressed Jews. I know Christian ministers who own yarmulkes or kippot (traditional Jewish head-covering) for when they attend a synagogue. Any synagogue that requires men to wear a yarmulke has them available; I believe that these Christians own yarmulkes because it is meaningful for them to own this Jewish ritual item and because they want to appear to be prepared and "in the know" when they visit a synagogue. I also know Christians who own Jewish prayer shawls, tallitot, or who have affixed a mezuzah to the doorpost of their house. All of these suggest a new openness to Jews and to Judaism that would have been impossible a generation or two earlier. Perhaps the most interesting and prevalent example of this is the phenomenon of the contemporary Christian seder. I am not talking about an interfaith or a model seder, but rather about a Christian seder. The difference is important. An interfaith seder or model seder is designed to teach those who are not Jewish about the Jewish festival of Passover and, ideally, is led by a knowledgeable representative of the Jewish community. A Christian seder may include elements of teaching about Judaism, but it is, first and foremost, a form of Christian worship. We see this, for example, in an article entitled "Introduction to Christian Seder: Recovering Passover for Christians" by Dennis Bratcher. After explaining that the Last Supper was a Passover Seder (about which I will have more to say in a moment), Bratcher writes: "Our goal here in presenting a Christian adaptation of Passover is to retain the theological, confessional, and educational dimensions of the service. That is, it is presented as a way for people of Christian Faith to express that faith in the context of a gathered community by participating symbolically in the story of salvation. It is presented very deliberately and purposefully as a Christian service, with no apologies." He then goes on, "Yet, there has also been a deliberate attempt to preserve the spirit of the Jewish traditions and experience in the service, and to respect the faith journey of Israelites and Jews across the centuries. For that reason, apart from the fact that it will likely be Christians who are participating in the service, the thoroughly Christian dimension will come at the end of the service. After all, that is really how God chose to work in history: to the Jew first, and then also to the rest of us!" (2) The Seder ritual that this author is describing reserves the "thoroughly Christian dimension" until the end. Other Christian Seders interpret every aspect of the ritual in Christian terms, as we find the following in an article called "How the Passover reveals Jesus Christ" and in many "Christian" Hagaddot:

 Christian symbolism in the Passover occurs early in the Seder (the Passover dinner). Three matzahs are put together (representing the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). The middle matzah is broken, wrapped in a white cloth, and hidden, representing the death and burial of Jesus. The matzah itself is designed to represent Jesus, since it is striped and pierced, which was prophesized by Isaiah, David, and Zechariah. Following the Seder meal, the "buried" matzah is "resurrected," which was foretold in the prophecies of David. (3) 

There is much that is problematic about this passage and about Christian Seders in general. One problem is the assumption that the Last Supper was a Seder. In the first place, there are a number of historical problems in ascertaining the actual date of the Last Supper. One of them is that there is conflicting evidence from the Gospels. A larger problem, however, is that there is no evidence of a Seder ritual during the time of Jesus. The entire Seder ritual was developed after the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. in order to provide a way of celebrating Passover without the Temple. Furthermore, it is likely that some key aspects of the Seder are specific responses to some of the claims of early Christianity. The folks who promote Christian Seders either are unaware or ignore these historical considerations. What drives them, I believe, is a mistaken sense that by conducting a Seder they are somehow doing something that Jesus did and therefore are connecting themselves to the life of Jesus. This would not be possible, however, without awareness of the Jewishness of Jesus and a general attitude toward Judaism and things Jewish that is respectful, and honors, as Mr. Bratcher says, "the faith journey of Israelites and Jews across the centuries." At their worst, however, I believe that Christian seders smack of what Lindbeck labels expropriation: that Christianity is the sole heir to the entirety of Israel's heritage. In this view, the seder ritual, like the rest of Jewish heritage, belongs to Christianity to do with what it likes; Jewish sensitivities need not be taken into consideration, Most Jews, and many Christians, for that matter, do not find Christian seders respectful. On a gut level, we Jews feel like something of ours that is sacred has been taken and changed for a purpose that was never intended. This is particularly disturbing when a Christian seder is used as a missionary tactic, as is sometimes the case with Jews for Jesus and similar groups. Here the words of a United Church of Christ document are instructive: "At times, people celebrate Maundy Thursday as a 'Christian' Seder. A Seder is the Jewish liturgical observance of the Passover and the recital of the Haggada (or Haggadah) rite. A 'Christian' Seder is a misappropriation of a theologically particular, ongoing Holy Feast of Jewish life and faith. For that reason a 'Christian' Seder seems as incongruent as a 'Jewish' Eucharist and is inappropriate in a time of deep sensitivity between Christians and Jews." (4) The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America states the following in its Guidelines for Lutheran Jewish relations:

 Attendance by Lutherans at Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, Seders (Passover meals) in Jewish homes or synagogues, and Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) observances can be of great educational and spiritual value. Likewise, Lutherans should welcome Jews at our occasions and ceremonies.... Although attendance at Seders in Jewish homes or synagogues is to be preferred, "demonstration Seders" have been held rather widely in Christian churches and can serve a useful educational purpose, in which both common roots and significant differences can be learned. This should be approached with caution, however, and with the awareness that this might be considered "trampling on the other's holy ground. "If such demonstrations are done, they should be done carefully, preferably in consultation with, or hosted by, a local rabbi. (5) 

These comments bring us to the difficult challenge of the new era in which we find ourselves. With both a new appreciation for the Jewish roots of Christianity and for Jews and Judaism, what is the appropriate way for this to influence Christian thought and practice? How can Christianity recover and celebrate its Jewish roots and its connection to Judaism without being disrespectful, without expropriating? Here I tread into dangerous territory because, as a Jew, it is not my place to tell Christians how to practice their faith, a faith that I respect but do not share. And yet, as a Jew, I find that I am at one and the same time heartened by Christian interest in my traditions and disturbed (and probably on some level threatened) by what I consider to be inappropriate or insensitive use or abuse of my tradition. It seems to me that the best way for Christians to explore their Jewish roots is to do so in conversation with Jews. (Similarly, the best way for Jews to learn about Christianity is in dialogue with Christians.) Even with the purest of intentions, we cannot presume to understand how others will react to our perception or framing of their traditions. The humanity of the other must always be before us. My colleague Amy-Jill Levine of Vanderbilt Divinity School used to take her young son to her classes and stand him in from of her students, who were studying for the ministry. She would tell them not to preach anything in their sermons that might bring harm to this child. She readily admits that this was an extreme move [and, now that the boy is a teenager and no longer as cute or sympathetic, it has lost some of its effectiveness] but it illustrates what I think is the essential point. The relationship between Christianity and Judaism cannot be separated from the real lives of Christians and Jews; it is only through learning with the other, and in dialogue with the other, that we can test the validity of endeavors and turn the hard lessons of the past into tshuvah and tikkun olam, repentance and repair of our world. The past two centuries, and, especially, the last sixty years, have reshaped the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. From mutual objectification and demonization, many Jews and Christians have moved to a place where commonalities and differences can be explored together and even celebrated. Rather than finding the encounter threatening, I believe that we can each learn from it to be better Jews and Christians. A significant part of this new relationship involves the reclamation, on the part of Christianity, of its Jewish roots as a result of the twin influences of biblical scholarship and post-Holocaust theology. While occasionally the consequences of this reclamation make Jews uncomfortable, and should force us as Jews to examine that discomfort with a self-critical eye, for the most part, it has opened us up to each other and shown us that what dominated Jewish-Christian relations for centuries is neither inevitable nor the only way for Jews and Christians to be in the world. Contemporary Jews and Christians share so much--a common scripture, significant origins in Second Temple Judaism, and a long history--that we are inextricably bound together. It seems that we are finding a new way of being together, one in which we are a blessing to one another. As we say in the Jewish tradition, ken yehi ratzon, may this be God's will. NOTES 1. John T. Pawlikowski, "Christian Anti-Semitism: Past History, Present Challenges," Journal of Religion and Society, Vol. 6, 2004. http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2004/2004-10.html 2. http://www.cresourcei.org/seder.html 3. http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/passover.html 4. http://www.ucc.org/worship/ways/pdf/ww42-4.pdf 5. http://www.elca.org/ecumenical/interfaithrelations/jewish/guidelines.html DAVID FOX SANDMEL is Rabbi of K.A.M. Isaiah Israel Congregation in Chicago and Crown-Ryan Professor of Jewish Studies at Catholic Theological Union. His article, "Jews, Christians, and Gibson's 'The Passion of the Christ," appeared in the Winter/Spring 2004 issue. This paper was originally given as the 2005 Knipor Lecture in Tulsa, Oklahoma, February 6, 2005. A revised version was presented in Rome at a conference, Nostra Aetate Today: Reflections 40 Years after its Call for a New Era of Interreligious Relations, September 27, 2005. COPYRIGHT 2005 American Jewish Congress No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder. Copyright 2005 Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. Please bookmark with social media, your votes are noticed and appreciated: Article Details Printer friendly Cite/link Email Feedback Author: Sandmel, David Fox Publication: Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought Date: Jun 22, 2005 Words: 5275 Previous Article: A Strange Death: Zichron Ya'akov, then and now. Next Article: Scene with starlings in Jerusalem. 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