On the Jewish Question as a Christian Question

An invitation posted by Berdyaev a century ago

The antichrist was widely thought to be Jewish. That this way of thinking came to have its anti-Semitic perversion, as if the Jew qua Jew were a kind of antichrist, cannot be denied. The rise of anti-Semitism, first in the Church and then, without any gospel restraint, in the world at large—not in the Islamic world only but also in the world of the philosophes and in the Aryan and Russian worlds, which ignored the urgent criticisms of Berdyaev and others and pressed on toward the Holocaust—is itself a grave sign of antichrist.

So I wrote in my commentary on Thessalonians (2020: 217), not knowing that this sign would in short order be writ so large. As for Berdyaev, he remains for me a puzzling figure, despite everything I learned about him while co-supervising a very instructive dissertation on his political thought. On the one hand, he seems to follow Eckhart and Böhme in tracing the inherently chaotic back into God, a colossal theological error that inevitably engenders many further errors. On the other hand, he is always penetrating, insightful, stimulating—a writer who sees the big picture and knows how to capture in words what lies at the heart of it. What he sees and says about the Jewish question is no exception.

In 1924, Berdyaev published a brief essay on that topic which I am going to supply here in its entirety, because in 2024 it remains terribly germane. His immediate concern was for the Jews in Russia whenever the new Bolshevism should collapse. As it happened, that collapse took longer than expected and the “unprecedented slaughter” of Jews that some foresaw took place, not in Russia, but rather in Germany and in German-occupied territories. It did indeed take place, however, on a scale few could have imagined. And the sorry fact is that people no longer cry, Never again! A new cry has gone up proclaiming that once is not enough. The unprecedented is to be a precedent, from the River to the Sea.

That new cry is heard not only from Hamas and its Gazan supporters, but from people far away. It can be heard even at the gates of McGill, as this Instagram post illustrates:

Jew-hatred is out in the open again, exacerbated by the advent of modern communications, which being instant and impersonal, are not social but anti-social, lacking context and qualification even when not lacking candour. It is exacerbated also and especially by the modern rejection of biblical religion in favour of utopian politics pursued with fanatical zeal. For biblical religion forbids both utopian politics and their inevitable counterpart: the scapegoating that covers up failure.¹

To forbid is not necessarily to prevent, of course, as the history of Jew-hatred during Christendom attests. Yet it is by no means an accident that the occasional riotous pogrom gave way to systematic destruction of Jewry only after Christendom was gone and the process of discarding biblical religion was all but complete. For neither the Jew nor (if at all devout) the Christian fits very well into the secularist’s dream of a future without God. Having cast away the kernel and retained only the husk of biblical eschatology, hence also of biblical morality, the secularist becomes quite capable of contemplating “the destruction of life unworthy of life,” a category into which the former can be fitted. In his fanaticism for a godless future, or rather for a future in which he himself is God, he can even make ad hoc alliances with the Islamist who thinks killing the kafir a work of God.

That, of course, is a contradiction and a very foolish mistake. But the kind of secularist of whom I am speaking has cast caution to the wind. His anti-Semitic spirit has begun to chafe at the remaining constraints. When a suitable catalyst appears, those constraints quickly dissolve and his inner rage suddenly bursts forth. We may safely assume that those who planned and carried out the brutally inhuman attacks of 7 October 2023 intended to provide such a catalyst, not counting the cost—which they knew would be steep, especially if Israel in its own rage reacted rashly—but coveting the consequence: the lid coming off the cauldron of our collective anti-Semitism.

The lid is indeed coming off, just as it did in the autumn of 1938, on Kristallnacht. Even back then, the German Christians (I speak of the movement by that name) were already half-pagan, though their country was not yet in consequence half-Muslim, as soon it will be. They regarded themselves as creatures of the Reformation, and perhaps they were. One of the two spirits of Luther had deserted them, however, during the Enlightenment, leaving the other to prevail. By now they were thoroughgoing anti-Semites, who had progressed through all the stages or layers of anti-Semitism, to which they vainly added a religious veneer. They could no longer empathize with St Paul at all, that “Hebrew of the Hebrews” who had penned these passionate words:

I am speaking the truth in Christ, I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen by race. They are Israelites, and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ— God, who is over all, be blessed for ever. Amen.

But I ask: Is this spirit, the spirit of Paul, any more ours than theirs? We are almost fully pagan now, in our peculiar post-Christian way. To those who still consider themselves Christian, or think they might like to be Christian, I recommend pondering anew the epistle to the Romans; and pondering also this essay by Berdyaev that I am here presenting in its centenary year. The latter requires updating, yes, beyond the updating and elaboration it received in “Christianity and Anti-Semitism,” drafted shortly before Kristallnacht. It remains valuable, however, for its simple yet nuanced taxonomy of anti-Semitism, and for the fact that it takes us quickly to the heart of the question.²

The question came long ago to the Jews first, to the chosen people, through their own prophets. It was a question about receiving the kingdom of God by grace, instead of seizing it by force, as if it were just another fruit to be plucked, another vineyard to be possessed the way Ahab and Jezebel possessed the vineyard of Naboth; that is, by deceit, perversion of justice, and bloody violence.

When this question was posed afresh for them by John the Baptist and by Jesus, through whom God at last demanded a clear answer, they gave him one. John was beheaded. A cross was erected for Jesus. On that cross, Jesus alone gave righteous answer, on Israel’s behalf. He purchased the vineyard with his own blood, not another’s. For the grace of God never fails.

The grace of God never fails! That is the whole thrust of Romans, which reaches its climax in chapters nine to eleven, assuring the Jew of divine grace despite his answer and—mirabile dictu—even through his answer, while assuring the Greek that God is not done with the Jew, but through the Jew has made an opening for the Greek, that divine grace might triumph over both.³

The Greek, then, must face the same question. Will he receive the kingdom of God by grace, as he now may, or will he try to seize it by force? Anti-Semitism is a sure sign that he is trying to seize it by force. He will drive out the Jew! He will even do so in the name of Christ, because the Jew has killed Christ. But all the while he is operating on borrowed capital. He has, as Berdyaev observes, taken up the very idea, “the Jewish chiliastic idea, in the name of which Christ, with his religion of the cross and of crucifixion, was rejected.” Only now he is using it to attack all Jews, as atonement for his own kingdom-building.

He thinks like the radical Islamist, with whom he makes common cause. Though he hates Israel, he also thinks like the radicalized Israeli, who has had altogether enough of the Palestinian, guilty or innocent. He is a scapegoater. He has entered a hall of mirrors in which he sees, not one cross, and that a holy one, but countless unholy crosses to satisfy his rage.

If this anti-Semite thinks himself a Christian, he is sorely mistaken. For he supposes that God has done just what Naboth refused to do, that the Holy One of Israel has abandoned his inheritance altogether and taken up a new one.⁴ The people of Israel are no longer longer God’s vineyard, his precious vine. Gentiles are not grafted into that vine so that they too might be dressed and pruned and become fruitful. They are the vine, the new vine, into which the odd Jew might perhaps be grafted, thus ceasing for all practical purposes to be a Jew. The anti-Semite is a militant supersessionist.⁵

Berdyaev understood that the Jewish question, as a question about the kingdom, comes to Christians quite concretely as a question about the Jews themselves. Are they to be hated and hounded for rejecting Jesus as messiah, or is that just the cultural Christian’s way of repeating the Jew’s own error? Is it not rivalry with the Jew for possession of a worldly kingdom, contested in a worldly way? If so—and Berdyaev believed it so, even before the war and the creation of a Jewish state—it is the same kind of rivalry the Muslim maintains with the Jew. It has nothing to do with Christ, save as a betrayal of Christ.

It should be noted that Berdyaev, when he treats his fourth category, the religious category, refuses to marginalize Christ. He distinguishes between emergent Christianity's messianic anti-Judaism—that is, its historic dispute with reactionary rabbinic Judaism’s anti-Christian messianism—and the anti-Semitism he has been describing with his first three categories.⁶ That distinction is crucial. For what Berdyaev is talking about when he speaks of anti-Judaism is not a form of Jew-hatred. It is rather a choice between sides in a dispute between Jews. This “anti-Judaism” is Jewish before it is Christian, whereas anti-Semitism is neither Jewish nor Christian.

Anti-Semitism is not better but worse for being religious. Religious anti-Semitism fails to acknowledge the spiritual fault-line that runs between Jew and Jew, as between Christian and Christian. It makes out the Jew qua Jew to be unfaithful, and so elides the Jewishness of Jesus himself. It provides cover for the lower forms of anti-Semitism, perverting the gospel—the gospel that Paul says is for the Jew first, even as the question about the kingdom is for the Jew first.

“If anti-Semites were for one moment capable of understanding the mystery of the religious destiny of the Jewish people, all their anti-Semitism would vanish,” says Berdyaev. He does not elaborate that mystery, as Paul does in Romans 9-11, though elsewhere he points us to those chapters.⁷ What he does do is something quite shocking to many, though it would not have been at all shocking to Paul. He invites the Christian to serve the Jew as Simon of Cyrene served Jesus. Our attitude towards Jewry, he avers, “is a test of the strength of the Christian spirit.”

That thesis is sound, that test is true. One cannot be anti-Semitic and authentically Christian. Of course, one’s attitude towards Jews and one’s attitude towards the Israeli state are two different things, or should be. One can be a severe critic of the latter, as one can be a severe critic of a given Jew or group of Jews, without being tainted in the least by anti-Semitism. One can challenge those who put their faith in the State of Israel rather than in the God of Israel, without rejecting the very idea of an Israeli state. One can do all this as a Jew or as a gentile. But one cannot be an anti-Semitic Christian. It is a contradiction in terms.⁸

The Jewish question, as Berdyaev poses it, is a question the Christian must face if he means to be Christian. And the Jew, too, must face it in his own way. The one must ask what he will do with the Jew, kin to Jesus. The other must ask what he will do with Jesus, kin to the Jew. Each is asking about the kingdom of God, or rather being asked; for Jesus, as even Pilate knew, is “king of the Jews” before he is king of the gentiles. The Jewish question sends both Christian and Jew to one and the same place. It sends them back to the cross erected on Golgotha, to look on him whom they have pierced.

The question itself, then, binds Jews and Christians together. Whenever they “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,” as Jesus advised, they are already on the way to answering it rightly, and to the spiritual kinship that is still greater than biological kinship.⁹ Which, though it does not yet unite them in Christ as they ought to be united, at least unites them against antichrist.

But here at last is Berdyaev’s essay, for which I have now provided much too long an introduction.¹⁰

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Nikolai A. Berdyaev

The Jewish Question as a Christian Question

Russian pogrom

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When I read the collection Russia and the Jews, I felt keenly the deep tragedy of the self-consciousness of Russian Jews who love Russia, detest the Russian revolution, and want to be Russian patriots. While I disagree with much of the thinking in this collection, I respect the efforts of the group united in it to affirm the dignity of Russian Jews rather than to exploit the revolution for Jewish interests. It points us to the profound, seemingly hopeless, tragedy of the Jewish question.

Anti-Semitic sentiment among Russians, both in Russia and abroad, is growing wildly and is taking the form of a frenzy peculiar to Russians. The hour may come when this anti-Semitism will express itself in savage and bloody violence, when the unhappy Russian people, crushed and humiliated by the revolution, will take cruel revenge for their sufferings and humiliations on the Jews, holding them entirely responsible for their calamities. Already the enemies of the Jews, the friends of the Jews, and the Jews themselves are saying that the fall of Bolshevism will be accompanied by a terrible and unprecedented slaughter of the Jews.

That the Russian Jews are caught in the vise between Bolshevism and the pogrom should alarm and worry above all the Jews themselves. Such a situation is reprehensible from a humane, liberal, democratic point of view and from the point of view of the ‘progress’ of humanity and the destiny of civilization. But there is another point of view, which is rarely taken, and which seems to me the most essential and fundamental in the discussion of this tragic question—the Christian point of view. For the Jewish question is also a Christian question, an interior question of Christian consciousness.

The voice of Christian conscience is not heard about this question, which arouses passions and is fraught with catastrophe inside the Christian world. Only two points of view on the Jewish question have proved widespread: either the antisemitic (that of the pogrom) or the humane liberal-democratic. Those from whom Jews await with horror the pogrom, in the hour of the liquidation of Bolshevism, in the final revolution, are Orthodox Christians. And many Jews see in Russian Christianity, in the growth of the Orthodox movement, a grave danger for themselves. Can we, Russian Christians, calmly and indifferently endure such a situation? Should not our voice be heard as the voice of Christian conscience?

Twelve years ago I wrote an article in Russian Thought under the title ‘Nationalism and Anti-Semitism before the Court of Christian Conscience’. There I tried to speak about the Jewish question, in its essence, as an internal Christian question. Already I sensed how difficult it was to discuss this question essentially rather than politically. In Russia there has never been moral freedom of thought in discussing the Jewish question. There had been none earlier, because there were too many Jews among the Soviet commissars and their predominance presented the danger of a swift and violent reaction. There were pogromists then, and there are pogromists now. But one would like to speak the truth, for once, on its own terms.

A poisonous atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion has formed around the Jewish question. Some see everywhere a ‘Jewish-Masonic conspiracy’. Others see anti-Semitism everywhere. Freedom of thought and freedom of conscience are completely stifled in this atmosphere of mutual hatred and hostility. Jews and some defenders of the Jews are suspicious and mistrustful to the point that, if you are a Christian and an Orthodox Christian by conviction, if you do not see democracy as the pearl of great price and are not a supporter of revolution, they assume that you are a secret anti-Semite. This is just as much a distortion and a threat as finding in the Jews the source of all evils and calamities. There must at last be a declaration of the right to discuss the Jewish question as freely as any other question. No opprobrium should be attached to those who freely express their thoughts on this question. This is the condition of possibility for discussion of the Jewish question, and for any defence of Jews by Christians.

Four types of anti-Semitism can be identified: the quotidian, the political, the racial, and the religious. Let us consider all these types from the point of view of Christian consciousness.¹¹

The most common type of anti-Semitism, the quotidian, does not need conscious ideological justification; it is spontaneous and based on immediate instinct. The word ‘Yid’ was born in its depths. The instinctive, immediate aversion and repulsion to the Jew is as irrefutable as any taste, any sympathy or antipathy. It is not a matter of orientation or worldview. I have known people very much to the left, democratically and revolutionary-minded, who were garden-variety anti-Semites. There are such anti-Semites among communists as well; just as, conversely, there are people on the right who are very nice to Jews.

One can only say that it is not a Christian thing to cultivate antipathy or hatred for an entire people. It is an unhealthy mental attitude and disposition. To cultivate disgust towards Jews, as towards Germans or Poles or Armenians, is in general a very bad attitude toward people. A Christian consciousness can never justify this quotidian anti-Semitism, any more than it can justify any other hatred and disgust, except hatred and disgust for evil itself. Russians are everyday anti-Semites not by virtue of being Christianly aware, and certainly not because of any deep Christian feeling. Feelings of hatred must be repented in [the sacrament of] confession.

Political anti-Semitism is usually based on competition and rivalry, on the struggle for dominance and power over life. These foundations have nothing in common with Christianity. Political anti-Semitism clearly belongs to the kingdom of Caesar and its passions belong to this world, not to the kingdom of Christ. In this sphere, too, the anti-Semites stand on the same ground on which the Jews stand, driven by the same motives and interests. On the basis of political anti-Semitism it is impossible to oppose the Jewish idea and the Christian idea. The restriction of the political rights of Jews belongs to an ordinary worldly campaign for dominance and power. Political anti-Semitism usually has an economic basis and is a form of struggle against the economic domination of the Jews. Often it seeks to protect the economically weaker. This form of anti-Semitism does not touch the depths of the Jewish question.

Racial anti-Semitism runs deeper. It has its own ideology. It is an entire ideological movement. The ideologists of racial anti-Semitism are mostly Germans. German consciousness likes to oppose the Aryan and Semitic races and to see the Germans as carriers of a purely Aryan spirit. A very talented representative of racial anti-Semitism is [H. S.] Chamberlain. In the German spiritual culture this Aryan anti-Semitic current is pervasive. It existed in Fichte, in Wagner, in many great Germans. The ideology of racial anti-Semitism does not want to receive the Jewish spirit into the bowels of Aryan culture. It regards Jewry as a race absolutely alien, hostile, and inferior.

Can a Christian be a racial anti-Semite? Racial anti-Semitism, carried to its logical conclusion, becomes enmity against Christianity. It is forced to recognise Christianity as a Semitic graft to Aryan culture and to turn to India for the origins of purely Aryan religiosity. The Christian cannot endorse racial anti-Semitism because he cannot forget that the Son of God in his humanity was a Jew, that the Mother of God was a Jewess, that the prophets and apostles were Jews, and many of the early Christian martyrs were Jews. The race which was the cradle of our religion cannot be declared an inferior and hostile race. Chamberlain's efforts to represent Christ as not a Jew by blood are not at all acceptable to the Christian mind. And, scientifically speaking, these experiments are frivolous. Christians are compelled to believe that the Jewish people are the chosen people of God. In that fact lie the depth and tragedy of the Jewish question. Which brings us to the religious type of anti-Semitism.

Christianity, in its most profound sense, is religious anti-Semitism or, more precisely, anti-Judaism. Just as domestic or political hatred of Jews is utterly inadmissible to the Christian consciousness and completely alien to the religion of love, so religious anti-Judaism belongs to the Christian faith as an integral component of it. Christian anti-Judaism is the flip side of belief in the divine election of the Jewish people.

Vulgar anti-Semitism, which breathes a spirit of hatred and violence, can make no sense of this religious anti-Judaism. It does not reach the requisite level of understanding—that of the Jewish question as a religious question. If the anti-Semites were for one moment capable of understanding the mystery of the religious destiny of the Jewish people, all their anti-Semitism would vanish, [having been recognized] as the spawn of petty and self-serving feelings. For the mystery of the religious destiny of the Jewish people is the mystery of world history. It lies hidden by the outworking of their messianic hopes, in the duality of their image of the Messiah, in the confusion of expectations of a kingdom not of this world and a kingdom of this world.

The kingdom of this world is the Jewish chiliastic idea, in the name of which Christ, with his religion of the cross and crucifixion, was rejected. But are anti-Semites among all the nations [of the Christian world] faithful to the crucified Truth and to the kingdom not of this world? Is it in the name of the kingdom of Christ that they hate Jewry and are ready to crucify it? This is the Jewish question.

Anti-Semites are no less devoted to the Jewish messianic idea than Jews. They want power, authority, success, bliss on earth without crucifixion and redemption, and they are more accustomed to rule than the Jews. The anti-Christian Judaic idea of dominion and happiness in this world, unredeemed from sin, is not peculiar to the Jews! It is no less adhered to by pure Aryans. And not all of Jewish blood serve this idea, for the way to the kingdom of God is open to them as well. For the Christian consciousness, there is ‘neither Greek nor Jew’; only a contest of ideas and beliefs, not of races and nationalities.

The Jewish spirit played a large role in the creation of capitalism and socialism, two forms of modern man's exclusive attachment to this world. The first of these forms is of that of the Rothschilds and the other that of Karl Marx, both Jewish (though that did not prevent Marx from being anti-Semitic and claiming that Jews are the carriers of the capitalist spirit of exploitation). But Aryans of all nationalities belonging to the Christian world are no less seduced by this spirit [of worldliness] than Jews. They rebel against Jews out of a sense of competition. On the other hand, even Jewry continues to put forward many detached idealists.

In order to have the religious right to speak out against the predominance of the Jewish spirit, it is necessary to have another spirit oneself. That other spirit, the spirit of Christian detachment, is hard to find in most anti-Semites. They want rather to be the undisputed masters of life, and to eliminate the Jews as competitors too talented in this respect. People of such an orientation spiritually cannot be the bearers of a Christian idea opposed to the Jewish idea. Their anti-Semitism is determined by selfish political and mundane motives, by the struggle for vested interests and control. It is of the same nature as the class struggle.

Anti-Semitic Christian are usually worse than Jews, because, as Vladimir Solovyov has already pointed out, Jews treat Christians according to their own beliefs and convictions and are not obliged to treat them in a Christian manner, while Christians who treat Jews in a non-Christian manner betray the commitments of their faith. He who has the courage to claim that his anti-Semitism has a Christian source is obliged to treat Jews in a Christian way, obliged to put his Christianity into practice. Only he who will love rather than hate the Jews, who will oppose the Jewish spirit with the strength of his Christian spirit, has a spiritual right to a Christian anti-Semitism. Such is the paradox of the Jewish question as a Christian question.

The attitude towards Jewry is a test of the strength of the Christian spirit. This testing has been allotted to the Russian people in the highest degree, and with bitterness we must concede that they are not well able to handle it. In vain do our anti-Semites think that the test consists only in not succumbing to anti-Christian hatred of the Jews and in not walking the path of conflict with anger and violence. It is not by chance that the Russian people have been connected with the Jewish people historically and been forced to provide refuge to God's chosen people, [consigned] to suffer punishment for not recognising the Saviour born in their midst.

The Jewish question, then, is the question of the Christian vocation of the Russian people. Between these peoples there is a certain affinity in messianic consciousness and it is no accident that the ascendent communism turned out to be predominantly a Russian-Jewish idea, a Russian-Jewish anti-Christian faith. In the Russian spiritual nature, and in Russian Christianity, there were powerful Judaic chiliastic and national messianic elements. The experiment in realizing an ‘earthly paradise’, a kingdom of absolute justice on earth, was one Russians had to attempt together with Jews. And if the Russian people, in the hour of victory over the nightmare and hell of communism, should carry out a bloody pogrom against the Jews, that will mean that the Russian people are not cured spiritually, not freed from the demons that have tormented them.

For us Russian Christians, this is a very grave and terrible question. And those of us in whom Christian conscience and Christian consciousness have not been extinguished will have to protect the Jews from the violence and vengeance that threaten them. The Jewish question, as our internal Christian question, is the question of whether the Russian people really want to be a Christian people and to conduct life in a Christian way. We should be concerned not only with the physical fate of the Jews, but above all with the spiritual fate of the Russian people itself, as a Christian people. Pogrom anti-Semitism is the death of the Russian soul, a further betrayal of Christianity after pogrom Bolshevism.

Christianity is incompatible with the cult of malice and hatred. Our epoch is choking on anger because it has betrayed Christianity. We Russians, if we are still Christians, must first of all realise our own guilt and repent of our own sins, not blame others only, and above all the Jews, for everything. It is not a Christian thing to be angry and vengeful and to look for culprits everywhere. Pogrom anti-Semitism is a manifestation of the weakness of the Russian character, of the inability to defend courageously its ideas and its spirit.

There is nothing more humiliating than these embittered complaints that the Jews are everywhere beginning to play too great a role in modern culture. The role of Jews is indeed disproportionately great. But what is to be done? It is ridiculous to complain that the Jew Einstein discovered the law of relativity. If we Russians, Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen want to play a greater role, we will have to show more spiritual strength, more talent, more fidelity to our own idea and faith, more initiative. There is no other honourable way. We still pretend that among Jews there is [naturally] more cohesion, more solidarity, more willingness to help each other. Since we ourselves have very little inclination to cohesion and solidarity and are always ready to eat each other up, we are left with impotent slander and envy. All this reminds us of our Russian sins. We ourselves are to blame for our unhappy fate, not the Jews; not even the Bolsheviks, but first of all ourselves, each of us. With this consciousness the revival must begin.

Historically, we live in the days of [a great] Lent. In such a time it is not advisable to be angry and hateful. Objectively, from the religious-Christian point of view, the Jewish question is insoluble; it remains tragic until the end of time. The remarkable Catholic writer, Léon Bloy, formulated the tragedy of Christianity and Judaism very acutely: Christ will come down from the cross when the Jews believe in him; the Jews will believe in him only when he comes down from the cross. But subjectively, the Jewish question is resolved, at all times, as the obligation to treat the Jews Christianly.

Vladimir Solovyov reminded Christians of their duty. His dying prayer for the Jewish people is a deeply moving fact that we must remember. We may hate a false idea, but we are absolutely forbidden to hate people and nations.¹² Even if it turned out that the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ were true and expose the role of Jewry in the world—I am personally absolutely convinced of the falsity of these protocols; any open-minded person should sense the falsification—even in this case our obligation to treat the Jews in a Christian manner would be undiminished.

The Christian solution of the Jewish question does not depend on this or that Jewish solution of the Christian and universal question. Let the unhappy and painful lot of the Jews in the present age be an atonement for the religious guilt of the elect people, of their consuming hunger for the kingdom of God on earth without a conscious embrace of Golgotha. Still it is not the business of us Christians to make heavier the Jewish people's historical cross. It is our duty to bear our own cross and to lighten the burden of others.¹³

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Fifth Station: Simon of Cyrene compelled to help Jesus

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1. “The pogrom is not only a shameful and inhuman things: to me it is a sign of terrifying weakness and incompetence” (Berdyaev, “Christianity and Anti-Semitism,” sec. II).

2. Berdyaev’s 1924 essay, “The Jewish Question as a Christian Question,” builds on an earlier essay from 1912, “Nationalism and Anti-Semitism Affront the Judgment of a Christian Consciousness.” Its concerns are pursued at more length in “Christianity and Anti-Semitism,” which is based on a lecture published in Russian in 1938, with a revised text published in French in 1940 and in English in 1948. One can find the English here, and with extensive commentary by its co-translator, Alan Spears, here. I am dependent on Spears (1952, 1954, n. 30) for my understanding of its provenance, about which there seems to be some confusion. As for his account of Berdyaev’s “mystic” orthodoxies and unorthodoxies, I cannot even begin to engage all that. It will be enough to engage the 1924 essay, with an occasional glance at its elaboration in “Christianity and Anti-Semitism.”

3. With Romans 1–11, see for example Psa. 89:30–33 and 2 Tim. 2:13.

4. The story of Naboth’s vineyard contains a more elaborate typology than is commonly realized. Ahab and Jezebel (a Jew and a gentile, respectively) appear as Adam and Eve in their utter reprobation, just as Jesus and his virgin mother later appear as Adam and Eve in their ultimate redemption. Jezebel, like Eve, tells her sulking husband to eat and drink and otherwise do nothing; she herself, taking charge of his servants, will see to the nasty business of securing the coveted vineyard. Mary, by contrast, being full of grace, defers to her Son, as she had deferred to his heavenly Father through her fiat mihi. She instructs the servants to do whatever he commands. Jezebel, like Eve, is cursed for what she obtains. Mary is honoured for her righteous desire; an abundance of wine is provided, signifying a renewed creation. Jesus himself defers to the Father—“Thy will, not mine, be done”—displaying the divine faithfulness. Thus, and only thus, is the vineyard secured, the vineyard that belongs to the Father and will never be given up, nor plucked from his hands.

5. I have said before, and will say again, that not all supersessionists are alike and not all are wrong. But this kind of supersessionist is profoundly and irreparably wrong. See chapter eight of Theological Negotiations, available again from Baker Academic.

6. Compare “Christianity and Anti-Semitism,” section II: “The Christian religion actually is opposed to the Jewish religion in the form it took after the refusal to see the awaited Messiah in [Jesus] Christ. The Judaism which preceded Christ’s coming, and that which succeeded it [Talmudic Judaism], are two distinct spiritual manifestations.”

7. Berdyaev has Romans in mind when, in the first section of the later essay, he writes, “How mystifying is the historic destiny of the Jews!” Or again, in the second section: “How paradoxical the Jewish destiny is! … They reject the cross as a temptation, while their whole history is a perpetual crucifixion.” And in the fourth section: “It is possible for the Jews to acknowledge Jesus as their Messiah, for this tendency already exists in the heart of Judaism.” “In order that Jews may become converted,” he adds, “it is of the highest importance that Christians should make a start by getting converted themselves; that is, by becoming real believers and not [merely] formal ones.” Cf. Romans 12.

8. “In truth, the superficiality of Christians who believe they can be anti-Semites is prodigious!” (ibid., sec. I) They have overlooked the fact that “anti-Semitism is fatally sure to develop into anti-Christianity; it must reveal its anti-Christian nature. That is what we are seeing today.” (sec. IV)

9. Being greater, it does not eliminate it, but must be allowed to qualify it: “Then his mother and his brethren came to him, but they could not reach him for the crowd. And he was told, ‘Your mother and your brethren are standing outside, desiring to see you.’ But he said to them, ‘My mother and my brethren are those who hear the word of God and do it.’” (Luke 8:19–21; cf. Matt. 6:33)

10. “The Jewish Question as a Christian Question” was originally published in the daily journal, The Rudder, 18-19 March 1924, No. 999-1000, Berlin. It is republished here in its centenary year, with new paragraphing and other minor adjustments for clarity. NB: My version is not a direct translation from the Russian. It is dependent on a combination of machine-assisted translation (DeepL), the 2006 translation by the late Fr Steve Janos at nicholasberdyaev.com, my own study of the essay in translation, as of its sequel, and improvements recommended by friends who read Russian. I remain solely responsible for any errors introduced by my attempt to provide a more accessible English text.

11. I use “quotidian” to represent бытовой, but not exclusively; other words, such as “garden-variety” or “everyday” or “domestic,” come closer, I am told, to its colloquial sense. But the other side of this quotidian anti-Semitism is what in the later essay he calls “a mystical fear of the Jews.” It should also be mentioned that there he prefers “political and economic” as a label for the second type, and (wisely) changes the order, advancing from the quotidian to the racial to the political, which is in service of the economic.

12. Solovyov, he reminds us, “believed the defence of the Jews to be one of the most important missions of his life” (“Christianity and Anti-Semitism,” sec. I). In the present situation, that must surely involve at least some support, however cautious and critical, for their nation and its new state. In “Christianity and Anti-Semitism” Berdyaev remarked that the founding of an autonomous Israeli state would provide no ground for optimism so far as any historical resolution of the underlying question is concerned; the only solid ground for that is the parousia and the transfiguration of the world. He was entirely right. At the same time he rejected political defeatism, finding some inspiration in Maritain, and he was right there too. Other things he says in that essay’s final sections are more problematic, to be sure, but they need not detain us here.

13. “The Christian and universal question” I have tried to expound in my introduction, albeit somewhat differently than Berdyaev. But we should also bear in mind, while reading this final paragraph, what I suppose him to have in mind; viz., Augustine’s treatment in The City of God of the role of the Jewish people in the saeculum. It is their great service, in their sojourning among the gentiles, to bear witness to the truth of the gospel by carrying with them the scriptures of the old covenant, which make a path for that gospel in the spiritual desert of the nations. If John the Baptist prepared the way for Jesus at his first coming, paying a great price for doing so, the Jewish people as a whole, whether wittingly or unwittingly, continue to do that until his second coming, very much lightening the load of the Christian “other”—who, insists Berdyaev, must reciprocate—until by God’s grace “all Israel” is saved.

D. B. Farrow © 2024