ECAJ co-CEO Peter Wertheim responds to report that church head Bruce Hales claimed Jews killed Jesus, while referring to “their lies, and their iniquity, and their wickedness”.

“The refusal of Jews to accept the religious claims of Jesus and Muhammad, and hence their refusal to convert to Chris­tian­ity or Islam, were seen as offensive and deeply threat­en­ing by the leaders of these later forms of ethical mono­the­ism.

“In the case of Chris­tian­ity, its early theo­lo­gians responded to this refusal by seeking to demonise and malign Jews col­lect­ively on the basis of all manner of false­hoods. Jews col­lect­ively were branded as ‘Christ-killers’ by the Christian author­it­ies (the Deicide charge) and were ruth­lessly per­se­cuted through pogroms, expul­sions, the Inquis­i­tion, ghet­toisa­tion, forced con­ver­sions and other horrors over the course of mediaeval, pre-modern, and modern history, cul­min­at­ing in the Holocaust.

“This religious basis of antisemitism and the per­se­cu­tion of Jews to which it gave rise were not offi­cially repu­di­ated by the major churches until the second half of the 20^th century, most notably by the Catholic Church in the document known as Nostra Aetate (In Our Time) in 1965. Before it was offi­cially repu­di­ated, the Deicide charge and asso­ci­ated false­hoods and col­lect­ive myths about Jews had been used as the basis for untold deaths and suffering by Jewish com­munit­ies for nearly two millennia.

“To this day, the attri­bu­tion of col­lect­ive guilt to the Jewish people on any purported basis remains one of the clearest dis­tin­guish­ing markers of the disgrace of antisemitism.”

Peter Wertheim
Co-CEO, ECAJ