A Jewish convert to Christianity, Edward Hadas is deeply troubled by the resurgence of antisemitism following the Hamas attack on Israel. Hadas faces up to the dark, lingering influence of Nazi and Soviet antisemitism not only in the Middle East but also on the Left in Western countries, and to the widespread belief that Israel is the centre of global evil. Arguing that Christian anti-Judaism originally spawned this hatred, he asserts that this is the moment for Christians to show they have truly repented of their great error. For Christians, judgements of Israeli policy and Zionism should be of far less importance than the obligation to show solidarity with Jews and all people of goodwill in rejecting all antisemitism. He asserts that this solidarity should be a central element of the common good that Christians are bound to promote.
Christians owe Jews total solidarity in the fight against antisemitism
l am more Jewish than ever
I am going to tell a sad story. It is autobiographical, historic, and, I believe, urgent. It is about Jews, Christians, and antisemitism.
The happy life of a Jew who is a Christian
I start with my own conversion to Christianity in 1987. Entry into the Catholic Church required abandoning some of the religion of my childhood, which can be described as non-practising and spiritually lazy Judaism. However, as a Christian I have not, and indeed cannot, abandon, forsake, or reject the Judaism which is my birthright and my heritage. I am simultaneously a fulfilled Jew and a fully committed Christian.
Such was and is my understanding of what it meant for a Jew to become a Christian. The Christians of the first centuries must have had a similar understanding, but the rich theological and psychological significance of this double identification was soon lost. During the many centuries of Christian denigration of all things Jewish, Christians interpreted all the practices of unconverted Jews to be signs of the acceptance of responsibility for killing Christ. Conversion was necessarily accompanied by a total repudiation of the beliefs and practices of Judaism. (I simplify a complex story. Some scholars argue that many basic Jewish practices adopted over the long centuries of living under Christian political and cultural influence, most notably the reliance on the “oral Torah” in preference to what Christians call the Old Testament, were actually developed largely in response and resistance to the Christian story.[1])
I can thank Adolf Hitler for once again, after almost two millennia, making a Judeo-Christian existence acceptable. His slaughter of European Jews provoked a profound and much needed Christian re-evaluation of the Church’s largely dismal treatment of Jews. The result is a truly new era in Christian-Jewish relations. Thanks to this reconceptualisation, I can recognise myself as a Jew who is also a Christian and a Christian who remains a Jew. As a Catholic, I have an excellent role-model: Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger (1926-2007), a convert from Judaism who firmly identified as both Jewish and Christian.
It was rumoured that some old-style, Jew-hating French Catholics opposed the appointment of Lustiger as archbishop of Paris in 1981. They could only complain in private. It was no longer acceptable for any respectable Christian to speak publicly against Jews, inside or outside the Church. Indeed, in the decades since my conversion, I cannot remember hearing any practising Christians express even a hint of an antisemitic sentiment. Of course, the knowledge that I was a convert from Judaism might have discouraged some people from speaking freely.
In my own necessarily limited experience, the untroubled acceptance of Jewishness was not limited to my new co-religionists. In close to four decades of living in both the United States and Europe, I have noticed no anti-Jewish prejudice from friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. I have heard only a tiny number of passing antisemitic comments from strangers.
My own experience was unusually benign. Friends regularly brought me much less cheering reports about the persistence of insulting Jewish stereotypes and casual talk of Jewish conspiracies. Rather than pay attention to them, I preferred to think the best. I wanted to believe that antisemitism was already, or soon would be, fading away everywhere, even in the countries where it still flourished. I reasoned that in a secular age, such religious prejudice must be heading for the rubbish heap of global history.
My unhappy awakening
The responses to the current fighting in the Holy Land has demolished my complacent optimism. While I personally am still untouched by any overt antisemitism, that isolation has become increasingly exceptional. There have been vast increases harassment of Jews outside of Israel.[2] The stated reasons for anger include both dislike of Jews for being Jews and dislike of Jews for being people who are presumed to support Israel’s military operations in Gaza.
The insults, vandalism, and attacks are bad enough, but if anything, I am more concerned by the ease with which traditional and neo-traditional antisemitic thinking has amplified and poisoned the European and American discourse about the conflict. The sudden public flourishing of anti-Jewish tropes cannot come from nowhere. They must come from noxious ideas that were spreading widely during the decades when I was persuaded that they were being rooted out.
It does not take much reading to discover the roots of these weeds that were largely hidden by the then dominant Western public discourse, which was friendly to Jews. It is clear that old antisemitic tropes about conspiratorial and greedy Jews have lingered in the thinking and instincts of many people. It is also clear that the old ideas have been modernised within the increasing influential ideology of oppressors and victims of oppression. In the 21st century, the rootless cosmopolitan Jews of the 19th and 20th centuries have almost effortlessly been transformed into the structurally oppressive Jews, ruling the global world of commerce with their money and terrorising the displaced Palestinians with their clever malice. New words, same delusion, same hatred.
I still feel uneasy about my new attitude. Perhaps I am exaggerating. Perhaps I have foolishly given into what I used to think of as post-holocaust Jewish paranoia. I ask myself some hard questions:
- Does antisemitism really lurk when people are much more indignant about bad things done by Jews than by non-Jews? For example, is it antisemitic to condemn what can reasonably be argued to be Israel’s current disproportionate response to Hamas’s terrorist provocation much more fervently than the slaughter that provoked the current invasion of Gaza, or than about other, current and recent, and much larger, slaughters that do not involve Jews, for example in Yemen, Ethiopia, and Sudan?
- Does antisemitism actually aggravate or even lie behind some of the uncritical enthusiasm for Hamas’s claimed “resistance”, an enthusiasm that is common in left-wing political circles in Europe and the United States?
- Is it truly antisemitic never or almost never to criticise Hamas, the ruler of Gaza, for its avowed antisemitism?[3]
- Can excusing Hamas’s antisemitism as a response to Israel’s supposedly hugely unjust original foundation and current policies honestly be attributed to antisemitism?
Before the current conflict, I would have answered each of those questions with a fairly firm “No”. Experience and research have changed my mind. I now say, “Not necessarily, but often, and these days very often, these responses must be considered antisemitic.”
I come to these conclusions with great reluctance. It is hard to admit that the world is less pleasant and less safe for Jews than I had previously thought. It might also be hard for me to admit that that my father saw the position of the Jews more clearly than I did. He used to say that Hitler had only temporarily given formerly respectable Jew-hating a bad name. He was confident that the horror at the Shoah would eventually fade away and that antisemitism would then return, because anti-Jewish prejudice was not really dead. It was only resting and, as the Irish journalist Conor Cruise O’Brian once wrote, antisemitism is a light sleeper.
Reasons to worry now
For decades, both before and after his death in 2004, I thought my father was far too pessimistic. I still think that my positive judgement was not entirely wrong. There has been a decline in antisemitism in many places, to some extent the result of a widespread and serious educational effort, a sort of anti-antisemitism. However, I now have to admit that the fear and hatred of Jews are far more deeply set in Western and global culture than I had believed and hoped.
While Hitler gave antisemitism a bad name in much of Europe and the Americas, the Nazi fantasies of scientific or racial antisemitism have taken deep roots in the Middle East. The weeds of hatred have grown unchecked, further irrigated by the more casual but equally deep antisemitism spread out of the former Soviet Union, and later by the increasingly antisemitic ideology of Western promoters of anti-American and pro-Palestinian policies.[4] Unlike in Western Europe, in the Middle East there has been no effort at re-education, no sentiment of repentance, and no shortage of Jews to persecute.
Middle Eastern antisemitism was not always so virulent. For centuries, Jews overall had probably fared about as well under Muslim as under Christian rule. They were almost always taxed for holding onto their non-Muslim religion, but they were often tolerated. This has all changed, thanks to what might be called the Nazi-Soviet antisemitism pact. The foundation of Israel led to more Jews than Muslims being expelled from their longstanding homelands.[5] Since then, three generations of children have been educated in the fantasies of European antisemites. Promoters of decolonisation ignore the persistence of this particular variety of colonial thinking.
Indeed, this legacy of European intellectual domination receives relatively little attention from mainstream Western reporters and commentators. Readers who are unaware of the intensity of the anti-Jewish obsession in the region will be surprised to read a joint Jewish-Palestinian institute’s account of an extreme – but by no means extraordinary – expression of Arab pseudo-scientific antisemitism.
“Abd al-Aziz al-Rantisi, Hamas leader from Gaza, went further by denying the Holocaust, while simultaneously charging that ‘the Zionists were behind the Nazis’ murder of many Jews, with the aim of intimidating and forcing them to immigrate to Palestine.’ Furthermore, he claimed that the Nazis ‘received tremendous financial aid from the Zionist banks and monopolies, prior to their seizure of power and that ‘this great financial aid helped the Nazis build the military and economic force needed to destroy Europe and annihilate millions.’ ‘When we compare the Zionists to the Nazis,’ Rantisi concluded, ‘We insult the Nazis.’”[6]
When enemies are described as purely evil, directly hostile, and supremely powerful, it is easy enough to justify any amount of violence against them, no matter how cruel and futile. According to antisemitic logic, Israel’s extraordinary and essentially Jewish evil justifies collective delight in militarily self-destructive rapes and murders of Jewish civilians.[7]
I used to blame ignorance for the Western near-silence about the contribution of fantastical antisemitic tales to anti-Israeli narratives. I am now persuaded that the only plausible explanation for this omerta is sympathy. There is a widespread sympathy – perhaps unconscious, but nonetheless effectively antisemitic – with at least some elements of the old narrative of evil and powerful Jews. In many Western left-wing circles, the antisemitic prejudice is quite conscious. Many pro-Palestinian demonstrators describe their cause as a battle between the semi-demonic Jews of Israel and the semi-saintly fighters of Hamas.
The “Zionist” confusion
In Arab rhetoric, the Jewish super-evil is often described as Zionist. That usage demonstrates an unsurprising historical illiteracy. Zionism was originally a response by a relatively small group of secularised Jews to secular antisemitism. Until the Holocaust, it was strongly opposed by most Jews, secular as well as practising and believing. Even today, when most Jews feel some loyalty to the Zionist Jewish state, many Jews, especially those described as orthodox and ultra-orthodox, are either hostile to or doubtful about the Zionist cause. Conversely, many Zionists are indifferent about or even hostile to the religious aspect of being Jewish.
My own family story encompasses a wide range of responses to Zionism. One great-uncle was a firmly secular Zionist who left Germany for what was then Palestine before the Nazis took over. His brother, my grandfather, was not a Zionist. As a refugee from the Nazis, he settled happily in the United States. He was deeply upset by what he considered to be the blind support of Israel by the Aufbau, the German-Jewish newspaper published in New York. When my mother, a practising but atheistic Jew, was young, she wanted to migrate to Israel. And my father, a self-described non-practising, non-believing orthodox Jew, was so deeply opposed to Zionism that he refused to learn any modern Hebrew. I am like my father: a Jew who considers Zionism to be confused in its approach to religion, misguided in its political motivations, and dangerous to Jews in its implementation.
The dual meaning of Zionism, as either general evil Jewishness or specific secular Jewish nationalism, used to allow me to deny that actual antisemitism was increasing. I declared that real antisemitism was only a serious problem in the Middle East, where it was known as anti-Zionism. The situation was different, I said, for more sophisticated Europeans and Americans. I was sure that such people could keep their friendly attitudes towards all Jews and Jewishness separate from their perhaps less enthusiastic appraisal of Zionism.
The Jewish-Zionist distinction is still important to me, but it increasingly seems that all Jews are hated for being Zionists and Zionists are increasingly not being hated because of their support for Israel’s existence, but – solely, largely, or partly – simply because they are Jews. Under these unwanted and unfair circumstances, I must show solidarity with my people, however they are named and however much I might doubt the wisdom or justice of the policies of the Israeli government. And, as I have said, the Jews are my people.
I am a Jew, because of God’s inscrutable will
It might be worthwhile to explain in somewhat more detail my unchosen and inalienable Jewishness, especially as it seems to go against what the Catholic Church now defends as the “fundamental human right” of people to choose their own religion.[8] That civil and philosophical claim must be modified by the shared Jewish and Christian theological understanding of the central Jewish role in God’s plan for Creation. Christians believe, and many Jews would agree, that the Jews are the chosen people, chosen to bring God’s law and God’s salvation to the entire world.
This role exempts Jews from the full freedom of religious choice, because Jewishness is chosen for them by God. It is an inherited condition. Jews can never stop being some type of Jew. For example, I was a non-practising Jew when I was six years old, a Jewish atheist at twelve, a Jewish agnostic with vaguely spiritual tendencies a few years later, and finally a Jew who is Christian. If I were to become a Buddhist or a Unitarian (religious paths followed by many American Jews), I would become a Jewish Buddhist or a Jewish Unitarian. It is simply impossible for any Jews to become totally non-Jewish. The religious identification can only be dissipated though many generations of non-practice and intermarriage.
Jews who are Christians have an especially deep bond to their birth-religion, no matter how ignorant they are of it. For them, accepting the truth of Christianity is necessarily a choice to believe that they have completed their Jewishness, because the Jesus whom they worship is the fulfilment of the law and the prophets (see Matthew 5.17, Romans 10.4). This belief requires Jews who are Christians to continue to identify as Jews and to appreciate all things that are Jewish, even when believing Jews accuse the converts of apostacy and when the State of Israel denies them the right of return supposedly guaranteed to all Jews.
Of course, there is something peculiar about the special position of the Jews. “How odd of God / to choose the Jews”, in the words attributed to the writer William Ewer. There is no explanation for the inscrutable divine choice, at least none that humans can understand. We, Christians as well as Jews, just have to live with God’s choice of his people.
For Jews, that living-with has rarely been easy. Before Christ, Jews suffered persistent military defeats and lived in almost continuous political impotence. The Jew Jesus was crucified. After Christ, Jews suffered intermittent but persistent persecution, especially in Christian lands. The end of Christendom brought Jewish political emancipation, but along with that came the racism of secular antisemitism. This thinking turned out to be the most murderous of all anti-Jewish ideas. In short, the Chosen People seem to have been chosen to suffer, sometimes for obeying their divine law, sometimes for trying to shirk it, and, in modern antisemitism, simply for existing.
Israel was supposed to change that. The first Zionist dreamers imagined that by discarding their religion the Jews could become a normal nation, or at least what various European nationalists considered to be a normal nation-people combination during the final decades of the 19th century. The Zionists eventually got their country, again largely thanks to Hitler. In some ways, the state of Israel is what they dreamed of, a normal and successful European-style country. However, the principal Zionist wish, to end the exaggerated hatred of supposedly scheming and evil Jews, has not been granted. On the contrary, at least until very recently, Israeli Jews have suffered far more from the antisemitism of their non-Jewish neighbours than do Jews living in the United States and Europe.
When there is antisemitism, I am a Semite
Any antisemitism – religious or secular, in Israel or elsewhere – amplifies my own identification as a Jew. I describe my response with the last recorded words of Edith Stein, a German Jewish intellectual who became a Catholic in 1922 and a Carmelite nun in 1933. In August 1942, she and her sister Rosa, who had followed her into Catholicism and the convent, and who was then following her to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, were being arrested by the Nazis. Edith declared, “Come, we are going for our people.”[9]
Our people. The Jewish people of the Stein sisters are just as much my people. For the Jews of the 20th century, the Nazi persecution helped define and deepen this “we”. For me, living in the 21st century, the Palestinian, Middle Eastern, and now revived Western antisemitism has done the same. All of us who were born into the chosen people must recognise and resist this fundamental irrational hostility to Jews for being Jewish, whether the hostility is expressed in hateful deeds and words or through the acceptance of hateful ideas and the tolerance of hateful deeds.
We Jews who are also Christians have an additional reason to go for our people, to share fully in their suffering. The definitional Christian suffering, of Christ on the cross, redeems all Israelites’ sufferings. When we Jews who are Christians suffer with our fellow Jews, then we are truly accepting our Christian responsibility to “complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is the church” (Colossians 1.24).
Stein’s identification with her Jewishness when it mattered most showed exactly her willingness to take up her cross. In this, she was wiser than the Catholic hierarchy of the period. Outside of the Netherlands, where the Stein sisters were living, almost all bishops were far more concerned to prevent the murder of Jewish converts to Catholicism than to show any solidarity with unconverted Jews.
When there is antisemitism, all Christians are Semites
Defenders of the Catholic response to the Nazis often point out that in 1938 Pope Pius XI declared, “No, it is not possible for Christians to take part in antisemitism…Spiritually, we are Semites.”[10] That sounds like a call for solidarity. However, the words between those two noble sentiments in practice undermine both of them. “We acknowledge for all the right to defend themselves, to adopt measures of protection against what threatens their legitimate interests.”
By “all”, Pius was referring to the governments of Europe, including that of Nazi Germany. His “measures of protection” were the numerous anti-Jewish policies, most of which Catholic bishops largely endorsed. For him as for his papal predecessors, full civil rights for Jews, the supposedly excessive prosperity of some Jews, and the socialist beliefs of others were all serious threats to what these Popes still believed could be a basically Christian Europe. In effect, Pius XI was saying that we Christians are indeed Semites, spiritual descendants of the Jewish patriarchs, but that we Christians must distinguish. We must support a general spiritual kinship, but we also support policies which ensure that our spiritual kin do not damage the common good. Thus, antisemitism, the scientific and racial hatred of Jews, is bad because it denies the spiritual kinship. On the other hand, various sorts of restrictions on the Jewish people can be good, because such rules protect Christians’ “legitimate interests”.
By the 1960s, the Church had learned that this distinction between bad antisemitism and sensible anti-Judaism was a grave theological mistake which in practice invited great evil. The Second Vatican Council accepted that poisonous secular plant of antisemitism had grown from the seed of religious anti-Judaism. “The Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”[11]
This statement should help frame the Christian response to the dispute in the Holy Land. The shared patrimony with the Jews should lead to support of the Jewish people who are living in Israel. The condemnation of antisemitism certainly applies to many of Israel’s political-religious opponents, certainly including the deeply anti-Semitic Hamas.
More generally, Christians should declare their relatively newfound identification with the victims of antisemitism whenever and wherever antisemitism is promoted. The common good that Christians are bound to promote does not exclude Jews. On the contrary, a common stand against hatred of the Jews should be a central element of it, especially right now. As members of a religion that is suffering violent persecution in many countries, from Nigeria to Pakistan, Christians should be particularly sensitive to anti-Judaism.
Sadly, perhaps tragically, in the current war I see little respect from Christian leaders for any “should” of anti-antisemitism. In particular, there have been few explicit condemnations of the actual, avowed antisemitism that permeates so much anti-Israeli rhetoric and thinking. Have these Christians fallen back on old prejudices? Are they forgetting or denying the central role of these prejudices in fomenting the terrible blight of antisemitism?[12]
The puzzle of Israel
Let me be clear. Christian-Jewish solidarity does not require endorsing either Zionism as a political movement or any of the policies of any Israeli government. This distinction brings me back to my own difficult relations with the country of Israel. Neither as a (fulfilled) Jew nor as a practising and believing Christian can I identify closely with the self-declared Jewish state. Why should I? The Zionists who established it, like most of the country’s current ruling class, saw their Judaism as racial, cultural, and political – anything but religious.
I can only see Israel as a state with a large Jewish population and an openness to non-Christian Jewish immigration. From that perspective, criticism of the Israeli government and its policies is no more antisemitic than it is anti-Muslim to criticise the government and policies of Egypt or Morocco, or anti-Christian to criticise the government and policies of Poland under the PiS party.
Once again, this judgement does not excuse all criticism of Israel. Antisemitism undoubtedly contributes to the widespread self-righteous indignation against Israel. Antisemitism has to be at least part of the explanation of the special status of Israeli policies in international discourse. Why else would governments that are much crueller to their domestic and foreign opponents receive far less opprobrium from the international community and especially from elements of the political left?
Many Jews, both inside and outside of Israel, would say that I am drawing distinctions that are too fine to be useful. They say that it is completely wrong to worry about the differences among Zionism, Israel’s existence, Israeli policies, and the Jews as a people or race, let alone my effort to decide whether criticism of policies is proportionate or disproportionate. Such Jews argue that my efforts to be clear only serve to confuse the reality of an increasingly antisemitic world.
I still think that the oversimplification they recommend carries its own dangers, but I do have to admit that I am less insistent about the fine points of Jew-hating now than I was when antisemitism seemed to be a steadily declining force in the world. The distinctions lose some of their salience when antisemites so easily conflate opposition to Israeli policies with a battle against an almost preternatural world-scale Jewish evil, and when support for Palestine and Hamas is allowed to excuse antisemitic assumptions and violence. As long as these anti-Jewish sentiments flourish, all Jews – orthodox, reform, secular, and Christian, in all corners of the diaspora – must stand with all their people, including all the Jewish people who govern and live in Israel.
My third person injunction is inadequate. It is we who must be “going for our people”. And right now, the we includes all Christians, who constitute the new Israel of God. In this particular sense, we Christians are Jews.
I am for peace; but when I speak, they are for war
Of course, the many Christians who are not Jews by birth can only be Jews to a very limited extent. To be precise, they can be fully Jews only in showing unconditional solidarity against antisemitism. Beyond that, they can only do their best to promote the peace that Christians must always promote, a covenantal peace that is as lasting and as profound as is possible in this fallen world.
The way to peace in the current war is hard to discern. A prerequisite, though, is the rejection of antisemitism by all of Israel’s opponents and critics, wherever it is found. Bitter experience should have taught the entire world about the dangers of fantastic antisemitic ideas. Speaking as a Jew who is a Christian, I understand – more clearly now than ever before – that antisemitism is not merely the enemy of the state of Israel, of a minority ethnic group, or of a particular religion. It is the enemy of God’s will, for his chosen people and for what I believe to be his Church.
© Edward Hadas
Edward Hadas is a Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford University, associated with the Las Casas Institute. Formerly, he worked as a journalist mostly with Reuters Breakingviews, and at the Financial Times. Before that, he spent several decades working as an equity analyst in the US and Europe. He is the author of three books: Human Goods, Economic Evils, A Moral Look at the Dismal Science (ISI Books, 2007); Counsels of Imperfection: Thinking through Catholic Social Teaching (Catholic University of America Press, 2021); and Money, Finance, Reality, Morality (Ethics Press, 2022). He is currently writing a book on narratives of modernity. Edward was educated at Columbia University, Oxford University, and SUNY Binghamton.
NOTES
[1] The claims are controversial, to put it mildly. The leading exponent of the interdependent understanding of Jewish and Christian history was the prolific scholar Jacob Neusner. See, for example, his Judaism and Christianity in the Age of Constantine: History, Messiah, Israel, and the Initial Confrontation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
[2][2] For example, Community Security Trust, “Antisemitic Incidents – 7 November Update”, at https://cst.org.uk/news/blog/2023/11/07/antisemitic-incidents-7-november-update.
[3] Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, “The Liberation of the Arabs From the Global Left”, Tablet Magazine, July 11, 2022, at https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/liberation-arabs-global-left.
[4] Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda in the Arab World, New Haven: Yale University Press 2009, especially pages 255-259. Izabella Tabarovsky, “Demonization Blueprints: Soviet Conspiracist Antizionism in Contemporary Left-Wing Discourse”, Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, Vol. 5,| No. 1 (Spring 2022), pp. 1-20.
[5] Avi Beker, “The Forgotten Narrative: Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries”, Jewish Political Studies Review, Vol. 17, No. 3/4 (Fall 2005), pp. 3-19.
[6] Meir Litvak, “The Anti-Semitism of Hamas”, Palestine-Israel Journal, Vol 12, no. 2 (2005). https://pij.org/articles/345/the-antisemitism-of-hamas For reference, “Palestine-Israel Journalis published by Middle East Publications, a non-profit organization (No. 58-023862-4) founded in 1994 by two prominent Palestinian and Israeli journalists, Ziad AbuZayyad and Victor Cygielman (1926-2007), and was established concurrently with the first phases of the Oslo peace process to encourage dialogue between civil societies on both sides and broaden the base of support for the peace process.”
[7] More optimistically, the more muted response to the October 7 attack from the traditional supporters of the Palestinian cause might indicate that this crazed logic may be losing some appeal.
[8] United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Dignitatis humanae: The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty”, at https://www.usccb.org/committees/religious-liberty/dignitatis-humanae.
[9] See Vatican News Service, “Teresa Benedict of the Cross Edith Stein (1891-1942): nun, Discalced Carmelite, martyr “, at https://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/saints/ns_lit_doc_19981011_edith_stein_en.html
[10] https://ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/primary-texts-from-the-history-of-the-relationship/pius-xi1938sept6
[11] https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html Nostra aetate, 4.
[12] See my discussion of the failure to counter antisemitism as the greatest failure of Catholic Social Teaching in Counsels of Imperfection: Thinking Through Catholic Social Teaching, Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2021, pp. 227-235.
[13]Psalms 120:7 New King James Version (NKJV)
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