A Rabbi, a Pastor, and a Bishop Defend a Shared Goal

They stand together, facing the abyss of secularism and atheism.

I grew up in the 1960s as an Orthodox Jew in a semi-parochial community in Brooklyn, New York, a neighborhood tucked between Flatbush, Flatlands, and Canarsie. Although very few of our neighbors were Orthodox, the community must have been 95 percent Jewish. Kathy was the one Catholic kid on the block. Hers was the only window in a half-mile radius that did not display a menorah kindling in December. Since she was the only non-Jew in our world, we assumed all non-Jews were Catholic. Protestants were exotic. There were Italian Catholics, Irish Catholics, Polish Catholics, and Kathy.
All we knew about Catholics — i.e., Christians — was that there had been Crusades in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries assembled to liberate the Holy Land from Muslims, but somehow the English, French, and German Crusaders always managed to get detoured along the Seine or Rhine rivers and end up instead massacring whole Jewish communities. Some communities had outposts that hid Jews, and some bishops risked their own safety to offer Jews sanctuary. But these massacres became indelibly impressed on the Jewish consciousness. To this day, Ashkenazic Jews (descendants of Northern and East European Jewry) recite a prayer every Shabbat morning to remember the martyrs of the Edicts of 4856 (the Hebrew year coinciding with the 1095–1096 First Crusade). A direct cultural and sociological line connects that Holocaust with the one that returned to Germany a millennium later.
This article is taken from The American Spectator’s latest print magazine. Subscribe to receive the entire magazine.
In time, we also learned about the Catholic Church’s Spanish Inquisition, which was established by Spain’s Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand II. It spread on the Iberian Peninsula to Portugal in 1497 when Portugal’s king, Manuel I, married their daughter. The Inquisition tortured and burned Jews. As those two world powers explored the New World, they brought the Inquisition with them. That drove Jews out ...