Barcelona 1263 Replayed? The Church Disputes Article in Algemeiner Journal

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June 5, 1992

During the Middle Ages the Church harassed the Jews by many barbarous means. One such method was to herd a group of rabbis before the king and have some Christian clergymen, often renegade Jews, conduct "disputations" on the validity of the Talmud, on Jews' attitude to Christianity, etc. The catch was that the Jews were not allowed to answer back. Yet the rules of the game dictated that the "losing" side in the debate had to convert to the religion of the victor. Thus these tragic disputations were more than "fixed" in advance, for the Jews were faced with an impossible impasse before they even started. The one exception to this miscarriage of justice was the famous disputation between the great Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, also called Nachmanides or Ramban, in Barcelona in 1263, when King James of Aragon permitted the great Jewish sage to freely answer the vicious, underhanded claims of the renegade meshumad (apostate Jew) Pablo Christiano. Nachmanides, of course, won the disputation hands down.

Today, thank G-d, even if we enter into disputations with the Church we have the freedom to speak up freely and proudly and do not have to hide our many grievances of the cruelty and crimes inflicted on us by the Church, accumulated over the centuries. These thoughts came to mind when I received a letter a few days ago from Dr. Eugene J. Fisher, Secretary of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Inter-religious Affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, in which he demands that I publish an apology to Cardinal Cassidy for having written an "outrageous misrepresentation of the facts" in my article in the Algemeiner Journal of May 15th. Here is his letter:

Dear Dr. Lehmann,

I am in receipt of your letter of May 12 and enclosed article, "On My Mind," on the recent International Catholic-Jewish Colloquium in Baltimore. In your piece you state that Cardinal Cassidy's opening address, which he began by reading Psalm 85, "skipped the first verse and only read the verses referring to…'salvation' and 'sin,' which have Christological overtones."

As you must know, this statement is entirely false. Enclosed is a copy of the text of Cardinal Cassidy's opening talk as he had it himself and as it was given. It is clear that the Cardinal read the whole Psalm, not just selected verses as you falsely accuse him of doing. Indeed, the opening verse, "You were favorable to your land…" is not only included, but the key reference to "the land" is given in both Hebrew and Latin in the text.

Dr. Burg's "rebuke" may be excused since he had flown over that day from Israel, I understand, and so may have been suffering jet lag. Not so your own false witness, since you could easily have checked out the facts before publishing your column.

I call on you to publish an apology to the Cardinal in your column and to clarify immediately this outrageous misrepresentation of the facts for the sake of the public record.

Sincerely, Eugene J. Fisher

Fortunately, the letter encloses the full text of the Cardinal's speech. I find it providential that the Church has seen fit to write this letter just before Shavuot because it gives us an opportunity to go in depth into the differences between Judaism and Christianity, and show again the unmatched, eternal superiority of the Torah on the occasion of "Z'man Mattan Torah," the time of the giving of the Torah.

At the outset it is important to explain the constraints under which the Church guides its students of the Hebrew Bible, which Cardinal Cassidy quoted in his speech. The late Monsignor Patrick Skehan, member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission and head of the Department of Semitic Literature at the Catholic University in Washington formulated the guidelines which are given Catholics in studying the Hebrew Bible: "The duty of every Old Testament scholar is to trace in sacred history the development of the readiness to be aware of Christ when he would come…It is incumbent upon biblical scholars to indicate the general lines of progress by which G-d steadily led to the Christian Church."

This means that Catholics are supposed to see in the Hebrew Bible, in every word and incident, a hint at the coming of Jesus. Pope Pius XII - besides his sad role during the Holocaust - was the Pope who allowed Catholic Bible scholars to be as critical of the Hebrew Bible as they wished, as long as they would not touch the veracity of the New Testament.

This guideline clearly diverts Catholics away from a literal understanding of the Biblical text, and instead demands that they see some imagined, invisible message. This makes it difficult if not impossible for a Jewish scholar to debate with Catholics over the Bible. I experienced this absurdity when I was a student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, under the late Professor William Foxwell Albright, no doubt the greatest Orientalist and Biblical archeologist of this century. I had Catholic "Fathers" as fellow students and came to realize the difference of our outlooks.

Now to Dr. Fisher's letter on Tehillim chapter 85. Not one of those who attended the meeting whom I spoke to remembers Cardinal Cassidy quoting the first verse, "Ratzita Hashem artzecha." If Dr. Burg gently rebuked the Cardinal for this omission, I would at any time accept his memory, which has the international reputation of being fabulously accurate, even when the minutest details of 50-60 years ago are concerned. Besides, it was probably not known to our Catholic hosts at the Baltimore colloquium that Dr. Burg has, for many years, been the Chairman of the International Bible Quiz because of his unparalleled mastery of the entire Hebrew Bible, like an advanced computer. In fact, he was rushing away from Baltimore to attend that Quiz in Jerusalem a few days later on Israel's Independence Day. Also, he had not, as Dr. Fisher assumes, "flown over that day from Israel and so may have been suffering jet lag." In fact, Dr. Burg spent a very leisurely weekend before coming to Baltimore - I met with him a few times during that weekend.

However, I do remember that the entire session was videotaped, and would suggest that the tape be consulted. If we were all deaf at the moment the Cardinal read that vital verse, assuring the Land of Israel to the Jews, then we should apologize - or the acoustics in St. Mary's Seminary should be checked.

But the matter goes much deeper than a point over one Biblical verse. As I stated above, Catholics interpret the Hebrew Bible differently than the text intended. Therefore there must necessarily be profound disagreements between Jews and Catholics when a Biblical text or certain words are concerned.

There are a number of words which, right off the bat, mean something totally different to Jews and Catholics respectively. Here are a few such words: "L-rd" to us is necessarily G-d, the Al-mighty. The Christians it mostly means Jesus. "Salvation" to us means liberation, victory over our enemies; to Christians it means being "saved by Jesus." "Teshuva" to us means returning to our own Jewish manifest destiny; to Christians, it means conversion (that was the actual word used by Cardinal Cassidy, also in the written text of his speech, as unbelievable as it must appear to every Jew). "Christian charity" to us indicates the giving of alms; to Christians it means "the willingness of the Church to accept Jews in conversion." "Israel" to us of course means Eretz Yisrael ; to the Catholic Church it simply means "the Church," also called "Verus Israel" (the true Israel).

In his speech the Cardinal claims that in Tehillim chapter 85 "the Lord speaks": to them that can only mean Jesus. To us the text is simple: the words are those of the Sons of Korach, Divinely inspired, of course, and refer to the liberation of the Jews from the forthcoming Babylonian exile. The word "yesha," which occurs three times in the Psalm, is certainly a far cry from "salvation" - it means victory and liberation. The Targum translates the word each and every time it occurs in the Hebrew Bible as "purkan" - liberation or victory. (See e.g. Psalms 12:6. 20:7. 25:5. 50:22. 65:6. 95:1. 132:16.)

Another head scratcher is the Cardinal's call "for an even deeper sense of brotherly solidarity between the Church and the Jewish people as we prepare to enter into a new Christian millennium." As students of Christianity know, this "Christian millennium" includes the expectation that the whole world will be Christian at that time. There has been a movement of "millenarians" for a long time, also among the Protestants. That millennium leaves no room for Jews.

What shocked me during the Cardinal's speech was that he quoted from a statement of March 26th of this year by Spanish Archbishop Ramon Toralla in the presence of the Cardinal of Toledo. I had occasion to quote from that sadly remembered statement in my article of May 22nd, in which all the unspeakable crimes against the Jews of Spain by the Church over the centuries - wholesale massacres of Jewish communities, forced conversions of countless thousands, burnings at the stake of countless thousands, burnings of sacred Hebrew books, expulsions, etc. - are cavalierly dismissed as a "penchant to evil which exists in the human heart, as taught by the Torah and repeated in Jewish tradition." The memory of those atrocities which make Jews recoil from forgetting and forgiving are merely called by the Spanish Archbishop "a wall and a wedge" between Jews and the Church! I would have thought that Cardinal Cassidy, as Head of the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, would have displayed more sensitivity to Jewish feelings in the face of such gross misrepresentation of what actually happened in Spain before and after 1492.

There are more points I could raise about the Cardinal's speech, but I prefer to stop at this point. It should have been apparent to the Catholic hosts of the colloquium that the Jewish side entered the meeting with considerable hesitancy and reservations. No wonder that most of the Jewish press reports which followed had a negative view of the proceedings. It remains to be seen if there really exists a basis for Catholic-Jewish dialogue, except on evident political issues such as recognition of Israel, the fight against anti-Semitism, the access to Vatican archives, the return of Hebrew Manuscripts, etc.

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