Joseph Klausner, Israel, and Jesus.

This essay focuses on the work of a Jewish scholar of Christianity, Joseph Klausner, who did his work at the beginning of the twentieth century. More broadly, it examines what I consider to be the symbiotic relationship between New Testament scholarship, or, more precisely, scholarship about Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity, and Jewish-Christian relations.

Beginning with the Enlightenment, many scholars and theologians, both Jewish and Christian, have analyzed Christian attitudes toward Jews and Judaism. Jewish attitudes to Christianity, though by no means totally ignored, have received less attention. One explanation for this imbalance is the now widely shared view that the historical realities of the relationship between Jews and Christians have been tragic. This realization has resulted in the desire on the part of both Jews and Christians to study and explain the past and, for some, also to draw moral, religious, social, and political lessons from it.

Because Christians have, for most of this history, been the oppressors and Jews the oppressed, the attitudes of Christians that led to this oppression have been of greater interest for both Jews and Christians than have the attitudes of Jews toward Christianity. Thus, in the words of a Christian colleague of mine, much of contemporary Jewish-Christian dialogue has been about "getting Christians to clean up their mess," with much less attention being paid to the Jewish "side" of the dialogue. Similarly, Jews and Judaism have always been significant for Christian theology in terms of the new covenant, supercessionism, and the continued refusal of Jews to accept Christianity. The reconsideration of these questions in the wake of the Sho'a, the Holocaust, has given rise to post-Holocaust Christian theology, a phenomenon that has had, and continues to have, significant impact on much of the Christian world. In comparison, while it is a gross oversimplification, for Judaism Christianity is merely another gentile religion with no special theological significance. There is specific terminology for Christian attitudes toward Judaism: anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism (often, but not always, qualified with the adjective "Christian"). We also have, in the middle ages, the phenomenon of "Christian Hebraists." For none of these is there a common term or a recognized Jewish counterpoint. In terms of bibliography, the sheer number of books and articles on Christian attitudes toward Jews and Judaism is far greater than the reverse.

It seems to me that the study of Jewish attitudes toward Christianity can provide a novel perspective on the complicated issue of Jewish identity and self-definition in the modern era. It also can shed light on the Jewish side of Jewish-Christian relations. Since Emancipation, Jews who do not actively isolate themselves from Western society (1) have had to construct a sense of self that in some way responds to the implicit--and occasionally explicit--challenges of being a Jew in an essentially Christian world. (2) Jewish constructions of Jesus can be particularly fruitful because of the liminal nature of the figure of Jesus for Jews. As a Jewish individual who became the Christ, Jesus straddles the boundary between Judaism and Christianity. From the Jewish perspective, then, he is both "ours" and "not ours." Thus, it is possible for Jesus to serve, in the words of Susannah Heschel, as a "theological transvestite." By dressing Jesus up in intellectual, historical, theological, or polemical "drag" a Jew can define Jesus in his or her own terms. (3) Then, through this newly "accoutered" Jesus, the Jew can locate himself or herself in relation to the broader society and at the same time challenge the dominant Christian view of Jews and Judaism.

Similarly, Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus has suggested, "Our concrete social contexts not only shape the content and arguments of Jewish scholarship on the New Testament but also provide an orientation to choose (by means of our emphases and arguments) to transform these very concrete social contexts in turn." (4)

It is in this light that I view my current study of Joseph Klausner's construction of Jesus and early Christianity. Klausner was born near Vilna in 1874 and began his education in a traditional Jewish heder, or schoolhouse. While still young, he moved to Odessa, where he received an "enlightened" modern education and was part of the vibrant Zionist and Hebraic intellectual culture then centered in that city. (5) He was particularly committed to the revitalization of Hebrew as a modern, spoken language. He received his Ph.D. in 1902 from the University of Heidelberg and gained a reputation as a literary critic, historian, Zionist ideologue, and ardent Hebraist. He made aliyah to Palestine in 1919 and joined the faculty of the Hebrew University at its inauguration in 1925. As both a scholar and a popular commentator and essayist, Klausner was an important public figure in the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine under the British Mandate) and, subsequently, as a venerated senior citizen, in the new state of Israel. His politics were closely aligned with the right-wing nationalism of Ze'ev Jabotinsky and the Revisionists (the ideological ancestors of today's Likud); he was therefore on the extreme edge of the political minority. His feisty and confrontational personal style contributed to a constant atmosphere of controversy and conflict that alienated some, especially at the Hebrew University, but probably served to increase interest in his work among the general reading public. His books and articles were popular, and his courses at the Hebrew University were often the best attended. His writing has influenced not only the history of scholarship on Judaism and Christianity in the Greco-Roman world but also the emerging Israeli "collective consciousness." (6)

Among his many areas of interest, Klausner's true love was the history of the Second Temple period. This was by no means merely a matter of intellectual curiosity. He found in this period, and especially in the Hasmonean dynasty, a golden age of Jewish independence that could serve as a model and inspiration for his own generation and its quest for national "resurrection and redemption." So, for example, he concludes an article on "Jewish Religion in the times of the Hasmoneans" with the following words:

But with the striking of roots in the land of our birth, in the state of
Israel, which is in the process of occurring before our eyes, we are
obligated to return to those same spiritual plants that flourished on
healthy Jewish soil in the days of independence of the kings of the
Hasmoneans. Then the old-new Israelite faith will grow and flower and
thrive and it will bring honor to the people Israel, a blessing to the
land of Israel, and [serve as an] example for the sons of Shem, whose
earliest ancestors were an example for us, and will [bring us great
distinction] among all the peoples of Europe, our students and our
teachers as one. (7)

Klausner repeatedly claimed to be an objective historian whose scholarship was free of bias. Even in his day, however, the strong nationalistic bent of his scholarship was recognized and criticized, as was the originality of the scholarship itself. Klausner bristled at being called a "popularizer," a charge his academic critics used to suggest that his writing was shallow. However, he states over and over that the primary goal of his work is to educate the Jewish people. (8) He even defended his combination of scholarship and public activity by comparing himself to Jewish intellectual heroes such as Saadya Goan, Maimonides, Judah Ha-Levi, and Moses Mendelssohn, who, like Klausner, did not isolate themselves in ivory towers. (9)

In order to understand Klausner's view of history, including Christianity, we should start with the phrase yahadut v'enoshiuyut--Judaism and humanism--that was his motto and represents his own unique view of Jewish identity. It was worked into the iron of the gate of his home in Talpiyot and was the title of a collection of essays in which he explicated his Jewish "worldview." "Judaism and humanism" represents the combination of the best of Jewish (that is, moral and religious) culture with Greek aesthetic and scientific culture. Greece was polytheistic and therefore created a philosophy that considered nature and humanity as one entity; it focused on the external, on explaining and manipulating the world. The Jews, because of their ardent monotheism, focused on the internal and created an ethical philosophy that includes only humanity and its relationship to God and the universe. Though Klausner sees both as essential, complementary elements of Western culture and highly values the Greek contributions, implicit in this dichotomy is a belief in the moral superiority of Judaism as well as its ultimate significance. (10) Judaism and humanism are able to coexist because Judaism has always been open to change and to learning from other peoples and cultures. It can absorb art and science as long as there is no contradiction of the foundational values of Judaism as found in the Tanakh (the Hebrew Old Testament), especially in the Prophets, whom Klausner credits with developing the vision of the Messianic era, which he considered the great original Hebrew idea and Israel's gift to the world.

For many Jews, Zionism was a kind of secular Messianism promising national revival for the Jews in their ancestral homeland. For Klausner, Zionism was ultimately not just about Jewish self-determination. Rather, a renewed Jewish nation, reestablished in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) and restored to its full cultural power, would lead the rest of the world to value and to live by the eternal Jewish/humanistic

values embodied in the Messianic Idea, thus helping all humanity to move toward the Messianic Era.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

As both a historian of the Second Temple period and as a Zionist seeking to redefine the Jew and establish this new Jew's proper place in the world, Klausner was naturally interested in Jesus and early Christianity. Indeed, his reputation in the non-Hebrew-reading world, his international reputation, is based almost entirely on the three books that were translated into European languages. Two of these, Jesus of Nazareth and From Jesus to Paul, focus specifically on early Christianity. The third, The Messianic Idea in Israel, a study of Jewish messianism, is closely related to the other two.

For the Jewish community, which had a tradition of never pronouncing Jesus' name (referring to him as oto ha'ish, "that man") and which considered the very act of reading the New Testament idolatrous, the production of books in Hebrew about Jesus and Paul was a radical step. But Klausner had impeccable Jewish credentials. He was a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he had a German Ph.D., he was a committed Zionist and Hebraist, and he was ritually observant. While other Jewish scholars before Klausner had dealt with Jesus, most of that work was in German or English. Some of it was buried in multivolume histories or in journals, and some of the authors (especially reformers like Geiger or Montefiore) were suspect in the eyes of both nationalists and traditionalists. Klausner is the first credible Jewish scholar to have put the modern critical (Jewish) study of Jesus before a wide Jewish audience. It marked, if not a turning point, at least a milestone in the modern engagement of Jews with the Christian world and provided the Jewish study of Jesus with, if you will, a sort of hechsher (made it kosher).

So where do Jesus and Christianity fit into Klausner's historical and nationalist agenda? I think that in order to liberate the Jews from the effects of the galut (extended exile) and establish a revitalized, authentic Jewish culture, Klausner had to confront the numerical success of Christianity and refute the claim that Christianity lies at the heart of Western, European civilization. So, using the tools of European objective scholarship, Klausner constructs the following portrait of early Christianity.

Jesus was a Jew who preached the purest form of Jewish morality, yet there was nothing original in Jesus' teaching and nothing that was not fully consistent with first-century Judaism. (11) Furthermore, Jesus was a Pharisee, and therefore what he taught is essentially consistent with rabbinic tradition, that is, with normative Judaism. Jesus' major failing or weakness is that his extreme morality eclipsed the national aspect of Judaism, thus his vision is flawed or incomplete. Turning the other cheek, giving up one's possessions, and the like make uplifting ethical sermons but do not form a practical foundation on which to build a society that works in the real world. Judaism, on the other hand, especially the renewed Judaism Klausner envisioned, is such a religion.

Paul is responsible for translating Jesus and Jesus' teaching into a form that was comprehensible to the masses of Gentiles by combining it with pagan and Hellenistic elements with which they were familiar and comfortable. This version of Jesus' expression of Jewish values further distorted the purity of the Jewish vision. Unintentionally, however, it also served the useful purpose of spreading Jewish monotheism in general as well as that great Jewish cultural creation, the Tanakh, with its prophetic morality and its great messianic idea, to the world.

Klausner argues that were it not for Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Islam, Judaism would not have survived at all.

Only in a place where the Hebrew Old Testament, in its original form and
in translations, is recognized--alongside the New Testament and the
Koran--as a great and influential religious book; or in a place where
the great Jewish cultural influence of the "Book of Books" is a third
part of total culture alongside the influence of Greece and Rome--only
in such a place can Judaism survive as a religio-national unit, to
develop its internal life and also to influence the outside world. In a
place where the Old Testament is not a recognized and influential
cultural force, there Judaism is not revealed as a power to itself and
to others, and it steadily wastes away or else "vegetates" without
revelatory or creative power. (12)

Once a new and free Judaism is resurrected/renewed (he uses both words) in its own land, the great messianic idea of human progress will be realized, and through Israel the entire world will be redeemed, though in a sort of evolutionary rather than supernatural way. Judaism will be a "light to the nations" and by example and instruction will lead humanity toward the world to come.

It seems to me that Klausner has, in a sense, co-opted the death and salvific resurrection of Jesus--the Christian myth--and replaced it with the "death" and "resurrection" of the nation of Israel. Israel dies, or, more precisely, is put to death by Rome (the same folks who executed Jesus!) with the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., and its "body" is placed in the "cave of burial" that is the Diaspora. (13) There, unable to live full national life because of oppression and lack of political and territorial independence, the Jewish people wait for 1,900 years. Zionism gives the Jews the power to roll back the rock of the galut and "rise" to a new life in its new land, through which salvation is brought to the world.

Just as Christianity portrayed the covenant with the Jews as temporal and having served its purpose because the law was ultimately unable to lead to salvation, Klausner sees the success of Christianity as temporal because its distorted teaching is unworkable in the real world. Christianity has served its purpose by providing an environment in which Judaism could survive and by preparing the world to receive the word the new/old people in its new/old land will send forth from Jerusalem. If Christianity portrays the Jews as scorning and rejecting Jesus (as an incarnation of the Logos), Klausner portrays Christianity as scorning and rejecting (crucifying?) the Jews, in whom the true Logos, the Jewish Idea of Messianism, is incarnated.

This inversion of the Christian myth is not explicit in Klausner's work. But he is very clear about the superiority of Judaism to Christianity. His books on Jesus and on Paul end with chapters titled, respectively, "What is Jesus to the Jews?" and "What is Paul to the Jews?" In these chapters and in numerous other essays Klausner rejects the teachings of both Jesus and Paul in toto and even more so what was done to their teachings by subsequent generations. At the same time he recognizes in each "lofty ideas" worthy of (or, better, identical with) the best that is within Judaism. Thus both Jesus and Paul as Jews are part of the unfolding story of Judaism and humanism.

In sum, Klausner reconstructed Western civilization from a decidedly Jewish and Zionist perspective, and primarily for Jewish consumption. Western culture finds its roots in Jewish and Greco-Roman culture. Judaism provides the moral and ethical core and especially the messianic idea of progress that holds such hope not just for Jews but for all of humanity. Greece provides the arts and the sciences. Christianity has played a central role in history but has contributed little of lasting value to human culture. When the pagan elements that enabled it to spread at its given historical moment are finally stripped away (as they inevitably will be), what will remain is the pure Jewish core of which Christianity is but a distortion.

For Jews of Klausner's generation, emerging from the isolated world of Eastern Europe and searching for a new understanding of their place in the world, this reading of Jewish and Christian history served a crucial purpose. It stood in stark contrast both to the dominant Christian view of history and of Jews and Judaism and to the traditional Jewish refusal to consider Christianity at all. Jews like Klausner, who sought a middle ground between conversion and assimilation on the one hand and religious obscurantism on the other, now had an interpretation of Christianity and Western culture in which the Jew was no longer a marginal relic. Instead, Jews and Judaism provided both the foundation of society and its hope for the future--they have become, if you will, the alpha and the omega of humanity. (14)

In my final comments, I want to step back and say a few words about Klausner's work and the history of scholarship. It is hard for us to imagine a study of early Christianity that is not rooted in a nuanced understanding of the Judaism of the time of Jesus, but that, in fact, was the dominant model at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Driven to a great extent by the history of Christian contempt for Judaism, scholars assumed that the Judaism of Jesus' day was dry legalism and that the Jewish people groaned under the yoke of the law and of the corrupt priesthood. (There is a strong element of anti-Catholicism in this mostly Protestant model as well.) Jesus sought to liberate the Jews from both of these stifling influences, but they, in their ignorance and stubbornness, crucified and denied him. Perhaps the extreme of "Jesus over and against the Judaism of his time" is represented by those scholars (or perhaps so-called scholars) who denied altogether that Jesus was Jewish and tried to prove that he was, in fact, Aryan.

Klausner comes on the scene at a time when Christian scholars were just beginning to take first-century Judaism seriously. Emil Schurer's The Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ appeared at the end of the nineteenth century; as Schurer revised the work, he included references to Klausner's Ph.D. dissertation. Herbert Danby, whose translation of the Mishnah is still the standard, worked closely with Klausner on a translation of Klausner's Jesus of Nazareth. R. Travers Herford and George Foote Moore were contemporaries and correspondents of Klausner's. All of them stressed the necessity of placing Jesus and early Christianity in its first-century context. The four of them--Danby, Herford, Moore, and Klausner--initiated a major shift in the study of early Christianity that has shaped its direction to this day. Klausner's book on Jesus, despite its many weaknesses and eccentricities, served as a model for both Jewish and Christian scholars.

Klausner argued for the relevance of both Jewish classical, especially rabbinic, texts and contemporary Jewish scholarship, and he presented them in some detail in his book. For many Christian students, this was their first exposure to these materials. And he provided to many Jews their first exposure to the literature of early Christianity and to the work of contemporary Christian scholars. It is fair to say that Klausner almost single-handedly made the Jewish study of early Christianity a "kosher" subject.

This shift in scholarly emphasis was affected by and in turn affected Jewish-Christian relations. The growing recognition of the vitality of Judaism, both in the time of Jesus and after the crucifixion, combined with a growing appreciation of Jesus' Jewishness, meshed with modern tolerance and post-Holocaust sensitivities. Scholars who were more open to Jews and Judaism became more open to reexamining the assumptions of scholarship, and religious leaders could rely on scholarship to question long-held religious assumptions and prejudice.

1. It is questionable the extent to which any group can truly isolate itself from the rest of the world. A study of attitudes to Jesus and Christianity among separatist or fundamentalist Jewish groups, along the lines of Israel Bartal's study of Orthodox historiography, is warranted. Views of Jesus and Christianity in Israel, where Jews are the majority culture, are also deserving of study; see Pinchas Lapide's brief and somewhat dated Israelis, Jews and Jesus, trans. Peter Heinegg (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., [1976] 1979).

2. Some would argue that society is becoming increasingly secular, with both Judaism and Christianity becoming increasingly marginalized. It may be that this trend itself has provided the "historical moment" for the kind of analysis I attempt in this paper.

3. Christians do this as well.

4. See Susannah Heschel, "Jesus as a Theological Transvestite," in Judaism Since Gender, ed. Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt (New York: Routledge, 1997) 188-99, and "A Jewish Ideological Perspective on the Study of Christian Scripture" by Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus, Jewish Social Studies 4:1, 121-52. Heschel attempts to apply some of the lessons of feminist theory and queer theory to Jewish portraits of Jesus. Brumberg-Kraus uses the work of Clifford Geertz to suggest an analytical approach to Jewish scholarship on Christian origins. These articles represent, I believe, the first attempts to address some of the broader issues involved in the Jewish scholarly study of Jesus and early Christianity.

For a more complete study of an individual Jewish scholar, see Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Geiger (1810-1874) was an early leader of German Reform Judaism. His work on early Christianity was part of his larger effort to overcome the anti-Judaism that characterized German New Testament studies and to provide support for the struggle against the religious and cultural objections to Jewish civil equality. He also wanted to give Jews "an explanation of Christianity that would foster respect for it among Jews without encouraging abandonment of Judaism or conversion." By defining Jesus as a figure within Judaism rather than as the founder of a new religion, Geiger sought to empower his co-religionists by providing them with a view of Judaism as "the original, true religion, from which Christianity was a deviant derivative." This portrayal of Jesus and Christianity, not surprisingly, caused quite a storm in Christian theological and scholarly circles. It is an important episode in the history of both scholarship and Jewish-Christian relations.

5. See Steven Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985).

6. In this regard, see Nachman Ben Yehuda, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory Making in Israel (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).

7. "Ha-emunah hayehudit biymei hahasmonaim" [The Jewish Faith in the Days of the Hasmoneans], in Biymei Bayit Sheni (Jerusalem: Hotzaat "Mada," 1954), 196-229. Other examples are "Zehu hag ha-hashmonaim lanu kayom" [Thus is the Festival of the Hasmoneans to us today], Herut 23 Kislev, 5719, 3, and "Keyzad hafkhu ha-hasmonai-im et eretz yehuda l'eretz yisrael" [How the Hasmoneans turned the Land of Judah in to the Land of Israel], Ha-Mashkif 68 (April 24, 1939); "Yannai hamelech--hakovesh ha-gadol me-bet hasmonai" in Ma-asaf Sofrei eretz yisrael l'sifrut ul'divrei mahshava [Journal of Authors of the Land of Israel for Literature and Thought], ed. A. A. Kabak and A. Shteinman (Tel Aviv: ha-Mif'al ha-'atsmi shel Agudat ha-sofrim ha-'Ivrim be-Erets-Yisra'el be-hishtatfut "Keren ha-tarbut" be-Amerikah, 1939) 61-73.

8. Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times and Teaching, trans. Herbert Danby (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., [1922] 1925), is a "book in Hebrew for Hebrews ... [to fill] a blank page (from the point of view of Hebrew writers) in the History of Israel which has so far been written upon almost solely by Christians" (p. 10). The Messianic Idea in Israel from Its Beginning to the Completion of the Mishnah, trans. William F. Stinespring (New York: Macmillan, [1927] 1955), was written to put "before our minds the future of our Jewish people and of all humanity; for Messianism, whose origin is from the ancient past, is the summation of the most exalted hopes for a shining future, which our greatest and most venerated dreamers await" (p. 6). In the introduction to From Jesus to Paul, trans. William F. Stinespring (New York: Macmillan, [1939] 1943), written after the beginning of World War II, Klausner states that if the Jews had accepted Paul's religion 1,900 years ago there would be no Jews and Jewish problem. Given all that the Jews have suffered, why had they not abandoned their Torah and the nationhood? The book strives to answer this question, "to strengthen the desire for complete redemption" and to answer a "burning question as old as both the Israelite exile and Christianity" (p. viii in the Hebrew; this passage is omitted from the English translation).

9. Darki likerat ha-techiyah v'hage-ulah [My path toward resurrection and redemption] (Jerusalem: Hotzaat "Mada," 1955) 2: 164.

10. See "Yehuda ve-yavan, shenei hafachim?" [Judah and Greece: two opposites?] in Yahadut ve-enoshiyut, 2 vols., 4th ed. (Jerusalem: Hotzaat "Mada" Ltd., 1955), 1:214-30.

11. "Jesus of Nazareth [in contrast to Christianity], however, was a product of Palestine alone, a product of Judaism unaffected by any foreign admixture. There were many Gentiles in Galilee, but Jesus was in no way influenced by them." Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth, 363.

12. Klausner, From Jesus to Paul, 606.

13. Or better, in 135 with the defeat of Bar Kochba at Beitar.

14. "And finally, since the Messiah is nothing but 'a righteous person ruling with the fear of God' and he brings only freedom and ethical completeness to the world, the progress of humanity is not dependent on him, but--on humanity itself. The Talmud innumerably repeats the idea that redemption depends on repentance and good deeds; the interpretation of the verse 'I the Lord will speed it in due time' [Is. 60:22] is well known: 'if they are worthy, I will speed it, and if they are not, in its time.' [BT Sanh. 95a] And the people of Israel, who first recognized one God, the god of good, and were his prophets truth and righteousness, must and are first able to 'speed redemption' by repentance and good deeds. That is to say, it must and is able to walk at the head of humanity on the path of personal, national and cultural progress, on the path to freedom and ethical wholeness. This will only be possible when it returns to its land and gathers in its exiles, and will no longer be found under the oppression of strangers; rather the 'kingdom of heaven' is the purpose and the lofty desire without which Israel will not be released from 'the bondage to foreign powers,' the abolition of which is the clear, external sign of 'the messianic era.' And therefore we can say without any suspicion of special inclination to Judaism: the messianic faith of Judaism is the seed of progress that was sown by Judaism in the entire world." "The Jewish Messiah and the Christian Messiah," in Yahadut v'enoshiyut, 2:217.

"And therefore we, the Jews, who yearn for resurrection of the nation with all its material and spiritual possessions on its historic land, take another step forward. We hope that the day will come when Christianity will give up everything it inherited from idolaters and only that will remain which Judaism bequeathed to it and which was purified and refined by the loftiest Greek and new (modern) thought. And Judaism, which will be complete with all its possession and rooted in its land, will no longer require, for the continuance of the nation, so many fences and gates, and it too will be purified by the loftiest, ancient European thought, and even that lofty thought which will become the fruit of a reawakened and resurrected Asia in its entirety. And them Christianity will return to its source--to pure and refined, prophetic-Pharisaic, old-new Judaism. And then, as in our prayer during our Days of Awe, humanity 'will become one band' of nations who 'will do the will of God with a whole heart.' The Jewish messianic and social-national idea will be realized as one, and 'God will be king over all the earth, on that day the Lord will be one and his name one.

"This is the distant ideal of Judaism which thinks thoughts and which creates values of resurrection even today. And the day will come, and all 'the righteous of the nations' will recognize this beautiful ideal, national-humanistic idea, that 'they have a place in the world to come'" ("Righteous Gentiles on Judaism," in Yahadut v'enoshiyut, 2:271).

David Fox Sandmel

K.A.M. Isaiah Israel Congregation, Chicago

Crown-Ryan Professor of Jewish Studies, CTU

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Rabbi David Fox Sandmel coordinated the publication of "Dabru Emet: A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity," www.icjs.org/what/njsp/dabruemet.html.