Council of Christians and Jews - Background

Background

Prior to the foundation of the Council of Christians and Jews a number of initiatives had already taken place. The London Society for the Study of Religions,founded in 1904, included Jews in its membership. In 1924 the Presbyterian Church of England Congress agreed to form a sub committee to discuss the lack of understanding between Jews and Christians. The committee wished to abandon proselytising and instead promote cooperative methods of action.

In 1925 Herbert Lowe, a Jewish Cambridge scholar, addressed the General Assembly for the first time.

"The love of God and love of man are the foundations of our faith and of yours. We have a vast heritage in common...We recognise that we are put on earth to serve each other...When we consider the framework on which our creeds are built the wonder is not that our views of life are similar, but that we should have been so long in discovering the similarity, the wonder is that centuries of ignorance and hatred should have intervened between us..I am convinced that our partnership in the fight against oppression and injustice and race-hatred can be successful, and our efforts can never be blessed until we learn to respect the standpoint of each other."

In 1924 the Social Service Committee of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue convened a meeting for Jews and Christians to confer together on the basis of their common ideals and with mutual respect for differences of belief'. From this developed the Society of Jews and Christians in 1927 that provided a platform for a number of notable speakers. The inter war years was marked by a reappraisal by Christian scholars of Jewish religion. In 1930 James Park published 'The Jew and his neighbour', setting out the causes of anti-Semitism and its Christian roots. Parks would later be placed on Hitler's list of those he wanted killed.

With the rise of Nazi anti-Semitism a few Christians did speak out. In 1934 The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland noted the 'age-long sufferings of the Jewish people' and that during 'the present outbreaks of anti-Semitic fanaticism', declared its 'heart-felt sympathy for the Jewish people' and deplored their present treatment as being 'abhorrent'.

A Youth Council on Jewish-Christian Relations was formed in 1934 that included several Christian organisations and by 1940 also included Jewish groups. By the middle of the decade various groups made up of Jews and Christians were involved in giving aid to Jewish refugees from Germany, whose number rose sharply after Kristallnacht. The Refugee Children's Movement took care to ensure that whenever a Jewish child was placed in a Christian home the child would not be subject to proselytisation and that contact was established with the nearest Rabbi.

Anglican, Free church and Roman Catholic Churches came together in 1938 to form a Christian Council for Refugees following the passing of the Nuremberg Decrees. The councils secretary was W. W. Simpson, a Methodist minister, who would dedicate his life to the improvement of Christian-Jewish relations. His 1939 pamphlet 'The Christian and the Jewish Problem' recognised the part of Christianity in Jewish suffering, involving factors such deicide, the Crusades, the ghettos, the Inquisition and their influence on present day persecution.