Religious Anti-Judaism, Racial Antisemitism, and Hebrew Catholicism: A Critical Analysis of the Work of Elias Friedman

Abstract

This article analyzes the work of Fr. Elias Friedman, whose legacy of theological work on Jewish identity and Jewish conversion to Catholicism serves as the foundation of the Association of Hebrew Catholics, of which he is the founder. Friedman frames his work as a sensitive approach to Jewish identity and Catholic faith, but as this paper demonstrates, his work reveals a reiteration of some of the most entrenched and historically devastating tropes of Christian anti-Judaism, as well as racial antisemitism. This article presents three main arguments. First, it demonstrates that Friedman’s work evidences a theological anti-Judaism characteristic of Catholicism prior to the Second Vatican Council, which he maintained firmly even after the theological revision of Vatican II rejected such views; and furthermore, that his work also expresses an antisemitism that reflects the modern racial antisemitism adopted by the Nazi regime. Second, this article examines the positive reception of Friedman’s work, as evidenced not only in the revered position he holds within the Association for Hebrew Catholics, but also by the nihil obstat and imprimatur on both of Friedman’s monographs, that is, the official stamp of ecclesiastical approval within the Catholic Church, which declares that the work is “free of doctrinal and moral error.” It proposes that these factors evidence the uncritical reception of his work not only within the Association of Hebrew Catholics, but also on behalf of the institutional Catholic Church. Third, it raises the question of the extent to which Friedman’s identity as a Jewish convert to Catholicism is relevant in the analysis and reception of his work. It argues that his Jewish identity makes his concoction of religious anti-Judaism and racial antisemitism particularly potent, rendering anodyne even the most virulently antisemitic of his statements.

1. Introduction

The twentieth-century theologian Fr. Elias Friedman, O.C.D., is remembered today as the founder of the Association of Hebrew Catholics, an organization with the aim of preserving the Jewish heritage and identity of Jewish converts to Catholicism, and for his work on the intersection of Jewish identity and Christian faith. However, a close reading of his work reveals a reiteration of some of the most entrenched and historically devastating tropes of Christian anti-Judaism and racial antisemitism.1 This paper analyzes Friedman’s writing on Judaism and the Jewish people, tracing its development from his earlier to later work, and raising critical questions about the reception of his work in the Hebrew Catholic movement.

Friedman published two monographs on Hebrew Catholicism, The Redemption of Israel in 1947, and Jewish Identity in 1987, which together develop a detailed program for the inclusion of Jewish converts within the Catholic Church, as well as a broad theological vision that covers ground from ancient Jewish history to Catholic soteriology. He presents his work as a historically sensitive and theologically promising vision for the future of the Jewish people, laying the groundwork for a movement that claims to have as its primary concern the well-being of Jewish converts to Catholicism. Nevertheless, as this study demonstrates, his work constitutes an unveiled and unapologetic attack on the Jewish people, history, faith, and tradition.

Although Friedman’s work serves as the theological foundation of the movement known as Hebrew Catholicism, and he is regarded with great respect by theologians who work within this movement, his work remains little known outside of this domain. To my knowledge, it has received virtually no critical scholarly analysis prior to this current work.2 Although his body of work has escaped critical scholarly attention, it has not only been lauded by the Association of Hebrew Catholics, but significantly, has also received official approval by the Vatican, in the form of the nihil obstat and imprimatur that grace each of his publications.

The following pages will begin with a summary of Friedman’s biographical background and will then briefly introduce the scope and aims of the Association of Hebrew Catholics. The next section, which constitutes the bulk of this article, will be dedicated to an analysis of Friedman’s work. In this analysis, this article presents three main arguments. First, it demonstrates that Friedman’s work evidences a theological anti-Judaism characteristic of Catholicism prior to the Second Vatican Council, which he maintained firmly even after the theological revision of Vatican II rejected such views; and furthermore, that his work also expresses an antisemitism that reflects the modern racial antisemitism adopted by the Nazi regime. Second, this article examines the positive reception of Friedman’s work, as evidenced not only in the revered position he holds within the Association for Hebrew Catholics, but also by the nihil obstat and imprimatur on both of Friedman’s monographs, that is, the official stamp of ecclesiastical approval within the Catholic Church, which declares that the work is “free of doctrinal and moral error.” It proposes that these factors evidence the uncritical reception of his work not only within the Association of Hebrew Catholics, but also on behalf of the institutional Catholic Church. Third, it raises the question of the extent to which Friedman’s identity as a Jewish convert to Catholicism is relevant in the analysis and reception of his work. It argues that his Jewish identity makes his concoction of religious anti-Judaism and racial antisemitism particularly potent, effectively disguising and validating views that would otherwise have raised alarms.

2. Biographical Summary

Fr. Elias Friedman was born in 1916 as John Friedman in Cape Town, South Africa, to an observant Orthodox Jewish family. As he writes in an autobiographical essay about his faith, he began to doubt the existence of God in his childhood, and by the age of thirteen had begun to identify as agnostic, yet through this his Jewish identity remained central for him (E. Friedman 1987a, pp. 17–19). As a teenager he was active in a Zionist youth movement, concerned about the need for a Jewish homeland and about the threats of antisemitism. As an adult, Friedman became a medical doctor, and during the Second World War was employed at a military hospital in South Africa.

During this time, he began to experience a religious conversion to Christianity, and in 1943 he was baptized into the Catholic Church. He later wrote that during this conversion process, he saw his newfound faith as an answer to what he termed “the Jewish problem” (E. Friedman 1987a, p. 21). Although in his teenage years as a member of a Zionist youth movement he had been concerned with “the Jewish problem,” identifying it then as the ongoing struggle against antisemitism, as this paper will demonstrate, after his conversion to Catholicism he redefined his understanding of this problem into theological terms, positing the collective Jewish “failure” to believe in Jesus as the Messiah as the source of the Jewish problem, and Christian faith as its answer.

In 1947, just four years after his baptism, Friedman entered the Carmelite order, and in 1954, he immigrated to Israel to become a member of the Stella Maris Carmelite monastery in Haifa, where he remained a monk until his death in 1999. In Israel, inspired by his conviction about the source and solution to the “Jewish problem,” he envisioned creating a distinct community of Jewish Christians in an attempt to facilitate Jewish conversions to Christianity while preserving elements of Jewish identity (E. Friedman 1987a, p. 22).

3. The Association of Hebrew Catholics

Friedman’s vision was realized in 1979 when he founded the International Association of Catholic Israelites, which today is entitled the Association of Hebrew Catholics. The association’s “Original Manifesto,” written by Friedman prior to the launch of the association, summarizes the association’s aims: “The Association of Hebrew Catholics aims at combating the alienation of Jewish converts and their descendants from their historical heritage by the formation of a Hebrew Catholic Community, juridically approved by the Holy See.” It continues, “Within a community framework the convert would be free to develop his new identity in harmonious continuity with his past, to assure the Hebrew education of his children and, God willing, to establish a mutually beneficial relation with the Jewish People.”3 However, as the following pages will demonstrate, the apparent inclusivity of these goals stand in stark contrast to Friedman’s theological writing, which serves as the theological foundation of this organization.

The Hebrew Catholic movement, particularly as it is enunciated by the Association for Hebrew Catholics, is distinct from a few related contemporary movements. The most visible of these is the phenomenon known as Messianic Judaism, which refers to a wide range of expressions of religious practice incorporating aspects of Jewish tradition into primarily Protestant forms of Christianity, generally sharing the basic beliefs of evangelical Christianity. Despite the fact that Messianic Judaism maintains all of the core beliefs of Christianity, most Messianic Jews claim that their identity is Jewish rather than Christian; meanwhile, all four of the main denominations of Judaism insist that Messianic Judaism is not a valid form of Judaism (Kollontai 2004, p. 195; Shapiro 2012, pp. 4–5). Although some members of Messianic congregations are Jewish converts, or have some degree of Jewish heritage, many are also Christians without Jewish heritage. The elements of Jewish tradition incorporated into Messianic Judaism are not doctrinal, but rather ritual and material; for example, wearing a tallit and kippah, or blowing a shofar, or celebrating major Jewish holidays, all of these altered them to serve liturgical celebrations aimed at the worship of Jesus.

The Association of Hebrew Catholics is also entirely unaffiliated with another related but very different community, the St. James Vicariate for Hebrew Speaking Catholics in Israel. The St. James Vicariate is a ministry for Catholics who live in Israel and speak Hebrew, and who constitute a minority beside the Arabic-speaking majority of Catholics in Israel. Originally founded in 1954 under the name the Association of Saint James, in its early years the organization maintained a focus on Catholics of Jewish heritage in Israel (Polyakov 2020, p. 175; Rioli 2020, p. 232). Friedman was involved in the Association of Saint James in its early years, but later broke away and founded the Association of Hebrew Catholics independently (Rioli 2020, p. 250n). In its current form, however, the St. James Vicariate for Hebrew Speaking Catholics has departed from its early focus on Catholics of Jewish heritage, and ministers to all Hebrew speaking Catholics in Israel, of which only a very small minority are of Jewish heritage (Polyakov 2020, pp. 174–78).

Friedman’s vision of Hebrew Catholicism as represented by the Association of Hebrew Catholics also must not be mistaken for the various approaches to Jewish identity and Catholic faith that were enunciated by a number of Friedman’s contemporaries. In the mid-twentieth century, in wake of the Shoah and in the early years of the State of Israel, some Catholics of Jewish origin in Israel were also exploring expressions of Jewish-Catholic identity, leaving a legacy of theological thought on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. The most well-known of these is Fr. Daniel Rufeisen, who saved hundreds of Jewish lives during the Shoah while employed by the German military police under an assumed identity, and who later became well known through a widely publicized court case over his attempt to attain Israeli citizenship through the Law of Return. Others include Fr. Bruno Husar, Fr. Isaac Jacob, Fr. Gabriel Grossman, Sr. Charlotte Klein, Sr. Regine Canetti, Sr. Paula Drazek, Fr. Gregor Pawlowski, and Fr. Abraham Shmuelof, as well as a number of Catholics without Jewish heritage who also contributed to this work, such as Fr. Yochanan Elichai and Fr. Marcel Dubois.4 It must be noted that Friedman’s vision diverged substantially from these perspectives, and he rejected many of their approaches, at times forcefully (Polyakov 2021, pp. 8–11).

Friedman’s association, the Association of Hebrew Catholics, maintains goals distinct from the work of these others. The identity of the members of the Association of Hebrew Catholics is diverse, comprising Jewish converts to Catholicism, Catholics with some Jewish heritage, as well as Catholics who simply express an interest in the Jewish roots of Christianity; yet overall, Hebrew Catholicism remains a phenomenon premised on advocating for a distinct religious community of Jewish converts to Catholicism (Tavcar 2014, p. 153). The association is relatively small, and may be considered a fringe movement within Catholicism. However, it remains very active nearly fifty years after its founding, and its members understand themselves to be working toward Jewish–Catholic reconciliation. The AHC defines its aim briefly with the following statement on its website: “The AHC seeks to help preserve the corporate identity and heritage of the People Israel within the Church. By connecting with Jews who have entered the Church, we hope to help them rekindle and live out their collective vocation, giving corporate witness to Jesus, the Messiah of Israel, and His Church.” It continues, “We hope, as well, to help the Church prepare for the day when the Lord will gather and unite all peoples to Himself, hastening the day when all Israel will proclaim “Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord.”5 This second statement points to the association’s final goal, i.e., expediting the realization of the eschatological prophecy of the conversion of the entire Jewish people to Christian faith. This indicates that the welcoming inclusivity of the association’s aims is instrumentalized for an end that would entail the eschatological erasure of the Jewish religion, and this suggests that the apparent disjunction between the aims of the Association of Hebrew Catholics and Friedman’s impassioned discourse against Judaism and may be less polarized than it seems.

In another document on the association’s website, “The Logo of the Association of Hebrew Catholics,” penned by Friedman, the impact of his views within the AHC becomes clearer in statements that evidence an unapologetic theological anti-Judaism. Expressing a theology of Jewish collective sin that the Catholic Church had already rejected well before the foundation of the association, the document claims, “The Hebrew Catholic is called upon to bear three crosses: (a) the sins of his ancestors and his own; (b) the burden of confession and expiation on behalf of his people; (c) the hostility of his brother-Jews on the one hand and anti-Semitism on the other.”6 It follows this by drawing an analogy between the biblical story of Jacob’s wrestling with an angel and the encounter between the Jewish people and Jesus: “Jacob does not cede; but his hip is dislocated by the angel. The Jews did not cede to Jesus; but they limped their way through history.”7 The following analysis of Friedman’s monographs will explore how this overall vision is developed in Friedman’s work, which evidences not only religious anti-Judaism, but also racial antisemitism, and which serves still today as theological foundation of the Association of Hebrew Catholics.

4. An Analysis of Friedman’s Work

4.1. The Redemption of Israel

Friedman’s first monograph, The Redemption of Israel, published by Sheed and Ward in 1947, was written in the immediate aftermath of his conversion to Catholicism. Combining theological supersessionism, racial antisemitism, and an unusual anti-Jewish version of Zionism, the book outlines a historical vision that traces the effects of the supposed sin of the Jewish rejection of Jesus throughout history, culminating in an eschatological vision of the eventual conversion of the entire Jewish people following the “ingathering” of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. Reflecting on The Redemption of Israel in a later autobiographical essay entitled “A Branch, Re-ingrafted into the Olive Tree of Israel,” he writes, “the book contained the high point in my search for a solution to the Jewish problem which had occupied me since my entry into the Zionist Youth Movement at the age of fifteen.” He continues, “I reached the conclusion that Jewish history from the time of the French Revolution to the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine announces the entry of Israel into the phase of salvation.” With the birth of Zionism, he proclaims, “the Christian era in the history of Israel was imminent” (E. Friedman 1987a, p. 25).

Friedman presents Judaism as a failed religion, collectively marked by sin from the failure to recognize Jesus as the Messiah. He holds that this rejection of Jesus is “the culminating national sin” of Jews, and a “corollary to the rejection of God” (J. Friedman 1947, p. 41). He claims that the Jewish people have failed to live out their responsibility of sanctifying the world, with the exception of the few Jews who have followed Jesus (J. Friedman 1947, p. 41). For this failure and this sin, to which he attributes not only the rejection of Jesus but also of God, Friedman sees one clear solution: Jewish conversion to Catholicism. He writes, “Catholicism has been the solution of the Jewish problem for 1800 years” (J. Friedman 1947, p. 103). He elaborates, “Catholicism solves the Jewish problem by applying Christianity as a spiritual exercise to a specific case of sin, suffering and evil” (J. Friedman 1947, p. 129).

Throughout The Redemption of Israel, Friedman blames the entire history of Jewish suffering on this sin: “Their failure is the womb of all horrors, woes, miseries, pains and savageries which come upon the people they misled and to the tale of which new and yet more fierce chapters are being added at the very moment of the writing of these words” (J. Friedman 1947, p. 46). The present moment that he alludes to at the time of the book’s publication in 1947 is the wake of the Shoah, yet aside from this very indirect mention, he addresses the Shoah directly only near to the end of the book, framing it as part of a divine plan, and the effect of Jewish sin. In this latter passage, he makes a mathematical calculation to prove that this is part of a divine plan. He offers the equation 40/400 = 200/2000, explaining that after 400 years of slavery in Egypt, Israel wandered in the desert for 40 years, and that after 2000 years of spiritual slavery from the time of the Jewish rejection of Jesus, Jews must wander in a spiritual desert, which he identifies as beginning with the French Revolution and concluding 200 years later (J. Friedman 1947, p. 110). The point of this equation, for Friedman, is to illustrate the mathematical symmetry of God’s punishment of the Jews, which reaches its high point in the Shoah, the ultimate punishment for their failure to believe in Jesus.

Friedman’s general arguments about Jewish sin reflect the anti-Judaism that has been a part of Christian teaching for millennia, yet, while this view is not unusual in Catholic theology prior to the Second Vatican Council, its combination with racial antisemitic tropes is far more unusual. Friedman dedicates many pages of his fifth chapter to describing what he believes to be the Jewish mind, with sections entitled “Psychology,” “Ego and Temperament,” “Volition,” “Intellect,” and so on. A selection of passages from this chapter are reproduced here with minimal commentary, given that the racism in these passages is undisguised enough to make itself imminently clear:

The first sign of the deprivation of grace is found in the absence of Personality in Jewish character. Individuality, strong individuality yes, the Jew undoubtedly has, personality no. The extraordinary emphasis placed on personal life, the drama of personal passions as we know it in the literature, manners and customs of western culture, is well-nigh absent from Pharisaic Society.

(J. Friedman 1947, p. 85)

The place of Personality and personalities is taken by the racial psyche and social types. The body politic is held together by a cement of tribal and family emotions. The range of emotional expression is narrow. The centre-point of the Jewish mind is not defined by clear personal responses. It is a violent physic fluid sometimes strong as running water, sometimes evasive as a mist folding round the sword that cuts it, ‘mass-reacting’ under stimulus in a clotted block of all the human categories.

(J. Friedman 1947, p. 85)

The Jewish mind is dominated by endogenous energies poorly conditioned by objective physical and spiritual facts… It finds extraordinary difficulty in focusing itself quietly and patiently and learning from simple things. It rejects reflexly and as a habit, and ultimately rejects all life in the present by a victory whose spiritual equivalent is the knowledge of the vanity of created things. But it wins this sense of freedom to find itself a prisoner in its own mind, rejected in turn by the World it has seen fit to reject.

(J. Friedman 1947, p. 86)

Here is the rock from which Marx was hewn. Here is the Pharisaism against whose leaven Christ warned and which in his day he spurned, the assertiveness, the tactless indifference to decorous manners and personal sensibility, the over-riding of finer feelings in the name of abstract righteousness and good intention”.

(J. Friedman 1947, p. 87)

Only too many Jews do not exhibit even this unhappy assertiveness [i.e., volition]. They live and drift on the psychic stream. Those who live in the psychic stream must drift with it. The effect is the colossal overpowering drag to inertia which envelops the classical Pharisaic society and caused it simply to float like a log on a river down the ages.

(J. Friedman 1947, p. 88)

The absence of objective volition explains the impression of secrecy that the Jews gives the Gentile… The answer is that he rarely projects his mind at all. It is habitually recessed below the surface of realized mental states.

(J. Friedman 1947, p. 89)

The effect of deprivation of grace on the intellect has been its loss of the power for the highest creative and co-ordinative thought. The Jewish intellect has been content with lesser plants of function, criticism, analysis, argument, dialectic, codification, systematization and memory-work. In the face of an intellectual decision he is evasive and ambiguous; when he takes the panoramic view he loses sight of the details, when he fixes on details he loses sight of the wider view. He tends to substitute intuition for logic. In music he is a better performer than composer, in drama a better actor than dramatist. There is in fact a striking lack of great Jewish plays and playwrights.

(J. Friedman 1947, p. 89)

We have come upon the typical sick Jew, the melancholy figure with a broken will and an imprisoned promise—the ‘batlan’ of the Jewish Ghetto. He is no less capable of being perverse and exasperating by a tenacious assertion of his opinions as the Gospel truth. His melancholy is the shadow cast by the hollowness within.

(J. Friedman 1947, p. 90)

It should be clear to the reader that these passages echo some of the very same racial theories used by the Nazis, which draw from the pseudo-science of eugenics to assign inherent character failures to people according to their heritage. In each of passages above, Friedman ascribes a broad range of disorders, unsavory characteristics, and general failures of the intellect and personality to the inherent nature of Jews.

Following this, Friedman circles back to Christian theology, linking his racial theories to theological views. He describes the muscular habits of Jews, alluding to a stereotypical shrug gesture, and uses it as a symbol for the Jewish rejection of Jesus:

The uninhibited excess of energy displayed by the Jew pours into characteristic muscular channels… His skepticism flows to his shoulders in an expressive shrug with the aid of head and neck. The shrug is the complete embodiment of his ‘rejectiveness’. The Pharisee did not reject only once. He maintains his status quo by making rejection a habit which practice has perfected. The shrug is the answer to all the dilemmas (and they are innumerable) which face him. Into that shrug goes the whole weight of his inertia, his contempt, distain, skepticism, whereby he gains his pyrrhic victories and exposes the trap into which his leaders have led him.

(J. Friedman 1947, p. 91)

Friedman is not unaware of the racial antisemitic tropes that he repeats and magnifies. Indeed, he explicitly mentions the antisemitic myth of the Jewish conspiracy, in the context of attempting to disprove it. Nevertheless, paradoxically, his argument against the conspiracy myth is no less antisemitic, for he uses another antisemitic trope to disprove the former. He attempts to disprove the Jewish conspiracy trope, yet only through using the trope of Jewish laziness as proof: “This immense volitional inertia makes all talk of a Jewish conspiracy psychologically false. The Jews cannot conspire to save themselves let alone others” (J. Friedman 1947, p. 88).

4.2. Jewish Identity

Forty years later, in 1987, Friedman published Jewish Identity with Miriam Press, the printing press of the Association of Hebrew Catholics. In the forty years that had intervened since his first book, the world had changed greatly. Of these changes, those most relevant to Friedman’s work include a broader recognition and deeper reckoning with the horrors of the Shoah, as well as the Second Vatican Council, which inaugurated momentous theological change within the Catholic Church. Held between 1962 and 1965, the Council marked a major reform in the Catholic Church’s teaching on Jews and Judaism. The major document of the Council to address these changes was Nostra Aetate (Catholic Church 1965), the fourth part of which outlines a revision of Catholic teaching. Its main revisions include the suggestion that the biblical covenant between God and the Jewish people has not been broken, contrary to earlier teaching; the repudiation of the accusation that Jews are collectively responsible for killing Jesus; and the condemnation of all expressions of antisemitism (Catholic Church 1974).

Jewish Identity gives the impression of being a book dedicated to Jewish-Catholic dialogue and reconciliation, and in the appendix it includes in full the two most central Catholic documents on Jewish–Christian relations of its time: Nostra Aetate #4, and “Guidelines and Suggestions for Implementing the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate, 4.” The back cover of the book lauds the “great spiritual insights” contained within, and claims that the Catholic Church’s reforms of its teaching on Jews and Judaism during the Second Vatican Council “bears witness” to Friedman’s work. This bold comment suggests not that Friedman’s work reflects the Council’s, but rather that the Council’s work reflects Friedman’s:

Jewish Identity is the fruit of a lifetime of prayer, study and more than 40 years of religious life in Israel. The new international organization founded by Father Elias, The Association for Hebrew Catholics, is an early manifestation of the great spiritual insights contained in this work. In a parallel development, the Church, beginning with Vatican II, has been revising its teaching regarding Jews and Judaism. The relevant material, included in the book’s appendix, bears witness to the thought of Father Elias.

(E. Friedman 1987b)

In Jewish Identity, Friedman returned to his argument for the need for Jewish conversion to Christianity, and engaged in an extended discourse on the religious identity of Jewish converts to Christianity. Writing within the more theologically progressive atmosphere of post-Vatican II Catholicism, he abstained from the virulent racial antisemitism he had expressed in The Redemption of Israel. Does the book’s presentation as an expression of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, however, truly reflect a substantive change in Friedman’s theological views? As the following analysis will demonstrate, Jewish Identity reflects the changes of the Second Vatican Council primarily in its language use rather than in its substance: the undisguised racial antisemitism is gone, as if recognized by now as unsavory or impolite, and yet the anti-Judaism remains unchanged, tempered only by evasive and suggestive language that serves to disguise his most anti-Judaic arguments.

Friedman repeats the arguments of classic supersessionism in Jewish Identity, claiming that Judaism has been “destitute of divine authority” since the time of Jesus (E. Friedman 1987b, p. 58). He writes of the “obsolescence of the temple system” in the time between the ascension of Jesus and the destruction of the 2nd Temple: “Inwardly, what had been a divinely approved order was now a hollow façade, doomed to inevitable destruction (E. Friedman 1987b, pp. 58, 66).

Continuing this line of thought, Friedman attacks the claims of Eugene Fisher, a theologian advocating for a pluralistic Catholic approach to Jewish–Catholic relations, who argues for the ongoing validity of the Jewish covenant:

We are now in a better position to judge how erroneous are certain positions summarized by Eugene Fisher. Some scholars, for instance, hold that post-Christic Judaism and Christianity are both ‘in full and valid covenant with God,’ and that ‘Christianity is an alternate form of the Sinai covenant, which remains in force’; or again, ‘that the Christian covenant thus perfects and fulfills, not Sinai, but the covenant with Noah’.

(E. Friedman 1987b, p. 52)

Here, Friedman indicates that he believes that Judaism is no longer in a valid covenant, and this suggestion that the covenant has been revoked counters the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.8 He develops this more clearly later in the book, claiming “Christianity passes an irrevocable act of invalidity on Rabbinical Judaism…” (E. Friedman 1987b, p. 82).

Following this, Friedman launches a new argument which he presents as supporting, rather than rejecting, the validity of biblical promises to the Jewish people. In this new argument, he claims that the biblical election of the Jewish people remains valid to this day, claiming that “The Jewish people is a part of the Chosen People, a part of the Elect People, a part of Israel” (E. Friedman 1987b, p. 87). Explaining why the Jewish people are only part of the elect, he argues that although the biblical election is irrevocable, Jews are no longer the chosen people after Christ: the chosen people are now the believers in Jesus within the Catholic Church, and the biblical election of the Jews means that Jews are called to convert, but to maintain their Jewish identity as Catholics through his vision of Hebrew Catholicism.

Friedman frames this discourse as a fight against antisemitism, rather than a theological argument that fuels it. In arguing passionately against the belief that the election of the Jewish people has been revoked, he proclaims that such a belief is an expression of “the theological anti-Semitism of Christianity” (E. Friedman 1987b, p. 89). Utilizing a tactic that will be explored in more depth at the conclusion of this paper, Friedman here leverages himself as an opponent of antisemitism and a supporter of the Jewish people.

Continuing to posit himself as an opponent of antisemitism, Friedman discusses the deicide charge, referring to it as a hateful cause of antisemitism (E. Friedman 1987b, p. 105). He offers a theological argument against the deicide charge, clarifying that there is no collective culpability of all Jews for deicide, but only of the Jewish high priests at the time of the crucifixion. Again he presents himself as a defender of Jews and an opponent of antisemitism, when he posits that the belief that Jewish suffering is punishment for deicide is a “vindictive, cruel, and false” misconception (E. Friedman 1987b, p. 123). Nevertheless, lest the reader mistakenly think he has renounced notions of Jewish collective sin, he clarifies that the history of Jewish suffering is indeed a punishment for Jewish collective sin; not the collective sin of deicide, but rather the collective “sin of incredulity” (E. Friedman 1987b, p. 105).

Within the history of suffering for which, according to Friedman, Jews are to blame, no moment was more catastrophic than the Shoah. While in The Redemption of Israel the Shoah was only directly mentioned once, in Jewish Identity Friedman more explicitly focuses on it, framing it as punishment for Jewish sin. He asks, “After the Holocaust, the question stands, in stark, monumental grandeur: what could have been the sin that brought on a punishment of such infinite proportions?” (E. Friedman 1987b, p. 151). He holds that rabbinic explanations do not suffice, and that the question remains unanswered within Jewish discourse.

Addressing this question, Friedman cites the views of notable Jewish figures, including Abraham Heschel and Golda Meir, who each stated that there is no explanation or answer for the Shoah. Friedman presents their statements only to counter them, declaring, “Yes, there is an answer to Auschwitz, God’s answer, the ingrafting of the Jews and the glory of the ‘resurrection of the dead’ to follow” (E. Friedman 1987b, p. 127). For Friedman, if Jewish belief in Jesus and conversion to Christianity is the answer to Auschwitz, then the sin that caused it can only be what Friedman claims to be the ongoing Jewish collective sin: the sin of disbelief in Jesus.

In a final blow to any remaining illusion that Friedman’s proclaimed opposition to antisemitism is sincere, he writes that through the Shoah, “the people of the Messiah had to be molded into the image of their Messiah, in order to learn who the true Messiah was” (E. Friedman 1987b, p. 125). For Friedman, the Shoah was necessary: through being “crucified” in the Nazi genocide, Jews could come to realize that the crucified Jesus is the true Messiah. That is, according to Friedman, while the Shoah may have been evil, it was a necessary evil to teach Jews the lesson that they needed to learn.

5. Nihil Obstat

When Friedman published his first book, the Church had not yet undertaken the major reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Nevertheless, the growing recognition of what had occurred during the Shoah, and the question of the implication of Christian theology in it, were already serving as a sobering call to Catholics to rethink the anti-Judaism imbedded in their theological tradition.9 Friedman’s first book was published after the war, in 1947, and yet unlike much other theological work from this time, he seems to be not sobered by the recognition of the Shoah, but rather inflamed by it.

The theological anti-Judaism that Friedman expresses, with its tropes of accusing Jews of collective sin in the refusal to belief that Jesus is the Messiah, and seeing the history of dispersion and oppression of Jews as just punishment for this sin, is characteristic of much Catholic thought prior to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. However, its pairing with racial antisemitism is not. Rarely have such views been presented together within a Catholic theological work in the modern era in such open and undisguised language, and certainly not after the Shoah.

One may argue that the work of individual theologians does not represent the teachings of the Catholic Church as a whole, and that Friedman’s work might best be understood as an unfortunate chapter in the long tradition of controversial theologians whose work departs from Catholic teaching, and yet who nevertheless inspire a devoted following. One such example would be Fr. Leonard Feeney, S.J., who began in the 1940s to preach a controversial interpretation of the doctrine “extra Ecclesiam nulla salus,” rigorously holding that non-Catholics cannot be saved. Feeney’s theology exhibited a virulent anti-Judaism, pushing back against the changes that the Church was working towards in the lead-up to the Second Vatican Council, and even though he was excommunicated in 1953 for his refusal to renounce this interpretation, he maintained a devoted following nevertheless (Feldberg 2012, pp. 109–15).

Like Feeney, Friedman has developed a following of those devoted to his work and legacy, through the Association of Hebrew Catholics which thrives to this day, nearly fifty years after its founding. However, unlike Feeney, the ecclesiastical and scholarly responses to Friedman’s work have been positive, far from the infamy accorded to Feeney. Friedman’s work has received virtually no critical response or condemnation, neither from the institutional Church nor within theological scholarship.10 Quite to the contrary, his work has been embraced and praised.

The rare mentions of Friedman’s work in academic theological scholarship are laudatory. In an article aimed at “resisting antisemitism and anti-Judaism in Catholic practice and theology,” Gavin D’Costa, one of the most well-known Catholic theologians working within Jewish-Catholic interreligious dialogue, includes Friedman in a list of “great” Jewish converts who “have openly spoken of their love for their Jewish tradition” (D’Costa 2022, p. 348). He refers to Jewish Identity as “the classic foundational text for Hebrew Catholics,” and proposes that through this movement Jewish converts to Catholicism “can witness to the Jewish world the non-threatening good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ,” serving as “living testimony to the Jewish people that following Christ and his Church involves no denigration or eradication of Jewish identity” (D’Costa 2018, p. 956; 2019, p. 187.) In D’Costa’s analysis, a Hebrew Catholic component of the Church that maintains its own version of Jewish identity and practice is a positive “solution” to Jewish resistance to Christianity.11

The Redemption of Israel and Jewish Identity both received the nihil obstat and imprimatur, which together constitute an official ecclesiastical approval of a theological work. The nihil obstat is given by a censor who declares that nothing theologically stands in the way of publishing the work, and the imprimatur may then follow.12 A statement often follows the nihil obstat and imprimatur, and in Jewish Identity the statement is printed on the copyright page immediately beneath the nihil obstat and imprimatur: “The nihil obstat and imprimatur are official declarations that a book or pamphlet is free of doctrinal or moral error. No implication is contained therein that those who have granted the nihil obstat and imprimatur agree with the contents, opinions or statements expressed.” Although this statement clarifies that the nihil obstat and imprimatur do not indicate full agreement with the views the work expresses, they do state unequivocally that the work is “free of doctrinal or moral error.”

6. The Relevance and Impact of Friedman’s Identity

The combination of theological anti-Judaism with racial antisemitism that Friedman expresses is striking in a work of 20th c Catholic theology, and the overtly racist content is particularly surprising given his own Jewish identity. Nevertheless, the notion of a Jewish person expressing antisemitism is not new, as illustrated by the following dark joke:

Two Jewish guys are walking down the street one day when they pass a church with a sign that reads “Convert to Christianity today and receive $1000!” The first guy laughs and says, “I’ll go in and see what the scoop is, and I’ll be right back.” He stays in there for hours, and when he finally emerges, the second guy exclaims “I was so worried! What happened? And what about the $1000?” The first guy replies with disgust, “You people only think about money.”13

In this joke, the person who spontaneously converts to Christianity not only adopts antisemitism as a corollary to his newfound faith, but he also no longer identifies as Jewish; or at the very least, he no longer identifies himself with the antisemitic stereotype he now employs.

This article does not attempt to hypothesize about the personal or psychological causes behind Friedman’s antisemitism in relation to his own Jewish identity, which would only be speculation. Rather, it considers the more pertinent question of the extent to which his Jewish identity is relevant to the analysis and reception of the antisemitism within his work.

Aside from a brief autobiographical essay that Friedman published in a volume of personal reflections by Jewish converts to Catholicism, he does not directly address his own identity in his work. However, it could be argued that his work as a whole constitutes an extended commentary on his identity, expressing his attempts to reformulate traditional understandings of Jewish identity to serve a Catholic theological framework.

Friedman’s vision of Hebrew Catholicism rests on the assumption of the distinction between Judaism as a religion and as a peoplehood. Although today it is taken for granted that a person may be Jewish without ascribing to the Jewish religion, that is, a secular Jew; this distinction is relatively new, reflecting a modern understanding of the difference between ethnicity and religion that arose in the 19th century with the emancipation of Western European Jews (Gitelman 2009, p. 15).14 This distinction was then utilized within early Zionism to promote the ideal of a new secular Jewish identity that would discard both religious tradition as well as the cultural traditions that arose in the context of living as a persecuted minority in the diaspora.

Friedman’s reformulation of Jewish identity paradoxically follows in a pattern similar to that of early Zionism, which redefined Jewish identity through separating it from religious Judaism. His vision, taken up by the Hebrew Catholic movement, offers a revised understanding of Jewish identity removed from Judaism, and also paired with his own form of Zionism. As Anne Perez observes, “In their espousal of Zionist ideals and their attempts to join Zionist efforts, Hebrew Christian notions of Hebrewness reflected the multivalence of Hebrew identity in the Zionist movement itself, and particularly the understanding of Hebrewness as racial, ethnic, and cultural” (Perez 2019, p. 21). Although Friedman paradoxically follows in the footsteps of secular Zionism in this way, his own form of Zionism is not secular, but thoroughly religious: it is a Catholic Zionism, fueled by Christian eschatological expectation. Similarly, his own concept of Jewish identity removed from the Jewish religion is not secular, but entirely religious, subsuming and transforming Jewish identity within the Catholic religion.

Friedman’s thought also mirrors another aspect of early Zionist rhetoric; quite paradoxically, it is through his repetition of antisemitic stereotypes. This can be seen in the turn of the century work of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who constructed a vision of the new ideal “Hebrew” in contrast to antisemitic stereotypes of the diaspora Jew: “Our starting point is to take the typical Yid of today and to imagine his diametrical opposite… Because the Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum, we shall endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty. The Yid is trodden upon… the Hebrew ought to be proud and independent…The Yid wants to conceal his identity from strangers and, therefore, the Hebrew should look the world straight in the eye and declare: ‘I am a Hebrew’.” (Quoted in (Baker 2017)). Jabotinsky’s repetition of antisemitic stereotypes is voiced in an attempt to construct a new vision of Jewish identity freed from the chains of antisemitism. Despite this intention, however, Jabotinsky’s discourse serves to reaffirm these antisemitic stereotypes. Decades later, this repetition and amplification of antisemitic stereotypes in an attempt to define a new Jewish identity was mirrored, whether wittingly or unwittingly, by Elias Friedman.

We now return to the question of whether Friedman’s identity is a key player in the reception and impact of his work. In an abstracted context, one might argue that his identity does not matter; that antisemitism from a Jew is just as damaging as antisemitism from non-Jews, and what matters is the content of his work rather than the identity of the writer. However, such an argument might work only in the abstract, and the context of the reception of Friedman’s work is not abstract, but concrete. His work has made a major impact in the Association of Hebrew Catholics, and in this context his identity is indispensable to his work. His work is respected within the AHC, even lauded and revered, precisely as a theology of Jewish identity developed by a Jewish convert to Catholicism.

I argue that Friedman’s identity does indeed shape the reception and impact of his work, and it matters in ways that extend beyond the fact that his identity as a convert is central to the reverence accorded to him within the Hebrew Catholic movement. More impactfully, his identity can be interpreted as an inherent validation of his views, which would suggest that because a Jewish person holds these views, they can’t possibly be antisemitic.

The suggestion that Friedman’s Jewish identity may serve to validate his views and whitewash his antisemitism is reinforced by his own attempts to posit himself as an opponent of antisemitism and a defender of the Jews. In The Redemption of Israel, his most unapologetically antisemitic work, Friedman makes claims that appear to denounce antisemitism. However, his supposed outrage against antisemitism, combined with his Jewish identity, serve to disguise his own antisemitism, all the while strengthening its potency.

In The Redemption of Israel, Friedman refers to antisemitism as “heinous,” and “intrinsic to all evil and a weapon of the Devil” (J. Friedman 1947, p. 95, 99). He claims that it is contrary to Christian faith, and that “The less Christian men are the more they will persecute the Jews…” (J. Friedman 1947, p. 99). And yet, he suggests that although antisemitism is unacceptable, it can also have a beneficial impact by allowing a murdered Jew to become Christian in the afterlife: “The anti-Semite who killed a Jew who in turn died in the perfect love of God, according to his knowledge (as so many did), made him a Christian so that he enters the Communion of Saints.” To this he adds, “The heinousness of anti-Semitism is greatly magnified in that it makes the innocent suffer indiscriminately with the guilty, but God judges!” (J. Friedman 1947, p. 95). In other words, he suggests that while some victims of antisemitism are innocent, others are guilty and deserving of the punishment.

A few pages later, Friedman criticizes antisemitic myths such as the blood libel and the claims of the Protocols of Elders of Zion. Nevertheless, he continues by suggesting that these antisemitic myths are the fault of Jews for tempting the antisemite to hatred: “Anti-Semitism is the sin of succumbing to the temptation of diabolical hate provided by the presence of the Jew in the midst of the Gentile.” (J. Friedman 1947, p. 98). As a remedy to these supposed causes of antisemitism, all of which result from the Jewish sin of failing to believe in Jesus, Friedman has a clear answer: “It is manifest that the cure to Anti-Semitism will be effected by God following on national repentance and humble obedience to His will” (J. Friedman 1947, p. 27).

If these words had been written by a Catholic theologian without any Jewish heritage, their hypocrisy could not have gone unnoticed, and they would likely be recognized as blatant antisemitism barely cloaked in what claims to be a discourse against antisemitism. Instead, Friedman’s work is lauded by many today who believe themselves to be opposing antisemitism and honoring Jewish heritage. Friedman’s identity, then, seems to have served the purpose of rendering anodyne even the most virulently antisemitic of his statements.

Friedman’s legacy remains a dark stain on efforts in the Catholic Church to address its history of anti-Judaism and to rectify this teaching. This stain seems to be thoroughly unrecognized, as there is little evidence that his work has been subjected to scholarly criticism. As institutions around the world today reassess the historical and intellectual heritage that they have received, critically challenging the legacies of their founding figures, Friedman’s work and its impact within the Hebrew Catholic movement demand serious analysis and commentary.