I really feel for Jews like comedian David Baddiel venting their anger and frustration at so-called progressives.
In a Channel 4 documentary, Jews Don’t Count, David (and fellow Jews he interviews including David Schwimmer of Friends) goes through a long list of vulnerable minorities whose welfare is currently being championed by the wokerati.
The list includes all the usual suspects such as victims of race, gender, Islamophobia and the LGBT community without ever embracing the Jews, it seems. Why?
The question has everyone scratching their heads, especially in days like these when so many Jews are as secular and non-religious as the rest of us. And so, in thus assimilating with the general trend of other Westerners, why do they still come in for such abuse?
The programme unfortunately went around in ever-decreasing circles without coming to a conclusion, though I was called away by the phone before it ended.
Without wishing to be too simplistic, there is a one-word answer to this conundrum – God. I concede that a great many modern Jews try desperately to distance themselves from their ancient calling as God’s chosen people, beginning with Abraham 4,000 years ago, but there is no getting away from it.
He has called them as his special representatives – God’s ambassadors, if you like – to model the kind of people he wants us all to be. All of which provokes a raging jealousy and hatred which boils down to enmity against God himself.
And if an individual Jew claims to be an atheist, as many do, it will be no defence against persecution. He is still God’s chosen, whether he likes it or not – just as, by turning his back on his father, the prodigal didn’t stop being his father’s son.
The Jew – and Israel as a nation – is something of a litmus test for how we view God, whether we’re for him or against him. It’s all part of a cosmic spiritual battle between good and evil, which goes some way to explaining the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the confusion among politicians about whose land it is, despite the indisputable evidence of international treaties, not to mention God’s own word as expressed in the Bible.
Jewish persecution goes all the way back to their 400 years of slavery under the Pharaohs until – some 3,500 years ago – God brought them out of Egypt with a miraculous deliverance through the Red Sea, setting them free by the blood of a sacrificial lamb to be a light to the Gentiles.
Some 1,500 years later, their Messiah Jesus appeared as the ‘light of the world’ to take away the sins of both Jew and Gentile as the ultimate Lamb of God. And Jesus repeatedly warned his original disciples (all of them Jews) that they would face much persecution. Jesus is the key to understanding all this.
For it isn’t just the Jews who are left out of the progressives’ list of those we should be championing. Christians rarely get a look-in. Christians in the UK have been coming under increasing pressure to conform to woke culture, and some are losing their jobs by standing up for their beliefs.
And in many other countries (particularly those under Islam) they are facing the prospect of brutal persecution and even death. There is in fact a growing ‘holocaust’ of Christian martyrs rarely mentioned on our national media.
The fact is that Jews and Christians are in this together. Christians too are persecuted because they follow Jesus, the Jew, and are (by their faith) ‘grafted in’ to the natural olive tree that is symbolic of Israel (Romans 11:24).
Christianity is in fact Jewish, and its practice is an extension or fulfilment of Judaism. The whole of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) points to the Messiah revealed in the New Testament. God’s ‘new covenant’ promised through the prophet Jeremiah was essentially for Israel before it was extended to the rest of us. (See Jeremiah 31:31-34)
Atheist and other secular Jews should be aware that many of their persecutors don’t really know what they’re doing; they are being driven by evil ideas that have sadly captivated their hearts and minds. You may recall the shocking incident in north London as protests erupted in the wake of the Gaza war of May 2021 when Palestinian supporters could be heard shouting antisemitic obscenities as they drove through a Jewish neighbourhood. Even more shocking, perhaps, is that no-one has been prosecuted for it.
Yet Jesus said of those who nailed him to the cross:
“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)
Just as the new covenant was for Israel, so is the Isaiah 53 passage so familiar to Christians. Yet many Jews are unaware of it. No wonder it begins: “Who has believed our message?” But it goes on to say:
“He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with grief…But he was pierced for our transgressions…the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.” (vv 1, 3 & 5)
This is a graphic depiction, prophesied 700 years earlier, of what Jesus did for us on the cross – for his own people as well as for all who have since trusted him. Yes, persecution is promised, but so is peace!
Charles Gardner is author of Israel the Chosen, available from Amazon; Peace in Jerusalem, available from olivepresspublisher.com; To the Jew First, A Nation Reborn, and King of the Jews, all available from Christian Publications International.
