This again is a new category, and not a happy one. I include it because honesty is a higher virtue than pleasantness. First, the politics. Here, the unpleasantness is on the Christian side. I refer to the heavily politicized, anti-Zionist recent works of Rosemary Radford Ruether. Although a few Christian scholars of stature reacted positively to Ruether's overstated arguments in her 1974 Faith and Fratricide, many, especially those involved already in the dialogue, responded negatively. The book, however, seems to have struck a sympathetic chord among Jews, many of whom set up her dictum, "Antisemitism is the left hand of Christology" as the yardstick by which to judge other Christian thinkers. Several years ago Michael McGarry warned against the proclivity on the part of some in the Jewish community to judge Christian thinkers on the basis of how close they come to the most radical positions. Such idealization of what are destined to be at most fringe Christian positions, and which have no meaningful chance of being adopted by the larger Christian community, can lead to confusion and unwarranted disappointment.

Ruether's tendency to argue from and to extremes has now zone full circle. Her book, The Wrath of Jonah: The Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989), written with her husband, Herman J. Ruether, former director of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign in Evanston, IL, is a straight "good guy/bad guy" thriller. The "Zionists," of course, are the bad guys and the source of all evil in the Middle East, with the Palestinians and other Arabs playing the part of the victims that Ruether had reserved for the Jews in Faith and Fratricide. While strong critiques of Israeli governmental actions and policies are, in my view, certainly in order in the dialogue, Ruether makes the jump to what I would call the "demonization" of Zionism, which is another level of rhetoric altogether than the "prophetic" that she invokes in justification. The highly critical reactions of responsible Christian scholars involved in the dialogue to the Ruethers' Wrath may be found in a symposium in the journal Continuum (New York: Crossroad, and Chicago: St. Xavier College, Autumn 1990, pp. 105-136). In my own view, I would have to conclude that Rosemary Ruether has, unfortunately, allowed ideology to overtake her scholarship.
While it contains several articles by very good scholars and is more balanced than Wrath, R.R. Ruether and Marc Ellis, editors, Beyond Occupation: American Jewish, Christian, and Palestinian Voices for Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), is a questionable offering. In a startling display of editorial pique, for example, the editors at the end of the volume argue with and seek to devalue precisely the thinkers whose participation they invited to give the volume some sense of realism. Irving Greenberg, Arthur Hertzberg, John Pawlikowski, Robert McAfee Brown, and even Michael Lerner are found wanting by the editors. Rosemary Ruether, in her concluding essay, curiously wants to position herself in a transcendent position "Beyond Antisemitism and Philo-Semitism." I do not believe she has succeeded in moving much beyond the first, nor would I view moving beyond the second to be much of a goal to which a Christian should aspire.

Like Ruether, Hyam Maccoby, Librarian of Leoory.ck College, London, came to prominence with a book that many consider to have become a classic, Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University, 1981). So far as I know, this book has stood the test of time better than Ruether's. But Maccoby seems to have gotten stuck, as it were, in the time period he analyzed so well. In his subsequent works he tends to presume that the situation that existed in the Middle Ages was also true, without significant difference, in the centuries before and after the period of the disputations. Briefly, Maccoby views history as basically flat, so that things that were said or believed in the High Middle Ages are present in full bloom in texts written a thousand years earlier.

Paul and Hellenism (London: SCM and Philadelphia: Trinity, 1991) and Judas Iscariat and the Myth of Jewish Evil (New York: Macmillan: The Free Press, 1992) present themselves as objective scholarly studies of Christianity. And the author doubtlessly sincerely believes that they are. But in my view they should more properly be categorized as polemical literature. Both read as if Maccoby were somehow personally engaged in a medieval dispute and is launching in that context devastating barbs against the Christian faith. This makes for stimulating reading and, if one is Jewish, one could well issue an understandable cheer now and then at Maccoby's verbal pyrotechnics. But readers should not confuse this genre of writing with scholarly work that will in fact tell them anything meaningful or significant about Christianity or Christians. Christians have been reduced to a caricature (as Christians themselves have done so often in the past to Jews and therefore doubtlessly deserve to be).

Similarly, Joel Carmichael, the redoubtable editor of Midstream, has indulged in a flight of comforting fantasy in his The Satanizing of the Jews: Origin and Development of Mystical AntiSemitism (New York: Fromm International, 1992), inventing a Christianity that is an easy target for his debunking rather than doing the hard work of grappling with the real intransigencies and complexities of history. The problem with this genre of Jewish anti-Christian polemics is not that we Christians don't deserve to be hoisted on our petard in this fashion. We do. And it is impossible not to admire the verve and spirit with which these two powerful rhetoricians skewer Christianity by parodying it. The problem is that this type of literature can obscure the real difficulties that must be d by Jews and Christians together by refusing to allow one side the integrity of its own belief and traditions. This repeats but does not solve the ancient error.

Readers may find it odd to find a work by one of the foremost theologians of our time included in this section on polemics. But I believe Hans Küng's massive Judaism: Between Yesterday and Today (New York: Crossroad, 1992) fits this category. Küng attempts to summarize all of the Jewish history and thought through paradigm theory. But in this instance that theory turns into a procrustean bed. A key test of any attempt to describe another religious tradition is whether members of that tradition will actually see themselves in the attempted description. In this case, I do not believe that very many Jews will see Judaism depicted here either accurately or sympathetically. This book tells us a lot about what kind of religion would be an ideal one in Küng's mind. But it tells us almost nothing about what Judaism in its many manifestations over the centuries has been, is, or could be. In short, it fails to live up to its title and cannot be recommended.

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