The Irrationality of Anti-Semitism

By Audrey Stallsmith

We recently watched a movie about Irena Sendler. A Polish social worker, she managed to smuggle about 2500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. 

Although Irena definitely wasn’t a saint—apparently carrying on a romance with a Jewish friend while her husband was in a German prison camp—she risked everything to save those children from Hitler’s holocaust.  And she almost had to sacrifice her life for theirs at one point. 

Since the sound in the movie wasn’t the greatest, we often had a hard time hearing what was being said. So it wasn’t clear whether Irena was captured and tortured by the Nazis because they found out about the children or because they discovered her ties to the Polish underground Zegota. At any rate, she never revealed to her tormentors where she kept the addresses of the children she had relocated, and Zegota managed to save her from execution by bribing guards.

When Irena was trying to convince parents in the ghetto to hand over their children to her, even the Jews themselves seemed to have a hard time believing that Hitler really intended to kill them all. To this day, the hatred felt by some for God’s chosen people—as evidenced by the Holocaust and the recent shootings here in western PA—remains incomprehensible to many of us. Especially to us Christians, since our Lord was a Jew. 

I think we only can understand that irrational prejudice by realizing that Satan hates what God loves, especially the One who was the means of saving the world. And the Jews were the people God chose for the task of delivering Christ to that world. Therefore, they often take the brunt of Satan’s wrath. And he makes use of violent people who are looking for somebody else to blame for problems they generally have brought upon themselves. 

Hitler, for example. We know his pride was hurt due to his country’s defeat in World War I. He still wanted to believe that Aryans were superior to other races, which might help explain his animosity towards the real chosen people. As God makes clear, however, He didn’t pick the Jews because they were any better or worse than anyone else, but because he needed a people through which to manifest Himself.

And being chosen by God, as I have pointed out in the past, usually is no picnic. It, in fact, made many of the Jewish prophets pariahs to their own people—just as it often seems to make those people pariahs to the rest of the world.    

I expect part of it springs from jealousy as well, since Jews often are stereotyped as being shrewd in money matters, just as Italians are supposed to be emotional and the British not. Such assumptions made on the basis of race are, of course, pure nonsense. Human temperament and talent varies in all cultures, and the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto certainly weren’t rich at the time so many of them were sent to extermination camps.

Before we get too depressed by psychopaths such as Hitler and the Pittsburgh shooter, we should remember all the people in Polish families, orphanages, and convents who took in the children that Irena brought to them. The Jews didn’t just deliver the ultimate Sacrifice to the world. They also made it possible for Gentiles to sacrifice in return. 

Many of the people who hid Jews during the war died simply for doing the right—the Christian thing. But I doubt any of those martyrs would regret that now.