Ever since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023—the deadliest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust—Jews have drawn on our biblical heritage to process the horror. Many examples have been moving and constructive, such as elegies for destroyed kibbutzim inspired by the book of Lamentations and invocations of the matriarch Rachel “weeping over her children” (Jeremiah 31:15). Others have been unacceptable, such as depictions of Palestinians as Amalekites—a people whom God commands the Israelites to annihilate. For my part, I have recently found myself thinking about the situation through a more mundane biblical image. I’ve been thinking about oxen.
The laws that follow the Ten Commandments in Exodus feature a discussion of penalties for a person whose domesticated ox fatally gores someone else (Exodus 21:28–31). If the ox gores randomly, it is put down. However, if it’s known to have gored previously, such that the owner has been “forewarned” (hu‘ad), then the owner is executed, too—punished for gross negligence. Postbiblical halakhah (Jewish law) elaborates considerably on the shor hammu‘ad, the “forewarned ox.” Although this case might seem oddly specific, it offers a model for a much broader phenomenon: parties who have a history of wrongdoing and are therefore subject to baseline suspicion that might otherwise be unfair.
How does this relate to October 7? As a Jewish Bible scholar who teaches at a Catholic university, I’m often asked by members of my Jewish community—pro-Israel, like most Jews—about liberal American Catholic (and broader liberal Christian) anti-Zionism. For many Jews, antisemitism is so baked into Christianity that it’s the simplest explanation for liberal Christians’ opposition to Israel: they think that the Jewish state is evil only because their religion has primed them to think that Jews are evil. This, so the theory goes, is the real reason why they support the Palestinian cause; human rights are just a pretense. In halakhic terms, Christians are the owner of the forewarned ox. Their documented history of antisemitism means that their critiques of Israel are inherently suspect.
There’s no doubt that animosity toward Jews is deeply embedded in Christianity, including Catholicism. Over the past year, some Christian critiques of Israel have echoed this history. One example was the viral “Christ in the rubble” image from Christmas 2023, which reimagined the infant Jesus as a Palestinian child in Gaza. While many Jews, including me, understood why this was powerful for Christians, we couldn’t help but notice that the analogy cast the modern Jewish state in the role of the Christ child’s ancient Jewish persecutors. To us, this sounded perilously close to the charge of deicide, that the Jews are collectively and eternally responsible for murdering God. This is arguably the founding myth of antisemitism itself. There have also been characterizations of Israel as hypocritical Pharisees, claims that Israel represents the oppressive “law” versus Christ’s compassion, and celebrations of anti-Zionist Jews as witnesses to the Gospel—just to name a few.
Despite the prevalence of these motifs, I’ve typically pushed back on allegations that Catholic anti-Zionism is nothing other than Catholic antisemitism. There are two reasons for this. The first applies to Christians in general. Although I support Israel and regard it as both historically justified and religiously miraculous, I cannot deny that its founding and continued existence have entailed serious injustices to Palestinians. This is a historical fact—one that even a possible affinity between anti-Zionism and antisemitism would not change. As such, the most proximate explanation for liberal Christians’ anti-Zionism is exactly what they (and all progressive activists) say it is: commitment to justice for Palestinians.
The second reason concerns Catholicism specifically. I regularly find myself explaining to other Jews that liberal Catholics—as well as Pope Francis, whom the liberals regard as an unprecedented champion of their cause—are the principal defenders of the legacy of the Second Vatican Council. This includes the revolution in Catholic-Jewish relations represented by the 1965 declaration Nostra aetate, which renounced the ideas that historically fueled Catholic antisemitism (including the deicide charge) and instead encouraged Catholics to see Jews as respected partners in building an open, modern society. Indeed, my own role as a Jewish professor in a Catholic theology department—where I have flourished intellectually, professionally, and spiritually—would be unimaginable without Vatican II. Meanwhile, the liberals’ traditionalist opponents are typically more skeptical of the council and highly critical of Francis. In the most extreme cases, they want to roll back Vatican II entirely and establish a Catholic theocracy—something that would fundamentally threaten Jews.
In this relief, it’s difficult for me to accuse liberal Catholics of surreptitious antisemitism. Both the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause and the internal politics of the Catholic Church militate against it. I disagree with liberal Catholic anti-Zionism, but it doesn’t meet the criteria of the forewarned ox. At least, that’s what I used to think.
On the first anniversary of the October 7 attack, I was doomscrolling on Facebook. Amid somber reflections and calls to free the hostages, something caught my eye: one of my Catholic colleagues had posted a letter from Pope Francis to the Catholics of the Middle East—who, by any account, have suffered tremendously over the past year. Emphasizing that the Church “must never tire of imploring peace from God,” the Pope declared a day of fasting and prayer to “defeat our one true enemy: the spirit of evil that foments war, because it is ‘murderous from the beginning,’ ‘a liar and the father of lies’ ([John] 8:44).”
There’s nothing objectionable about this message, especially compared with the violent rhetoric that has prevailed in public discourse. However, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read that the Pope’s biblical basis for his appeal was John 8:44. Anyone familiar with this verse knows that, in context, these disparaging epithets aren’t directed at a vague “spirit of evil that foments war.” They’re directed at Jews—part of a passage with a longer, bloodier history of antisemitism than perhaps any other in the New Testament.
The scene, like many in the gospels, depicts Jesus in a testy conversation with other Jews about his legitimacy. He provocatively questions their claim to be descendants of Abraham, arguing that the great patriarch, unlike them, would have duly accepted the truth. Instead, Jesus charges, “You belong to your father the devil and you willingly carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he speaks in character, because he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).
It might seem that this condemnation cannot be antisemitic because Jesus was Jewish, too. However, the authors of John—writing more than half a century after Jesus’ time—were already engaged in a rhetorical process of othering “the Jews” and separating Jesus from them. Regardless of historical reality, the gospel tells a story in which Jesus and the Jews—the child of God and the children of the devil—face off in a cosmic showdown between good and evil. This story deeply influenced such important Church fathers as Augustine and John Chrysostom. It metastasized as Christianity attained political power. In the medieval and early modern periods, John 8:44 spurred violent persecutions of Jews. Later, the Nazis mobilized it as scriptural support for the Final Solution. Most recently, the perpetrator of the 2018 synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh—the worst of its kind in American history—cited the verse as inspiration.
It’s unclear what the Pope (or whoever actually wrote the letter) intended by quoting from John 8:44 to characterize “our one true enemy.” But given the gruesome legacy of this verse, intentions are beside the point. Significant portions of the world—including within the pontiff’s audience—blame the current crisis in the Middle East squarely on Israel. In that context, citing this particular passage—of all the dozens, if not hundreds, of biblical passages that one could use to say “war is bad”—leaves the door open for the idea that the actions of the Jewish state reflect the satanic nature of the Jewish people. As in Jesus’ days, the Jews stand in opposition to goodness, peace, the Church, and humanity itself.
Although I’d become pretty numb to vicious rhetoric about Israel, this shook me. I wrote about it on Facebook, and as the responses rolled in, it quickly became clear that the letter had largely gone unnoticed. Many of my colleagues in Catholic-Jewish relations were first learning about it from my post. Predictably, they were horrified. The Pope’s language outraged even many of my peers on the Jewish left—scholars, rabbis, and activists who never characterize opposition to Israel as antisemitic. People across the political spectrum urged me to write something more formal about it. Even amid intense Jewish disagreement about Israel, there was a widespread sense that the pope’s letter had crossed a clear line and needed to be addressed.
On October 10, I published an opinion piece, “Pope’s Oct. 7 letter citing antisemitic verse is a disaster for Jewish-Catholic relations” in Religion News Service. Within days, it became the site’s most-read article. Prominent scholars shared it on social media. Eventually, it was picked up by the American Catholic journalist John L. Allen Jr., who cited it in his own piece about the letter for his widely read Church-news site, Crux. It reached the top of the charts there too.
Watching these developments, Jews in my community wondered whether my article might prompt an official response from the Vatican. But my academic colleagues and I were much keener to hear from our immediate interlocutors: Francis’s liberal American Catholic defenders. These are the Catholics who trip over themselves to condemn antisemitism when it comes, as it so often does, from their traditionalist opponents. Would they speak out now that it was coming from their own team? In an ironic way, the pope had given liberal Catholics a gift: by rejecting this use of John 8:44 without renouncing their pro-Palestinian stance, they could show that Catholic criticism of Israel needn’t entail Catholic antisemitism. All they had to do was say, “Hey, maybe don’t allude to the idea that Jews are the spawn of Satan.”
But even that was too much to ask. The response from the liberal American Catholic establishment was crickets. In fairness, America published an op-ed by my colleague Philip A. Cunningham of the Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. He echoed my critiques from a Catholic perspective. As much as I appreciated this, I nevertheless felt that the gravity of a papal letter merited a response from the leadership of prominent liberal Catholic publications or organizations. What I really wanted was an institutional acknowledgment that using this language was unacceptable. It never came.
The silence from institutions might actually have been preferable to the noise on social media. While I was grateful to receive online support from some liberal Catholic colleagues and friends, there was also a striking backlash—from strangers, yes, but also from people in my networks—consisting of tellingly questionable objections and excuses. Some insisted that Jews had no right to be upset because the pope’s letter was not meant for them. This is about as convincing as Donald Trump dismissing his violent misogyny as “locker-room talk.” Others argued that most Christian invocations of John 8:44, including by Francis, are not antisemitic at all because they merely use Jews as a symbol for the actual target (war, in this case). To my ear, this amounts to objecting, “We don’t hate Jews! It’s just that when we see something that we do hate, we call it ‘Jews.’” Most frustrating was the suggestion that because I didn’t unequivocally condemn Israel myself, my perspective was disqualified from the start—as if to say, “If you don’t want to be called the devil, stop acting like the devil.”
In retrospect, my initial shock over the pope’s letter seems naïve. Far more concerning is the subsequent refusal of the liberal American Catholic world to address it. Rejecting the use of John 8:44 in such proximity to Jews is the lowest bar imaginable for delineating criticism of Israel from antisemitism. By and large, liberal Catholics failed to clear that bar. For me, this necessitates a reconsideration of that community’s entire discourse around Israel since October 7—the deicide imagery, the disparagement of Pharisees, the charges of legalism, all of it. Given the long, bloody history of Catholic antisemitism, why should Jews give the benefit of the doubt to Catholics who say such things and then also won’t say that it’s wrong to call us the devil? Maybe so much liberal Catholic anti-Zionism looks like old-fashioned Catholic antisemitism because that’s exactly what it is. Maybe this ox has gored before.
Given the political urgency of our present moment, it’s reasonable to wonder about the practical ramifications of this unfortunate episode. An obvious starting place would be to ask whether it discredits liberal American Catholic support for the Palestinian cause. Many pro-Israel Jews will surely say that it does. In my opinion, however, this is the wrong conclusion. As I’ve emphasized, there can be no denying the injustices that Palestinians have endured. Liberal Catholics who oppose Israel have understandable moral reasons for doing so. The fact that many of them articulate that stance through antisemitism—or, perhaps, are even partially drawn to it because of antisemitism—doesn’t invalidate the stance itself.
There’s another question that we must ask, though: Does this episode discredit liberal American Catholic support for Catholic-Jewish dialogue? This, for me, is more complicated. I don’t think that good-faith Catholic-Jewish dialogue requires Catholics to support Israel. (This isn’t because my own support for Israel is shaky. It’s because interreligious dialogue shouldn’t impose such litmus tests at all.) But I do think that good-faith Catholic-Jewish dialogue requires intellectual honesty and self-awareness. If liberal Catholics are going to traffic in antisemitism as they criticize Israel, then they at least need to acknowledge that that’s what they’re doing. Their resolute unwillingness to do so suggests that they only care about antisemitism when it’s politically useful for their own agenda—ironically, itself an accusation that they often level at their traditionalist opponents. Even for me—a Jewish scholar at a Catholic university, deeply committed to building community with Catholics in the spirit of Vatican II—it’s difficult to see how meaningful dialogue is possible under such circumstances.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Next year will mark sixty years since Nostra aetate, an anniversary fated to become a proxy battle for competing visions of the Church: the liberals will celebrate the document, the hard traditionalists will lament it, and the moderate traditionalists will be somewhere in between. But I want to suggest that the forewarned ox offers a different way of thinking about it. The Babylonian Talmud (ca. 500 CE), the most important collection of rabbinic law and teaching, defines precisely what “forewarned” means: “An ox does not become forewarned until [witnesses] testify against it in the presence of [its] owner and in the presence of a court” (Bava Kamma 24a). A forewarning isn’t just a conclusion that the owner is expected to draw from the ox’s behavior, or even a private admonition by someone else. It’s a public process that unambiguously signals the owner’s acknowledgement of both the problem and the consequences. Only communal involvement may confer the necessary accountability.
For Catholic-Jewish relations, Nostra aetate serves this function. It is Catholics’ solemn testimony before the Jewish people and the entire world that they know what antisemitism is, admit their past implication in it, reject it—and accept the consequences for participating in it again. Liberal Catholics who champion Nostra aetate need to start recognizing that it holds them accountable as well, not just their opponents. The hypothetical antisemitic dystopia that they often claim to fear from the traditionalists? That’s the actual historical reality that John 8:44 produced for significant parts of the past 1,500 years. That’s what the liberals’ silence (or worse) is condoning. If they want their defense of Vatican II to have any credibility with Jews, then they must reckon with this. Whether they are prepared to do so will determine whether next year’s commemorations of Nostra aetate feel more like an anniversary or a funeral. One thing is certain: they can’t say they weren’t forewarned.
