Goodbye Moderation
A European at this Christmas season must feel a little like a Roman enjoying one of the last Lupercals of the pagan era. The old religion still fills the public space of society. It still possesses its old wealth and the great temples in the centers of towns, and national leaders still profess their adherence to its teachings.
Elites still disdain the old religionÕs new eastern competitor, the religion of migrants and the poor. Its houses of worship are found in cheap suburbs, far from the pomp and glitter of the central cities. The new competitorÕs holidays are ignored by the state and observed only by its own believers. But every year there are more and more of them ....
The great historian Bernard Lewis has predicted that at current trends, Islam will replace Christianity as EuropeÕs predominant religion within the next fifty years. Some skeptics doubt this prediction. They argue that EuropeÕs Muslim population must succumb to the same forces of modernization and secularization that have emptied EuropeÕs Christian churches.
Perhaps these skeptics are right. But whether Europe is fated to move toward an Islamic future or a secular one, equally post-Islamic and post-Christian, there is one future predicted by nobody: a revival of the ancient Christian faith that defined European civilization for 1500 years.
Whatever the future holds, nobody should assume that the transition from one era to the other will be peaceful or easy. Last monthÕs Muslim rioting in France, last weekÕs clashes between old-stock Australians and Muslim immigrants on the beaches of Sydney - these may well be portents of a troubled future. It took only a century for the rulers of Rome to switch from persecuting Christianity to banning its rivals.
I belong to a religious community often and horribly persecuted by European Christianity. Under Islam, by contrast, Jews were usually tolerated and sometimes even protected. Does the history of the past offer any comfort for the future?
Only if we believe that the Islam of the future will resemble the Islam of the past. And the evidence indicates pretty strongly that this will not be so.
The anti-Jewish incitement preached in contemporary mosques, the surge of anti-Jewish violence in European cities with large Muslim minorities, the Holocaust denial urged by the governments not just of Iran but also of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the blunt threats of nuclear annihilation of the Jews heard from the government in Teheran - these tell us more about what is to come than the benign practices of the lost Muslim past.
Life in Christian societies has seldom been easy for Jews. But even at its persecuting worst, Christianity always acknowledged its own descent from Judaism - and always preserved a place for Judaism, if not for Jews, in its theology and teaching.
Islamic theology, by contrast, taught that the Jews deliberately falsified the Torah and the Bible to conceal the fact that Abraham was a Muslim who lived in Arabia and preferred Ishmael over Isaac. It carried over large passages from Jewish scripture directly into the Koran and other sacred writings while furiously denying any connection with the Jewish past. However kindly Islamic societies have treated Jews, Islam the religion has no place for Judaism.
Combine the hostility to Judaism taught by Islamic theology with the hostility to Jews felt by contemporary Muslim societies - and you arrive at the disturbing verdict: When the Christian era ends in Europe, so too will end the era of European Jewry.