There are two things we must always remember about the Jewish people. First, they exist because God willed them to be. Their identity and existence is rooted in an act of divine intervention and the generosity of Almighty God. He fashioned them as a people after his own heart, which sets them uniquely apart in salvation history. 

And the second thing? That throughout history, powerful forces have repeatedly sought to annihilate them. It certainly did not start with Hamas and the murderous rampage of Oct. 7, 2024, a massacre that left 1,200 Jews dead in the desert, while hundreds more were taken hostage to Gaza, there to languish in tunnels where many remain to this day. Nor did it start with Hitler, who succeeded in murdering 6 million. While the numbers may vary, the genocidal fury remains the same, all fired by a common hatred.

Thus, the call to destroy the Jewish people persists, wherever they may be found. Scattered across the world since the great Diaspora, their largest concentration is in a land about the size of New Jersey — the modern state of Israel — where they remain surrounded by hostile groups committed to their destruction. This is why, unlike those of us who live mostly quiet lives in the West, they can never wholly relax, but must keep their resolution strong.

To what end? It is not just physical survival that is at stake here, although it matters enormously that Israel endures as a geopolitical entity. In a world where threats to the Jewish people persist, vigilance has got to be the order of the day. But there is a larger point in play here, one that touches upon the mystery of divine election itself, thus implicating both Israel and the Church in a drama fraught with far-reaching, even eschatological consequences. 

We dare not forget, we who are Christian, that the Rock on which we stand is anchored to a people from whom God himself would come into being as man. Both Jesus and his Mother were Jewish, as were St. Joseph and the Apostles. And so to vilify the Jewish people is to dishonor God himself, for whom the Children of the Covenant will always remain the sign of his fidelity, the deepest and most abiding pledge that his promised word, once given, will never be withdrawn. “For the gifts and the call of God,” declares the Apostle Paul, their fellow kinsman, “are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). 

The glory of Israel is neither ethnic nor racial; nor is it a matter of politics or power. It is fundamentally a matter of faith, and of faith’s understanding, which we call theology. It is rooted in the fact that for more than two millennia all the revelations of God were entrusted to a certain people. Can such a thing be said of any other group in the history of the world?

And it is not as if the words of God through the medium of the Law was all that God had in mind. But that the sheer unheard-of Incarnation of God’s very Word should have taken place within Israel, within the very womb of a young Jewish girl named Mary. No other people can boast that from its very life the Eternal Word and Son of the Most High God sprang into human being.

“In this alone,” writes Jean Daniélou, “there is a greatness that staggers our imagination and reason.

All other earthly greatness is passing. The great empires of antiquity have sunk into oblivion; their monuments — attempts to defy time — are merely tombstones of bygone civilizations. The great powers of today will decline in their turn, but Jesus Christ will live eternally and will be eternally Jewish by race, thereby conferring a unique, eternal privilege on Israel. 

Such is the reason why, at the profoundest level, the sin of antisemitism stands condemned; why it is not lawful for anyone, and especially not for the Christian, to visit contempt upon any Jewish person, or to countenance the least persecution by others against him. “Spiritually, we are Semites,” declared Pius XI, who, against the backdrop of Nazi rage directed against the Jews, reminds us of our shared kinship with the People of the Book.

Whatever the vicissitudes of history now sadly dividing us (two disparate communities, nevertheless rooted in a common revelational source), the plan of God cannot suffer lasting defeat. “For if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world,” to quote those infinitely mysterious words of St. Paul, “what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead?” (Romans 11:15).