The Place of Teaching About Zionism in a Department of Christian Theology

38 SHOFAR Fall 1994 Vol. 13, No. 1 THE PlACE OF TEACHING ABOUT ZIONISM IN A DEPARTMENT OF CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY by James F.Moore James F. Moore is Associate Professor of Theology at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana. He is author of Se:xuality and Marriage (Augsburg Publishing House, 1987) and Christian Theology After the Shoah: A Reinterpretation of the Passion Narratives (University Press of America, 1993) as well as numerous articles on Jewish Studies, on Christian theology and the Holcoaust, and on teaching courses in jewish Studies. He is on the editori'al board of the Studies in the Shoah series of the University Press of America and is an educational consultant to the Philadelphia Center for the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights. ----------------Teaching about Judaism has historically been a natural part of teaching about Christianity. Thus, jewish Studies has been a part of the curriculum of departments of Christian theology from the beginning, usually as a component of showing the historical development of Christian thought and life. Courses on Bible, Christian history, and Christian doctrine have often used views of Judaism and Jewish thought as means for both uncovering the roots of Christianity and providing a stereotypical contrast for Christian thought. The accuracy of such study to the actual shape ofjudaism and Jewish thought at any particular period ranged from careful study to extremely distorted typologies. Even so, departments of Christian theology were already primed for taking on a new approach to Jewish Studies with the onset of that discipline as a separate course of study in the last couple of decades. The ordinary approaches to Jewish Studies through Bible, language, history, and philosophy/theology gave way to separate courses on Judaism and Jewish history as unique phenomena Teaching Zionism in a Christian Theology Department 39 not confined to the need either to show Christian roots or to provide a contrast for "Christian truths." This transition was by no means smooth or complete in many universities, often retaining vestiges of the earlier period of teaching Jewish Studies as a component of Christian studies even when Jewish Studies courses were developed quite separately from the typical curriculum of Christian studies. Some of this history of the development ofJewish Studies courses in departments of Christian theology at private, often church-related colleges and universities is evident in the development of courses on the Shoah at these places. On the one hand, these departments often hired adjunct Jewish instructors who chose to offer courses on the Holocaust as part of a pattern of introducing Jewish Studies into these departments. Very often these courses were taught as unique courses in an otherwise standard Christian curriculum without much obvious relationship between these courses on the Shoah and other courses on Christian Bible, history, and theology. Since the students at these institutions often continued to be primarily Christian students, the great tendency for these courses on the Shoah, if they were offered as part of the offerings of departments of Christian theology, was to teach these courses as a way to ask questions about Christian history and thought, especially as that history and Christian thinking contributed to the context that made the Shoah possible. That is to say, courses on the Shoah became more than just courses in Jewish history and Jewish thought but also courses in Christian history and Christian thought. Any such course would naturally struggle to maintain a balance between the identity of Jewish Studies and the identity of Christian studies as the guiding feature of the course even if the course were taught by an adjunct Jewish instructor. The unique features of the Shoah in relation to Christian history made the course a relatively natural fit for Christian studies curriculum even if the intent was initially to teach the course as a piece of Jewish Studies. Many of us who have taught courses on the Shoah know this phenomenon and attempt a fairly precarious balance in an attempt to keep the course from collapsing into merely a study of the history of Christian antiJudaism and efforts by Christians to manage this anti-Judaism in a postShoah world. Of course, there are any number of models for teaching the wide variety of...