And this Europe — a Europe of ethnic rivalries and illiberal ideologies, of depression and demagoguery — is starting to look eerily familiar. Haven't we been here before? And wasn't the whole point of European Union supposed to be "Never Again"? Despite the miraculous success of the Jewish state, European Jews are indeed being forced back into the role of victims. No other community has to go to such lengths to protect its people and institutions from violence. No other community must endure threats not only from Egyptian imams and Turkish premiers, but from English cartoonists and German judges. In France, a quarter of Europe's largest Jewish community is considering emigration, and thousands have already left, disillusioned by the broken promises of the French state. Europe's Muslims, who now vastly outnumber Jews, also play their part in creating a climate of fear.
Yet Jews, Christians and Muslims are all supposed to be "Abrahamic faiths", thereby offering a basis for reconciliation. As the great Harvard scholar Jon Levenson shows in Inheriting Abraham (Princeton, $29.95), Muslims utterly reject the biblical Abraham, along with his chosen people, descended through Isaac and Jacob. The notion of the three Abrahamic religions is wholly Western; it means little to Muslims, but Christians and Jews often use it to disguise their real differences with each other and above all with Islam. Like "European", "Abrahamic" is at best platitudinous, at worst bogus.
Yet there is one Christian religious leader who took the legacy of the patriarch seriously, seeking not to avenge but to atone. When Pope John Paul II visited Israel in 2000, he made a point of praying at the Western Wall. The prayer that he left in the Wall, as countless Jews had done before him, read as follows: "God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your Name to the nations; we are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant. Amen."
