Moshe Decter on the misleading term Judeo-Christian
It assumes too much continuity
Moshe Decter, one of the “New York intellectuals,” was among other positions director of research of the American Jewish Congress, and co-author of one of the first books to take out Senator Joseph McCarthy. He was primarily responsible for bringing the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union to public attention. His dissection of the common term appeared in his 1951 review in Commentary of the Jewish psychiatrist Karl Stern's story of his conversion Catholicism, The Pillar of Fire.
Stern, so to speak, became a Christian in order to be a better Jew, for he contends that Christianity’s basic doctrines are virtually explicit in Judaism and that his arguments are based on specifically traditional Jewish concepts and traditional interpretations of such concepts.
It would be futile to undertake a detailed refutation of the misunderstandings from which this point of view flows, a point of view based on the kind of half or quarter-knowledge (it is as common among Jews as among Christians and converts) that parades as easy familiarity and that is more dangerous than total ignorance.
Suffice it to remark here that the Jewish “election” was never taken by the Jews to be for the purpose of spreading the Revealed Word among the nations; it was, rather, a contractual undertaking of responsibility to live the Revealed Word, as individuals, and as a group.
Furthermore, the Jewish people never understood its acceptance of revelation in terms of its future production of someone, a Messiah, whether he would be the son of God, God Incarnate, or not; this notion can only by the wildest stretch of the imagination be derived by pious Christians from completely distorted and mistranslated texts.
He has already explained that Judaism and Christianity
are, after all, not the same, since Christianity is, for Stern, clearly a higher form of Judaism. This is to say — Christianity affirms and believes everything of essential importance in Judaism, it possesses the same God, the same ethics, the same piety and spirituality. But it is Judaism “. . . cleansed of its ethnic elements . . . its racism,” and all this through the medium of the Messiah who has already come.