Allah God ???? One and the Same or Different Deities

Do Jews and Christians worship the same God?  This question might seem rather silly to any Christian.  Of course we do.  The God of the “Old Testament” (or better put, the “Hebrew Scriptures”) is the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Incarnation of the Eternal Word, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity.  Well, that of course is the Christian interpretation.  Were I a Jew I would have a few questions. 

In Jewish theology there is no room for a Trinity of Divine Persons.  “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is One” (Deut. 6:4), is the key creedal prayer of Judaism and is known from its Hebrew first words as the Schema Yisrael.  It is the center prayer of both the Morning and Evening Prayer in the Synagogue (equivalent to our daily offices of the same name or sometimes called Lauds and Vespers).  It is the prayer Jewish children are taught to say before bed and it is the final prayer on the lips of a devout Jew as she or he surrenders their soul to God.  So while Judaism does speak of the Word of God and of the Breath (Spirit) of God, there is no room to give them a personality unique from the Creator.

And that is another difference.  In the Hebrew Scriptures while God is sometimes referred to as the Father of Israel, a devout Jew never assumes any familiarity with him in the way Jesus did (remember, they wanted to kill him for “making God his Father”) or has taught us to do.  God is King.  Master of the Universe.  Lord.  Creator.  He is not Jesus’s Father or any other individual’s Father.  It is the supreme lèse majesté to address God with such familiarity and in Jesus day it was even worse—it was blasphemy. 

Nor in Judaism is it possible for there to be any sort of Incarnation of the Divine Person assuming a human nature.  The Incarnation is the rabbinic equivalent of a square circle, essentially self-contradictory.  God is God and humans are human.  There is an essential difference between Creator and creature that cannot be breeched. 

In the 80’s, about fifty years after the Death and Resurrection of Christ, the Rabbis inserted into the daily prayers known as the Eighteen Benedictions, a “blessing” (actually a curse) on the minim—the heretics or apostates.  While not explicitly identifying Christians as those placed under this “blessing,” historians agree that they were among the various groups the Rabbis were trying to separate out from the synagogues for their “unorthodox” beliefs. 

Given this history it is surprising that most Rabbis acknowledge that Christians and Jews worship the same God.  It would seem even to me that Christianity had so changed the understanding of God from our roots in Judaism that we had in effect “morphed” the God of Israel into a very different Deity.  I suspect that some of the ultra Orthodox (and I mean ultra as in the Hasidim) might think this but they keep themselves so isolated even from other Jews that if they do it remains unspoken in inter-faith circles.  Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Jews express no problem that despite the doctrinal issues relating to Jesus we do in fact worship the same God.

Now to the point: I am not writing about Jews and Christians at all but rather Christians and Muslims.  It is much more clear that Jews and Muslims worship the same God and if they do then Christians and Muslims obviously worship the same God. 

The name “Allah” is the Arabic for “The God” (literaly al ilah) to distinguish Allah from the lesser deities worshiped among the Arab people before Mohamed.  Allah is not unique to Islam but was used to speak of God by Arab Christians both before and after the rise of Islam.  Christians, including Catholics, who speak Arabic, even today refer to God as “Allah.” 

The Name “Allah” finds its cognates in other languages spoken by the ancient peoples of the Bible.  When speaking Aramaic, his native language, Jesus would refer to God as Elah—a Name very closely related to Allah.  The Canaanite Name for God, El, was borrowed by several of the authors of the Old Testament.  In Hebrew God is called Elohim.  These Names are all closely related to the Arabic Name of God, Allah. 

When Mohamed devised his new religion of Islam he rooted it Judaism and Christianity.  As a young man driving camel caravans for his uncle, a merchant, across Arabia to the markets along the Mediterranean coast in what is today Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon, he was familiar with both religions.  Moreover, it seems that for several months he lived with a Christian monk who taught him to read and write.  This monk apparently was not Orthodox but belonged to the Nestorian tradition.  The Nestorians believed that in Jesus God did not truly become human but sort of wore a human body to mask his Divinity.  It gave the young Mohammed a skewed understanding of Christianity and its beliefs, but he always maintained—and wrote into the Quran—a deep respect for Christian monks and priests. 

His exposure to Judaism and Christianity led him to the idea that God had first revealed himself to Abraham but over the centuries the Jews had changed the revelation and strayed from the Truth. So God sent Jesus to be his prophet and set people right but again, over the centuries Christians moved away from the Truth, “exaggerating” Christ into a Divine Person.  In the end Mohammed felt that he was the final prophet who came once and for all with a Revelation that would not be corrupted. 

As a consequence of his exposure to Christianity Jesus and Mary play a significant role in the Quran.  The Quran teaches that Mary was and remained a virgin through the conception and birth of Jesus.  Muslims have a great respect for the Virgin Mary.  I remember being in a procession in honor of Our Lady in Trapani in Sicily about 20 years ago.  While the participants were all Catholics, it was mainly Muslims who lined the streets respectfully to watch Our Lady’s statue being carried by. 

There are those who want to tell us that the “Muslim god” is a false god, an idol.  But in fact they know neither their history nor their theology.  Yes there is a significant difference in how we understand God but there is an equivalent difference in how we and Jews understand God.  Whatever divides us one from another is the work of the Evil One and the sort of bias that slams the door of authentic commonality between Christianity and Islam is from Satan and not from God.  

Of Rainbow Shamrocks and Protestant Parades

Great parade yesterday up Fifth Avenue and past Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.  Cardinal Dolan was the Grand Marshal.  Previous Grand Marshals include Governor Al Smith, (first Catholic to run for President of the United States)1925; Mayor Jimmy Walker (1932); Mayor Robert Wagner (1954); Governor Hugh Carey (1976); Cardinal John J. O’Connor (1996); Maureen O’Hara (1999); and Cardinal Edward Egan (2002).   There was some controversy because for the first time in parade history a LGBT group, Out@NBCUniversal marched under their own banner.   (It would be naïve—at the least—to think this was the first time gays marched in the parade.)   While openly gay participation in the past has been blocked, Grand Marshal Cardinal Dolan made a point of saying that he thought it a wise decision to make the parade more “inclusive” and that he welcomed everyone.  The Krazies, of course, are furious but then anger is their mother’s milk. 

I only watched the first half hour or so of the parade, but one curious factoid I heard implied it (wasn’t actually said) that this parade has always been a Catholic celebration.  The panel of NBC commentators were remarking on the history of the parade which originally was in lower Manhattan.  (In the eighteenth century today’s midtown site of the parade was nothing more than open fields and “truck gardens” that supplied the city with food.)  One of the commentators, admittedly I don’t remember who, remarked that this was because the Old Saint Patrick’s Cathedral was in Greenwich Village.  Two problems.  The Old Saint Pat’s is not in the Village but on Mulberry Street in what would become Little Italy and is now Chinatown.  But the more egregious mistake is that while the parade dates back to 1762, the Cathedral was built only in 1809-1815.  You see, despite the implication—and the common historical misperception—the parade was not originally a Catholic sponsored event.  To the contrary: those who marched in the first parade of 1762 were all Protestants.  And such would have been the case for the first twenty or more years—it was a Protestant event.  In fact it was at least predominately a Protestant event well into the 19^th century.

The first Saint Patrick’s Day parade in New York was comprised of Irish soldiers in the British Army.  Until 1778 Catholics were prohibited from joining the army (and their commissioning as officers was even later).  In fact, while all other churches and religions, even Judaism, were legally tolerated, it was illegal to be a Catholic in New York until the 1777 State Constitution that marked independence from Great Britain. 

The 1737 Boston Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, generally considered the first in the colonies—and thus the oldest American Parade to honor Ireland’s national saint, was also comprised of Irish Protestants who had immigrated to Massachusetts.  Irish nationalism in the 18^th century—and the Saint Patrick Day Parades were celebrations of Irish Identity and Nationalism within the British Empire—was not a Catholic phenomenon but a Protestant one.  The Catholics had been so beaten down by the Penal Laws, and especially so in Ireland after the 1688 victory of William of Orange over the Catholic James II, in the British Empire that they were a political non-entity.  The principal advocates of Irish Nationalism from William Molyneaux to Jonathan Swift to Henry Grattan to Samuel Nielson to Wolfe Tone to Robert Emmet were all Protestants as would later be Charles Stewart Parnell, and literary figures W.B Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Seán O’Casey.  And the artist and indomitable Irish revolutionary, Baroness Markievicz, who advised her female admirers to: “Dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave your jewels in the bank and buy a revolver,” was Protestant until she was in her 50’s when she was received into the Catholic Church. 

 Two of the first four Presidents of Ireland, Douglas Hyde and Erskine Childers were Protestants.  By no means has Irish Nationalism been a exclusively—or even predominately—Catholic phenomenon.

In those pre-Revolutionary (and Protestant) days in America, Saint Patrick’s Day was marked by the Irish in the larger colonial cities such as New York by dinners in the more elegant taverns such as Bolton and Sigel’s, now known as Fraunces Tavern.  For a day such as St. Patrick’s Day they would feast on oysters, lobster, turtle soup, cod, duck, goose, venison, and smoked hams.  Meats would be eaten roasted, or potted, or cooked in pasties—pies and hot-pockets.  Winter vegetables would include turnip, parsnips, carrots, squashes and winter cabbage.   Apples and pears conserved from the previous autumn would be pricey but available and a wide variety of summer fruits would have been put up into jams that might be served as is or used as fillings for pies.  Hard cider was the most common drink, but ales and beers would be common enough as well as rum imported from Jamaica and home-distilled whiskies.  Alcoholic beverages were drunk with no thought of moderation, especially for celebrations like today’s feast.  Desserts would include a variety of pies, sweetmeats (candied fruits), nuts, and boiled puddings such as whitepot, figgy pudding, or plum duff.  There were also such puddings as flummery, syllabub, and blancmange.  Celebrants would sit down to dinner midafternoon and the feast would last into the night or as long as the alcohol held out. 

It was only in the 1820’s that Catholic Irish began to migrate to New York in significant numbers and the floodgates opened with the Great Famine after 1846.  The second half of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth were the high-water mark of Catholic Irish immigration.  The “established Irish,” Protestant and Catholic, did not particularly welcome the immigrants who were of much lower social and educational status.  The Catholics were embarrassed by their immigrant co-religionists and the Protestants disowned them completely thinking them to be superstitious savages. But the immigrants were quick to organize themselves in an effort to better themselves by mutual help.  Among their first acts was to organize a separate Saint Patrick’s Day Parade which they had done by 1858.  Immigrant Irish participation in the Northern cause of the American Civil War not only united the Irish among themselves but gave them a certain political clout in New York and other Northern cities.  By the end of the Civil War the New York Parade was firmly under the control of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an immigrant association formed to fight the prejudices against (Irish) immigrants that had been strong in the decade immediately before the Civil War. From that time on the New York Saint Patrick’s Day Parade has been firmly in the hands of Irish Catholics, yet it has always been a civic parade and not a religious procession.  Never in its history has it been a religious procession and while there was an active policy of excluding groups identified with the LGBT movement these forty years and more since the gay liberation movement has appeared, the exclusion of LGBT marchers or groups certainly can’t be argued on religious grounds.  

Anti-Catholicism in Post-Civil War America

      I will eventually come back to the topic about Vatican II being under attack from within the Church, but I have noticed that questions of the history of the Church in the United States tend to draw considerably more interest than European Church history or “history in the making” issues.  And so today I want to go back to the subject of the history of anti-Catholicism in the United States.   In earlier blogs we looked at the Charlestown Convent burning, the Philadelphia Riots, the Know-Nothing movement and other episodes in nineteenth century America of prejudice against Catholics resulting in violence and discrimination.  At some point I want to take a deeper look at anti-Catholicism in the pre-Revolutionary colonies, especially Massachusetts, New York and Virginia.  Today however I want to pick up the thread where we had left off with the American Civil War and Catholic involvement in the Lincoln assassination. 

In a certain sense the Civil War was a bit of a draw for Catholics.  On the one hand the remarkable work of the nursing sisters on the battlefields, the diplomacy of Bishop John Hughes of New York, and the Irish immigrant troops that fought for the Union built up the esteem of Americans for the Catholic faith.  On the other hand, the Diplomatic Recognition of the Holy See for the Confederacy, the support for the Confederacy of Archbishop Oder of New Orleans and Bishop Lynch of Charleston, along with refusal of Bishop Elder of Natchez to have prayers said for the President of the United States, and the predominance of Catholics in the Lincoln conspiracy cast Catholicism in an unfavorable light, at least among the Northerners in general and Republicans in particular.

In the years immediately after the Civil War, veterans of the Confederate army organized the original Ku Klux Klan to resist the Northern “Carpetbagger” politicians who were enforcing “Reconstruction” in the South in order to disenfranchise those who had been loyal to the Confederacy and to keep the African American population, almost all former slaves, from exercising their political and civil rights. This “First Klan” (as opposed to the revived Klan, or “Second Klan” of the 1920’s and 30’s did not have a specifically anti-Catholic agenda but that is not to say that there wasn’t strong anti-Catholicism in the Southern United States.  Catholicism was virtually unknown in the South whose population—with the exception of Maryland and Louisiana— was almost entirely Baptist and Methodist Protestant.  Catholicism’s being unknown was both a blessing and a curse.  Catholicism was not a strong threat and thus did not provoke as strong a reaction as it did in places such as Ohio and Indiana where the Catholic-Protestant balance was more delicate with the rural population being Protestant and Catholics often holding the political edge in the cities and larger towns.  But also being unknown, it became the subject of negative myths and stories.

The greater problem, however, was in the North where a rapidly growing Catholic population was a threat to the economic and political establishments.  The fierce Catholic attachment to the Democratic Party with its ties to labor and its openness to immigrants along with the stories of Catholic involvement in the murder of President Lincoln generated a strong anti-Catholicism in Republican circles.  This often worked against the Republican interest such as in the 1884 Presidential campaign when a Presbyterian Minister, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Burchard in a speech at which Blaine was present, declared: “We are Republicans, and don't propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and Rebellion." Blaine failed to repudiate the statement (he probably had not even noticed it) and it ended up costing him the election and returning the White House to the Democrats for the first time since 1856, before the Civil War. 

Even more acrimonious was the Republican cartoonist Thomas Nast.  Nast, a German Protestant immigrant, is best known for his visual creation of “Santa Claus” drawn for an 1863 illustration of the Rev. Clement Clark Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas”  in Harper’s Bazaar, but he had a pathological hatred for the Catholic Church, accompanied by a particular hatred for the Irish.  Nast depicted the Irish as violent drunks and Catholics as dangerous to American liberty.  His cartoons were carried in scores of newspapers and journals across the country. 

Much of the anti-Catholicism of the period had to do with the huge flood of immigrants sweeping in the United States from the end of the Civil War right up until World War I.  Irish (almost entirely Catholic) and Germans (more than half Catholic) composed the largest number of immigrants, but considerable numbers came also from such Catholic populations as Italy and the Austo-Hungarian Empire, including parts of Poland.  While these immigrants were almost invariably relegated to menial work and the poorest of living conditions, it was clear to the old Anglo-Saxon establishment that America was changing and would soon be nation in which they—the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants—would be a political and economic minority.  This put them in a conflict between their traditional intellectual liberalism and their self-interest.  Social evolution would in time create a more homogenous society where the descendents of the immigrants would “Americanize” but in interim fear and anxiety fed stereotypes and  prejudices. 

The image today is one of Thomas Nast's (1840-1902)  anti-Catholic and anti-Irish cartoons

More on the "City of Brotherly Love" and its hatred for Catholics

Yesterday we talked about the Philadelphia riots in May 1844. Churches and a convent , were burned, a school was destroyed, hundreds of Irish Catholics lost their homes to the mob and scores of people were left dead or injured. A grand jury blamed the riots on the Catholics. Bishop Fenwick, who had done everything possible to quell his flock and keep them calm under attack from the nativists who claimed that Catholics were trying to get the bible out of the public schools, changed his strategy. No longer confident that Catholics could expect protection in a Protestant dominated society he began to creat a Catholic Ghetto, a society within the larger society with its own schools and organizaitons where Catholics would not be exposed to the prejudices of the Know-Nothings and their nativist friends. But the trouble was not over. On July 3—just short of two months after the first riots, Father John Patrick Dunn of Saint Philip Neri parish in the Southwark District was warned that an Independence Day parade scheduled for the next day and led by the Know-Nothings, might attack his church. The parish applied to the Governor for the formation of a volunteer force, armed from the local arsenal to defend the church. The request was granted. The Pennsylvania militia was also put on alert and weapons were handed out--twenty-five rifles--to those appointed to guard the church building.
In the event, the parade went on without incident but the next day a nativist mob of several thousand, hearing there were weapons at the church, gathered outside the building. The mob demanded that the weapons be removed. Despite the legitimacy of the weapons having been authorized by the governor, the sheriff complied. However after the sheriff left, a speaker whipped the crowd into a frenzy demanding that representatives of the mob be authorized to search the church for yet more weapons. You would think the sheriff would have found them all but when an alderman, the sheriff (who had returned) and seventeen of the mob entered the Church they an incredible amount of armaments—fifty-three muskets, ten pistols, a keg of gunpowder and ammunition—being guarded by ten armed men. This was far in excess what the governor had authorized. Had the Catholics been storing weapons on their own in anticipation of a papal invasion? It sounds silly to us, but not the Know-Nothing mobs whose newspapers and preachers had been admonishing to protect the American Republic "from the bloody hand of the pope." At nightfall, after the crowd had returned to their homes, the little arsenal was removed
The tension escalated with incredible stupidity being shown by those very officials the governor had charged with guarding the church. In addition to the militia, the sheriff had gathered a posse of 150 men. They seemed to go out of their way to incite the mob. They brought cannon to defend the church and then actually fired on the crowd when the crowd began to pelt them with stones. Most of the soldiers sent to protect the buildings left during the night of July 6th but the crowd returned, led by the alderman and the sheriff—who apparently couldn’t decide whose side he was on. The few remaining soldiers abandoned guarding the church, the mob turned two of the cannon on the building, weakening the walls. The mob broke into the church trashing the interior. That evening the soldiers returned with more cannon which they turned on the mob. The mob having seized the cannon earlier brought, turned them on the soldiers. Fighting raged through the night but by July 8th the soldiers had captured all the cannon and the crowd dispersed. Approximately 20 people had died and 50 were injured. The Grand Jury blamed the Catholics for the incident,.
Philadelphia became a strong-hold of the Know-Nothing party. Their candidate won the mayoralty in 1854 with the promise to fire all non-American born city employees. The Catholic immigrant population, feeling that they could not count on the city government for justice, withdrew into their own enclave, building Catholic schools to avoid the public ones and forming various Catholic organizations—including Militia—to protect themselves and avoid contact with the Protestant population. This strategy of withdrawing into closed Catholic Ghettoes would become increasingly popular for most working-class Catholics in the ninetenth and well into the twentieth centuries.
The Philadelphia riots were far more serious than the Charlestown Convent burning—not only in scope but in breadth—in as that Charlestown people of what might be called “the better sort” that is educated and middle class were appalled at the violence while in Philadelphia, although the mayor and the governor played their roles well, the mob was by no means limited to the poor and working classes. Even more disconcerting is that while Boston had a long history of “anti-popery,” Philadelphia had always been, even in colonial days, a city of great tolerance where the Catholics had existed in peace with their neighbors. These riots marked a clear change in the place Catholics held in American society. But Philadelphia was not the only place where Know-Nothingism raised its ugly—plug ugly—face. But more about that tomorrow. Also, i found that I had written a bit more on the Charlestown Convent burning and forgot to publish it--so more of that in a day or two as well.

Today's image is "Citizen Know-Nothing"--a nineteenth century nativist engraving depicting the ideal "American Man" --white, of Anglo-Saxon background, and Protestant.