Selections of Elias Friedman’s Writings on the Jews

Elias Friedman, O.C.D. (born John Jacob Friedman; 1916, Cape Town, South Africa – 1999, Haifa, Israel), known in religion as Father Elias of the Cross, was a South African-born Jewish physician, Catholic convert, Discalced Carmelite priest, poet, and theologian, who spent over four decades as a member of the Stella Maris Monastery on Mount Carmel in Haifa, Israel. Born into an observant Orthodox Jewish family, he converted to the Catholic Church in 1943 while serving as a doctor in the South African Medical Corps, became a Carmelite friar in 1947, was ordained a priest in 1953, and entered Stella Maris the following year. In 1979 he founded the Association of Hebrew Catholics (AHC), an organization devoted to preserving the Jewish identity and heritage of Catholic converts from Judaism. Both of his published monographs — The Redemption of Israel (Sheed & Ward, New York, 1947) and Jewish Identity (The Miriam Press, New York, 1987) — bear the Nihil obstat and Imprimatur of the Archdiocese of New York, the official ecclesiastical declaration that the works are “free of doctrinal or moral error.”

The passages reproduced here bear on the following themes of his thought: the Christological framing of the “Jewish problem” and its solution in Catholic baptism; supersessionism (post-Christic Rabbinism as “destitute of divine authority” and a “hollow façade”); the collective sin of Jewish unbelief in Christ as the root cause of all Jewish historical suffering, including the Shoah; the eschatological necessity of Israel’s conversion; the invalidity of Rabbinic Judaism after the Ascension; and the Shoah as punishment and pedagogy — a “crucifixion” through which the Jewish people were to be “molded into the image of their Messiah.” All texts below are drawn from the primary sources identified in the Sources section. No word has been altered.

I. The “Jewish Problem” and Its Christological Solution

“A Branch, Re-ingrafted into the Olive Tree of Israel” (autobiographical essay)

(Published as the opening chapter of Jewish Identity, The Miriam Press, New York, 1987, pp. 17–25)

Friedman recounting his conversion, and the question that precipitated it:

“How could the Jewish problem be explained? The answer came in a shaft of light: Jesus Christ.”

Friedman recounting the historical argument for Christianity that convinced him:

“The historical reality of the fate of Israel appeared to me so strong an argument for the divinity of Jesus Christ that all difficulties which my agnostic past and scientific formation could have raised against the possibility of miracles and prophecy, fell away.”

Friedman explaining the theological rationale underlying his conversion:

“The people of Israel had been exiled from its land to languish in a shocking dispersion for two thousand years, because it had not believed.”

Friedman on the meaning of the Zionist return to Palestine, read in the light of Christianity:

“I reached the conclusion that Jewish history from the time of the French Revolution to the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine announces the entry of Israel into the phase of salvation.”

Friedman on the eschatological implication of Zionism:

“With the birth of Zionism … the Christian era in the history of Israel was imminent.”

II. The Collective Sin of Jewish Unbelief as the Root of All Jewish Suffering

The Redemption of Israel, Sheed & Ward, New York, 1947

Friedman on the Jewish rejection of Christ as the supreme national sin:

“The culminating national sin … [is] a corollary to the rejection of God.”

(p. 41)

Friedman on the consequences of that rejection for all subsequent Jewish history:

“Their failure is the womb of all horrors, woes, miseries, pains and savageries which come upon the people they misled and to the tale of which new and yet more fierce chapters are being added at the very moment of the writing of these words.”

(p. 46)

Note: Writing in 1947, in the immediate aftermath of the Shoah, Friedman makes this statement as an encompassing causal explanation for Jewish historical suffering, including the Holocaust.

Friedman on the solution to the “Jewish problem”:

“Catholicism has been the solution of the Jewish problem for 1800 years.”

(p. 103)

Friedman defining the mechanism by which Catholicism solves that problem:

“Catholicism solves the Jewish problem by applying Christianity as a spiritual exercise to a specific case of sin, suffering and evil.”

(p. 129)

III. Rabbinism as a Regime “Destitute of Divine Authority” and “A Hollow Façade”

The Redemption of Israel, Sheed & Ward, New York, 1947, and Jewish Identity, The Miriam Press, New York, 1987

Friedman on post-Christic Rabbinical Judaism as lacking divine sanction:

“The new religious regime which we call Rabbinism … [is] destitute of divine authority.”

(The Redemption of Israel, p. 58; repeated substantively in Jewish Identity, p. 58)

Friedman on the Temple system after the Ascension of Christ:

“Inwardly, what had been a divinely approved order was now a hollow façade, doomed to inevitable destruction.”

(Jewish Identity, pp. 58, 66)

Friedman attacking the claim, advanced by Catholic theologian Eugene Fisher, that post-Christic Judaism retains a valid covenant:

“We are now in a better position to judge how erroneous are certain positions summarized by Eugene Fisher. Some scholars, for instance, hold that post-Christic Judaism and Christianity are both ‘in full and valid covenant with God,’ and that ‘Christianity is an alternate form of the Sinai covenant, which remains in force’; or again, ‘that the Christian covenant thus perfects and fulfills, not Sinai, but the covenant with Noah.'”

(Jewish Identity, p. 52)

IV. “Christianity Passes an Irrevocable Act of Invalidity on Rabbinical Judaism”

Jewish Identity, The Miriam Press, New York, 1987

Friedman’s direct supersessionist declaration:

“Christianity passes an irrevocable act of invalidity on Rabbinical Judaism …”

(p. 82)

Friedman on the status of “post-Christic Jews” within the economy of salvation:

“The Jewish people is a part of the Chosen People, a part of the Elect People, a part of Israel.”

(p. 87)

Note: Friedman immediately qualifies this statement: the election is irrevocable in its calling, but the chosen people in full are now exclusively “believers in Jesus”; Jews are part of the elect only insofar as they are “ordained, one day, to become an effective organ of the Church.”

Friedman on the specific sin that governs post-Christic Jewry — not the deicide charge per se, but the ongoing collective refusal of faith:

“The sin of incredulity …”

(p. 105)

[Used throughout Jewish Identity as the technical theological term for the continuing collective Jewish failure to believe in Christ as Messiah, which Friedman holds to be the governing moral fact of Jewish corporate existence after the Resurrection.]

V. The Shoah as Punishment, Pedagogy, and Divine Symmetry

The Redemption of Israel, Sheed & Ward, New York, 1947

Friedman articulating a mathematical theology of divine punishment, written in 1947, in the wake of the Shoah:

[The equation he proposes: 40 years desert wandering / 400 years Egyptian slavery = 200 years spiritual desert / 2000 years of spiritual slavery since the Rejection of Christ. The 200-year period of most intense punishment, beginning with the French Revolution, reaches its culmination in the Shoah.]

(p. 110)

Jewish Identity, The Miriam Press, New York, 1987

Friedman posing the question the Shoah raises for his theological system:

“After the Holocaust, the question stands, in stark, monumental grandeur: what could have been the sin that brought on a punishment of such infinite proportions?”

(p. 151)

Friedman declaring that, contrary to Jewish witnesses such as Abraham Heschel and Golda Meir who found no adequate answer, there is a theological answer:

“Yes, there is an answer to Auschwitz, God’s answer, the ingrafting of the Jews and the glory of the ‘resurrection of the dead’ to follow.”

(p. 127)

Friedman on the redemptive necessity of the Shoah:

“The people of the Messiah had to be molded into the image of their Messiah, in order to learn who the true Messiah was.”

(p. 125)

VI. The Eschatological Vision: Jewish “Crucifixion,” “Resurrection,” and the Conversion of All Israel

Jewish Identity, The Miriam Press, New York, 1987

Friedman on the typological meaning of Jewish historical suffering, framed as a participation in the Passion of Christ:

“As he walked slowly across the stage of history, the Jew took on an uncanny resemblance to Jesus: beaten, spat upon, mocked, derided, bleeding from his judicial scourging, crowned with the thorns of incomprehension, bearing his Cross on the way to Golgotha. Jewry ran the gauntlet of the nations.”

Friedman explicitly interpreting the Holocaust as a collective Jewish “crucifixion” and the founding of the State of Israel as a collective “resurrection”:

“Mystically speaking, Jewry as a whole was nailed to the Cross and dies under Hitler. … On the third day, three years after the conclusion of hostilities in 1945, Jewry rose from the dead; the State of Israel was proclaimed.”

Friedman on what Israel’s eventual conversion to Christ will mean for the Gentile world:

“Once faith is given, Jewry will be transformed into a powerhouse of spiritual motivation, sufficient to bring about the ‘resurrection of the dead’, the return to the faith of lapsed Gentility.”

VII. The Burden Laid Upon the Hebrew Catholic: Sin, Expiation, and the People

“The Logo of the Association of Hebrew Catholics”, written by Fr. Elias Friedman

(Published on the official website of the Association of Hebrew Catholics, hebrewcatholic.net; available at: https://www.hebrewcatholic.net)

Friedman describing the threefold cross the Hebrew Catholic must bear:

“The Hebrew Catholic is called upon to bear three crosses: (a) the sins of his ancestors and his own; (b) the burden of confession and expiation on behalf of his people; (c) the hostility of his brother-Jews on the one hand and anti-Semitism on the other.”

Friedman drawing an analogy between Jacob’s wrestling with the angel and the Jewish encounter with Christ:

“Jacob does not cede; but his hip is dislocated by the angel. The Jews did not cede to Jesus; but they limped their way through history.”

VIII. The Psychology of the Jewish Mind Under Deprivation of Grace

The Redemption of Israel, Sheed & Ward, New York, 1947

Note: The following passages come from Chapter V of The Redemption of Israel, which contains extended sections entitled “Psychology,” “Ego and Temperament,” “Volition,” and “Intellect,” in which Friedman offers a systematic characterisation of the Jewish character as deformed by the collective withdrawal of divine grace following the Rejection of Christ. Both this book and Jewish Identity bear the Nihil obstat and Imprimatur of the Archdiocese of New York.

Friedman on the absence of “Personality” in Jewish character as the first sign of the withdrawal of grace:

“The first sign of the deprivation of grace is found in the absence of Personality in Jewish character. Individuality, strong individuality yes, the Jew undoubtedly has, personality no. The extraordinary emphasis placed on personal life, the drama of personal passions as we know it in the literature, manners and customs of western culture, is well-nigh absent from Pharisaic Society.”

(p. 85)

Friedman on the Jewish “racial psyche” and collective psychology:

“The place of Personality and personalities is taken by the racial psyche and social types. The body politic is held together by a cement of tribal and family emotions. The range of emotional expression is narrow. The centre-point of the Jewish mind is not defined by clear personal responses. It is a violent physic fluid sometimes strong as running water, sometimes evasive as a mist folding round the sword that cuts it, ‘mass-reacting’ under stimulus in a clotted block of all the human categories.”

(p. 85)

Friedman on the Jewish mind’s relationship to objective reality:

“The Jewish mind is dominated by endogenous energies poorly conditioned by objective physical and spiritual facts. … It finds extraordinary difficulty in focusing itself quietly and patiently and learning from simple things. It rejects reflexly and as a habit, and ultimately rejects all life in the present by a victory whose spiritual equivalent is the knowledge of the vanity of created things. But it wins this sense of freedom to find itself a prisoner in its own mind, rejected in turn by the World it has seen fit to reject.”

(p. 86)

Friedman connecting the Jewish character explicitly to Pharisaism and to the spirit Christ condemned:

“Here is the rock from which Marx was hewn. Here is the Pharisaism against whose leaven Christ warned and which in his day he spurned, the assertiveness, the tactless indifference to decorous manners and personal sensibility, the overriding of finer feelings in the name of abstract righteousness and good intention.”

(p. 87)

Friedman on Jewish “volitional inertia” and the drift of classical Pharisaic society:

“Only too many Jews do not exhibit even this unhappy assertiveness. They live and drift on the psychic stream. Those who live in the psychic stream must drift with it. The effect is the colossal overpowering drag to inertia which envelops the classical Pharisaic society and caused it simply to float like a log on a river down the ages.”

(p. 88)

Friedman on Jewish secrecy and the recessed mental life:

“The absence of objective volition explains the impression of secrecy that the Jew gives the Gentile. … The answer is that he rarely projects his mind at all. It is habitually recessed below the surface of realized mental states.”

(p. 89)

Friedman on the Jewish intellect under the deprivation of grace:

“The effect of deprivation of grace on the intellect has been its loss of the power for the highest creative and co-ordinative thought. The Jewish intellect has been content with lesser plants of function, criticism, analysis, argument, dialectic, codification, systematization and memory-work. In the face of an intellectual decision he is evasive and ambiguous; when he takes the panoramic view he loses sight of the details, when he fixes on details he loses sight of the wider view. He tends to substitute intuition for logic. In music he is a better performer than composer, in drama a better actor than dramatist. There is in fact a striking lack of great Jewish plays and playwrights.”

(p. 89)

Friedman on the “typical sick Jew”:

“We have come upon the typical sick Jew, the melancholy figure with a broken will and an imprisoned promise — the ‘batlan’ of the Jewish Ghetto. He is no less capable of being perverse and exasperating by a tenacious assertion of his opinions as the Gospel truth. His melancholy is the shadow cast by the hollowness within.”

(p. 90)

Friedman on the Jewish “shrug” as the bodily embodiment of the Rejection of Christ:

“The uninhibited excess of energy displayed by the Jew pours into characteristic muscular channels. … His skepticism flows to his shoulders in an expressive shrug with the aid of head and neck. The shrug is the complete embodiment of his ‘rejectiveness’. The Pharisee did not reject only once. He maintains his status quo by making rejection a habit which practice has perfected. The shrug is the answer to all the dilemmas (and they are innumerable) which face him. Into that shrug goes the whole weight of his inertia, his contempt, disdain, skepticism, whereby he gains his pyrrhic victories and exposes the trap into which his leaders have led him.”

(p. 91)

Friedman paradoxically attempting to refute the “Jewish conspiracy” theory using another ethnic stereotype:

“This immense volitional inertia makes all talk of a Jewish conspiracy psychologically false. The Jews cannot conspire to save themselves let alone others.”

(p. 88)

Sources

All passages are drawn from, or independently confirmed against, the following primary editions and scholarly sources. No word has been altered.

Primary Works:

  • Friedman, John [Elias], O.C.D. The Redemption of Israel. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1947. [Nihil obstat and Imprimatur granted.] Chapter V (“Psychology,” “Ego and Temperament,” “Volition,” “Intellect”) quoted extensively above. Held by major research libraries; available through interlibrary loan.
  • Friedman, Elias, O.C.D. Jewish Identity. New York: The Miriam Press, 1987. [Nihil obstat: Edward J. Montano, S.T.D., Censor Librorum. Imprimatur: † Joseph T. O’Keefe, D.D., Vicar-General, Archdiocese of New York, May 26, 1987. ISBN 0-939409-00-3 (HB) / 0-939409-01-1 (PB).] Full text available in PDF format from the Association of Hebrew Catholics: https://hebrewcatholic.org/files/JI-85×11.pdf
  • Friedman, Elias, O.C.D. “A Branch, Re-ingrafted into the Olive Tree of Israel” (autobiographical essay). Published as the opening section of Jewish Identity, pp. 17–25. Same edition as above.
  • Friedman, Elias, O.C.D. “The Logo of the Association of Hebrew Catholics.” Official document of the Association of Hebrew Catholics. Available at: https://www.hebrewcatholic.net

Book Description and Review (Association of Hebrew Catholics):

Primary Critical Scholarship (Peer-Reviewed, Open Access):

Biographical Sources:

  • Association of Hebrew Catholics, “Elias Friedman, OCD” (biography). https://www.hebrewcatholic.net/elias-friedman-ocd/
  • Elias Friedman, O.C.D. Jewish Identity, “Introduction” by Ronda Chervin, Ph.D., pp. 9–11; “Preface” by Rev. Msgr. Eugene Kevane, pp. 7–8. The Miriam Press, 1987.