Semitism: The Whence and Whither, 'How Dear Are Your Counsels'

ISBN-13: 9781845190712 / Angielski / Miękka / 2005 / 214 str.

K. Cragg

Opis

This book is an incisive attempt by a leading exponent on Christian Muslim relations to unravel and understand the perspectives and complexities of semitic past and present in theological, political and cultural terms. The work tackles sensitive issues of ethnicity, prejudice, persecution and state-making. Cyclone and anti-cyclone are comprehensible contrasts. Semitism and anti-Semitism are of a different order. Semitism is hardly current at all; the latter is all too grimly and darkly familiar. Both terms seem only to have come into use in the 19th century, but the reality of their meanings is harsh centuries long. Semitism is a human story of distinctive intimacy with a God, believed to belong with birth, sealed in history and homed in given territory. How dear are Your counsels to me, O God, the psalmist cried how precious, yet how costly this privilege between us. These three denominators of tribe, territory and remembered time belong to all human identities, understood as one creation in a single cosmos in the Bible and the Qur an. Anti-Semitism is a tragic misprision of this long conviction of the Judaic mind, bringing endless suffering to the one, shame and guilt to the other. Its effect has been to make those counsels dearer still, whether in Zionist will to recover and rule territory or in a secular diaspora struggling to know itself. Semitism has overtaken itself with the barbarity of a dividing Wall a scar across a land allegedly beloved above all, by both God and People. Its presence resembles Solomon s judgment on a disputed child."