ABSTRACT
Christology—the effort to understand what it means to speak of Jesus as the Christ—can and does very often entail Christian triumphalism vis-a-vis the Jewish people and Judaism. Jewish education has an important role to play in apprising students and the wider world of learning of such phenomena within the Christian church and Christian scholarship. Whenever Jewish education loses sight of historical concretion, it runs the danger of idealist ineffectiveness. It deteriorates into a series of truisms already known to all. The social and historical reality of anti-Semitism creates a distinctive and repugnant profile for the Jewish-Christian dialogue and within the pedagogy that directs itself to a shared historical era. A most important ‘function’ of the component of anti-Semitism, pedagogically and practically speaking, is to ensure a certain psycho-moral asymmetry within the dialogue—well before discrete dialogue activities ever get under way. A foremost source of tension within the Jewish-Christian encounter arises out of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
