Removing hate from hateful terms
Rabbi Noam Marans describes collaboration by AJC and Catholic bishops’ conference
In some ways, “Translate Hate: The Catholic Edition” isn’t unlike the Talmud. Its most basic unit, the term and its definition — the Mishnah — is surrounded by the Gemara — the commentaries. Those commentaries come from a range of sources.
There are also many differences. This isn’t a multivolume work of dense print on thin paper; it’s one slim booklet, thin enough to be stapled rather than bound, printed on glossy paper, with full-color illustrations.
But it packs a punch.
Not only does it include more than 60 terms, ranging from “blood libel” to “Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG),” each one defined and the reasons either when or why it is antisemitic detailed, but often those terms are accompanied by Catholic commentary, explaining the poisoned meaning through a Roman Catholic filter.
The project comes from a partnership with the American Jewish Committee and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.
Imagine such a document — or such a partnership — a century ago. The idea would have been a sad joke. Even around 80 years ago, as World War II ended and the monstrous scope of the Holocaust started to become evident, such a relationship would not have been possible.
But the world has changed.
Rabbi Noam Marans of Teaneck is the AJC’s director of interreligious affairs. He wrote the foreword to the new edition, and he’s deeply proud of the book, and of the collaboration that produced it.
As he began to talk about it, he explained the structure.
Its predecessor, “Translate Hate,” was first published, both in hard copy and online, at www.ajc.org/translatehate, in 2019. “This oft-accessed tool is a glossary of antisemitism terms, themes, and memes,” Rabbi Marans said.
“It’s been revised multiple times and grown by dozens of entries. It’s a vehicle to help readers and others learn how to recognize antisemitism.”
The beginning of the collaboration between the USCCB and the AJC on this book goes back a few years. “The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and particularly the secretariat of ecumenical and interreligious affairs, has a Catholic/Jewish focus, among its other responsibilities, and it initiated its own campaign to address rising antisemitism, which it calls ‘Fruit of Dialogue: Catholics Confronting Antisemitism,’” Rabbi Marans said. “After a lot of conversation and work, the key piece of their initiative is this new edition of ‘Translate Hate,’ which brings Catholic teaching to bear on select entries.”
The work can unearth surprising findings.
“There is a challenge,” Rabbi Marans said. “There’s both deliberate antisemitism and inadvertent, unconscious antisemitism. Not everybody knows why something is antisemitic.” (This might sound a bit like the tree falling in the forest — if no one is around to hear it, is there really anything to hear? — but it’s not. And it won’t be, until any one particular slur is so dead, so lost to history, that its echoes will evoke absolutely no reverberation for absolutely anyone. Until then, it remains toxic.)
Take, for example, the word “deicide,” Rabbi Marans said. The word literally means killing a god; it’s not at all antisemitic when it’s used to describe the Greek gods, who seemed to make a habit of it. But when it’s aimed at Jews — the idea that the Jews killed Jesus, or at the very least were responsible for his death, has been at the heart of Christian antisemitism for millennia — it drips with venom.
In “Translate Hate,” the term is defined and explained; the Catholic Church’s rejection of it, in the world-changing Nostra Aetate (literally In Our Time, the declaration of the church’s relations with non-Christian religions), published in 1965, is described. And then, in the Catholic annotation, readers are told, straightforwardly, “This trope is a classic anti-Jewish charge leveled against the Jewish people for nearly seventeen centuries.”
It goes on to explain Jesus’s death as necessary for salvation. The Catholic sections are unflinching in both their confession of historic antisemitism and their deep rootedness in Catholic theology — and theology that is not necessarily emotionally accessible to Jews.
Rabbi Marans mentioned the entry on the Khazars, defined as “a people once existing as a nation in the Caucasus and southeastern Russia.”
Sounds bland enough, right?
But because the Khazars, who live in what is now Kazakhstan, are rumored to have converted to Judaism, they were woven into a conspiracy theory that had Jews taking over the world. (That is but one of many such oxygen-starved theories.) The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, invoked it as recently as September 2023, “Translate Hate” tells us.
The Catholic edition of “Translate Hate” includes all the terms defined in the original one, but it also has four new elements, Rabbi Marans said. There is his foreword, and the open letter that follows it, addressed to “My dear brothers and sisters” and ending “With a promise of prayers and the support of my fellow bishops,” by the Most Rev. Joseph C. Bambera, who is the bishop of Scranton and the chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs. There are the Catholic interpretations of the terms, and there is a section listing Catholic resources.
“This is incredible,” Rabbi Marans said. “This document has both the AJC’s and the USCCB’s logos and imprimaturs. I can’t even begin to say how much it means for the official address of the Catholic church in America and its 60 million followers to bring the weight of the Catholic church in America to bear on this issue.”
This work is particularly important right now because “I think that we can say that this is a time when there are serious strains in Catholic/Jewish relations at the highest level,” Rabbi Marans said.
“Pope Francis has been consistently outspoken against antisemitism as an un-Christian sin again God, and he has called for the immediate release of the hostages. He has been supportive of the hostage families, including meeting with them. But since Gaza, some of his utterances and actions have caused strain.”
The pope has been quoted as saying “We should investigate carefully to assess whether this fits into the technical definition (of genocide) formulated by international jurists and organizations.”
“When the word genocide is used a little bit too casually regarding Israel’s response to October 7, we have a challenge on our hands,” Rabbi Marans said.
But he is hopeful.
“In my foreword, I say that this publication, this mission, is the result of decades of nurturing and advancing Catholic/Jewish relations,” he said. “That doesn’t happen overnight. It happens only with the hard work of overcoming two millennia of enmity that the Catholic Church expressed in its teaching toward Judaism and the Jewish people, which was life-threatening to the Jewish people.
“But during the second half of the twentieth century, the Catholic church began singing from a new hymnal. It has become an ally in combatting antisemitism.
“Let’s not simplify,” he continued. “This is a project that is ongoing and never-ending. There continue to be challenges in Catholic/Jewish relations. But the conversations in the wake of these challenges are conversations between friends. And even with these challenges, we are capable of producing a monumental project like this one, which has a long-term impact.
“The USCCB is committed to getting this publication into the hands of every bishop in the country,” Rabbi Marans said. “There are hundreds of bishops in the United States. The USCCB is committed to getting it into the hands of every interreligious office in every diocese in America, and to finding ways to incorporate it into seminary and youth education.
“And we at the AJC see this as a possibility for other Christian denominations, and even other faith groups.
“Why couldn’t Orthodox Christianity have its own edition of ‘Translate Hate’? What about the Episcopal church?
“It wouldn’t have to look the same for each group.”
Getting back to the Catholic edition, “We already have a Spanish-language version of the book,” Rabbi Marans said. “The sky’s the limit. A decreasing number of Catholics speak English. Spanish and other languages are increasing.
“There are places where Jews and Catholics live side by side, and places where they do not. As we well know, you can have antisemitism without Jews. You can have teachings based on the Gospels that erroneously foment antisemitism.”
He talked about a term that’s not in the book but should be, and probably will be in the next edition.
In 2019, Pete Buttigieg, the outgoing secretary of transportation, said, “There’s an awful lot about Pharisees in there.” Mr. Buttigieg, a devout Episcopalian, was running for the Democratic nomination for president. He was talking about Vice President Mike Pence’s hypocrisy, using an age-old antisemitic trope without realizing it.
When someone pointed out the antisemitism behind Mr. Buttigieg’s comment to him, he was horrified, and immediately stopped using it, Rabbi Marans said; it was such a well-established figure of speech in his world that its history and deeper meaning never occurred to him.
“Pharisee is one of the most esoteric and longest-lasting tropes,” Rabbi Marans said; its exclusion from the book simply shows how much ongoing work the project demands. “The term needs to be in there,” he said.
“Historic virulent interpretations of the Gospels is ongoing, and it’s renewed every day. So when a priest or a minister uses the term ‘pharisee’ as a synonym for hypocrite and doesn’t contextualize it as not referring to all Jews, or all Jews now, or any Jews now, they are contributing, probably unconsciously and inadvertently, to the perpetuation of antisemitic tropes.
“I used to think that maybe we shouldn’t publish booklets like this because we are giving the antisemites tools, but I think that in 2024 it’s fair to say that that train’s left the station,” Rabbi Marans said. “The internet is filled with this vile stuff. So many people have stepped in it recently, including celebrities and politicians, who are not always as innocent as they portray themselves to be. Then they say, ‘I’m just saying what’s in the New Testament!’
“That’s true, but there has been a revolution in the way the New Testament has been understood, within the historic context of an internecine feud within the Jewish community during the first century of the common era.
“We must never forget that Jesus and the apostles all were Jewish.”
Both Jews and Catholics worked on the booklet, Rabbi Marans said, and he is deeply grateful to all of them.
The original version of “Translate Hate” and the Catholic and Spanish versions all are available at www.ajc.org/translatehate.
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