Glenn Beck: We have heard from so many people, English, Jewish, no longer feel comfortable there. What's happening in England?
Rabbi Sacks: I don't think it's England. I think it's Europe, and I think it's the world. And, you know, sometimes it happens with an illness, that you find a cure, you eradicate it from a certain population, but before you've done so, you infect another population.
And I kind of think that's what happened with antisemitism. That after the Holocaust, Europe woke up and said, what is this that's happened in our midst? And from then on, there was a sustained campaign, probably the most complete in history, to strengthen the immune system of European culture, so that there would never again be an outbreak of antisemitism.
Sadly, the virus did infect certain populations in the Middle East.
Glenn Beck: It was intentionally transferred. I mean, Iran is called Iran as a salute to the Aryan nation.
Rabbi Sacks: It goes back a way, yes. A very European thing called the Blood Libel, which accused Jews of killing Christian children, was taken by Christians to the Middle East, to Egypt and Syria and Lebanon in the 19th century.
And then very sadly, from Germany in the 1930s, a forgery, famous forgery, called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” was also taken into the Arab world. And so this huge effort of Holocaust education, anti-racist legislation, interfaith dialogue, that had such an impact and actually transformed relations between Jews and Christians, which had been estranged for almost 2,000 years.
And there really was a transformation. I mean, let me salute a great human being here, Pope John XXIII, who in the early 1960s began to realise what had happened and set in motion something called Vatican II, which produced a document called Nostra Aetate in 1965, which transformed the Church's relationship with other faiths, but especially with Jews. And that has been one of the most positive changes in religious history. But unfortunately, it began to infect parts of the Middle East. And today that has fed back into Europe, and it's very problematic.
