Isaiah 53:7-9, Who is the Servant? (3)

The question today is, why did the rabbis begin to interpret Isaiah 53 as referring to the suffering nation rather than the suffering Messiah?  If I were guessing, I would have thought the answer had to do with the success of Christianity, that the rabbis favored this view to protect Jews from Christian evangelism.  Guessing is, of course, never a very good approach to “thought.”  Here is where Buksbazen begins.

Behind this change lies the tragic Jewish experience during the Crusades.  After the end of the First Crusade in 1096 A. D., when the Crusaders, in their misguided zeal, attempted to wrest the Holy Sepulchre from the Muslims, they became aware that the infidels were not only “the pagan Muslims” in far away Palestine, but also “the Christ-killing Jews” who were living in their very midst, in so-called Christian Europe.  Encouraged by their fanatical leaders and frequently incited by high-ranking clerics, the Crusaders committed massacres of the Jews, especially of those who lived in France, Italy and Germany.  Thousands were butchered, their synagogues burned and their possessions pillaged. 

This horrible experience, which lasted for almost two centuries, left a traumatic impact on the Jews, comparable only to their later experience under Hitler.  From that time on, their revulsion against everything that the Christians believed or represented, became more violent and hostile than ever before. 

And since the Christians in their frequent disputes with the Jews used Isaiah 53 as one of their main arguments for the Messiahship of Jesus, the Jews felt impelled to reinterpret this prophecy in such a way as to blunt the Christian argument.  Since that time the question of Isaiah 53 took on a heated polemical and emotional character. 

Another compelling reason for the abandonment of the Messianic interpretation of the controversial passage was the fact that many Jews themselves became convinced that there is a cogent and strong argument for the Christian position.  In fact many Jews actually converted to the Christian faith as a result of the Christian-Jewish disputations of the Middle Ages.  During that period the outstanding Jewish scholar, R. Joseph Ben Kaspi (1280-1340 A. D.) warned the rabbis that ‘those who expounded this section of the Messiah give occasion to the heretics (Christians) to interpret it of Jesus.’  About this statement Rabbi Saadia ibn Danan observed: ‘May God forgive him for not having spoken the truth.’ (S. R. Driver & Adolf Nenbauer, The Suffering Servant of Isaiah, p203.)) 

In any case, since 1096 A. D. Jewish interpreters began to teach that Isaiah’s suffering servant was not the Messiah but persecuted and suffering Israel, ‘who was led to the slaughter like a sheep and opened not his mouth’ (Isa. 53:7).

If, instead of guessing, I had thought about it, I might have known that something like the Crusades was the instigating motivation to alter the interpretation of Isa. 53.  We have been to Yad Vashem, the holocaust museum in Jerusalem, on several occasions, and I am aware that they credit forces within Christianity with the planting of the seeds of modern day antisemitism.  It’s hard to argue, given the influence of Chrysostom (Orthodox), Augustine (Catholic) and Luther (Reformation) in modern theology, all of whom had no place for the nation of Israel in the continuing plan of God.  It is sad to see, in recent days here in the United States, voices of hatred for the Jewish people being lifted up.