"Judæo-Christian" tradition

Last night I attended a forum organised by the Veritas Foundation in which Rabbi Dr Naftali Brawer (Head of Jewish-Muslim Relations for the Chief Rabbi of the U.K.)
Rt Rev Dr Michael Nazir-Ali (Bishop of Rochester) and Prof Tariq Ramadan (Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford) debated the role of the Abrahamic faiths in the public domain.

Many interesting things were said, which may find their way on to this blog. One thing that caused some sparkiness was the bishop's reference to the "Judæo-Christian tradition". Tariq Ramadan said - quite rightly, in my view - that this is a post-Second World War construction of the Christian world in recognition of its failures to denounce the Nazi holocaust. It rankled him because it excludes Islam, which has not been without influence on 'the tradition', especially in the mediæval period.

150 years ago most Christians wouldn't have known what 'Judæo-Christian tradition' meant : for them, Jesus was a Christian, persecuted by 'the Jews', and the 'Old Testament - read 'correctly' - pointed exclusively to Jesus. Christian scholars only started recognising that maybe Jesus was Jewish in the late 1800s. Even today, I bet most Christians don't know that he never stopped being Jewish.

I think one can overdo the Muslim influence on European culture. Although it's not negligible (especially in Oxford, where the Oxford college is modelled on the mosques/madrassas of the Middle East), it's only recently that Muslims have really become 'insiders' in Europe. But I'm suspicious of the way the phrase 'Judæo-Christian tradition' is now being used. Melanie Phillips is one that (if I recall) uses it a lot. It's becoming a phrase of the 'pro-Israel' (and anti-Muslim) lobby. The bishop, to my surprise, seemed unaware of this and described it as a simple 'fact'. If it originally served its purpose in challenging anti-Jewish thought in Christian thinking, it is now becoming a liability for quite different reasons.