James Parkes (clergyman)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section needs to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article with relevant internal links. (April 2008)

Clergyman, groundbreaking historian, social activist, James Parkes was born in 1896 on the Island of Guernsey in the Channel Islands.

Starting in 1929 with the publication of THE JEW AND HIS NEIGHBOUR, for the next forty years this clerical maverick broke the essential ground for a Christian reevaluation of Judaism. He was arguably the past century's most significant and influential advocate for the unravelling of traditional theology of Christian contempt and hostility toward Judaism.

Drawn to his lifelong task by first-hand exposure to the brutality of antisemitism on the Continent, Parkes traced its animus to the obdurate hard-heartedness and wrongheadedness of Christianity vis-à-vis the Jewish people and their faith. To his chagrin and eternal shame, this committed Christian cleric discovered that the principles and practice of historic Christianity bore the major share of culpability for the sins and excesses that culminated in the Shoah. His life's work amounted not alone to hundreds of articles and twenty-three books, among them THE CONFLICT OF THE CHURCH AND THE SYNAGOGUE (1934), his magnum opus, but to a heroic enterprise in penetential retribution. In that endeavor, for twenty years his would be a lonely clerical voice against the missionizing of Jews, and he would be the driving force in the founding of the Council of Christians and Jews.

Following three years of active duty as an infantryman during WW I, he took a degree at Oxford, orders in the Anglican Church. and spent the next 12 years on the Continent as an activist in organizations that promoted international cooperation. It was there that he grew aware of the brutality of antisemitism and very early on spoke out loudly about the Nazism menace, surviving, in fact, an assassination target in 1935.

Upon his return to England, he carved out a remarkable career as an independent scholar. He bequeathed his splendid Judaica collection to the University of Southampton where it became the cornerstone of the Parkes Jewish Library and the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/Christian Relations.