The report that the Vatican is reviewing the traditional Catholic attitude to Judas Iscariot is another sign of a welcome improvement in relations between Judaism and Christianity. Judas was for centuries treated as a symbol of the Jewish rejection of their Messiah, which in Catholic folklore, if not in official doctrine, justified the ?teaching of contempt? towards Jews for all time. This was only fully repudiated in 1965, when the Second Vatican Council revived the Pauline doctrine that God had not abandoned his covenant with the Children of Israel, and hence that it was wrong to treat them as accursed or cast out.

Pope Benedict XVI, consistent with the policy of his predecessor, underlined the significance of that change in his speech to a Jewish and Israeli delegation which he received at the Vatican, as reported in The Tablet this week. He even went a little further, touching on the sensitive question of what happened to God?s providential favour for the Jews at the time of the Holocaust, or Shoah. Even then, he said, ?in the dramatic moments of the Shoah the hand of the Almighty guided and sustained them?. Should he visit Auschwitz on his expected visit to Poland later this year, he may expand on that theme.

Historically the roots of racial anti-Semitism lay in a perversion of Darwinism and nineteenth-century German nationalism, but Christianity had already poisoned the mind of Europe against the Jews on religious grounds. Christians have to approach the forthcoming Holocaust Memorial Day in a spirit of humility, therefore, but also determined that the lessons of history will not be forgotten. The virus of traditional anti-Semitism is not extinct, and that includes in Britain. It is even more alive elsewhere in Europe: the Russian Orthodox Patriarch, Alexei II, has recently called for action by the state to stem hate crimes after an anti-Semitic attack in a Moscow synagogue.

But the greatest danger now is Islamic anti-Semitism, ...