Born a Shiite Muslim, Sohrab Ahmari converted a few years ago to Catholicism. He explains how, along the way, he developed a deep sense of appreciation for Jews and Judaism, of which his staunch support for the Jewish state is only a part:
Bizarre as this may sound to some ears, I benefited from many Jewish guides and guideposts on my road to Roman Catholicism. For starters, it was mainly Jewish writers who dispelled the dangerous Marxist illusions of my youth and ushered me to political maturity. Were it not for Leon Kass, Arthur Koestler, Irving Kristol, and Leo Strauss, to name but a few of them, I probably would have continued to wallow in the lethal “idealism” of the very hard left. In Natan Sharansky’s gulag memoir, Fear No Evil, I discovered the link between faith in the God of the Bible and freedom, both political freedom and the more important kind: spiritual freedom. . . .
I picked up that interior confidence—that no force on earth could shake me if I feared Almighty God, that no regime could compel me to abide evil if I hewed to God’s ways—from Jewish writers, some of whom weren’t even traditional believers. Initially, I was reluctant to articulate this newfound confidence in the first person, lest my mostly secular friends sneer at me. But eventually, I professed faith in the one God.
When I did, I professed faith in the Christian God. . . . But in so concluding, my mind never gave in to the classical anti-Semitism that historically disfigured relations between Christians and Jews.
Rather, my attitude was one of gratitude. Gratitude for the Jewish genius of the Hebrew Bible. Gratitude for the Jewish landscape of human salvation and the Jewish men and women who peopled it. . . . Thanks to Judaism, the Jewish tradition, and Jewish intellectuals, I’m a Christian believer and not a modern pagan. How could I then not love the Jewish people?
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/culture-civilization/religion/why-this-catholic-loves-judaism/