\"The Jew and His Neighbour\" James Parkes Signed FDC Dated 1948 For Sale

Up for sale "The Jew and His Neighbour" James Parkes Signed First Day Cover Dated 1948. 

ES-7294E

James

William Parkes (22

December 1896 – 10 August 1981) was an Anglican clergyman, historian, and social activist.

With the publication of The Jew and His Neighbour in 1929, he

created the foundations of a Christian re-evaluation of Judaism. Parkes was born in Guernsey on

the Channel Islands at

the end of the nineteenth century and educated at Elizabeth College.

While at school, he won an Open Scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford,

and then enlisted to fight in the First World War. After returning from the war, he went back to

Oxford to complete his degree, and did so, despite catching measles in the

middle of his final exams. He then went on to study for ordination. Parkes was

drawn to his study of Jewish–Christian relations 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. He

discovered that the principles and practice of historic Christianity was

responsible for the sins and excesses that culminated in the Holocaust. His life's work amounted not only to hundreds of

articles and twenty-three books, among them The Conflict of the Church

and the Synagogue (1934), his magnum opus, but also to social

activism. According to one historian, Parkes "devoted his whole life to

fighting anti-Judaism and promoting tolerance of Jews". In that

endeavor, for twenty years his was a lone 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 World War 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 about Nazism, surviving

an assassination attempt in 1935. Upon his return to England, he carved out a

career as an independent scholar. Parkes contributed to several British

publications, including The Observer, The Jewish Chronicle, Punch and Peace News. He bequeathed his 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. He also wrote Common sense

about religion, as part of the Common Sense series.