I read this with interest today:

...And here, let us speak a word for the Jews. How long and how sinfully has the Christian church despised the most honorable amongst the nations! How barbarously has Israel been handled by the so-called church! I felt my spirit burn indignantly within me in Rome when I stood in the Jew's quarter and heard of the cruel indignities which Popery has heaped upon the Jews, even until recently. At this hour, there stands, in the Jew's quarter, a church built right in front of the entrance to it and, into this, the unhappy Jews were driven forcibly, on certain occasions. To this church, they were compelled to subscribe - subscribe, mark you, as worshippers of the one invisible God, to the support of a system which is as leprous with idolatry as were the Canaanites whom the Lord abhorred. Paganism is not more degrading than Romanism. Over the door of this church is placed, in their own tongue in the Hebrew, these words: "All day long have I stretched out my hands to a disobedient and gainsaying generation." How, by such an insult as that, could they hope to convert the Jew? The Jew saw, everywhere, idols which his soul abhorred, and he loathed the name of Christ because he associated it with idol worship, and I do not wonder that he did.

I praise the Jew that he could not give up his own simple theism and the worship of the true God for such a base, degrading superstition as that which Rome presented to him. Instead of thinking it a wonder of unbelief that the Jew is not a Christian, I honour him for his faith and his courageous resistance of a fascinating heathenism. If Romanism be Christianity, I am not, neither could I be, a Christian. It were a more manly thing to be a simple believer in one God, or even an honest doubter upon all religion, than worship such crowds of gods and godesses as Popery has set up, and to bow, as she does, before rotten bones and dead men's winding sheets.

Let the true Christian church think lovingly of the Jew and, with respectful earnestness, tell him the true gospel. Let her sweep away superstition and set before him the one gracious God in the Trinity of His divine Unity. And the day shall yet come when the Jews, who were the first apostles to the Gentiles, the first missionaries to us who were afar off, shall be gathered in again. Until that time, the fulness of the church's glory can never come. Matchless benefits to the world are bound up with the restoration of Israel. Their gathering-in shall be as life from the dead. Jesus the Saviour is the joy of all nations, but let not the chosen race be denied their peculiar share of whatever promise Holy Writ has recorded with a special view to them. The woes which their sins brought upon them have fallen thick and heavily; and, even so, let the richest blessings distil upon them.

From: "Joy Born at Bethlehem," a sermon on Luke 2:10-12, preached by Charles Haddon Spurgeon on Sunday morning, December 24, 1871.