Abstract
There is, in principle, a fundamental difference between Nazi racial antisemitism and the traditional anti-Judaism of Christianity. The church’s official view has been that conversion transforms a Jew into a Christian, whereas the Nazi view was that a Jewish convert to Christianity remained a Jew. Nevertheless, the distinction between racial and religious antisemitism has often been less clear-cut than is often claimed by those who claim that Christian churches bear no responsibility for the Holocaust. That is not to say that it is illusory, just that it has often been less clear-cut than is often claimed. During the Holocaust and the decades that preceded it, Christian clergy often stressed the same themes as the Nazis, notably with respect to the Jews being “parasitic” capitalists exploiting Christians, as well as communists seeking to overthrow the governments and traditional Christian values of Europe (Passelecq and Suchecky 1997, pp. 123–36). We shall see that these clerics often also spoke of Jews in racial, as well as religious terms. Conversely, the Nazis often exploited traditional Christian themes, such as the diabolical nature of the Jew, the image of the Jew as “Christ-killer,” and the contrast between “carnal” (materialistic) Judaism and spiritual Christianity. In other words, the Nazis effectively exploited two millennia of Christian demonization of the Jew. Most scholars who have studied the role of the Christian churches during the Holocaust are well aware of most of these facts (Barnett 1992; Bergen 1996; Ericksen and Heschel 1999a; Kertzer 2001). Yet many comparative studies of religion and violence ignore the role played by Christian churches during the Holocaust—apparently on the assumption that the most horrific mass murder in human history was a purely secular phenomenon. In fact, some prominent scholars, including the best-selling authors Karen Armstrong and—incredibly—Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, go so far as to attribute the Shoah to the demise of religious values in Europe (Armstrong 2014; Sacks 2015)! This article is an attempt to correct these mistaken assumptions.
Highlights
Armstrong does write on pp. 298–99 of Fields of Blood that “the new anti-Semitism drew on centuries of Christian prejudice but gave it a scientific rationale,” but she ignores this point in her statement about the Holocaust being “born of modern scientific racism.”
She ignores the extensive scholarly literature demonstrating that the line between racial and religious antisemitism was often a porous and malleable one (Heschel 2011; Kertzer 2001)
The notion that the Holocaust occurred because Germany, and Europe in general, sought to find a secular substitute for religion does not provide an accurate picture of the role played by Christianity and Christian churches during the mass murder of the Jews in Christian Europe
Summary
In her 2014 book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, Karen Armstrong writes: Born of modern scientific racism, the Holocaust was the ultimate step in social engineering and the most extreme demonstration of the inability of the nation to tolerate minorities. She ignores the fact that many of the regimes that helped Nazi Germany carry out the mass murder of the Jews had an explicitly Christian orientation (Feldman et al 2008; Paldiel 2006) She ignores the extensive scholarly literature demonstrating that the line between racial and religious antisemitism was often a porous and malleable one (Heschel 2011; Kertzer 2001). The notion that the Holocaust occurred because Germany, and Europe in general, sought to find a secular substitute for religion does not provide an accurate picture of the role played by Christianity and Christian churches during the mass murder of the Jews in Christian Europe
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