Parsing Science and Prejudice: Susannah Heschel on “The Aryan Jesus” in Nazi Germany

Abstract

Susannah Heschel has now written two books about Jesus, one on the “Aryan Jesus” and one on the “Jewish Jesus.” The recent one, published in 2008, focuses on the German Protestant Church and Protestant theologians during the Nazi period. Heschel describes their efforts, consistent with Nazi ideology, to “dejudaize” Christianity. The former book, published in 1998, focuses on Abraham Geiger, a German Jewish theologian of the nineteenth century.1 Heschel describes his challenge to the dominant Christian viewpoint of his day, his effort to view Christianity through a Jewish lens. Each book makes an important contribution on its own. Taken together, they make an especially important set of claims. Heschel’s work is consistent with the concerns of Geiger, as she probes the boundaries of Christianity and Judaism. It is also consistent with the work of her father, Abraham Joshua Heschel, who studied and taught in the Jewish and Christian milieu of Berlin in the 1930s and finished his career in the Jewish and Christian milieu of New York, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Union Theological Seminary in the 1960s and early 1970s. Like them, she studies the nexus between Judaism and Christianity. Her work also points to another nexus, that between science and prejudice.