Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust (2007)

[color=#a00000]Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust
Edited by: Kevin P. Spicer, 2007

In recent years, the mask of tolerant, secular, multicultural Europe has been shattered by new forms of antisemitic crime. Though many of the perpetrators do not profess Christianity, antisemitism has flourished in Christian Europe. In this book, thirteen scholars of European history, Jewish studies, and Christian theology examine antisemitism's insidious role in Europe's intellectual and political life. The essays reveal that annihilative antisemitic thought was not limited to Germany, but could be found in the theology and liturgical practice of most of Europe's Christian churches. They dismantle the claim of a distinction between Christian anti-Judaism and neo-pagan antisemitism and show that, at the heart of Christianity, hatred for Jews overwhelmingly formed the milieu of 20th-century Europe.

The twelve essays comprising this volume originated with a two-week workshop sponsored by the Center for Advanced Historical Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. One of the book's chief aims, according to editor Kevin P. Spicer, is to challenge the "strict but misleading separation between Nazi 'racial antisemitism' and 'Christian antisemitism'". The contributors specifically address the role of antisemitism in the Christian response to Nazism, chronicling multiple points of overlap between Christian and Nazi antisemitism. The volume's weakness is that it contains a wide range of cross-disciplinary essays not overtly connected to each other. At the same time, the book's range and scope give it two great strengths: first, it includes work by historians and theologians, thereby representing both disciplinary perspectives; and second, it represents a wide range of Christian perspectives, and includes valuable analyses of Jewish views of Christian antisemitism.

Organized into four parts, the book's first section addresses theological antisemitism. Essays by Thorstein Wagner, Anna Lysiak, Robert A. Krieg, and Donald Dietrich touch on a variety of expressions of antisemitism by priests, theologians, and other prominent religious figures in Denmark, Poland, Germany, and France. Ultimately, these authors show, Christian theology informed Nazi antisemitism in myriad ways that blended with national sentiment, and those bold Christian thinkers who sought to use their theology to resist Nazi anti-Jewishness found themselves bereft of the doctrinal tools to do so. Indeed, as Wagner's essay on the Danish Lutheran Church and the Jews shows, even Denmark's Lutheran clergy, who played a key role in the remarkable rescue of thousands of Danish Jews to Sweden in October 1943, were not free of antisemitism. Challenging the "narrative of heroic humanism" that has emerged as a result of the rescue, Wagner finds that Danish assistance to Jews was less rooted in a belief in religious pluralism and a regard for Jews than in a Danish nationalism constructed in opposition to Nazism and Nazi antisemitism. Further east, Christian thinkers in Poland and Germany deliberately misinterpreted Jewish texts, held fast to supersessionism (the idea that Christians replaced Jews in God's plan for salvation), maintained precritical interpretations of the Bible, and rejected the concept of religious freedom--positions that enabled the rapid spread of Nazi antisemitism. Even those who did think progressively about Christian-Jewish relations during the Nazi era, Dietrich shows, would not see their ideas come into wider acceptance until the Second Vatican Council. [...]

„… a wellpacked collection of twelve articles on the ambivalence of the Christian Church toward the Holocaust and antisemitism.” – John Jovan Markovic, Andrews University, Journal Church and State, Vol 50, 3 Summer 2008

„... sheds light on and offers steps to overcome the locked-in conflict between Jews and Christians along the antisemitic path from Calvary to Auschwitz and beyond.” – Zev Garber, Los Angeles Valley College and American Jewish University, SHOFAR, Vol. 27, No. 1 Fall 2008

C O N T E N T S

Preface

Introduction: Love Thy Neighbor?

I. Theological Antisemitism

1 Belated Heroism: The Danish Lutheran Church and the Jews, 1918–1945
2 Rabbinic Judaism in the Writings of Polish Catholic Theologians, 1918–1939
3 German Catholic Views of Jesus and Judaism, 1918–1945
4 Catholic Theology and the Challenge of Nazism

II. Christian Clergy and the Extreme Right Wing

5 Working for the Führer: Father Dr. Philipp Haeuser and the Third Reich
6 The Impact of the Spanish Civil War upon Roman Catholic Clergy in Nazi Germany
7 Faith, Murder, Resurrection: The Iron Guard and the Romanian Orthodox Church

III. Postwar Jewish-Christian Encounters

8 The German Protestant Church and Its Judenmission, 1945–1950
9 Shock, Renewal, Crisis: Catholic Reflections on the Shoah

IV. Viewing Each Other

10 Wartime Jewish Orthodoxy’s Encounter with Holocaust Christianity
11 Confronting Antisemitism: Rabbi Philip Sidney Bernstein and the Roman Catholic Hierarchy
12 Old Wine in New Bottles? Religion and Race in Nazi Antisemitism

List of Contributors

Index

360 pages

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