From today's Haaretz:

Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer is famously remembered for his reported response to the Kristallnacht burning of German synagogues, 71 years ago this coming Monday, when he commented to a colleague, "If the synagogues are set on fire today, it will be the churches that will be burned tomorrow."

It is not clear what he meant by this. Perhaps he was simply warning of the Nazis' intention to target the churches as well, without any reference to the distress of the Jewish people. For, in June 1933, three months after the Nazi rise to power - after the publication of the first anti-Jewish laws, which dismissed all Jewish teachers and professors from their positions - Bonhoeffer wrote, in a church periodical, that ever since the Jews had "nailed the Redeemer of the world to the cross," they had been forced to bear an eternal "curse" through a long history of suffering, one that would end only "in the conversion of Israel to Christ."

At the same time, Bonhoeffer, who is often remembered as a staunch and courageous anti-Nazi, initially and half-heartedly excused the Nazi regime for its anti-Jewish measures. "Without a doubt the Jewish question is one of the historical problems which our state must deal with," he asserted in the same article, "and without a doubt the state is justified in adopting new methods here." The only instance in which the Church was, in his words, obligated to object would be if the state took steps to prohibit missionary work by the Church among Jews.

The post-war exculpatory words of another anti-Nazi theologian, Marrtin Niemoeller, are displayed in many Holocaust museums and often quoted. Indeed, he lamented that he did not speak out on the Jewish issue at the time, "because I was not a Jew." Sadly, the record shows that Niemoeller did speak out about the Jews - though not in their defense. In a 1935 sermon, he spoke of the Jews as a people that "can neither live nor die, because it is under a curse which forbids it to do either." He also noted, in case his meaning is in doubt, that whatever the Jews take up "becomes poisoned, and all that they ever reap is contempt and hatred," because the world "notices the deception and avenges itself in its own way." As for the future, he added, the Jewish people must continue to suffer for the crime of deicide, and indeed, "now it bears the curse."

Karl Barth was another staunch anti-Nazi Protestant theologian who dipped into the well of anti-Jewish rhetoric, while at the same time condemning anti-Semitism. In the 1930s, he too charged the Jews with the death of Jesus - something they undertook not "in foolish over-haste" or misunderstanding, but, he asserted, as a "deliberate" act. Then, in 1942, from his base in Switzerland, in his theological work "Church Dogmatics," Barth castigated Judaism as a "synagogue of death," a "tragic, pitiable figure with covered eyes," a religion characterized by "conceited lying," and the "enemy of God." If the church needed the Jews, he felt, it was only as a negative symbol, for they are a mirror of man's rebellion against God, against which Christians must continually struggle.

The Catholic cleric Bernhard Lichtenberg reacted differently. As Kristallnacht was taking place outside, with synagogues, Jewish-owned businesses and other institutions under attack, he declared from the pulpit of St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin: "Let us pray for the persecuted ones, the non-Aryan Christians and the Jews ... Outside, the temple is in flames. That too is a place of worship to God."

He included all Jews in his prayers, not only (as did some others) ones who had been baptized. In mid-October 1941, Lichtenberg responded this way to an anti-Jewish publication by Josef Goebbels: "This pamphlet states that every German who supports Jews with an ostensibly false sentimentality ... practices treason against his people. Let us not be misled by this un-Christian way of thinking, but follow the strict command of Jesus Christ, 'You shall love your neighbor as thyself.'"

He was arrested a short time later, and in his interrogation by the Gestapo, he admitted having prayed for the Jews, and added, "I totally reject the 'evacuation' [i.e., deportation] with all the accompanying measures, since it stands in opposition to the Christian command of 'Love your neighbor as thyself.' And I consider the Jews also as my neighbor since they too were created in the divine image."

In March 1942, Lichtenberg was sentenced to two years' imprisonment. Berlin Bishop Konrad von Preysing told him the Gestapo had offered not to re-arrest him upon his release, on the condition that he remain silent, but Lichtenberg declined to accept. He died while being transported to Dachau, and appears on Yad Vashem's list of Righteous Among the Nations.

In 1978, Emil Fackenheim wrote, "How different would Bonhoeffer's struggle have been if he had repudiated the 'Christian tradition of the curse' from the start! How different would Jewish fate have been in our time had his whole church repudiated it!"

Bonhoeffer, Niemoeller and Barth - all fierce opponents of Nazism - could not divorce themselves from a poisonous theological anti-Semitism, although they paradoxically condemned anti-Semitism as un-Christian. They joined the chorus of those who pilloried the Jews, even if it was for reasons the Nazis cared little about, such as because of the Jewish refusal to acknowledge the Christian messiah. Therefore, they too must bear responsibility for contributing to the climate that made possible the burning of synagogues during Kristallnacht.

Mordecai Paldiel, a former director of the Righteous Among the Nations Department at Yad Vashem, is a consultant for the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.

He left out Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan who voluntarily died at Auschwitz in the place of another prisoner, and who was canonized by the Catholic church in 1982. Kolbe's death was heroic, and his life had been full of meritorious activity. But one of his many activities had been to edit a religious magazine that regularly ran articles making exactly the same sorts of statements about Jews that are attributed by Paldiel to Bonhoeffer, Niemoller and Barth.

...it was the long Christian tradition of hatred and resentment of Jews which created Hitler and the Holocaust in the first place. That some Christians felt it their "Christian duty" to help Jews victimized by the Nazis didn't really change that fact.

but I don't think they can do anything about shit for brains.

...what you can do with your recommendation, smart guy.

It's especially funny given that I only summarized what you yourself posted. What, wasn't I self-important enough to get your approval?

LOL

Tough shit indeed...:)

Fritz Gerlich:

but I don't think they can do anything about shit for brains.

Totally inappropriate response, Fritzie. You are known as a fine essayist and a mediocre poster, so no need to remind this board of that.

For our readers, rejoinder holds the view of many, including John Carol(sp?), that ha'Shoah was an inevitable result of church history from "Synagogue of Satan" on to the 20th century. The Pacellis of the world could easily look away from horror, secure in the belief that their various Gods wished the brutalization of the Jews. Fritz's excellent c&p reminds us of this.

FWIW, I don't believe that the Holocaust was a product only of Christian belief, nor do I sneer at those Christians who tried to help Jews even though they rejected Judaism as a faith. Not being religious, I suppose that I judge more by actions than by adherence to some particular dogma.

Just as Jewishness is more than a faith, hatred of Jews has always been more than a matter of mere religious differences, it seems to me. I'm sure I'm not the first one to notice that.

Thanks for that. You always find (or write) the coolest and most interesting stuff.

But though you apparently think rejoinder's judgment totally off the wall, still, it does seem natural that the long tradition of theological anti-semitism and the tradition of practical old everyday Jew-hating aren't exactly unrelated. Are they? Maybe subtle thinkers like German Protestant theologians can make clear distinctions in their own minds between people who wear the black hats in the metaphysical Christian narrative, and those hook-nosed merchants who live among us on the streets, but surely it's natural and not even unreasonable for the average Joe (or Josef) to have the theological opprobrium bleed over a bit into his treatment of and attitude toward the upstairs neighbor Mr. Goldberg.

"it was the long Christian tradition of hatred and resentment of Jews which created Hitler and the Holocaust in the first place" is so poshlost it doesn't deserve any other reply. It is so easy to jump to self-congratulatory judgments when one is ignorant of history.

European Christian anti-semitism for at least two centuries before the Holocaust was purely theological in nature. It did not condemn the Jew as a person but as the adherent of a false religion. "The Jew" was used as a religious symbol of blindness, ignorance, even perversity, which is how he got into all the articles and sermons mentioned in the Haaretz article, but there was not even the glimmer of an exterminationist aim behind such theological anti-semitism. On the contrary, "the Jew" was very valuable to Christian preachers. If he hadn't existed, they would have had to invent him. The kinds of tropes quoted by Paldiel were simply traditional stereotypes that had been used, not just by German Christian ministers but by Christian preachers throughout Europe, including England, and the United States, for about two centuries before Hitler. If they caused a genocide in Germany, why didn't they cause a genocide elsewhere? (Italy was a much "more" Christian nation than Germany, yet Primo Levi, an Italian Jew whom the Germans sent to Auschwitz, later commented that "anti-semitism didn't exist in Italy.") After the Holocaust, such sermon-blathering came to seem blameworthy, but before it is wasn't considered remarkable (as the number, and eminence, of the ministers quoted by Paldiel suggests). It is misguided to judge the past by retroactively imposing perceptions and standards of the present.

Hitler rose to power on an array of political, economic, strategic and cultural circumstances with which Christianity as such had little to do. Germany's defeat in WWI; the consequence economic ravages of reparations, hypterinflation and the Depression; Germany's humiliating demilitarization after Versailles and its ostracization from the community of nations; the rise of militant communism to Germany's east; the victories of fascism in Italy and Spain: all of these things are overwhelmingly more important in explaining Hitler's rise to power than the fact that Germany (like all of Europe) was traditionally Christian. The Germany people did not elevate Hitler because of his anti-semitism but in spite of it. It is perfectly true that they were willing to overlook it if he would restore Germany's prosperity and self-respect. They did not care if the Jews had to pay a price. But virtually none of them, outside the militant organs of the NSDAP, foresaw or desired the physical destruction of Germany's Jews (let alone those of the rest of Europe).

I posted the Paldiel piece because I myself had not known that these highly respected Protestant theologians had actually said such things, and I thought the information deserved wider currency. I added my observation that the same charges have been made against some respected Catholic figures. I was not proposing any particular historical thesis by doing so. While I do not disagree with Paldiel that such statements "must bear responsibility for contributing to the climate that made possible the burning of synagogues during Kristallnacht," there is a big chasm between "contributing" and "created." Christian anti-semitism certainly "contributed" to the atmosphere out of which the Holocaust arose, but then so did a writer like Stefan George. I don't hear anybody saying that he "created" Hitler and the Holocaust.

"European Christian anti-semitism for at least two centuries before the Holocaust was purely theological in nature."

Depends on where you draw the line for Europe or whether you can isolate European Christianity from Christianity in general, such as in Russia. The pograms are well within your two century range. Of course, I see no more reason to find "two centuries" meaningful, any more so than that there haven't been major Christian outbreaks against Jews since the Georgian seminarian died. Feel free to draw some more artificial lines to find a pocket in space and time to support your thesis. I will continue to see both the pograms and ha'Shoah within the context of Christian anti-Judaism, a long flowing river originating in the Hellenization of Christianity in the time of Paul and afterward. If you wish to try to mitigate Christian guilt, you might consider citing Greek anti-Judaism as recorded by Josephus and others.

"It did not condemn the Jew as a person but as the adherent of a false religion."

Do you think so? I was always under the impression that the jews were pretty much hated wherever they went because they seemed to prosper more than the people in the communities in which they set up shop...the religious stuff was just a way to justify the social maltreatment (forcing them to live in their own communitites, not be part of the mainstream community etc.). It always seemed to me that the religious based anti-semitism was mostly just a righteous cover for the secular based anti-semitism - a good justification to feel unchristian feelings.

I think what Hitler and the nazi's tapped into was more or less the secular anti-semitism that was underlying the religious anti-semitism - a way to put a nationalistic slant on it and so make it more acceptable to the majority by portraying the jews as a threat to the state and the rightful inhabitants of the state regardless of anyone's religious beliefs. And by doing that, they could enforce and make palatable the holocaust as a way of ridding the nation and the rightful inhabitants of the nation of this threat (e.g. the jews controlled the money, so by getting rid of the jews, the money could be accessed and controlled by "real" Germans, not jews).

And I think that is where the roots of the genocide lay in Germany and why it did not take root anywhere else. Germany was in the crapper economically, socially, culturally. They didn't have anything to lose. Most other countries were not as bad off and so there wasn't a need to steal the power back from "the jews" in other places as there was in Germany. I don't think Hitler was placed in power despite his anti-semitism. I think his anti-semitism struck a resounding note with the secular view of jews, moreso than the religious view of jews, and he was elevated because a great many people were ready to believe that getting rid of the jews was just good economic sense - it would offer a great many German citizens an economic opportunity that they weren't going to get any other way.

"They did not care if the Jews had to pay a price."

I also think the historical secular view of jews worldwide had more to do with the rest of the world's unwillingness to get involved, to speak out and against the nazi's during the initial stages of the holocaust. People, for purely secular reasons, did not like, did not sympathize with, jews and so it was something like a "well, it doesn't effect me" type of attitude that kept the world from getting involved. I don't think that people didn't care if the jews had to pay a price. I think they knew some price had to be paid and better the jews than themselves - basically Germany and the rest of the world threw the jews under the bus because they were always viewed as outsiders and despised to some extent by most everyone who wasn't jewish. The rest of the world only got involved when what was happening in Germany actually did start to effect them. And even then, the rest of the world didn't largely get involved in order to support, protect or defend the jews, per se, but simply because the instability in the region was causing instability elsewhere. The whole "saving the jews from extermination" was mostly just a way of justifying the ensuing actions - again, a righteous cover and rallying cry for doing the thing that had to be done to protect themselves, not so much to defend or protect the jews.

Historically, jews get scapegoated all the time because they tend to be the people that people dislike all the time due to the fact that they seem to flourish when/where no-one else can or does. Kill the jews works if that will get you what you want, save the jews works if that will get you what you want. But, either way, I think it's got less to do with religion than it does with economics and opportunity.

...then let me amend my statement to "CONTRIBUTED to the rise of Hitler and to the Holocaust." Anything to keep you from bursting a blood vessel.

I know it's a bit hypocritical for me of all people to say it, but maybe if you'd responded with a rational objection instead of blowing your stack, the whole discussion could have been more fruitful from the start.

Call it a bad paraphrase of your initial post, and move on. Sheesh..

...although I think you could still make the point that secular anti-Semitism arose out of religious anti-Semitism. But that doesn't mean that the former didn't surpass the latter as a reason for anti-Jewish behavior which eventually led to the Holocaust. As you say, Germany was fertile ground for the resentments Hitler played on so well in his rise to power.

"...secular anti-Semitism arose out of religious anti-Semitism."

Meh, you could make the point, but I don't think it's really valid (personal opinion). I mean, look at all the industrious Indians (from India) in this country. They aren't widely disliked because of their religion, they're disliked because they come in and take over the neighbourhood gas station/Seven Eleven/grocery store. Nobody really cares if they're hindu (or not), that's not why they're disliked, they're just foreigners moving in and getting all the good stuff - taking it so easily from natural born US citizens. The fact that they're "non-christian" (if, indeed they are, and some of them are not), is largely irrelevant or an additional reason not to like them, a justification for not liking them, not the primary reason.

"a justification for not liking them, not the primary reason."

I like my three Indian doctors; my GP, Neurologist, and Economist:)

In the case of Jews, their monotheism has long been offensive to pagans, from Pharaoh to Pope. The Greeks were offended by circumcision and abhorance of swine flesh and the Romans were offended by neglect of municipal Gods. All seemed offended by the Jews being able to survive and thrive in a world that hates them.

Well, that was part of my point...jews were almost universally disliked long before there were any christians around, so christianity was little more than a justifiable reason to carry on with the secular hate that had been directed towards them from the beginning of (biblical) time.

"All seemed offended by the Jews being able to survive and thrive in a world that hates them."

That's pretty much the reason why Americans hate all foreigners who come here and do good for themselves. I mean, really, Mexicans are even christian and most christians dislike them simply because they come over here and "steal" jobs from Americans.