_(english).jpg "Taking the Spiritual Dive")
_(english).jpg "Genetic Screening for Breast Cancer Genes")
_(english).jpg "When Bad Things Happen")
_(english).jpg "Judaism and the 12-Step Program")
+.jpg "Knowledge and Wisdom")
+.jpg "Moshe, Miriam and Prophecy")
+.jpg "Don't Give Up")
After celebrating their liberation from the ancient Egyptian yoke, Jews mark Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. The date was chosen to commemorate the revolt at the Warsaw Ghetto, an event in which a handful of Jews dared confront the all-powerful pharaoh. But the story of our brothers in the ghetto did not have a happy ending; the Red Sea did not open so that the pursued could escape, nor were their enemies smitten by divine hand. Instead, the few survivors from the hell that was the ghetto ended their lives in the vortex of death that was Treblinka.
The Warsaw Ghetto was one of the many ghettos the Germans established in various European cities. The ghettos were created with the sole purpose of keeping the Jewish population locked in to prevent them from having contact with their Christian neighbors. The Germans forced hundreds of hundreds of thousands of Jews to live packed in these places that would have normally held a tenth of the population.
The Jews from the ghetto, as well as those that still lived “free” in other cities, were forced to sew a yellow Star of David on their clothes so that the Christians could clearly identify them. The draconian anti-Jewish laws the Germans promulgated in 1935, followed by similar ones in Italy in 1938 and then in France, Slovakia, Hungary and other countries, prevented the Jews from socializing with Christians, holding public office or academic positions, working in professions such as law or medicine, as well as many other restrictions, including loss of citizenship. These laws constituted grave human rights violations and were the first steps in a gradual process of dehumanization of the Jews that made the subsequent genocide possible.
Where did the Germans get all these ideas? Which Machiavellian functionary thought of this? When the Nazis came to power in 1933 they discovered they did not need to invent almost anything in their persecution of the Jews, because the Catholic Church had invented practically everything hundreds of years before.
When Hitler came to power, he found that the population already deeply hated Jews.
The yellow badge in the garments, the prohibition to hold public office, the prohibition to have Christian employees, the burning of the Talmud, the prohibition of living next to Christians, the prohibition from belonging to guilds or work in industry, the ghettos, all these violations to basic human rights of Jews that we associate with the legislation of the Nazi tyranny was promulgated by the Catholic Church between 400 and 700 years before the Nazis. During almost two millennia Christians were taught that Christianity had replaced Judaism, and that Jews were evil, bent on the destruction of Christianity and that they were killers of Jesus.
So we should not be very surprised that when Hitler came to power, he found that the population already deeply hated Jews. That hatred had been planted and cultivated by Christianity since practically the beginning of the Christian movement in the first century of the Common Era. A verbal hatred that began as an intra-Jewish fraternal fight, with time and the distancing of the Early Christians from mainstream Judaism (as Christianity gained traction among the pagan peoples of the Roman Empire) it transformed itself in violent, visceral and irrational hatred.
The Christian movement accused Jews of killing Jesus and of rejecting his messianic mission. As a consequence, the Early Christians developed the concept of supersessionism in which Judaism was relegated to second plane as Christianity was replacing it. Christians believed at this time that God considered Christians the “New Israel” and the new “Chosen People.” They began calling the Christian Bible the “New” Testament and the Hebrew Bible the “Old” Testament, once again suggesting that the Jewish religion had become superfluous.
Despite oppression and hardship, the Jews did not disappear. This tenaciousness to survive and their continued refusal to accept Jesus as the Messiah led to an increase of Christian hatred toward Jews. The Church Fathers, whose writings make up the foundation of Christianity as we know it today, wrote about Jews in manner comparable to the Nazis. As St. Ambrose, known as the “Bishop with the Golden Tongue” said in 374 CE,
“The Jews are the most worthless of all men. They are lecherous, greedy, rapacious. They are perfidious murderers of Christ. They worship the Devil. Their religion is a sickness. The Jews are the odious assassins of Christ and for killing God there is no expiation possible, no indulgence or pardon. Christians may never cease vengeance, and the Jew must live in servitude forever. God always hated the Jews. It is essential that all Christians hate them.”1
Saint John Chrysostom, bishop of Antioch, was not that much better just a few years later:
“Where Christ-killers gather, the cross is ridiculed, God blasphemed, the father unacknowledged, the son insulted, the grace of the Spirit rejected. . . .If the Jewish rites are holy and venerable, our way of life must be false. But if our way is true, as indeed it is, theirs is fraudulent. I am not speaking of the Scriptures. Far from it!.. I am speaking of their present impiety and madness.”2
During the Middle Ages Christians began associating Jews with the Devil. This association was a natural one to make for a population already used to reading in the Gospels sentences like, “You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire.” Christian thinkers asked themselves what kind of creature would reject the truth and kill God, and concluded that only an inhuman agent of Satan could act that way. The descending spiral led many European Christians, most of whom had never even seen a Jew, to form a fantastic conception of them that had no basis in reality.
The Enlightenment transformed the Christian theological anti-Judaism into something modern, secular and pseudo-scientific.
The French Revolution brought about the Emancipation of the Jews, who quickly left the ghettos and in large part assimilated to the Christian population of the cities to which they moved. The Enlightenment transformed the Christian theological anti-Judaism into something modern, secular and pseudo-scientific, sine qua non prerequisites for a population that was rapidly adopting a modern worldview detached from the yoke of their religion. It’s in these cultural surroundings that anti-Semitism was transformed into something racial, and it’s in the 19th and 20th centuries that the old accusations of deicide, of poisoning wells, of bringing about the Black Death, of killing Christian boys to extract their blood to make matzah and many other baseless accusations were transformed into modern accusations in which Jews were blamed for Germany losing WWI, of creating and fomenting revolutions, of modernism, of Capitalism, of Communism, of inflation, of unemployment, and many more.
The Nazis inherited this conception of the Jew. Hitler was raised as a Catholic and imbibed the traditional anti-Jewish teachings in Christianity, and he took maximum advantage of them to promote his agenda. As he told two German Catholic bishops in 1933:
“The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them into ghettos, etc., because it recognized the Jews for what they were. . . . I am moving back toward the time in which a fifteen-hundred-year-long tradition was implemented. . . . I recognize the representatives of this race as pestilent for the state and for the church and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service for pushing them out of schools and public functions.”3
***
A Note from the Author: Antisemitism in Christianity and its role in the Holocaust
Thank you all for your comments. One important point to keep in mind is that this article does not describe modern Christians or Christianity. The focus of the article (and the book) is on the history of Christianity leading up to the Holocaust, particularly as it was in Europe. The Catholic Church convened the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s and among other things officially lifted the Christian accusation of deicide. But for those Christian readers who were raised after 1965, you should know that prior to that Christianity taught that Jews were Christ-killers, and that all the Jews of Jesus’ time, and for all time, were guilty of his death: ‘Let his blood be on us and on our children!’ (Matthew 27: 24-25). This brought untold misery on Jews during centuries of persecution. Christians were incensed by passion plays and Good Friday liturgy and went out on murderous rampages. The negative teachings about Jews were pervasive, starting with the New Testament (just the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles contain 450 antisemitic verses, an average of two per page!) and including the writings of the Church Fathers, Martin Luther and other Christian thinkers and theologians. Priests everywhere in Europe routinely disparaged the Jews through the centuries in their sermons, even during the Nazi era.
In other words, there’s a sad history wich runs deep and for a long time. Many of the perpetrators of the Holocaust saw first hand, or heard from their parents or grandparents about the ghettos the Church had instituted not in the name of Hitler but in the name of Jesus. Think about it: the walls of the Roman ghetto, literally across the Tiber from the Vatican, were destroyed for the last time in 1870!
Most Christians today do not harbor this hatred toward Jews. Many Christians helped Jews during WWII, but as good as that was, unfortunately it was a tiny drop in a giant ocean of violence toward Jews from other Christians. Many Christians today, particularly in the US, are friends of the Jews and of Israel. This is a good thing. It is my hope that through healthy discussion like this one, and through education about history as I tried to convey in my book Six Million Crucifixions, further links will be forged, and pre-existing ones will be strenghtened. Even with the great progress of Vatican II and its subsequent teachings, there’s still work to do to completely eliminate antisemitism from Christianity.
Based on the author's book, “Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Teachings About Jews Paved the Road to the Holocaust”.
- Quoted in Dagobert David Runes, The Jew and the Cross, p. 61.
- Quoted in Jeremy Cohen, “Robert Chazan’s ‘Medieval Anti-Semitism’: A Note on the Impact of Theology,” in Berger, ed., History and Hate, p.69.
- Akten deutscher Bischöfe, vol. 1, pp. 100-102. Quoted in Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, p. 47.
_(english).jpg "Understanding the Holocaust")
_(english).jpg "The Road to Neunburg")
(72) Rod, February 8, 2011 7:46 PM
Let's not today be decieved by Hitler and his people as the people of his time were. Hitler was no christian. He was definitively not religious, and if anything, his half baked ideology was rather pagan. He just used any means he could to gain the power he craved. It is true that martin Luther and other christians have been rabid anti-semites, but the true christian is not. There are depraved, greedy, power-hungry and criminals in all races and ethnic groups. Let's be careful not to continue to promote hatred of any kind. It will never do.
(71) Hubert Thomas/SRI LANKA, June 16, 2010 10:15 AM
Not all German Christians hated the precious Jews
I had the opportunity to spend three wonderful months with a German Christian family in NeuMuenster about 30 years ago. Otto Ruehling and his wife Lydia took me around many places-specially Schleshwig Holstein. Otto Ruehling's father had been a mayor in a city or town and they had helped save many Jews. He showed me a place near their former home where they had placed grave markers of Jews who were killed - to give them a place of remembrance. I do not remember the name of the city - but I very well remember they had arranged for a girl in a Dutch costume to explain the sights of the places in English to me -therefore the city or town must have been close to the Dutch border. (it had an old mint and the brick building was slanted in order to draw stuff from the road to the attic, also one street had houses with cannon balls stuck on the walls to remind them of some old day war). I am writing all this to say that even in the middle of hatred in Germany - there were Chistians who showed the love of Christ at the risk of their safety. Otto and Lydia Ruehling still live in Neumuenster. I visited Israel with my wife Kaushal about 4 years ago and we were taken to Yad Vashem and a place called the "Avenue of the Reighteous" where trees are planted in remembrance of those who helped the Jewish people during the war - I thought to myself Otto's name should be mentioned here - it is certainly NOT - because I beleive no one knows the deeds done by him and his family. Many who have been kind and helpful will remain silent, knowing they have fulfilled Christ's calling to love one another as He has loved us. Their reward is from Jesus who loves the precious Jewish people and those of other nations. I am a Chistian from Sri Lanka who beleives the Old Testament and the New Testament. There are many thing from Jewish customs which help me to undestand the Bible better- like the tassles in the shawl (called wings in the Jewish sense)
(70) Bill, June 6, 2010 3:02 PM
I believe St. John Chrysostom is called "The Golden Tongue" not St Ambrose.As a former Orthodox Christian in the Greek Church I sat through many liturgies named after him, and fully aware of his hatred for the Jews, I had to listen to these accusations many times during Holy Week, I could no longer continuing to do so. I have always been an admirer of the Jews and their faith, it is a subject that perplexes me to no end, why they draw so much hate? Please remember that their are good Christians who truly love the Jews and Israel, I believe they are the informed ones, and also their are many uninformed Jews who could care less about their faith and tradition, my brother in law is one, I find that sad that a Jew has a unique heritage to preserve and defend and could care less.
(69) Jack, June 3, 2010 5:43 PM
Taking their faith seriously
What I have found is that the Christians who seem to take their faith seriously don't necessarily listen to their various church fathers from throughout history. They seem to adhere to their New Testament and our Tenach. I mean I could be wrong but that has been my experience up-to-now. And if we judge them by a few bad apples instead of the vast majority of them, then we are giving everybody else the right to judge us by a few bad apples among us, like Bernie Madoff, the Stern Gang, Rahm Emanuel or David Berkowitz. There are quite a few others but those are the ones that appear off the top of my head. But just the same these people DO NOT represent us, they are just abberations to what our Scripture teach us just like those who murdered us and persecuted us in the name of Christ were either illiterate and couldn't read their own New Testament or they really did not bother to study it. If they had studied their holy book the New Testament, then they would have not only not persecuted us but much more they would have done everything in their power to save us from the likes of Hitler or Torquemada or Josef Stalin or some of the others through out history.
(68) Anonymous, May 18, 2010 5:26 PM
Who are Israel's biggest supporters?
As #64 states the protestants are the biggest supporters of Israel. If that was the case where were they during the holocaust? Where were they when the going gets rough with the Jewish people? Israel has existed for what 3000 years? And it's just recently, the last few decades that Evangelicals are fighting for the rights of Israel. Was it the christians trying to get the temple rebuilt after it was destroyed in 70 c.e.? Where were they then? Running around speaking against the Jewish faith and trying to get Jews to convert to christianity. Of course it's obvious Israel will be successful this time. What if it was doomed to fail? Where would you put your fight then? Just call the U.S. the New Jerusalem. Or Jerusalem in FL. We do not know who our friends are in times of prosperty. Everyone wants to be friends with the successful ones. It's during the bad times when you know who truly are your friends. A true friend will stick closier than a brother. The strongest supporters for Israel are the Jewish people. The strongest supporters of Israel, are the people that live there. What is the motive for a christian to support Israel? Is it because they think JC will return there? Is it because they want to make Jerusalem a christian place? They want Israel to be Christian? If someone was truly christian devoted to JC they wouldn't even want to study another religion that doesn't include him in the picture. Whether the author of the book is Jewish or not, he brings us the history of the church, how both churches has treated the Jewish people in history. You won't find this truth in your church history books. I've studied church history, it leaves out the cold facts. Protestants are quick to point a finger at the catholic church; when the finger can be pointed right back to them. In all actual facts a finger is pointed to both. Protestants has no right to think they are holier then catholic when it concerns the Jews. Both in history are guilty!