Without the long, ugly history of Christian anti-Semitism, the Holocaust would never have occurred.
Maybe so. Many so-called “Christians” and “Christian” leaders helped pave the way for the demonic and destructive atmosphere of the Holocaust, although it is important to remember that no church leader in history ever advocated exterminating Jews, that no church leader in history ever attempted to wipe out the Jewish people, that the church’s historic anti-Judaism bore no resemblance to Hitler’s racial anti-Semitism, and that the Holocaust itself was anti-Christian in every sense of the word.
Still, there is blood on the hands of all anti-Semitic leaders who claimed to be Christians, and to this day, sincere Christians around the world agonize over the things that were done to the Jewish people by Nazis, communists, and other Jew-haters. As Jews, however, we have a different kind of soul-searching to do, since we must ask ourselves why such calamities overtook us if we were in good standing with God as a people. Why, in fact, was there a Holocaust? This is the real question that needs to be answered.
I’m not going to spend a lot of time arguing this point with you because, for the most part, I agree with you. 222 Where we differ is over the definition of who is a Christian and what is the church, as well as over the question of whether the New Testament itself is actually anti-Semitic. As we have stated previously (2.6–2.7), the true Christians during the Holocaust were the ones who rescued and helped Jews, not the ones who rounded up and hunted Jews.
And the true church—in history and during the Holocaust—has often been marked by a special love for Israel, not a special hatred for our people. As for the New Testament, we have seen that it is no more open to the charge of anti-Semitism than is the Hebrew Bible. 223 Regarding the subsequent, anti-Judaic sentiments in early church writings, we have properly observed that such rhetoric “was in no way similar to nor has it directly been responsible for the racial anti-Semitism of this century that formed the rationale for the Holocaust of the 1930s and 1940s.” 224
In fact, in 1937, Pope Pius XI ordered that his encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (German for “With searing anxiety”) be read from every Catholic pulpit in Germany. The document, which was smuggled into the country and caught the Nazis completely off guard, condemned Nazism “as fundamentally racist and anti-Christian.” 225 As a result, the Nazi leadership “was infuriated and intensified its persecution of the [Catholic] Church and especially of its priests.” 226
I think you also need to come to grips with the fact that Messianic Jews in Europe—even if they were only one-quarter Jewish (meaning that only one of their grandparents was Jewish)—were slaughtered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. They too suffered the murderous madness of these killers, and the fact that they believed in Jesus and attended church did not change their lot one bit.
This reminds us that the Holocaust was in no sense of the word “Christian.” You could just as well say that Joseph Stalin was a God-fearing Jew as you could say that anything about the Holocaust was Christian.
The question that must be asked is why God allowed (or ordained?) millions of our people to die cruel deaths at the hands of the Nazis. Of course, that devastating and overwhelming question is, strictly speaking, outside the parameters of this book, and it deserves thousands of pages of in-depth, gut-wrenching, soul-stretching discussion. Still, I think it would be good for us to consider some religious Jewish responses to the Holocaust and compare them with some Christian reflections. We’ll do this in the next answer.
222 It was Raul Hillberg, one of the foremost historians of the Holocaust, who pointed out that most of the anti-Jewish measures passed by the Nazis (with the exception of the plan to exterminate our people) had their parallels in earlier church legislation. See his classic study, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985).
223 Lillian Freudman expressed the views of many Jews when she made reference to “nineteen-and-a-half centuries of Jewish suffering and the martyrdom of millions of Jews sacrificed on the altar of Christian antisemitism”; see her Antisemitism in the New Testament, xii. Of course, one might ask what Jewish suffering she was referring to that dated back to the mid first century of this era, as well as what relationship that alleged suffering had with Christianity, since it was the followers of Jesus who were being persecuted at that time.
It would also be fair to ask how accurately Nazi altars of death can be described as “Christian.” This illustrates how passionately our people feel about the subject of “Christian” anti-Semitism, even to the point of making exaggerated and unsupportable statements in the preface of what attempts to be a scholarly, careful study.
224 Lee Martin McDonald, in Evans and Hagner, Anti-Semitism and Early Christianity, 225, with reference to Simon, Verus Israel, 397–402. Although Simon documented in detail the early history of “Christian” anti-Semitism and was eminently aware of its development right up until this century, he still states: “But to argue from this that the Church must bear the essential responsibility, even though it be an indirect responsibility, for the Nazi atrocities, or to see the gas chambers of Auschwitz as the natural result of the Church’s teaching—this is to take a step that the historian will hesitate to regard as legitimate. It seems hardly likely, on a priori grounds, that in an age as secularized as ours, and even more so, under a regime as utterly hostile to Christian ideas as that of the Nazis, it should be the theological components of anti-Semitism that are the determining factors in it.” He adds, “It must not be forgotten, when the attempt is made to connect the Nazis’ anti-Jewish persecutions too closely with Christian teaching, that the Jewish massacre was not the only example of genocide engaged in by the Third Reich. Other ‘inferior’ races and malefactors were hunted down by the Nazis in the name of the same biological principle; the Gypsies for example” (397–98). Finally, Simon notes that, “From the Church’s point of view, at any period, a Jew was characterized by his religion. If he was converted, he ceased to be a Jew [of course, this view was one of the errors of the church], and the ultimate aim was just that, the conversion of Israel… . For Hitler’s anti-Semites, a Jew turned Christian was still a Jew, because a Jew was characterized by his race, and it was neither desirable nor possible to change his ethnic characteristics. Total extermination was the only solution. This, in my opinion, marks a fundamental difference that forbids us to establish any very definite or close connecting link or continuity between the two” (398).
225 Richard P. McBrien, Lives of the Popes (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 362.
226 Ibid. As to the question of why Pius XII, the next pope, was not more outspoken against the Nazis, see the fair discussion in ibid., 364–65. More broadly, cf. Klaus Scholder, A Requiem for Hitler: And Other New Perspectives on the German Church Struggle (Philadelphia: Trinity Press, 1989).
Brown, M. L. (2000). Answering Jewish objections to Jesus, Volume 1: General and historical objections. (175). Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books.