Christian Antisemitism and Interpretation of the Holocaust
I take issue with the article of Dr. Philip Rosen in the April 1995 edition of The Genocide Forum (1/8). He argues that the decisive factor of the Shoah was the racial ideology and he discounts the validity or necessity to "go deeply into Christian antisemitism as the engine that drove anti-Jewish persecution." The suggestion to ignore Christian antecedents will render the curriculum superficial. While the destruction of Europe's Jews was not carried out by Christian authorities or regimes, nevertheless, it would not have happened without two millennia of Christian reprobation — in word and deed — of the Jews and Judaism.
The exceptional power of antisemitism — its longevity, continuity, intensity — is traceable to 1) "deicide" — the unique accusation among world religions that a people is responsible for killing God, and 2) demonization, by which Jews, as agents of Satan, were accused of effecting limitless evil and destruction. The modern forms of such phobias, most notoriously embodied in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, are simply the secularization of medieval Christian stereotypes, transmitted in innumerable ways. The Middle Ages saw the formation of antisemitism as a lethal mode of hatred which, though it ebbed and flowed in intensity, had a continuous existence until its genocidal climax in the Shoah. This extreme form of Judaeophobia Gavin Langmuir has appropriately designated "chimeria," (as in chimera, unreal monsters, fantasies, delusions, etc.) and utilized to distinguish the types of antisemitism that are irrational and anti-empirical from anti-Judaism, which is no more than a dislike of Judaism or of Jews and comparable to anti-Catholicism or anti-Buddhism. Chimeria, a lapse into "illicit reification," depends upon a mentality that defies common sense, empirical evidence, tangible factors, and genuine witnesses, but, enveloped in subjectivity, is susceptible in literal extreme to allegory, myth, and symbol. In the Christian imagination, Jews, abetted by demonic powers, engaged in vile acts, including ritual murder, cannibalism, poisoning, and much else of the same tenor leading on to Christendom's destruction and Jewish domination of the world. These superhuman crimes also hinged on the Jews being identified as animals, the other side of a double dehumanization — supermen and subhumans.
The demonization of the Jews is, I think, the most fatal element in antisemitism and the quintessence of chimeria. It originates in the gospels where Jesus rebukes the Jews as children not of God but of the devil; dedicated to the devil's desires, they do not hear Jesus' word and are partisans of the lie (John 8:43–7; cf. Matthew 25:41). While there is much metaphorical play on the equation of Satan and the Jews in patristics and in later writings, it is not until the pivotal thirteenth century that these generally rhetorical flourishes became a formidable ideological conception transmuting the Jews into "the Counter-Incarnation." The image of the Jew as a standing menace, as kin and ally of the devil, armed with his super-human powers, was equated by Christians with everything they feared and hated. This image — given expression in art, literature, and folklore — became omnipresent in a world in which Satan was a real presence and fearful antagonist of God's rule and providence rather than a mere abstraction or vague symbol of evil.
Let us examine briefly some of the ingredients of the phantasmagoria of Satan and the Jews. The ritual crucifixion libel dates from mid-twelfth century England and hinged on the Jews' need to offer annual sacrifice to Satan with Christian blood; it was a rerun at the Easter-Passover season of the crucifixion and took definitive shape a century later with "Little St. Hugh of Lincoln," giving support to irrational beliefs and justifying murderous treatment of Jews from 1255 to Auschwitz. A parallel but distinct accusation stemmed from Fulda, Germany, in 1235, where the blood accusation, or ritual murder-cannibalism, made its debut: the Jews of the town were killed by a mob because they had supposedly killed the miller's five sons in order to siphon away their blood for religious sacrifice, a cordial offered to the devil, medicinal cure for "Jewish maladies," magical purposes, etc. And although popes prohibited and condemned accusations, and no single case of such ritual murder has ever been demonstrated, the chimera persisted and caused Jews to suffer massacre and expulsion, robbery and rapine well into the 20th century — the cult of "Blessed Simon of Trent" (1475) was not dismantled until 1965. A related allegation that Jews stole the communion wafer of the sacrament of the eucharist, either for magical and medicinal purposes or to mock Christian belief and ritual, dated from the 1290s and followed from a long tradition that the Jews and Satan together defiled all the sacraments, as they did holy water, blessed oils, crucifixes, biblical texts, indeed anything consecrated or sacred. This "body of Christ" Jews stoned, beat, stabbed, crucified, etc., causing the tortured host to cry out and "bleed" (probably a scarlet microbe that forms on stale bread kept in dark, damp places); for such "miracles" many Jews were killed and Jewish communities expelled over what for them was only unleavened bread. One of the host desecration shrines was in the Bavarian village of Deggendorf (1338), the scene of an annual antisemitic festival until 1992, when the bishop of Regensburg extinguished it and erected a plaque correcting this falsified history.
Christian chroniclers of these enormities make habitual reference to the Jews' "poison," highlighting a further motif of demonization. That Jews were bent on poisoning Christians — church councils warned against or forbade the faithful to buy foodstuffs from Jews, the "enemies who might perfidiously poison it" — was a long-standing charge, which came into its own in the calamitous fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The years 1315-17 saw a terrible famine in France in the aftermath of which the accusation emerged that Jews had, at Satan's command, conspired to poison the water supply to "the utter destruction of Christendom." The poison used included pulverized hosts, thus linking this new chimera to the host desecration phobia. The cycle was one of massacre of Jews, fear of revenge for the massacres, and the consequent manufacture of new accusations, followed by renewed massacres, the most harrowing examples occurring during the Black Plague of 1348-49 and after. Roving bands of flagellants — convinced that the Jews had confessed to plots "to kill and destroy the entire Christian faith," that they had poisoned food, wine, water, the very air, and had contrived to avert infection among themselves — carried out the greatest mass slaughter of Jews until the Holocaust. The arch-poisoner was the Jewish physician, against whom church councils warned, "for it is better to die than owe one's life to a Jew." "The devil can do much," Martin Luther averred in explaining Jewish medical capacity: "They know all that is known about medicine in Germany; they can give poison to a man of which he will die in an hour, or in ten or twenty years."
A corollary of the Jew as Satan's agent is the concept of the antichrist, an emanation of the devil characteristically equated with the messiah whom Jews awaited, for "if Jesus was the messiah, the only person for whom the Jews could be waiting . . . is the antichrist." He would reign for three and a half years of tribulation; he would "raise up Judaism again," making the Jews powerful enough to destroy Christendom; for, as a fourteenth-century theologian explained, antichrist, "with the help of Jewish money, would conquer the world in two and a half years." Variously, the antichrist was believed to be a Jew, the Wandering Jew, Satan, the son of a Jewish prostitute, etc. The Wandering (or Eternal) Jew is the archetype of a Jew present at the crucifixion and condemned by Jesus for injury and insult to wander the earth in anguish and misery until judgment day; in his agonies a paradigm of the Jewish people, the cosmic fugitive seeks but fails to find death or salvation by converting to Christianity!
Still another manifestation of this satanophany was the role ascribed to Jews as magicians or sorcerers and the many diabolic activities they were supposedly engaged in (necromancy, soothsaying, witchcraft, alchemy, astrology, and so on). Magic was the quintessential explanation for the prowess of Jewish physicians, and it was for occult purposes that Jews were accused of purloining communion hosts. Poisoning, too, was an undoubted art of the sorcerer. A principal reason for repeatedly burning the Talmud was the belief that it was a massive book of magic, an arsenal of weapons to the guileful Jews and source of danger to Christians. The same fate befell the mystical Kabbalah, taken equally to be a storehouse of magical powers and techniques. Hebrew was presumed to be the language of sorcery, and he who spoke Hebrew was feared as having supernatural powers, as the sorcerer supreme. The Jewish merchant or financier, the "usurer," was also feared as Satan's factotum and a practitioner of wizardry. According to popular tradition and ecclesiastical pronouncement, usury was the devil's invention, a heinous crime classified in canon law in the same category as heresy, arson, homicide, sorcery, etc. Shakespeare's Shylock, "the fiend who is . . . the devil himself" pursuing the pound of flesh in a variant of ritual murder, is quintessentially medieval: "Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnation."
Finally, to complete the circuit of their culpability, Jews as a fifth column conspiring with every possible enemy of Christendom litter the annals of medieval and early modern Europe. Judaism, talmudic rather than biblical, was defined as a "satanic law" in obedience to which Jews were obligated to inflict injury and destruction on Christians. Calamities and defeats, whatever their ostensible cause, were the work of "the devil . . . using his accustomed instruments, the Jews." In the thirteenth century the Mongols constituted a mortal danger to Christendom; to Christians the khan was both the herald of the antichrist and the hell-hound acknowledged by Jews to be "the son of David." They accused Jews of plotting to aid the Mongols with weapons and as spies, a tale told by the historian Matthew Paris, reporting vividly but chimerically on events for the year 1241. Similarly the Black Plague was attributed to a far-flung network of relentlessly conspiring Jews acting at the behest of Satan.
It will be seen that the Nazi-Hitlerite fixation with the Jews as a menace and highly organized race of negative supermen is a modern, secular version of the medieval demonized Jew. Hitler certainly spoke in medieval accents when he asserted, "The struggle for world domination will be fought between . .. Germans and Jews. We are God's people . . . Two worlds face one another — the men of God and the men of Satan!"; equally when he stated that "The Jews . . . invented capitalism. . . . an invention of genius, of the devil's own ingenuity," and much else in that vein. Irrational obsessions with mythical supermen is the most unexpected continuity between medieval phobias and the Holocaust. The continuity of medieval precedents with Hitler and Auschwitz is conveyed by Amos Funkenstein's pithy insight that in Nazi ideology "Jews were the hypostatized negation of sanity, creativity, health, and order, a secularized antichrist." Undoubtedly there came down to us from the Middle Ages what Nicolas Berdyaev designated, in a remarkable lecture of 1940, a "mystical fear of the Jews." Fear generates hatred and aggression, a sequence most notably seen by Curzio Malaparte, an Italian war correspondent who knew the Nazi death machine first hand: "That which drives the Germans to cruelty, to deeds most coldly, methodically and scientifically cruel, is fear. Fear of the oppressed, the defenseless, the weak, the sick; fear of women and of children, fear of the Jews."
The counterpart to demonization, effecting a unique double dehumanization, was the depiction of Jews in medieval iconography and theology as animals, as not really human beings, a distinction employed by German genocidists who gassed millions of Jews with a poison, Zyklon-B, developed for rodents and the fumigation of warehouse, ships, etc. As in Nazi propaganda, livestock metaphors abound in Christian polemic, such as St. John Chrysostom's use of goat, pig, horse, etc.: Jews, like a decrepit plough horse, are "marked for slaughter."
Transmitted rather than rejected by Reformation and Counter-Reformation thinkers and theologians (particularly Luther), this whole evil heritage was secularized and reinforced by the racial phobias and pseudo-science conjoined to the hypernationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: it was surely no accident that chimerical racial antipathy fastened on the same people as had the chimerical theological variety. If racism was so pre-eminent a factor in Hitler's mills of death, as Dr. Rosen's presentation urges, why was it not equally catastrophic for all "races" that Hitler had at his mercy? The answer can only be that they were not the subject of an age-old ideology of demonization, of a unique double dehumanization. Of the Slavic peoples captured by the millions in his invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler said "these people have but one justification for existence," namely "to be of use to us economically" as slave labor. There was no such justification for the Jews, on the contrary, there was a longstanding ideological justification for annihilation.
Thus the burden of Christian responsibility for Jewish suffering over the centuries is very great. The churches were transmitters rather than combatters of medieval myths, which endured and were modernized, and profoundly affected the thinking and feelings of the elites and the masses. When the test came, the churches were true to their religious traditions—with some exceptions, they failed to resist and fell among the bystanders who were indifferent to the victims or supportive of the perpetrators. Seven to ten million Jews were killed before the Holocaust, most under Christian auspices, and in one tabulation, half the Jews born in the last thousand years were murdered. In some respects, then, the story of these centuries reads like a prolonged, intermittent pogrom, a dress rehearsal.
Developments in Japan, the Axis partner, will confirm the view that the demonization of the Jews, and the consequent fear of them as a "menace" that had to be destroyed before they destroyed us, was the most decisive ideological antecedent of the Shoah. The Japanese had imported and swallowed every kind of antisemitism, and in its vilest form, such as Henry Ford's version of the Protocols, his International Jew, which was of particular significance to them. But for all the chimeria and rabid rhetoric, and coached as they were by Nazi preceptors, Japanese antisemites never ceased to regard the Jews as human beings. Jews were neither demoted to animaldom as goats, swine, vermin, bacilli, etc., nor demonized as a superhuman enemy, negative supermen, etc. Thus Japanese policy could be rational and pragmatic if also farfetched, rather than irrational and paranoid. As one of the Japanese "experts on the Jews" explained in a 1940 memorandum, "Is a Jewish problem fearful as alleged by the anti-Jewists? No; there is nothing to be afraid of . . . [The danger abides] only in [the] society of Western individualism where a strong religious prejudice exists but in Japan . . . does not exist. In Japan . . . we treat the Jews without any . . . religious prejudice . . ." Thus while Japanese "racism" was notorious in causing the death of many millions of people, and Japan's was an army of "mass murderers, mass rapists, mass arsonists, mass torturers" of POWs and civilians in China, Korea, the Philippines, in what is now Indonesia, and elsewhere; while Japanese civil and military authorities inflicted the most appalling kind of slave labor and medical experiments on Asians and white Westerners alike, they sought to "befriend" and "ally" themselves with "international Jewry" in order to "use" the presumed Jewish power, wealth, and influence in attaining Japan's imperial ambitions, to enlist "the immeasurable golden power of [Jewish] control over the financial, political and industrial worlds." Plans and proposals were drawn up to settle, variously, 18,000 to 900,000 European Jews in China, a "Manchurian Israel," in the Shanghai area, Korea, and elsewhere. Little came of these grandiose designs; but approximately 60,000 European Jews (some 18,000 in Shanghai) found refuge in Japanese domains, and there were no massacres or persecutions of Jews in that brutal and persecutory empire. We are, therefore, brought to the conclusion, first, that in Japan there was no demonization or dehumanization, no irrational fear, hence no "warrant for genocide" of the Jews; second, that the Holocaust is inconceivable in Hitler's Europe apart from the ancient Christian tradition by which the Jew was endowed with superhuman power and identified with Satan, the Anti-Christ, the eternally wandering and plotting Jew, and so forth.
This judgment finds confirmation in a paper on the Holocaust presented recently by R.J. Rummel at a conference on "The Other" at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in June 1995. He concluded that demonization is "a necessary preliminary" and "an intrinsic part of the process of genocide"; this phenomenon he contrasts with "democide," which he defines as large scale massacres which, in the absence of demonization, fall short of the genocidal intention of destroying a people to the last man, woman, and child as was the aim of Nazi Germany with regard to the Jews and probably the Romany and Sinti (Gypsies). The Japanese example suggests that the Christian image and myth of the Jew are not transferable to non-Christian societies and civilizations. Islamic societies (in many of which the Protocols, blood accusation, and much else of Christian provenance thrive) are not an exception given Islam's Judaeo-Christian inheritance and the conduit afforded by the Christian Arabs.
It cannot be helped that Christian Judaeophobia, an inordinately complex subject, is basic for an understanding of the Holocaust. To follow Dr. Rosen's prescription and confine the inquiry to racism is both intellectually and morally easy (who in his right mind would defend racism?). But to sort out from what may be one's own religious tradition its disposition for evil and to acknowledge its degree of responsibility for human suffering takes moral courage. Yet, unless historians and teachers reckon with that baleful heritage, we shall have only a shallow understanding of the Shoah and run the risk of giving support to complacency and indifference.
Frederick M. Schweitzer
History Department, Manhattan College
Nota Bene: The Genocide Forum at One (1994-5)
A Brief Retrospective
The Genocide Forum was launched with two goals in mind: 1) to encourage comparative analysis of genocides, in the hope of contextualizing Holocaust Studies and furthering the depth of understanding of other genocides before and after the Final Solution; and 2) to stimulate a broader dialogue among scholars and teachers involved in Genocide Studies. After one short year, both goals have been modestly served (in the light of high hopes), and surprisingly attained (from the vantage point of low initial expectations).
Since September 1994 and August 1995, there have been 10 issues (18 articles). The address list has grown rapidly from under 300 to over 850. No week passes without requests from individuals and libraries for complete sets, back issues, and placement on the mailing list: that is satisfying. However there have been, so far, only six articles submitted by readers: that is not.
The mail has grown, virtually all of of it encouraging and supportive. It has come from as far as Israel (to be expected), from Ukraine (not expected), from Moscow (surprising) and Hiroshima (very moving). Closer to home, many letters expressing interest and providing useful advice and valuable suggestions have come from a whole spectrum of people, to whom we express a collective thank you, hoping their interest will soon translate into contributions.
Letters of strong dissent (three) or of constructive criticism (a sizeable handful) must also be acknowledged.
Dissent came from a highly prestigious administrator of a museum, in part more ad hominem and self-serving than enlightening intellectual engagement. The essay prompting the correspondence was in Year 1, No.6, "Holocaust and the Homosexual Question." The substantive objections focused on a peripheral matter in the essay, but centered on fundamental philosophical issues having to do with the interpretation of administrative policy for which the writer was taken to task and asked to retract, though no information was provided to justify such a change of conclusion. Nevertheless, better to have responses than none at all! In this case, the exchange does contain the germs of an on-going issue to be discussed in a future Forum to be entitled "Museums: Holocaust and Dinosaurs" which, we hope, will indeed stimulate a wide range of views.
More important is a clutch of most interesting letters generated by the article "The Myth of Liberation" (Year 1, No 3). They fell into two even groups: those by survivors of the camps and those by veterans of World War II who witnessed the camps. Revealingly, the letters from survivors agreed in principle with the main points of the article, many appreciating its corrective effect. As for the letters from veterans, without exception, they, understandably (and predictably), expressed profound resentment at their reclassification or demotion from Liberators to liberators. Deep personal pain marked the letters of both survivors (with their excruciating memories) and of veterans (with their poignant recollections). I thank them all for taking the trouble to communicate and enrich discussion of a controversy that is only just being confronted, honestly and openly.
We now look forward to Year Two (and beyond), exhorting you, the reader, to share thoughts as scholars and/or teachers. The Genocide Forum was neither conceived nor designed as a solo event. Initial monologue must become dialogue soon.
Henry R. Huttenbach