The history of Christian relationships with the Jews has both its bright spots and its dark corners.
Today was Holocaust Remembrance Day (or Yom HaShoah in colloquial Hebrew). On this day, Jews do not have a uniform ritual for memorializing those who died as part of the Nazi genocide. The observance was established too recently (inaugurated only in 1951), for any genuine tradition to have developed. Jews marked the occasion in different ways today. I have even less sense of what I should do, but I decided this morning to wear my kippeh (yarmulke) to work as a sign of solidarity with my Jewish brothers and sisters. It gave me a number of opportunities to remind my Christian coworkers of today's significance.
The key issue Christians face is trying to grasp the degree of Christian responsibility for the Nazi genocide. Clearly, many German Christians were utterly complicit, but certainly not all. Clearly, there are cultural links between this history of Christian anti-Semitism and Nazi anti-Semitism. But there is more to the story than that.
Here are three things to remember and to help us have a balanced, accurate view of Christians' relationship to this great horror.
First, not all German Christians collaborated or quietly stood by. German Christians are counted among the ranks of the righteous Gentiles who resisted and protected Jewish lives. The most famous is, of course, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (See Christian History issue 32 for a full exploration of his heroism. And if you want to investigate the topic of righteous Gentiles even more, try to find a copy of the 1994 book by former CT columnist David Gushee, Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust: A Christian Reflection.) The stories of righteous Gentiles display how the fundamental Christian command to love our neighbors as ourselves motivated many to take great personal risks.
Second, Christian anti-Semitism was historically different in several key ways from Nazi anti-Semitism. One of those ways is the distinction between placing an accent on race (as the Nazis did) or on religious identity (as the medieval church did). Even in the church's teaching of contempt, the focus was on the spiritual blindness of Jews who refused to recognize what God was doing in Jesus of Nazareth. Baptism and conversion (and thus a changed religious identity) were always open doors for Jews who wished to escape prejudice and oppression. For a more detailed list of such contrasts, see my 1998 National Review essay about the Washington, DC, Holocaust Memorial Museum's handling of the topic. Also, my 1998 Christianity Today editorial, "Did Christianity Cause the Holocaust."
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Third, without Christian activism, there would not be a Jewish homeland today. More to come on that in a few weeks when Christian History will publish the story of British Christians who wanted to show their love for the Jewish people in marked distinction from the history of medieval Christianity and its teaching contempt for the Jews. (These British Christians saw their efforts on behalf of the Jews as part of their Protestant departure from historic Catholicism.) They were responsible for the British government's 1917 Balfour Declaration, which laid the foreign policy and legal groundwork for the eventual establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In that forthcoming article, Donald Lewis of Regent College reports: "Seven of the ten members of the war cabinet that issued the declaration were from evangelical homes; six of the seven were from Calvinist backgrounds, including Balfour (the foreign minister) and Prime Minister David Lloyd George."
So on Holocaust Remembrance Day, please recall that the history of Christian relationships with Jews has both its bright spots and its dark corners. We bear the shame of our fellow Christians whose long teaching of contempt toward the Jews and whose complicity with Nazi policies led to the deaths of millions. But we also claim as our own the righteous Gentiles who stood up to the horror and the Christians who laid the foundations for a Jewish homeland. Today, we honor them.
Cross-posted from the Christian History Blog.
Posted by David Neff on April 21, 2009 9:03PM
Comments
Completely unbelievable! On Holocaust Remembrance Day you decide to put up an apologia of "Christian" anti-semitism and how it wasn't as bad as Nazi anti-semitism? At least Christians gave Jews the right to convert and escape the oppression? Perhaps they could avoid death that way, but forced conversion isn't so much an escape from oppression as it is proof of the extent of the oppression.
Perhaps there is some scholarly article to be written comparing and contrasting Hitler and Torquemada, but today, on the Day of Remembrance, is the day to stand in solidarity with our Jewish brothers and sisters, without equivocation, and say "never again," not the time to worry (as in your National Review article) that some nuance of a phrase used at the Holocaust Museum might be perceived as critical of Christianity. Good grief! This article makes me sick to my stomach.
So, this week, when the extent of the depravity of the Bush Administration's torture memos is revealed, CT gives us the "mainstreaming" of a slavery apologist and the hair-splitting of an anti-semitism apologist, and the babbling of an anti-gay marriage beauty queen, but nothing on the (im)morality of torture. Unbelievable.
Posted by: Christian Lawyer at April 21, 2009
Regretfully, I agree wholeheartedly with Christian Lawyer's comment. It seems a serious lapse of judgment.
Posted by: drjay1941 at April 22, 2009
I didn't read all the linked articles, so I can't speak completely to the concerns posted above from ChristianLawyer. I appreciated your note to the Christian readers of this blog of the Day of Remembrance. I think, however, that it could have been a much better article had the author focused on the meaning of the day and its functions as a way to honor the lost and as a prompt to the world to avoid future genocides.
So, for me, the later paragraphs dampened the beauty of the first. I was happily surprised to see mention of Yom ha Shoah and impressed by the thought involved in donning a kippeh in honor of the day. But, that pleasure was dimmed by the emphasis on the work of Christians against the Holocaust and in favor of creating the modern State of Israel.
Couldn't we just join with our Jewish extended theological family in support of Remembrance, with links to other topics as a tangential aside, if, indeed, they are truly necessary?
Posted by: LawGirl at April 22, 2009
There is no denying the atrocity of the Holocaust. But we didn't learn from that blight upon human history. We continue with mass killings and genocide. How about the American Holocaust? Here again, Christians must seek God's forgiveness.
Posted by: Fr.Ian Yorston at April 28, 2009
I agree that David too lightly dismisses the broad continuity between Christian and Nazi anti-Semitism - the diferences in definition, religious or racial, only affected a tiny percentage of Jews, the rest were Jewish under both definitions. I might add that, having written a book, "The roles of the European Churches in the Holocaust", I have been unable for 4 years to find a Christian publishing house who would publish it. While the churches fought to defend those they no longer considered to be Jews, why did they not fight equally hard to defend their neighbours, as Jesus commanded? We need to be more serious about confessing our own sins.
Colin Barnes
Posted by: Colin Barnes at May 8, 2009
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