“It feels sinful to me to sleep in a warm bed when my dearest friends have been killed or have collapsed from exhaustion somewhere far away in the cold night. I tremble when I think of those close friends of mine who have now fallen into the hands of the most brutal savages on earth. And all because we are Jews!” Anne Frank, diary entry, Thursday, November 19, 1942
Exploring the history of Judaism and the persecution of Jews reveals one of the most insane phases of Europe’s recent history. The result was the cold-blooded and bureaucratically efficient mass murder of approximately 6 million Jews. To top it all off, it was done legally.
For us, looking back on these events many decades later, there is no need to prove or explain that Hitler was wrong. The word “wrong” does not even do justice to the scale of his crimes. The fact that we do not need to prove the nature of Hitler’s evil raises the question: why was this not obvious in Hitler’s Germany?
In the early 20th century, Germany was a leading nation in the fields of the arts, architecture, theater, and film. Berlin was a true cultural hub in the 1920s. German universities were among the best in the world.
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Germany was known for its world-famous physicists such as Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg. When Adolf Hitler came to power, 97 percent of Germans considered themselves Christian, two-thirds of whom were Protestant and one-third Catholic.
What on earth had happened in people’s minds to make the mass extermination of Jews seem acceptable? What makes the matter even more shocking is that the genocide was carried out in a civilized and highly educated Christian Europe.
Doris L. Bergen, associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA), offers a sharp analysis in her book Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust:
“As Elie Wiesel has said, not all victims of the Holocaust were Jews, but all Jews were victims. The mirror image of this is also true. Not all Christians stood idly by or participated in the atrocities, but all those who stood by and participated were Christians. Of course, not all of them were examples of genuine, personal, living faith. But just as surely, not all of the murdered Jews were necessarily practicing their faith or even members of the Jewish community. Likewise, those who carried out the Holocaust were Christians in the sense that they had been raised in homes, schools, and churches where the Christian Bible was read and taught, where the birth and death of Jesus marked the high points of the year, and where the Lord’s Prayer and Christian hymns were as familiar as the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.” (p. 109)
Robert P. Ericksen notes in his book Complicity in the Holocaust – Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany: “We understand the Holocaust best when we acknowledge the role of the university system and the church, and accept that those who were guilty of it were people just like ourselves.”
There is certainly no single path leading to the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism and hostility toward Jews have a long history in Europe, and its influence cannot be overlooked. But the traces of the Holocaust lead, at least in part, to the academic world of the 1700s and 1800s and to changes that occurred in theological thought as well.
Eero Kuparinen, in his book From Alexandria to Auschwitz, demonstrates how the rise of modern, biological anti-Semitism in the 1870s was partly “influenced by the efforts of many theologians and philosophers of religion to reinterpret Christianity. These thinkers were offended by the fact that Christianity was regarded as the heir to Judaism, and they wanted to define the truth of Christianity in a new way” (Kuparinen, p. 149). Johann Semler (1725–91), Johann G. Fichte (1862–1814), and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) were among those who, according to Kuparinen, sought to tie Christianity to Western culture, Indo-European identity, and a specific human species.
Similarly, they also sought to define Judaism as an anthropological category, a characteristic associated with a specific human race. In connection with this development, Schleiermacher denied the Old Testament’s theological significance for the Christian faith. Anyone who has taken basic courses in the theology department recognizes the names Fichte and Schleiermacher. The latter, in particular, is widely regarded as the father of so-called liberal theological thought.
Alongside the anthropologization of Christianity and Judaism in the 19th century, trends emerged in German academia that signaled a fundamental break with the revelatory nature of the Bible. Julius Wellhausen presented his famous source theory regarding the origin of the Books of Moses in the late 1870s: The collection, pieced together from four conflicting sources (J.D.E.P.) after the Exile, was not written by Moses. Therefore, the Old Testament could not, in any meaningful sense, be the word of God. According to Wellhausen, its origin represented “Jewish decadence.” The entire early history of Israel was an ahistorical myth created to serve the national and religious situation following the exile. Wellhausen, together with his influential colleague Herman Gunkel (1862–1932), regarded the patriarchal narratives as fairy tales. Wellhausen later resigned from his position as professor of theology because he believed his teachings rendered his students unfit for church service.
Noteworthy is the late Finnish Old Testament professor Timo Veijola’s account of the developments within the history of religion school that followed in Wellhausen’s footsteps, which in part culminated in the great Babel und Bibel controversy in the early 20th century. At that time, Friedrich Delitzsch, one of the founding figures of Assyriology, declared talks about the revelatory nature of the Old Testament to be baseless. He regarded the Old Testament as a fraud and (unsurprisingly) wanted to replace it with Germanic heroic tales (!):
“In his famous lecture ‘Babel und Bibel,’ which he delivered in Berlin on February 13, 1902, in the presence of Emperor Wilhelm II, Delitzsch declared that the Old Testament is nothing more than a poor-quality copy of Babylonian culture and devoid of any revelatory value. Delitzsch went even further, branding the entire Old Testament a ‘great deception’ and wanting to replace it with German heroic tales … The controversy surrounding Delitzsch himself caused him to develop in an even more radical direction. A shocking document of his development is the two-volume work *Die grosse Täuschung*, published in its final form a year before his death, which is, without exaggeration, a direct slander of the Old Testament and its religion in the spirit of anti-Semitism… Jesus himself—whom Delitzsch assumes to have been of Aryan descent—frees us from the shackles of Old Testament Judaism. The conclusion is that “the books of the Old Testament, from Genesis to Daniel, have absolutely no religious significance for us living today, especially not for us Christians.” To support his position, Delitzsch refers to Goethe and Schleiermacher and finally invokes the doctrine of Jesus’ love. There is no need to go into detail about how Delitzsch’s “great deception” was met. The subsequent course of history provides a sufficiently clear answer as to how beneficial it was to replace the Old Testament with Germanic paganism.” (Veijola: Old Testament Research and Theology, Gummerus Oy 2003, pp. 32, 44–45)
In the same book, Veijola refers to another leading figure in German liberal theology, Rudolf Bultmann, who in an article published in 1933 (the year Hitler came to power) stated in an article that “the Old Testament as such is not the word of God to us, nor is the history of Israel in general any revelation to us…” (Veijola, p. 64).
How, then, was the genocide of the Jewish people in Christian Europe possible? The perpetrators and bystanders of the genocide had grown up in Christian homes, where German “scientific biblical scholarship” had convinced them that the Jews had no revelation from God and that the nation’s roots and ancient history as God’s people were entirely fabricated! Israel and the Jews were not God’s people. As the scholars taught, so the people followed: Europe was ready to be “liberated from the shackles of Judaism.”
The genocide of the Jewish people can be considered the culmination of Europe’s anti-Semitic history up to that point. It was made possible by the indifference that had taken root at various levels of society. Although the church never officially endorsed direct violence in principle, even its highest leadership saw no problem with marginalizing Jews from the economic life of society, restricting their civil rights, and driving them into ghettos.
The German liberal theological interpretation of Christianity could very well coexist in harmony with age-old stereotypes (Jewish greed, baseless tales of the ritual murder of Christian children, the desecration of communion wafers, and aspirations for world domination).
Once the significance of the Jewish people’s sacred texts as divine revelation had been undermined, and the people’s early history branded as a “great deception,” there was no sufficient ideological, moral, or spiritual counterforce in Christian Europe to oppose Hitler’s ambitions. “The Jewish question” was on everyone’s lips long before Hitler’s rise to power.
It is therefore not insignificant what kind of understanding we have of the Bible as God’s revelation and of Israel’s position as God’s people. The history of the persecution of the Jews shows that what we believe and how we believe matters. It is interesting that Israel’s and the Jewish people’s strongest friends and supporters are found today among those Christian circles that also hold the Bible in high regard as the Word of God.
On this day of remembrance, we must not forget history so that it does not repeat itself. The first thing we must not forget, however, is God’s Word and the history of the Jewish people recorded therein.
Pasi Turunen is a Finnish author, theologian and Christian radio-broadcaster and president of Patmos Foundation.