Understanding the Holocaust

An Introduction

Dan Cohn-Sherbok

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780826454522
• eBook ISBN: 9781472535191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What is the Holocaust? Were Hitler and his executioners sadistic psychopaths? Were ordinary Germans morally culpable for murdering millions of innocent victims? This volume seeks to explore these and other ethical, cultural, and religious questions within a historical context. Beginning with the origin and growth of anti-Semitism, the book continues with a detailed account of the various stages of Nazi onslaught and concludes with a consideration of the legacy of the Holocaust in the modern world.Designed as a work for students in colleges and universities as well as the general reader, the volume contains 26 chapters which deal with a particular period. This is followed by discussion of the implication of the events of the Holocaust. Unlike other books on the subject, this study contains both a history of the Holocaust and extensive reflections about social, religious, and moral issues raised by the emergence of the Third Reich and its impact on subsequent history.Contains maps and illustrations related to the growth and development of Nazism and a lengthy bibliography for further study.

1. The history of anti-Semitism

For thousands of years Jews have been persecuted and murdered: arguably anti-Semitism is humanity’s longest hatred. Given such widespread antipathy, the Holocaust should not be seen as a modern aberration, but rather the last link in a long chain of history stretching back to ancient times. The German onslaught against the Jews is a catastrophe that might well have been predicted.

The origin and growth of anti-Jewish hostility

The long history of such Judaeophobia begins in the Graeco-Roman world. Living among pagans, both Jews and Judaism were subject to persecution and discrimination. Living in a Hellenistic culture, the typical view was that anything non-Greek was barbaric. Hence the Jewish tradition was viewed with suspicion and contempt. Later when Christianity emerged as a dominant force in the ancient world, Jews came to be regarded as contemptible and demonic. In its advocacy of anti-Jewish attitudes, the Church drew upon Hellenistic ideas.

Continuing this tradition of hostility to Jewry, the early Church believed itself to be the authentic heir to the promises given by God in Scripture. Jesus’ messiahship ushered in a new era in which the true Israel would become a light to the nations. Such a vision of the Christian community evoked hostility against Jewry, who were viewed as apostate and unrepentant. Such hatred was fuelled by the Gospel writers who depicted Jesus attacking the leaders of the Jewish nation. The Church taught that what is now required is circumcision of the heart rather than obedience to the law. In proclaiming his message, Paul emphasized that the Jewish nation had been rejected by God, and the new covenant had taken the place of the old.

Following New Testament teaching, the Church Fathers evolved an Adversos Judaeos tradition which vilified Jewry. According to the writers, the Jewish community is lawless and dissolute. For this reason all future divine promises apply only to the Church. It is the Church who constitute the elect, rather than the Jewish people. Appealing to Scripture, the Fathers sought to demonstrate that the conflict between the Church and the Synagogue was prefigured in Scripture. Separated from the Christian message of salvation, the Jews were rejected and are subject to God’s wrath. Destined to wander in exile, they find no peace on earth.

The tradition of anti-Semitism created by the Fathers of the Church continued into the Middle Ages. During the centuries of the Crusades, Jews were killed throughout Western Europe. During this period a number of charges were levelled at the Jewish nation. Repeatedly Jews were accused of murdering Christian children to incorporate their blood into unleavened bread for Passover; such allegations of ritual murder spread from country to country and Jews were victimized for supposedly condoning such atrocious deeds. Jews were also accused of blaspheming the Christian faith in their sacred literature, and as a consequence copies of the Talmud were burned. In addition, the Jewish population was accused of bringing about the Black Plague by poisoning wells.

During this period the stereotype of the demonic Jew became part of Western culture. Repeatedly Jews were accused of possessing attributes of both the Devil and witches. As the personification of evil, they were relegated to a sub-species of the human race. In addition Jews were perceived as magicians, able to work magic against the Christian community. This belief served as the basis for the charge that Jews desecrated the Host and committed acts of ritual murder. In the wake of these allegations, the masses attacked Jews in their pursuit of the demons, and in this onslaught thousands of innocent victims lost their lives.

In the post-medieval period such attitudes were perpetuated throughout Western Europe. Although the Jewish community was expelled from France in the fourteenth century, negative images of Jews continued to play a role in French culture. Catechisms, lives of Jews and canticles portrayed the Jewish people as tools of Satan. Further, tracts abounded which denounced the Jews in terms reminiscent of the Middle Ages. In England, Jews were vilified even though the Jewish nation was expelled in 1290. German Jews were also regarded with contempt – such hostility was powerfully expressed in Martin Luther’s Against the Jews and their Lies. Such publications were followed by a wide range of tracts which denigrated both Judaism and the Jewish people.

Although Spanish Jewry flourished during the Middle Ages, Jews eventually came to be regarded with suspicion and contempt. Measures were taken against the Jewish population, and as a result many Jews embraced the Christian faith to escape attack. Such apostasy, as well as the Christian onslaught on Jewry, led to the decline of the Jewish communities, a trend which was resisted by Jewish leaders. During the fifteenth century the Church initiated a new form of Jewish persecution. The Inquisition was established to purge conversos or New Christians – Jewish converts to Christianity as opposed to Old Christians of pure blood – who were suspected of practising Jewish customs. Tribunals were created throughout Spain which applied torture to extract confessions from the guilty. Those who refused to confess were cast into the flames. Finally at the end of the century, an Edict of Expulsion was enacted to rid the country of the Jewish race.

When the Inquisition intensified its efforts to root out Christian heresy in Spain, Marranos (Jewish converts to Christianity) fled to other countries for safety from their Christian persecutors. Many sought refuge in Portugal, where they led a Christian way of life while observing Jewish practices. Following Spanish precedent, the Portuguese Inquisition was established in the next century and sought to discover Marranos. Other Marranos were driven to find homes in other lands. Both Turkey and Salonica constituted Marrano refuges from Christian oppression. Others went to Antwerp, Venice, Ancona and Bordeaux. In the next century Marranos settled in Amsterdam, Hamburg and London. Although in these centres conversos returned to Judaism, they nonetheless retained many of their former cultural characteristics. Some Marranos, however, broke away from traditional Judaism, and advanced heterodox religious opinions which unintentionally became the basis of further Christian anti-Semitism in later centuries.

Unlike their co-religionists in Western Europe, Jews in Poland enjoyed considerable tolerance and were granted numerous privileges. They were not confined to ghettos, nor restricted in their occupations. Under such conditions, the Jewish community created an elaborate form of local and national self-government, and rabbinic scholarship reached great heights. Yet despite such general prosperity, the country was subject to Christian anti-Jewish hostility in the late medieval period, and in the seventeenth century Polish Jewry was massacred by Cossacks under Bogdan Chmielnicki. In the wake of this Christian onslaught, the Hasidic movement encouraged religious pietism, but was severely criticized by the traditional rabbinical establishment. As the community was torn by this conflict, attacks were directed against the Jewish population by Gentiles. Such hostility in Poland was paralleled in Russia. Initially Jews were prevented from settling in the country, and with the annexation of Polish territories to Russia in the nineteenth century, Jews were viewed by Christians with suspicion and contempt and eventually expelled from the villages where they resided.

During the early modern period the commercial interests of the bourgeoisie, coupled with centuries-old prejudice against Jews and Judaism, evoked considerable hostility towards the Jewish population in western countries. In Germany, merchants protested against the infidels living in their midst. Jewish trade, they believed, would destroy the economic life of the country and pollute the Christian population. Similar attitudes were expressed in France where the bourgeoisie resisted Jewish settlement despite the fact that the nobility regarded Jews as financially useful. In Great Britain, Jews were also subject to virulent criticism, and attempts to simplify procedures for Jewish naturalization and to authorize Jews to possess land were met with considerable resistance. In the United States, however, Jews gained a broad measure of freedom as the country struggled to achieve its independence from England. Nonetheless, despite many advances made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jewish life did not alter radically from medieval patterns of existence. Stereotyped as foreign and strange, Jews were subject to discrimination and persecution during the early modern period.

Under the banner of the Enlightenment, English free thinkers sought to ameliorate the condition of the Jews. Such attempts, however, were countered by other writers who attacked Jewry on grounds consonant with the spirit of a rationalist and scientific age. In France, Protestants influenced by the Enlightenment attempted to refute charges against the Jewish population. Yet despite such progressive attitudes, they were unable to free themselves from traditional Christian assumptions about Jewish guilt and divine retribution. In addition, many of the major thinkers of the age encouraged Judaeophobia. In Germany an attempt was made to present Jews in a more positive light, but here as well the rise of national self-confidence provoked antipathy towards the Jewish populace. Such philosophers as Kant, Fichte and Hegel wrote disparagingly of both Jews and Judaism. In order to escape such hostility, a number of enlightened Jews – primarily in Berlin – dissociated themselves from the Jewish way of life, and others sought to gain acceptance by becoming a new Jewish-Christian sect.

At the end of the eighteenth century the spirit of the Enlightenment stimulated Christian Europe to seek the amelioration of Jewish life. With the establishment of the Napoleonic era, Jewish existence was revolutionized. The summoning of a Great Sanhedrin in France paved the way for Jewish emancipation and the position of Jewry improved throughout the continent. In the midst of such social upheaval, German Jewish reformers such as Israel Jacobson attempted to adapt Jewish worship to modern conditions. To the consternation of the Orthodox, Reform Temples appeared throughout Germany. Yet ironically, many enlightened Jews influenced by the Romantic movement were uninterested in what Reform Judaism had to offer. Instead of providing a basis for the resurgence of Judaism, the movement undermined confidence in traditional belief and practice and intensified Christian antipathy to the Jewish way of life.

In Russia, the aim of emancipation was to bring about the assimilation of the Jewish population – the programme of the Tsars was driven by centuries-old Christian hostility to the Jews. From the Jewish side, responses to these moves throughout Europe to improve the plight of Jewry were mixed: traditionalists tended to fear that such steps would undermine Torah Judaism, whereas progressives enthusiastically welcomed new freedoms and opportunities. The Gentile reaction was equally ambivalent. Although liberals ardently campaigned for equal rights, many Christians feared the consequences of such agitation, and at the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century outbursts against the Jewish population spread from country to country.

In the enlightened environment of the nineteenth century, Jewish apologists sought to ameliorate the conditions of the Jewish population. In England Benjamin Disraeli, the Tory Prime Minister, formulated a theory of the Jewish race which served as the basis for his quest to grant civil rights to British Jewry. His advocacy of Jewish emancipation, however, provoked a hostile response from such critics as Robert Knox, who denigrated Jewry in terms reminiscent of previous centuries. Such disparagement was similarly a central feature of French life, as evidenced by the Damascus Affair in which the President of the French Council sided with the French consuls in Damascus who accused Jews there of ritual murder. Despite the peaceful conclusion of this affair, this medieval charge gave rise to widespread anti-Jewish sentiment in France. In addition, the Christian myth of the Wandering Jew who was driven from his homeland for having rejected Christ became a predominant image in French literature of the period and stimulated French Judaeophobia, as did the anti-Jewish allegations of French socialists. In Germany the advocates of German racism as well as metaphysical writers critical of Jews and Judaism generated considerable ill-will. Such hostility reached its climax in the diatribes of the composer Richard Wagner, whose critique of Judaism paved the way for the Nazi onslaught in the following century.

Discussion: The legacy of anti-Semitism

As we have seen, the Jewish people have been detested by those among whom they lived for nearly twenty centuries. What have been the causes of what is arguably humanity’s most virulent and sustained hatred? There appears to be a variety of answers to this vexing question. First, the Jewish population, as a small, distinct minority community, has continually been regarded by their host countries as alien and strange. Determined to remain faithful to their religious traditions, Jews generally remained unassimilable. In addition, Jewry regarded itself as God’s chosen people. Of all nations, the Jews were selected to be God’s special servants; they were to be a light to the Gentiles. It is not surprising that such a sense of religious superiority outraged their Gentile neighbours.

In the view of some modern Jewish thinkers, such a minority status has inevitably rendered the Jews vulnerable. The father of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, for example, was convinced that the problem of anti-Semitism could only be solved if Jews emigrated from the countries where they lived to create a Jewish homeland.

‘We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live,’ he wrote, ‘seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers. It is not permitted us. In vain are we loyal patriots, sometimes superloyal; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow citizens; in vain do we strive to enhance the fame of our native lands in the arts and sciences, or her wealth by trade and commerce. In our native lands where we have lived for centuries we are still decried as aliens.’¹

Was Herzl right? Modern historical events – the Holocaust in particular – have for many proved the truth of his analysis of the Jewish question. Germany, as one of the most culturally and intellectually advanced nations in the modern world, unleashed the most terrible mechanized apparatus of murder to eradicate Jewry from Europe. In its quest to carry out a policy of annihilation it violated the fundamental canons of human decency. The war against the Jews has arguably demonstrated that no minority people which holds fast to its ancient ways can escape the wrath of host nations with their own xenophobic convictions.

But, it was not simply the minority status of Jewry which fuelled the flames of hatred. The conflict between the Church and the Synagogue led to bitter rivalry and contempt. As Christianity emerged triumphant in the Roman Empire, its leaders denounced the rival tradition from which it had sprung. Typical among the critics of Judaism was the fourth century Patriarch, John Chrysostom, who denounced Jewry for its rejection of Christ. The Jews will be crucified throughout history, he declared, because they crucified Christ:

It is because you killed Christ. It is because you stretched out your hand against the Lord. It is because you shed the precious blood, that there is now no restoration, no mercy any more, and no defence.²

Such a tradition of contempt continued from century to century. Repeatedly the Church alleged that the Jews were to suffer because of their rejection of Christ. They were blamed for deicide, and accused of the most heinous crimes against humanity. Demonized in the Middle Ages, they were perceived as the scourge of European society, corrupters of Western civilization. In this light, the great reformer of the Church, Martin Luther, continued to vilify the Jewish nation. Initially he had hoped to convert Jewry, but when they failed to heed his call, he was incensed. In Against the Jews and their Lies, he called for the elimination of Judaism: ‘Their synagogues should be set on fire … they should be deprived of their prayer books and Talmuds in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught … their rabbis must be forbidden under threat of death to teach any more.’³

Christianity thus stands accused. Despite Jesus’ gentle words of compassion, Christians are guilty of the most callous, inhumane acts of violence against Jews. For two millennia the Church has continued and intensified the tradition of anti-Judaism which it inherited from the Graeco-Roman world. Today there are many Christians who are ashamed of this legacy of anti-Semitism and anxious for the Church to change its attitudes. Such a spirit of reconciliation has animated numerous official Church pronouncements which have sought to reverse its teachings.

Such efforts are to be welcomed. Yet, the wounds of the past are deep and the Jewish community is still traumatized by its ill-treatment at the hands of Christians over the centuries. This legacy of the past should not be forgotten in any discussion of the Holocaust. Within the Nazi party, there were many who sought to reconcile the policies of National Socialism with the Christian faith. Indeed, before the Nazi seizure of power, a number of Evangelical supporters of the NSDAP joined forces and demanded that the Evangelical Church and 28 Land churches be homogenized into one Reich church. These Nazi Protestants represented what they called ‘Positive Christianity’ – a form of racial ideology formulated in theological terms. In their view, God sanctified the Aryan lifestyle.

Is it surprising that many Jews continue to remain suspicious of Christian motives? As far as Catholics are concerned, the Vatican remained neutral during the Nazi period. Feeling itself vulnerable during the war, the Catholic Church remained silent in the face of Nazi monstrosities, and at times adopted an apparently pro-German position. The greatest charge against Pope Pious XII is that despite numerous appeals, he refused to speak out against the Nazi policy of extermination which in 1944 was described by Winston Churchill as ‘probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world’.⁴

What is the Jewish community to make of such Christian failures? Given t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology of the Holocaust
• Key names
• Glossary
• Plates
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1. The history of anti-Semitism
• 2. German hatred of the Jews
• 3. Hitler
• 4. The Nazi party
• 5. Nazi racism
• 6. Hitler’s executioners
• 7. The SS
• 8. German anti-Jewish legislation
• 9. The Nuremberg Laws
• 10. Kristallnacht
• 11. The onslaught against Poland
• 12. Massacre in Poland
• 13. The ghetto
• 14. The war against Russia
• 15. The Wannsee Conference and aftermath
• 16. Transportation and arrival at the camps
• 17. The concentration camps
• 18. The gas chambers
• 19. SS doctors and medical experiments
• 20. The euthanasia programme
• 21. Gypsies, the asocial and homosexuals
• 22. Jewish resistance and the final stages of terror
• 23. Reactions to the Holocaust
• 24. The Nuremberg Trials
• 25. Denying the Holocaust
• 26. The Holocaust and religious belief
• Bibliography
• Index