Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust (review)

This excellent collection was published in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and contains thirteen essays presented at a conference held at the museum in the summer of 2004. The volume is helpfully divided into four major sections: "Theological Antisemitism, " "Christian Clergy and the Extreme Right Wing," "Postwar Jewish-Christian Encounters," and "Viewing Each Other."

In the first section, Thorsten Wagner discusses the Lutheran Church and the Jews during the war, Ana Lysiak studies the writings of Polish Catholic theologians on Judaism between the two world wars, Robert Krieg narrates German Catholic views of Jesus and Judaism from World War I through World War II, and Donald Dietrich analyzes the response of Catholic theology to Nazism during and since the Shoah.

In the second section, the editor himself presents his study of a Catholic priest "working for the Führer," Beth A. Griech-Polelle writes on the impact of the Spanish civil war on Roman Catholic clergy in Nazi Germany, and Paul A. Shapiro of the USHMM staff discusses the Iron Guard and the Romanian Catholic Church.

In the third section on postwar Christian reflections and encounters, Matthew Hockenos presents Protestant European views and Elias H. Fullenbach presents Catholic reflections on the Shoah. This latter essay will be of great interest to historians seeking to reconstruct and understand the views and movements that paved the way for the Second Vatican Council's historic document Nostra Aetate.

In the final section, Gershon Greenberg presents the encounter with Christianity during the Shoah from the viewpoint of Jewish Orthodoxy, which reveals a range of Jewish views that will likely surprise some readers of this journal. Suzanne Brown-Fleming epitomizes the Catholic-Jewish encounter regarding antisemitism in the life and work of Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein, who was adviser on Jewish affairs to the American troops during the war.

Finally, the paper given by Richard Steigmann-Gall, "Old Wine in New Wineskins? Religion and Race in Nazi Anti-Semitism," supposedly wraps up the conference papers. Here, as in the editor's preface, is where I have some real difficulties. Steigmann-Gall wants to debunk "earlier assumptions that religious antisemitism played no part in the formation of its racialist counterpart" in Nazi antisemitism" (p. 289) primarily by citing Nazi writings in which the Nazis themselves claim to be in continuity with Christian teachings. My first difficulty is that Nazi propaganda is not likely to be one's best source of information on an exceedingly complex history. Second, I know of few people in the field who have made such a claim. Rather, most people in the field acknowledge that although there is a distinction to be made between the Christian teaching of contempt and racial antisemitism, the former established the mindset in European Christians, or in Pope John Paul II's words, so "lulled (their) consciences" that they were all too easy prey for Nazi propaganda about the Jews. Steigmann-Gall, it seems, has set up a straw man and knocked him down with an exceedingly odd weapon. His conclusion seems to be that there is no difference at all between Nazi racial antisemitism and centuries-old Christian teaching.

This, of course, is only one essay in an otherwise excellent volume, which normally would not exercise me too much. But the dust jacket unfortunately turns this one-person view, a view shared so far as I can tell by none of the other twelve contributors, into a conclusion all the scholars supposedly share: "They [the essays] dismantle the claim of a distinction between Christian anti Judaism and neo-pagan anti-Judaism. "Again, in the book, helpful and proper distinctions are made for the most part, in different ways, of course, by the different scholars. Fortunately, one cannot really judge a book by its cover.