Hitler, Jesus, and Our Common Humanity: A Jewish Survivor Interprets Life, History, and the Gospels by Bruce W. Longenecker, and: Lessons of the Holocaust by Michael R. Marrus, and: Edith Stein and Regina Jonas: Religious Visionaries in the Time of the Death Camps by Emily Leah Silverman (review)

Marrus is one of the world’s leading historians of the Holocaust. In this masterful and highly readable book, he weaves together his personal experiences and scholarship into what is at once an overview of the field, a critique/analysis of its major thinkers, and insights into what can be considered valid lessons of the Shoah for history, Western culture, and human nature, and what, all too often, are lessons imposed upon it. In biblical scholarly terminology, this is eisegesis, putting into the Scriptures what we want to see there, as opposed to exegesis, bringing out of the various biblical texts what the author, in his or her own time and context, wanted to convey to the people of that time and place. Only when one has solidified as well as possible the actual facts and intent of the biblical author can one begin to derive lessons for our own time and place, which is the work of biblical theology. Marrus similarly and painstakingly, in engaging prose, draws out criteria to determine what can actually be learned from the virtually unprecedented horror and evil, marked by the shining lights of a relatively few individuals, that was the Holocaust perpetrated in the midst of World War II.

The books of Longenecker and Silverman are specific studies of the lives and works of a survivor and of two female victims who died in Auschwitz. At the outset, it can be said that the latter two books meet Marrus’s criteria for lessons that Jews, Christians, and, indeed, all of us, can derive from learning not simply about the general facts of the Shoah but also about the lives and reflections of those caught up in it.

The foreword to Marrus’s book, by his colleague Margaret MacMillan, summarizes the book and its major points well. Marrus begins with a personal narrative of how he became involved in Holocaust studies, before it was a recognized field, and a number of his experiences while pursuing it. These shed light on key scholars in the field, as well as the difficulties of Christians, both individually and as churches, in coming to grips with it and its implications for Christian theology and attitudes toward Jews and Judaism—and, hence, toward Christianity itself as originally a Jewish movement that only gradually experienced a “parting of the ways” with its elder sibling in the faith in the One God, the God of Israel.

As a professor at the University of Toronto, Marrus has participated in conferences around the world, such as one in Sweden on Holocaust education, and on Jewish-Catholic commissions, such as one co-sponsored by the Holy See and Jewish organizations to delve into the complex issues of Pope Pius XII during World War II, which I coordinated on behalf of the Holy See. His recollections, I can personally attest, are accurate; his brief characterizations of the people involved and of the issues discussed and seldom resolved, though often clarified, are insightful.

Marrus presents and analyzes the “early” lessons of the pioneer historians of the Shoah. He then delves, with critical appreciation, into the lessons that many Jews have derived from their studies of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe. A very interesting chapter is devoted to lessons presented with regard to the Holocaust by Israeli authors; he...