And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews

Introduction

1 introduction During the final years of the eighteenth century, the new tolerance fostered by the Enlightenment enabled Jews in Europe and abroad to attain the rights of citizens. The domestic reforms of Hapsburg monarch Joseph II in 1782 included an edict that substantially improved the Jews’ legal status. The constitutions of the United States (1787) and France (1791) contained similar provisions for the integration of Jews in civil society. In Prussia, equal status for Jews came in 1812 under Chancellor Karl von Hardenberg. Equality was relative; until the First World War, for example, it was virtually impossible for nonbaptized Jews in Prussia to become officers or professors. Having escaped or outgrown social ghettoization, Jews at the end of the eighteenth century were a major force in creating an urbane aesthetic culture, epitomized by the artistic and literary salons of Berlin . The cosmopolitan flair of these salons was new to Prussia and that much more attractive to Prussian artists and scholars. A social and spiritual melting process resulted—partly at the cost of traditional Judaism, which had preserved itself for two centuries only through a segregation that was both socially coerced and religiously chosen. With the growth of secularism, the Torah was left behind in the ghetto. For the religiously indifferent, at least, it was tempting to exchange the legacy of the Torah for the pottage of lentils represented by equal civil status. The contradictions between traditional Judaism and the new enlightened spirit seemed to be irrevocable; by challenging the heart of religious belief and launching a process of critical self-examination, the Enlightenment affected Christianity as well. Pondering ‘‘the essence of Judaism,’’ many nineteenth-century Jews could not help but conclude that they had entered a process of ‘‘religious decline.’’∞ With the Jews’ growing freedom and the public expression of their intellectual capacities, there was a powerful outburst of anti-Jewish hatred , which had never died out but only been repressed by liberal enlightened ideas. The conservative bourgeoisie, with its roots in the romantic tradition, was unnerved by the emerging new philosophies that threatened to change economic, social, and religious conditions. Because Jews themselves had proved capable of such changes, the political and cultural influence of ‘‘the Jews’’ was regarded as ‘‘subversive.’’ Introduction 2 A number of scholarly and pseudoscholarly nineteenth-century authors began to expound anti-Semitism to their contemporaries; subsequent generations would use these writings to legitimate it.≤ Various anti-Semitic organizations were founded during the same period. The constitution of the Association of German Students (Verein deutscher Studenten), established in 1881, was receptive to anti-Jewish thinking. The Association of Anti-Semites, founded by journalist Wilhelm Marr in 1887, eventually became part of the German Anti-Semitic Union (Marr was known for his book, Der Sieg des Judentums über das Germanentum (The victory of Judaism over Germandom), in which the term ‘‘antiSemitism ’’ appears for the first time). Among the founders of the German Anti-Semitic Union was the writer Theodor Fritsch, editor of the Handbook of the Jewish Question, a compendium of anti-Semitic propaganda that was used during the Nazi era. These kinds of organizations differed from the assimilation movement promoted by the followers of Adolf Stoecker.≥ Stoecker (1835– 1909), a conservative theologian and follower of Bismarck, served as chaplain of the royal court in Berlin from 1874 to 1890; he also helped establish the Protestant Inner Mission, one of the earliest church social welfare agencies in Germany. His Christian Social party, founded in 1878, was ‘‘the most important anti-Semitic organization in the conservative camp.’’∂ Stoecker’s party did not try to agitate against religious Judaism but treated the Jewish question, in Stoecker’s words, as ‘‘a social question in the spiritual and economic sense.’’∑ Stoecker considered modern Judaism, stripped of its historically religious context, an ‘‘areligious power.’’∏ Although convinced that emancipated Judaism and Christianity in Germany had led to a substantial decline in faith, Stoecker focused on denouncing the cultural and religious decline in Judaism, which, in his view, was attempting to take the Christian people down with it.π ‘‘Above all,’’ wrote Stoecker, ‘‘what drove me to this battle was indignation over the godless, anti-church activities of the Berlin Jews and the conscientious necessity to awaken the Protestant people of Berlin from their sleep.’’∫ The goal of this ‘‘awakening’’ was not just a more conscious Christianity but a decisive anti-Semitism. Such anti-Semitism extended to the highest levels of society. Kaiser Wilhelm II is said to have been among...