Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust (review)

The twelve essays in this volume are products of an international workshop on antisemitism and Christianity sponsored by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Conference volumes can sometimes be a mixed bag in which the whole proves less than the sum of its uneven parts. Happily, that is not the case here. The book displays the sort of thematic and methodological diversity one might expect from a project designed to foster dialogue across disciplinary lines by historians and theologians. Yet each contribution builds either explicitly or implicitly on the shared working assumption that conventional distinctions between (religious) anti-Judaism and (racialist) antisemitism may conceal as much as they reveal. Traditional anti-Judaism, these scholars agree, both framed and exploited politically instrumentalized forms of cultural and racial antisemitism, reflecting a “Christian failure to understand and acknowledge Judaism on its own terms” (p. x). Taken as a whole, the present volume might be described as a series of critical reflections on supersessionism and its legacy. Supersessionist doctrines, by positing the Church as a new Chosen People replacing rejected Israel, provided the basis for secular formulas that bestowed elect status upon a particular nation, race, and/or culture; they thereby vitiated the Churches’ capacity to mount effective theological critiques of such projects, not least the genocidal millenarianism of National Socialism.

Roughly half of the essays examine the role of antisemitism(s) in European churches’ theological discourse and/or pastoral praxis. In a suggestive study of Danish Lutheranism, Thorsten Wagner seeks to account for the paradoxical coexistence of antisemitic traditions and willingness to act in solidarity with Jews in the famous Danish rescue action of 1943. Wagner argues that the chief motive at work in 1943 was a determination to reject collaboration with the Nazi occupiers in the name of national sovereignty, a stance that had the effect of assimilating local Jews to the Danish nation despite the anti-pluralist values that dominated the church and public opinion. The negative impact of supersessionism is especially evident in Anna Łysiak’s devastating review of the treatment of rabbinic Judaism by interwar Polish Catholic theologians, as well as in Robert Krieg’s analysis of antisemitic sub-themes in the Christology of German contemporaries such as Karl Adam and Romano Guardini.

Donald Dietrich’s nuanced interpretation of German contributions to Catholic ecclesiology in the 1930s and 1940s stresses the long-term significance of pioneering efforts by theologians such as Karl Rahner and Dominikus Koster to move beyond neo-scholastic juridical-institutional formulas to a more dynamic, anthropologically and historically informed doctrine of the Church—seeds that would eventually bear fruit in Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium and Nostra Aetate. But Dietrich points out that these conceptual breakthroughs failed to create a “foundational theology of resistance to Nazi brutalization” (p. 97). In the case of the corporatist “Kingdom theology” (Reichstheologie) of Robert Grosche, they in fact served to justify Catholic accommodation to the Führer state and its purposes. Fear of “Bolshevism” encouraged similar impulses, a point Beth Griech-Polelle underscores in a concise account of the German hierarchy’s responses to the Spanish Civil War. In some cases, religious and political enthusiasms degenerated into a full-blown syncretism of blood and altar, examples of which are described by editor Kevin Spicer in a cautionary case study of the German “brown priest” Philipp Haeuser, and by Paul Shapiro in a chilling account of the cultural and political cross-fertilization between Romanian Orthodoxy and fascist movements such as the Iron Guard.

The second half of the book shifts the focus to Jewish-Christian encounters during and after the Holocaust. Matthew Hockenos and Elias Füllenbach describe the halting efforts of German Protestants and Catholics, respectively, to recast their churches’ relationships with Jews and Judaism after 1945. While they agree that the moral and theological shock of the Holocaust eventually forced leaders of both confessions to...