The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (review)

This fascinating and often disturbing book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the Nazi-era Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life. Established in 1939 by radical German-Christians, the Institute sought to make the Church a full partner in the Nazi crusade against Jewry. Its goal was a “Germanic” Christianity closed to “non-Aryans” and cleansed of all “Jewish influence.” Its chosen means included faux-scholarly conferences and publications, workshops, public lectures, and a variety of devotional materials. The latter included a “de-Judaized” redaction of the New Testament; the Old Testament was simply rejected out of hand.

While the broad outlines have long been known, Susannah Heschel has uncovered a wealth of new information about the Institute’s origins, funding, programs, and leading personalities. Drawing on years of research in a host of archives, she argues that the Institute was more active, its influence more widespread, and its efforts to “de-Judaize” Christianity much closer to the Protestant mainstream than has often been assumed. Her account illuminates the ways in which the Institute exploited academic culture to legitimate its cause. Many of its leading figures were university professors. Walter Grundmann, for example, arguably the Institute’s spiritus rector, was a protégé of the eminent Tübingen New Testament scholar Gerhard Kittel and—thanks largely to high-level Nazi and German-Christian connections—a tenured member of the Jena Theological Faculty. The academic veneer helped buttress the Institute’s claims to promote serious theological research, its principal raison d’être after 1941. Subsidized conference participation and publication provided opportunities for younger scholars, many of them the doctoral students of the directors, to establish their credentials. The result was a network of collaboration and patronage that extended across the Reich and beyond, from Lund in Sweden to ethnic German enclaves in Romania.

Institute founders curried favor with Party officials in hopes of furthering the German-Christian dream of a single unified national Church under the aegis of the Nazi state. Their devotion to the Führer, however, went largely unrequited. The Institute never obtained the desired official imprimatur, and it dissolved for lack of funding in 1945. While it might be tempting to dismiss the entire episode as a grotesque footnote to the history of the Church Struggle (the factional strife within German Protestantism over the direction of Church affairs after 1933), Heschel makes a compelling case for the Institute’s larger significance. Following Uriel Tal, she argues that racialist antisemitism and theological anti-Judaism were neither distinct nor mutually exclusive. If Nazi ideology and German-Christian theology each involved an attempted “usurpation and colonization” (p. 8) of the other’s symbolic universe, antisemitism was their obvious point of convergence. The gospel of an Aryan Jesus come to rid the world of Judaism “effectively reframed Nazism as the very fulfillment of Christianity”; in so doing it worked to “erase moral objections to Nazi antisemitism” (p. 17). In this sense the Institute’s programs and the pulpit propaganda they fostered, while not direct causal factors in the Holocaust, can be said to have played a significant supporting role, even if its importance cannot be precisely gauged. As Heschel observes, the Institute’s trajectory of activism closely paralleled that of Nazi extermination, reaching its apogee during 1942, annus horribilis of the Shoah.

For all its extremism, little in the Institute’s project was truly novel, a point central to Heschel’s larger argument. As she writes, “numerous trails led up the mountain that came to constitute the Aryan Jesus” (p. 63). German-Christian theology was a farrago of borrowings from a wide range of often contradictory sources, among others the hoary tradition of Christian supercessionism, nineteenth-century linguistic and historical-critical arguments for Jesus’ non-Jewish “Galilean” identity, and the Germanocentrism of both liberal Kulturprotestantismus and conservative völkisch “order of creation” theologies. It may go too far to suggest that “by...