Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany by Christopher J. Probst (review)

Christopher J. Probst has written a helpful book on an important topic. For far too long, historians have assumed that members of the Protestant Confessing Church were opponents of the Nazi regime, when in fact they were opponents of the "German Christian" movement that developed a synthesis of Christianity and National Socialism within the Protestant Church. The German Christians, who gained control over significant portions of the Protestant Church, were virulently hostile, toward baptized Jews as well as non-baptized; members of the Confessing Church were frequently sympathetic to the plight of baptized Jews, if few cared about the non-converted.

The contribution of Probst's book lies in his careful examination of some of the pastors and professors from the two factions. He reviews each one's biography and writings to ask what use each made of Martin Luther's teachings about Judaism and Jewry. Probst's conclusions are equivocal: everyone read Luther, but each in a different way. Some, such as Stuttgart pastor Immanuel Schairer, rejoiced that Kristallnacht had "destroyed the sites of the Jewish religion" (p. 123). That religion, Schairer wrote, was nothing more than Bolshevism, "an ancient faith of the Jews" that seeks to subjugate all other peoples under its fanatical rule (p. 133). Bishop Martin Sasse of Thuringia, a major figure in the German Christian movement, celebrated Kristallnacht in a pamphlet—37,000 copies were printed—citing Luther's admonitions to burn synagogues and Jewish books. Wolf Meyer-Erlach, professor of practical theology at the University of Jena and an active member of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life, frothed that Jesus had not been a Jew, and that the Jews had sought to destroy the Aryan spirit through capitalism and "Bolshevism," the two great enemies of Germany.

But what about pastors who were not sympathetic to Nazism or racism? The Confessing Church pastor Gerhard Schmidt, rector of a seminary, rejected racial anti-semitism, but argued that the Jews had been cursed by God (p. 83). In an article on Luther, Schmidt asserted that the founder of Protestantism had appreciated the Old Testament as Holy Scripture, but despised the Jews, a view that Probst rightly notes "is representative of a characteristically conservative Confessing Church approach that affirmed the authority of the Old Testament while demeaning the present-day Jews" (p. 81). Confessing Church pastor Hansgeorg Schroth viewed Jews as enemies of Christians not because of their race, but because of their "anti-Christian Bolshevism" (p. 105); the Jews, he proclaimed, were "a symbol of God's anger" and a threat to Christianity. Both Schmidt and Schroth, however, left the door of baptism open to Jews. Probst confirms the findings of Wolfgang Gerlach, whose foundational book And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews (2000), made it clear that only a tiny minority of Confessing Church members—such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer—expressed concern about any Jews other than converts.

Probst documents the antisemitism that flourished in both factions, but these were different kinds of antisemitism. Drawing on the medievalist Gavin Langmuir's work on antisemitism, Probst correctly dismisses the unhelpful but all too common distinction between theological anti-Judaism and modern racial antisemitism, seeking instead a more nuanced appreciation of overlapping religious and racial animosities. Drawing from Langmuir, Probst distinguishes instead "irrational" and "nonrational" antisemitisms, the former associated with charges of well-poisoning or ritual murder, the latter with doctrinal convictions that were merely not subject to empirical verification. Thus, German Christians Sasse and Meyer-Erlach's irrational antisemitism characterized Jews as fighting a deadly war against Germany; Confessing Church theologians such as Schmidt and Schroth put forth a nonrational antisemitsm rooted in such theological convictions as that Israel in the flesh (Judaism) had been superseded by Israel in...