Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust by Kevin P Spicer (Editor) (Indiana University Press)

In recent years, the mask of tolerant, secular, multicultural Europe has been shattered by new forms of antisemitic crime. Though many of the perpetrators do not profess Christianity, antisemitism has flourished in Christian Europe. The charge of deicide has shaped the Christian conception of Jews and marked them as the Other. History has shown that, for Christians, no charge was too outrageous to levy upon Jews. Nowhere was this more clearly expressed than in Nazi Germany, its allied European states, and occupied territories. Compounded by racial science, Christian antisemitism, never benign, turned lethal and led to the near eradication of Europe’s Jews. Postwar reactions against the Nazi crimes may have made antisemitism much less socially and politically acceptable, but it hardly disappeared.

In this book, thirteen scholars of European history, Jewish studies, and Christian theology examine antisemitism’s insidious role on Europe’s intellectual and political life. The essays reveal that annihilative anti-Semitic thought was not limited to Germany, but could be found in the theology and liturgical practice of most of Europe’s Christian churches. They dismantle the claim of a distinction between Christian anti-Judaism and neo-pagan antisemitism and show that, at the heart of Christianity, hatred for Jews overwhelmingly formed the milieu of twentieth-century Europe.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface — Kevin P. Spicer
Introduction: Love Thy Neighbor? — John T. Pawlikowski and Kevin P. Spicer
Theological Antisemitism
1. Belated Heroism: The Danish Lutheran Church and the Jews, 1918–1945 — Thorsten Wagner
2. Rabbinic Judaism in the Writings of Polish Catholic Theologians, 1918–1939 — Anna Lysiak
3. German Catholic Views of Jesus and Judaism, 1918–1945 — Robert A. Krieg
4. Catholic Theology and the Challenge of Nazism — Donald J. Dietrich
Christian Clergy and the Extreme Right Wing
5. Working for the Führer: Father Dr. Philipp Haeuser and the Third Reich — Kevin P. Spicer
6. The Impact of the Spanish Civil War upon German Catholic Clergy in Nazi Germany — Beth A. Griech-Polelle
7. Faith, Murder, Resurrection: The Iron Guard and the Romanian Orthodox Church — Paul A. Shapiro
Post-War Jewish-Christian Encounters
8. The German Protestant Church and its Judenmission, 1945–1950 — Matthew D. Hockenos
9. Shock, Renewal, Crisis: Catholic Reflections on the Shoah — Elias H. Füllenbach
Viewing Each Other
10. Wartime Jewish Orthodoxy's Encounter with Holocaust Christianity — Gershon Greenberg
11. Confronting Antisemitism: Rabbi Philip Sidney Bernstein and the Roman Catholic Hierarchy — Suzanne Brown-Fleming
12. Old Wine in New Bottles? Religion and Race in Nazi Antisemitism — Richard Steigmann-Gall
Contributors
Index
Kevin P. Spicer, C.S.C., is Associate Professor of History at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. He is author of Resisting the Third Reich: The Catholic Clergy in Hitler’s Berlin