The poisonous well of anti-Jewish rhetoric

[Behind the Aegis]

Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer is famously remembered for his reported response to the Kristallnacht burning of German synagogues, 71 years ago this coming Monday, when he commented to a colleague, "If the synagogues are set on fire today, it will be the churches that will be burned tomorrow."

It is not clear what he meant by this. Perhaps he was simply warning of the Nazis' intention to target the churches as well, without any reference to the distress of the Jewish people. For, in June 1933, three months after the Nazi rise to power - after the publication of the first anti-Jewish laws, which dismissed all Jewish teachers and professors from their positions - Bonhoeffer wrote, in a church periodical, that ever since the Jews had "nailed the Redeemer of the world to the cross," they had been forced to bear an eternal "curse" through a long history of suffering, one that would end only "in the conversion of Israel to Christ."

At the same time, Bonhoeffer, who is often remembered as a staunch and courageous anti-Nazi, initially and half-heartedly excused the Nazi regime for its anti-Jewish measures. "Without a doubt the Jewish question is one of the historical problems which our state must deal with," he asserted in the same article, "and without a doubt the state is justified in adopting new methods here." The only instance in which the Church was, in his words, obligated to object would be if the state took steps to prohibit missionary work by the Church among Jews.


The post-war exculpatory words of another anti-Nazi theologian, Martin Niemoeller, are displayed in many Holocaust museums and often quoted. Indeed, he lamented that he did not speak out on the Jewish issue at the time, "because I was not a Jew." Sadly, the record shows that Niemoeller did speak out about the Jews - though not in their defense. In a 1935 sermon, he spoke of the Jews as a people that "can neither live nor die, because it is under a curse which forbids it to do either." He also noted, in case his meaning is in doubt, that whatever the Jews take up "becomes poisoned, and all that they ever reap is contempt and hatred," because the world "notices the deception and avenges itself in its own way." As for the future, he added, the Jewish people must continue to suffer for the crime of deicide, and indeed, "now it bears the curse."

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[aquart]

1. Well, gosh. Just what I needed to read before bed.

Good to know I'm cursed.