Hitler and his God

“Without Christianity no anti-Semitism”

The popular anti-Semitic mentality, in the rest of Europe as well as in Germany, was the result of a historic process which went back all the way to the life and death of Jesus Christ, and which was closely connected with Christianity. The attitude of Europe, where Christianity became the chief element of the culture, rested on the assumption that the Jews had refused to accept Christ as the Messiah and that they had killed him. This was written in the New Testament, revered as holy scripture and therefore indubitable truth. In The Origin of Satan, Elaine Pagels shows how the authors of the four canonical Gospels – Mark, Luke, Matthew and John – gradually grew more inimical towards the Jews. In this they followed the footsteps of Paul of Tarsus, himself a Jew who had converted to Christianity, and who would transform the Judaic sect of the followers of Christ into a potentially universal (“catholic”) religion no longer bound to a particular people and its religious beliefs and customs.

Pagels demonstrates how the Gospel authors, who wrote one to two generations after the facts they claim to report, exempt step by step the Romans from the guilt of Christ’s execution by shoving the responsibility onto the shoulders of the Jews. The stern Roman governor, Pilate, “grows more and more mellow from gospel to gospel … The more removed from history, the more sympathetic a character he becomes”. In historical fact, Pilate seems to have been as ruthless an office holder as any other Roman governor or proconsul. “Mark’s benign portrait increases the culpability of the Jewish leaders and supports the contention that Jews, not Romans, were the primary force behind Jesus’ crucifixion.” Pilate washed his hands, according to Matthew, to indicate his innocence of bloodshed, and at that moment “the Jewish leaders as well as ‘the whole nation’ acknowledged collective responsibility and invoked what turned out to be a curse upon themselves and their progeny: ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children!’’’. 543

Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus to the Romans and will be regarded as the typical representative of the Jewish people, was according to the Gospel writers possessed by the Devil before committing his loathsome deed. Before long, this diabolic possession will be transferred to the Jewish people as a whole. “If Judas isn’t singled out for his Jewishness in the New Testament (all the disciples were at least nominally Jewish), the identification was made official by papal pronouncement as early as the fifth century … Unofficially, elements of the Judas story in the Gospels have lent themselves – or helped create – the most pernicious stereotypes of the Jews: his treachery was mercenary (he sold Jesus to the authorities for thirty pieces of silver), he was a greedy embezzler (in the Gospel of John he’s filching from the disciples’ funds of the poor), and, above all, he was a dishonest, deceitful traitor, a smiling villain who kissed Jesus on the mouth while stabbing him in the back. Indeed, one can hear incendiary anti-Semitic echoes of the Judas story in the stab-in-the-back accusation Hitler manipulated to convince the German public that the heroic German army had not lost the First World War but had been betrayed, stabbed in the back, by treacherous Jews and Jewish-paid politicians on the home front.” 544

“For nearly two thousand years”, writes Pagels, “many Christians have taken for granted that Jews killed Jesus, that the Romans were merely their reluctant agents, and that this implicates not only the perpetrators but (as Matthew insists) all their progeny in evil. Throughout the centuries, countless Christians listening to the gospels absorbed, along with the quite contrary sayings of Jesus, the association between the forces of evil and Jesus’ Jewish enemies. Whether illiterate or sophisticated, those who heard the gospel stories, or saw them illustrated in their churches, generally assumed both their historical accuracy and their religious validity … And because Christians as they read the gospels have characteristically identified themselves with the disciples, for some two thousand years they have also identified their opponents, whether Jews, pagans, or heretics, with forces of evil, and so with Satan.” 545

This is thoughtfully worded. Hyam Maccoby, “an Oxford-educated literature scholar turned historian of religion”, puts the same conclusion much more bluntly in a conversation with Ron Rosenbaum: “Christians say the Holocaust is part of the evil of humanity. It isn’t the evil of humanity. It’s the evil of Christendom … Hitler was brought up to hate the Jews, particularly to hate the Jews as the people of the Devil. He lost his Christian faith, but he retained the hatred of the Jews as the people of the Devil … I don’t blame Germany for the Holocaust; I blame Christendom for the Holocaust.” 546

The anti-Judaic standpoint arrived at by the Gospel authors was soon taken over and confirmed by the so-called Fathers of the Church, who turned it into Church doctrine, obligatorily accepted in the centuries to come. Origen (ca 185 - ca 254) wrote: “We can therefore assert with the utmost confidence that the Jews will not regain their former position, for they have committed the most heinous crime by hatching the complot against the Saviour of humanity … It is in consequence necessary that the city where Jesus suffered be destroyed from top to bottom, that the Jew be chased from his home, and that others [i.e. the Christians] be called by God to the blessed election.” Gregory of Nyssa, around the same time, preached in the true Christian spirit: “Murderers of the Lord, assassins of the prophets, rebels against and haters of God, they distort the Law, resist the grace and reject the faith of their fathers. Collaborators of the devil, race of vipers, informers, slanderers, with obscured brains, pharisaic yeast, sanhedrin of demons, accursed, despicable, stoners, enemies of all that is beautiful …” And from John Chrysostom’s golden mouth (the meaning of “chrysostom”) flowed this eloquence: “Brothel and theatre, the synagogue is also a cave of robbers and a den of wild animals … Living for their belly, their mouth always gaping, the Jews do not behave better than swine and billy goats in their lewd baseness and their excessive gluttony …” 547