- Summary
- Traces the beginnings of modern antisemitism to romantic anti-rationalism in Germany. Notes how early antisemitism was not only anti-Jewish but also anti-Christian in its rejection of monotheism and morality, as viewed by Wilhelm Marr and others. Only a Christianity that rejected its Jewish roots and favored Aryan Germans was acceptable to antisemites. In the 1870s-80s German intellectuals saw antisemitism as a general attack against religion, especially Roman Catholicism. The contradiction between the racist view of Judaism and the Christian view that conversion could save the Jews was partly resolved by the Darwinian racial ideology espoused by Eugen Dühring, among others. The Third Reich introduced a new antisemitism, that of a pseudo-religion, a redemptive political messianism with an anti-theological structure, a pseudo-gospel with Hitler replacing Jesus and a new apocalypse. To determine the relation between antisemitism and the Church, one has to study the latter not in terms of a static essence but in terms of its history. Christianity inherited pagan elements that continued to exist as anti-Jewish attitudes within the Church, culminating in the destructive force of Nazism, directed not only against Judaism, but through Judaism against humanity, including Christianity. One strong anti-Jewish element in Christianty was the concept of collective guilt, which was secularized and used by the Nazis against the Jews and against Christians. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism).
- Series
- The Leo Baeck memorial lecture ; 14
Leo Baeck memorial lecture ; 14.
- Format
- Book
- Author/Creator
- Tal, Uriel.
- Published
- New York : Leo Baeck Institute, 1971
- Locale
- Germany
- Notes
-
Includes bibliographical references.
