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In defending myself against the Jews, I am acting for the Lord," said Adolf Hitler. "The difference between the church and me is that I am finishing the job." Hitler was lying in an attempt to mislead his public by concealing his own racial animosity behind a mask of Christian language.

Now, a group of prominent Jews has accused the United States Holocaust Museum of the same thing, of misleading the public by blaming Hitler's genocidal program on historic Christian beliefs about Jews (see "Is Holocaust Museum Anti-Christian?," p. 14). The writers of the U.S. Holocaust Museum orientation film Antisemitism, they say, have confused harsh Christian statements about Jewish religion with the race-based ideologies that informed Nazism. In addition, they have taken Hitler's explanation for his motivations at face value. Should Hitler's attempts to use the church to justify himself tell us any more about Christian theology than, say, David Koresh's ravings tell us about the Bible?

Hundreds of thousands of Christians who have visited the United States Holocaust Museum have sat and squirmed through all 14 minutes of the film's loose linking of historic Christian condemnation of Jewish refusal to believe in Jesus with Nazi racism. Most of those Christians, vaguely aware that there has been persistent prejudice against Jews for most of European history, have meekly accepted the film's claims and have not protested the inclusion of this anti-Christian message in a tax-funded national museum.

In December, however, six Jews, Jews who knew the horrific facts of historic Christian anti-Semitism, did indeed protest, sending a letter to the then director of the museum, Walter Reich. In that letter, Michael Horowitz, Elliott Abrams, and other notable Jewish thinkers called attention to the film's unfairness in portraying anti-Semitism in almost exclusively Christian terms. And since then they have taken a lot of heat for their stance—from The New Republic to vile personal attacks via e-mail.

The film paints with a broad brush. A dull voice intones disconnected facts and quotations that leave the viewer believing that anti-Jewish bias is the result of Christian influence on the Roman Empire, that it has been Christian society alone that has marginalized and oppressed Jews, and that Nazi racial prejudice against the Jews was in clear continuity with earlier religious prejudice. The anti-Judaism that preceded Christianity and that has long existed outside Europe is ignored.

Certainly one reason American Christians have not heretofore protested the dubious film is that they are largely unaware of the history of Christian anti-Judaism. They have heard, vaguely, about ghettos and pogroms, and they may have heard that Christians once called Jews "Christ-killers" and circulated rumors that blamed Jews for the Black Death. But they have not studied their own history, and they have no framework in which to place isolated facts and evaluate the claims of this film.

Facts without a framework
Let's be clear: From its very earliest days, Christianity spoke ill of "the Jews." The apostles (all of them Jews) felt deeply the rejection of their good news about Jesus from their own community's leaders, and they took the gospel to a more receptive Gentile audience. The internal disputes between Jesus and the leaders of various, competing Judaisms were transposed into a setting where the inner divisions of Judaism were obscured. Paul's hope for a church in which barriers between Jews and Gentiles were obliterated turned into a barricaded community.

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April 27 1998, Vol. 42, No. 5