Nazism spooks and fascinates us. Do a bit of television grazing any night of any week and sooner or later you are bound to happen on an advertisement for yet another video series on the “Monsters That Ran the Third Reich,” replete with scenes from Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda masterwork, Triumph of the Will, with SS marching, Hitler ranting, women running into the street to toss bouquets at the Fuhrer. It is, therefore, important to be reminded that this packaging of Nazi kitsch, a kind of domestication of Nazism, is itself a morbid sign of the times. We are fascinated. But do we have a moral compass with which to guide us through the tortured maze that is Central Europe at mid-century? The books on Nazism run to the thousands, many specifically on those genocidal policies given the name “the Holocaust.” Modest, reputable scholars of modern German history continue to profess a deep perplexity about how all this might have happened in precisely the way that it did. No single explanation suffices. There are many factors, many partial explanations. But eventually one seems to be peering over the edge into a hideous abyss at the Nazi phenomenon-and, one might add, though many do not, at the systematic Soviet extermination of the kulaks, with the body count in this instance going as high, in some estimates, as 10 million or more.
The Christian scholar must, or should, introduce the problem of human evil-and it would be human evil-and attempt to show the ways in which systematic and well-organized murder is, alas, an immanent possibility in human affairs given the right set of circumstances. But it is precisely this explanation that Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and John Weiss deny in the interest of promoting simplistic and, one might have hoped, outdated explanations positing an essentialist German taint. These are big books with small ideas.
Here is how the arguments work, beginning with Weiss’s book, the weaker of the two. (Doris Bergen’s book is a welcome exception, and I will treat it last.) Weiss, an intellectual historian, begins by telling the reader, in his preface, that there is a “special nature of German and Austrian history” that holds the “key to the immense power of anti-Semitism among millions of Germans and the reasons why, long before the Nazis, the historical basis of their success was built.” And the key to that key is “the Christian Legacy.” This legacy of anti-Semitism seems to have infected primarily lower-middle-class people (although upper-class reactionaries were prepared to use it as a weapon) and “backwards” Central Eastern European peasants, insistently represented by Weiss as ignorant, irrational, and even deranged. His heroes are the skeptics, rationalists, and deists who fought the rank superstitions of the religious mind. Alas, they did not prevail. What did triumph were dogmas of faith that do not conform to “common sense.” Indeed, “the primitive mentality of thousands of years ago” marched on with ignorant people taking the gospel as “literal truths.” And it was these very people who were the carriers of “an ancient and barbarous mythology.”
In his first chapter, “The Christian Legacy,” the crudity of Weiss’s argument and the shoddiness of his scholarship are amply displayed. He races through history, paying scarcely any attention to the most important scholarship, especially the work of Jewish scholars of medieval and Renaissance life. There is one story and one story only: Jews were slaughtered, expelled, or forced into ghettos. And that is it. What, then, would he make of Pope Gregory X’s l272 document extending papal protection to the Jews of Europe? Of course, we rightly find much in Gregory’s decree objectionable-he talks of the Jewish people persisting in “their stubbornness” rather than recognizing “the words of their prophets and the mysteries of the Scriptures.” But, nonetheless, he continues,
inasmuch as they have made an appeal for our protection and help, we therefore admit their petition and offer them the shield of our protection. . . . We decree moreover that no Christian shall compel them or any one of their group to come to baptism unwillingly. . . . In addition, no one shall disturb them in any way during the celebration of their festivals, whether by day or by night, with clubs or stones or anything else.
Gregory goes on to attack the ritual murder charge at length, following the lead of Innocent IV in l247, with these words:
And most falsely do these Christians claim that the Jews have secretly and furtively carried away these children and killed them, and that the Jews offer sacrifice from the heart and blood of these children, since their law in this matter precisely and expressly forbids Jews to sacrifice, eat, or drink the blood, or to eat the flesh of animals having claws. This has been demonstrated many times at our court by Jews converted to the Christian faith: nevertheless very many Jews are often seized and detained unjustly because of this. . . . [W]e order that Jews seized under such a silly pretext be freed from imprisonment, and that they shall not be arrested henceforth on such a miserable pretext. . . . We decree, in order to stop the wickedness and avarice of bad men, that no one shall dare to devastate or destroy a cemetery of the Jews or to dig up human bodies for the sake of getting money. Moreover, if any one, after having known the content of this decree, should-which we hope will not happen-attempt audaciously to act contrary to it, then let him suffer punishment in his rank and position, or let him be punished by the penalty of excommunication, unless he makes amends for his boldness by proper recompense.
Now, of course, Weiss might say such decrees were often ignored. And one would acknowledge the truth of this but go on to point out that not all Christians ignored such decrees and, moreover, that the existence of the views of Pope Gregory X, among others, demonstrates that there was no such thing as a monolithic “Christian anti-Semitism” that somehow had a unique hold on the people of Germany and Austria. (Goldhagen ignores Austria in framing his notion of a peculiar German illness-disease metaphors are rife in these volumes.) Throughout, Weiss reverts to a discredited history, including one that does a shocking injustice to the courage, creativeness, and determination of the Jewish people. Jews are victims plain and simple. Their history is the history of victimization. So we move from the deluded early Christians to malevolent later Christians, especially those of the medieval era with their “profound hostility” and their “unremitting” attacks with the Jews always and everywhere as victim.
(First of three parts; click here to read Part 2)
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books & Culture Magazine.
Mar/Apr, Vol. 3, No. 2, Page 3
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