The denier argument from religion and prophecy is the rarest form of Holocaust denial and the one most directly connected to classical antisemitism. It does not rest on engineering calculations, population statistics, or the provenance of documents. It rests on misreadings of Jewish religious texts, on theological claims about the character of Jewish belief, and on the long pre-existing tradition of Christian and Islamic anti-Jewish polemic that the denial movement has drawn on from its earliest days. The arguments are old. The Holocaust is being inserted into traditions of hostility that predate it by centuries.
Where these arguments come from
The theological strand of Holocaust denial draws on three distinct traditions. The first is the blood libel and the broader medieval accusation that Jews were conspiratorial enemies of Christian society, an accusation that produced mass killings of Jewish communities across Europe from the twelfth century onwards. The second is the specifically modern antisemitism of the nineteenth century, which took medieval religious hostility and recast it in the pseudo-scientific language of race. The third is the tradition of misreading the Talmud that runs from Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s Entdecktes Judenthum of 1700 through the antisemitic pamphlet literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and which produced a body of fabricated or wildly de-contextualised quotations that circulate in denial and far-right literature to this day.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the document that connects all three. Fabricated by the Russian secret police around 1902 and published as a supposed record of a Jewish plan for world domination, the Protocols drew on a French political satire, medieval conspiracy tropes, and the pseudo-scientific antisemitism of the period. They were exposed as a fabrication in 1921 by Philip Graves, the Times correspondent in Constantinople, who identified their plagiarised source. They continue to circulate in the Arab world, in far-right European and American movements, and on social media. They are the founding document of the conspiracy-theory tradition the denial movement draws on.
The three arguments in this section
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion Are Genuine addresses the claim that the Protocols represent an authentic account of Jewish planning. The forgery has been comprehensively documented. The argument for authenticity survives only in communities where documentary evidence is not regarded as a constraint.
The Talmud Teaches Jews to Deceive Non-Jews addresses the tradition of misreading and de-contextualising specific passages of the Babylonian Talmud. The tradition has its own scholarly history reaching back to Eisenmenger and forward through the antisemitic literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The argument does not survive contact with the actual Talmudic text in its actual context. Most of the passages cited as evidence of Jewish deceptiveness are either fabricated, taken from contexts that invert their meaning, or drawn from legal discussions about specific historical circumstances that have no general application.
God Would Not Have Allowed the Holocaust to Happen is the theological form of the argument. In its honest form, it is one of the central questions of post-Holocaust Jewish religious thought. Emil Fackenheim, Eliezer Berkovits, Hans Jonas, and Richard Rubenstein all addressed it seriously, from within traditions that took the question to be genuine and painful. The denier version inverts the question: instead of asking what the Holocaust means for Jewish theology, it uses the theological difficulty as an argument that the Holocaust did not occur. The confusion of theological difficulty with historical falsity is the move. The Holocaust is either a punishment from God, in which case some deniers accept it as real but justified, or an impossibility because a just God would not have permitted it. Neither position engages with the historical record. Both use religious language as a substitute for historical argument.
Why this form of denial matters
This cluster of arguments matters for a reason distinct from the other denier strategies. The engineering claims about gas chambers, the statistical arguments about population figures, and the document-forgery arguments are relatively recent: products of the post-war denial movement as it developed from the 1960s onwards. The religious and prophetic arguments are not recent. They connect Holocaust denial to a tradition of anti-Jewish hostility that produced the conditions in which the Holocaust became conceivable. The Nazis did not invent European antisemitism. They inherited it, systematised it, and acted on it. The religious strand of Holocaust denial is a reminder that the intellectual traditions they drew on have not disappeared.
Sources
- Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Serif, 1996
- Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery, Harvill Secker, 2011
- Philip Graves, “The Truth about the Protocols”, The Times, 16, 17, and 18 August 1921
- Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections, New York University Press, 1970
- Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Free Press, 1993
- Robert Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, Random House, 2010