The Holocaust was conducted on a continent that had been Christian for around fifteen centuries. The Christian theological tradition had developed, during those fifteen centuries, an extensive body of antisemitic argument that had been preached from pulpits, taught in schools, and written into church doctrine. Without that prior tradition the Nazi racial-political case against the Jewish population of Europe would have had a substantially weaker foundation in the popular imagination. Examining what the Christian churches had said about Jews, and what they did and did not do during the killing programme itself, is part of the historical record.
The medieval inheritance
Christian antisemitic argument had several components inherited from late antiquity and the medieval period. The deicide charge, the proposition that the Jewish people collectively bore responsibility for the death of Jesus, was the foundational doctrinal claim. The blood libel, the proposition that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes, originated in twelfth-century England (the William of Norwich case of 1144) and spread across the continent over the next four centuries. The host desecration libel, the proposition that Jews defiled consecrated Christian sacraments, was the second major popular accusation. The economic charges, the proposition that Jews were responsible for usury and exploitative lending, drew on the genuine concentration of Jewish populations in money-lending professions in regions where Christian law had banned Christians from charging interest.
The accumulated effect of these arguments, repeated in sermons, plays, manuscripts and oral tradition, was a body of popular Christian antisemitic feeling that ran across most of Europe by the early modern period. Mass expulsions followed: from England in 1290, from France in 1394, from Spain in 1492, from Portugal in 1497, and from many smaller territories in between. Pogroms against surviving Jewish communities took place across central and eastern Europe at intervals from the Crusader period onwards. The Jewish populations of the German lands had been progressively pushed eastward in the late medieval period, contributing to the concentration of Jewish life in Poland, Lithuania and the Russian Pale of Settlement that became the geographical heart of European Jewry by the modern period.
The Reformation
The Protestant Reformation did not soften the position. Martin Luther’s 1543 pamphlet On the Jews and Their Lies set out an explicit programme: synagogues should be burned, Jewish prayer books should be destroyed, rabbis should be forbidden to teach, Jewish travel and trade should be restricted, Jewish property should be confiscated, and Jews should be expelled. The pamphlet was reprinted at intervals over the next four centuries. Der Stürmer reprinted extracts in the 1930s as evidence that Luther had supported the Nazi position. After 1945 the Lutheran World Federation issued a formal repudiation of the pamphlet, but the historical record of its influence remained. The Catholic Church’s Counter-Reformation produced its own restrictions on Jewish life across the Catholic territories of Europe.
Catholic doctrine in the modern period
The Catholic Church through the nineteenth century maintained the deicide doctrine and the broader theological case against Jewish religious practice. The Vatican’s temporal authority over the Roman Ghetto, where the Jewish community of Rome was confined behind walls until 1870, was the most visible institutional case. The Church opposed Jewish civil emancipation in most of the Italian states. The Dreyfus Affair in France in the 1890s was conducted with substantial Catholic press support for the antisemitic position.
The 1930s and the silence
The German Catholic and Protestant churches in the 1930s did not, for the most part, oppose the Nuremberg Laws or the wider antisemitic legislation. The Reich Concordat of July 1933 between the Vatican and the Nazi government regularised the Catholic Church’s position in the regime. The Confessing Church, the Protestant resistance movement led by Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, opposed the Nazi takeover of the German Protestant Church but did not, until late in the period, make antisemitic legislation a primary objection. Niemöller’s post-war reflection, with his line about the Jews, the Communists, the trade unionists and finally himself, became one of the central texts of the post-war Christian reckoning with the Holocaust.
Pope Pius XII
The role of Pope Pius XII, Pope from March 1939 to October 1958, has been the subject of sustained historical argument. The position is covered in detail on the dedicated Pope Pius XII page in the Collaborators sub-section. The basic point is that Pius did not publicly condemn the killing programme during the war, and that the Vatican’s wartime conduct was, at best, ambiguous on the issue. Some Catholic clergy across Europe risked their lives to shelter Jewish refugees, including the network around the priests of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in the French Cévennes; some Catholic clergy actively collaborated with the killing programme, including in Slovakia and Croatia. The institutional Vatican response was muted on the whole.
The 1965 reckoning
The Catholic Church formally addressed the deicide doctrine for the first time at the Second Vatican Council in 1965, with the declaration Nostra Aetate. The declaration repudiated the proposition that the Jewish people as a whole bore collective responsibility for the death of Jesus. It was the most significant doctrinal move on the Christian-Jewish question in the modern period. The Lutheran World Federation issued its formal repudiation of Luther’s 1543 pamphlet in 1984. Various national Protestant denominations issued similar statements over the following decades. The Anglican Communion, the Eastern Orthodox churches, and most other Christian traditions have subsequently issued statements distancing themselves from the inherited antisemitic doctrine.
What the record adds up to
The Christian churches did not invent the Nazi racial doctrine, and the Christian theological case against the Jewish people was not the same as the Nazi biological case. But the centuries of preached deicide, blood libel, economic accusation and exclusion produced the popular cultural environment in which the Nazi case could be politically effective. Without the inherited Christian antisemitism the Holocaust would have been substantially harder to conduct. The post-war doctrinal repudiations are part of the historical record of the churches’ own reckoning with that fact.
See also
- Pope Pius XII and the Vatican
- Martin Niemöller
- Le Chambon-sur-Lignon
- The Nuremberg Laws
- Der Sturmer and the Pornography of Hate
Sources
- Robert Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, Random House, 2010
- Martin Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies, 1543
- Nostra Aetate, Second Vatican Council, 28 October 1965
- David Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews, Knopf, 2001
- Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, Princeton University Press, 2008
- USHMM: The Churches and the Holocaust