Jesus, Jews, and the Shoah

National Review, Jan 27, 2003 by Mark Riebling

It would be futile, of course, to deny that the Nazis built a vast mass of evil on a vast mass of prejudice. It would be equally futile to deny that strong prejudices against the Jews existed among Christians during the centuries before the Shoah. Since, moreover, the childhood of the European nations was passed under the tutelage of the clergy, we should not be surprised that these prejudices were, in part, ecclesiastically inculcated.

That this general anti-Judaism contributed to a moral climate in which Europeans became willing executioners of Jews has been argued by some, beginning with Jules Isaac in 1948. But, in the main, these critics stopped short of blaming Christianity for the Holocaust. The great exception is Hyam Maccoby, who in the 1980s posited that the Jesus of the Gospels was anti-Semitic. Goldhagen takes up Maccoby's view. In Hitler's Willing Executioners, as noted, Goldhagen distinguished between the Nazis' "eliminationist anti-Semitism" and Christian anti- Judaism. But in A Moral Reckoning that distinction is obliterated by a hurricane of ostensibly contrary proof.

"You brood of vipers . . . you are evil . . ." So said Jesus, Goldhagen reminds us, to "the Jews who were Pharisees." One could, of course, just say "the Pharisees," without reminding us they were Jewish; but then, the passage wouldn't seem anti-Semitic. This sleight-of-hand continues in the next sentence, where Goldhagen sneaks from "the Jews who were Pharisees" to Jesus' alleged indictment of "such a people," i.e., the Jews. Farther down the page, after quoting more criticisms of the Pharisees, Goldhagen mischaracterizes those words, too, as an "account of the Jews." At the tail end of this disastrous passage, he even inserts the word "Jews" in brackets where the text just says "you," meaning the Pharisees. He also puts in brackets "Jewish," where Matthew says merely "the whole people [laos]" -- which could mean the Jews, but could also mean the general Judean populace, including its many pagan Greeks and Romans. (These passages are often requoted as proof of anti-Semitism, with the bracketed insertions of Jewishness always stuck to them like pilotfish.) The paragraph closes with a false reassertion that Jesus "decrees Jews to be a 'brood of vipers'" when in fact -- as Goldhagen himself said at the paragraph's outset -- Jesus was merely addressing "the Jews who were Pharisees."

Having thus manufactured evidence of anti-Semitism -- having set up this straw Jesus -- Goldhagen wheels round his guns. Christ's denunciations of the Pharisees -- misrepresented as "speeches from Jesus deprecating the unbelieving Jews" -- are "the Christian Bible's libels." They thus constitute the major premise in Goldhagen's high argument: that Christianity is inherently anti-Semitic.

The anti-Semitism of the Christian Bible is not incidental to it but constitutive of its story of Jesus' life and death and of its messages about God and humanity. . . . Christianity has consecrated a heinous set of charges against Jews in its foundational text. . . . The Christian Bible is . . . a profoundly anti-Semitic text. . . . Christianity is a religion that consecrated at its core and, historically, spread throughout its domain a megatherian hatred of one group of people: the Jews. . . . The cumulative damage of the Christian Bible's defamatory account of Jews to their image and reputation among its credulous readers would be hard to exaggerate.