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The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany
 
 
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The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Hardcover)

by Susannah Heschel (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 384 pages
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press; illustrated edition edition (20 Nov 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0691125317
  • ISBN-13: 978-0691125312
  • Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.7 x 3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 369,463 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #89 in  Books > Religion & Spirituality > Judaism > Theology

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Product Description

Review

Heschel has a remarkable story to tell. Her reliance on primary sources and her objectivity are impressive. One comes away from her account wondering how such apparently intelligent and learned Christian scholars could have been so foolish and craven.
(Daniel J. Harrington America )

Susannah Heschel traces the evolution of the Institute and its various projects with great skill. . . . As an exercise in archival research it scores very highly. The detail is astonishing, and many intriguing points are made about both the origins of Nazism's Christian manifestations and the consequences of learned theologians spouting nonsense in Forties Thuringia.
(Catholic Herald )

Heschel tells the story of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life, showing how politics, theology, racial ideology, and political ambition shaped Nazi-era theological scholarship at one research institute. . . . This well-researched, theologically sensitive book is an important history of a troubling, shameful chapter in Christian history and will be a very important addition for most collections.
(A.W. Klink Choice )

Susannah Heschel's research is exemplary: she has followed up the careers of many theologians who took part in the attempt to rewrite Christianity. She has command over her subject without overstressing her Jewish sympathies; and this often shocking book is of considerable historical interest.
(Margaret Pawley Church Times )

Heschel's fascinating account begins not with the Third Reich but in the middle of the 19th century, when the intellectual foundation was laid for a German Christianity without roots in Judaism.
(Jewish Book World )

Some may resist reading another book on the Holocaust. Reacting to the title, they may even presume that its findings would be obvious and that examining its contents is unnecessary. That would be a mistake--with regard to the general attitude about the Holocaust and how it relates to Christian identity, as well as to any misplaced assumptions linked to the phrase Aryan Jesus.
(Henry Knight Christian Century )

Both as a history of German anti-Semitism and as an analysis of pronounced themes within Christian theology, Heschel's study is both broad and deep. I warmly hope that its success among general readers--a success it richly deserves--does not obscure its immediate relevance to students of divinity, and especially to scholars of the New Testament today.
(Paula Fredriksen Tablet )


Review

Susannah Heschel's The Aryan Jesus is a brilliant and erudite investigation of the convergence between major trends in German Protestantism and Nazi racial anti-Semitism. By concentrating on the history of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life, Heschel describes in forceful detail the Nazification of all aspects of Protestant theology, including the Aryanization of Jesus himself. This is a highly original and important contribution to our understanding of the Third Reich.
(Saul Friedlander, University of California, Los Angeles )
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A shameful story, 28 Dec 2008
By Ralph Blumenau (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)   
The `German Christians', founded in 1932, were a movement inside the Protestant Church of Germany to promote the Nazi ideology within Christian teaching. They eventually set up the `Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life'. This book is the detailed story of the academics associated with it. Its list of sources runs to 34 pages, and there is much repetition in the content; but from it a sordid story emerges clearly.

The twisted `scholarship' of Protestant theologians from bishops through university professors down to pastors, plumbed depths in a racial antisemitism (as distinct from theological anti-Judaism) whose origins can be traced to the 19th century, and which was strongly entrenched in theological faculties and student bodies, especially at the University of Jena even before the Nazis came to power. The academic director of the Institute, Walter Grundmann, was appointed Professor at Jena in 1938 (though the Institute, founded in 1939, was never formally a part of the University).

For these people it was essential to deny that Christianity evolved out of Judaism, and that it had been from the very beginning the very opposite of Judaism. Most Christians down the ages had seen Jesus as an opponent of Judaism, or, rather, taking their lead from St John's Gospel, had seen `the Jews' as an enemy of Jesus. What was new was that 19th century racists were troubled by the idea that Jesus was Jewish, and they invented a theory that, as an Aramaic-speaking Galilean, he was probably racially descended from the `Aryan' Assyrians who had conquered and populated Galilee in the 8th century BC; that his true Aryan teaching, which now found its culmination in Nazi Germany, had been corrupted by the Jewish writers of the Gospels and by the Jewish St Paul to suggest that Christianity was the fulfilment of prophesies in the Old Testament. It was therefore essential not only to exclude the Old Testament from the Bible, but to purge the New Testament, prayers, psalms etc from all Jewish material. Moreover, Christians who were of Jewish ancestry had to be purged from the Church: the teaching that baptism is sufficient to make someone a Christian was rejected. Nor did they stop at calling for the `purification' of the Church: they also espoused the physical destruction of the Jews. One would have thought that they would have found it easier to abandon all pretence of being Christians and whole-heartedly to embrace a völkisch paganism, as some Nazis of course did.

In 1940 the Institute published a `Volkstestament', its own version of the New Testament. The three Synoptic Gospels were amalgamated into one, in the process cutting much of Matthew, the most pro-Jewish of the Gospels, as well as the genealogy of Jesus, his circumcision and all references to his Messiahship. Out went references to his meekness; instead he is presented as a fighter. St Paul was too important to Lutherans to be excluded altogether, but his Epistles were stripped of all autobiographical references to himself as a Jew. Prayer books were purged of concepts like contrition and hope for forgiveness; the expression Divine Service was replaced by Divine Celebration; 1,971 our of 2,300 hymns had Jewish-influenced expressions removed - even from Luther's `A Mighty Fortress is our God' - and more `virile' and militaristic texts were substituted in a new hymnal of 1941. A new catechism in 1941 included such injunctions as `keep the blood pure' and `honour the Führer'.

There was of course some opposition to the `German Christians', most notably from the Confessing Church to which some 20% of Protestant pastors belong (as opposed to `between a quarter and a third' who adhered to the `German Christians'). These would not give racism priority over baptism. But very many of the Confessing Church members were as antisemitic as the `German Christians'. Some wanted to keep the Old Testament because the OT prophets almost always denounced the vices of the Jews. Some defended St Paul's teaching as a sharp refutation of the `Jewish-pharisaic spirit'; some worried that the attack on the roots of the New Testament might turn into an attack on Christianity itself.

For it is interesting how reluctant the Nazi leaders were to give the Institute the whole-hearted backing it had expected - not, of course, because they disapproved of its attack on Judaism, but because they were wary of the churches anyway, and Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologue, was actively hostile to Christianity. The Institute was never formally an organ of the Nazi Party, and some Nazis even mocked it for still being Christian at all; and the display of the swastika or other Nazi emblems inside the churches was prohibited.

All this gave many of its members the possibility to argue after the war that their work had been purely academic and not political, and that they had been loyal members of the Church rather than of the Party which some of them had the effrontery to claim they had opposed - the most they had done was to oppose Nazi paganism. The anti-Judaism of their writings, they said, was after all a classic Christian motif.

Not the least shameful aspect of the whole story is that most of them got away with it: after briefly losing their positions, their academic and pastoral careers in post-war Germany, both East and West, resumed or were even enhanced by promotions. Some of them were helped by even such famous opponents of Nazism as Pastor Niemöller. In 1954 Grundmann was appointed Rector of the seminary in Eisenach, and in 1956 he revenged himself against his former opponents in the Confessing Church, many of whom were now in authority, by becoming a Stasi informer against them. In his voluminous post-war writings, he continued to portray Jesus as an enemy of a Judaism devoid of morality, although we hear nothing more of an Aryan Jesus.

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