To: Cyprian who wrote (480059 ) 10/22/2003 5:03:37 PM From: Neocon Read Replies (1) | Respond to This is pretty typical (from one of your citations):Professor Stephen Aschheim, a historian from Jerusalem's Hebrew University, began by observing that nearly everything that preceded the Holocaust has been blamed for it. German romanticism, the counter-enlightenment, the supposedly peculiarly vicious form of German anti-Semitism, modernity, racism and, of course, Christianity, have taken their share of blame. But Aschheim is scornful of books with titles like "From Luther to Hitler," which make a simple leap from Christian anti-Jewish outbursts and calumnies to genocidal Nazism. There was bitter persecution, to be sure. Nearly every Nazi persecution of the Jews -- including the Nuremberg laws, but not the "final solution" -- had its parallel in earlier Christian oppression. The Holocaust was not perpetrated by the Church, nor the four scholars agreed, could it possibly have been. For while the Christian hatred and contempt for Jews was at times extreme during the Medieval period and afterward, the Christian faith is a moral one. Jews themselves understood this, and took refuge from murderous mobs in the homes of bishops and popes. Aschheim, while not accepting the view that Christianity caused the Holocaust, does not shrink from indicting Christian churches for creating the climate in which the more virulent and vicious seeds of Nazi racism could grow. As Professor Steven Katz, another of the scholars present, framed the question, "Why did the Nazis choose the Jews as the paradigm of the other?" Katz's answer is this: The Nazis understood that centuries of Christian anti-Judaism had prepared the ground for Nazi anti-Semitism. He argues that while you do not get to Auschwitz from the New Testament, you cannot get there without it, either. "The answer is yes," said Steinmetz, "Luther wrote repulsive things about the Jews, of which the Nazis made use. But he was not a Nazi."
