published in VI Holocaust and Genocide Studies (1991) Is 45-61j and also as a pamphlet from Elmhurst College (1994 - In Thy Light, II, 1:11-21)

Reinhold Niebuhr and the Jewish People

The 1990 Niebuhr Lecture at Elmhurst College

(©1990 Franklin H. Littell AND THE JEWISH PEOPLE*

From time to time we hear rumors of a "Niebuhr renaissance."^ From time to time we read tributes to him, Reinhold Niebuhr, from prominent figures in literature, politics or religion, frequently repeating the summary judgments by Hans Morgenthau or Bob Patterson. Patterson, publishing on a conservative Protestant press in 1977, esteemed him as "the greatest native-born Protestant theologian since Jonathan Edwards. "^ He was putting in print a judgment that long since had become part of the oral tradition of Union Seminary alumni. Morgenthau, himself a giant in political science, called RN in 1962 "the greatest living political philosopher of America, perhaps the only creative political philosopher since Calhoun."3 All of us see, every few days, on a calendar or greeting card, that prayer which he launched on its way in the little church at Heath, Massachusetts: "God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, the courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish one from the other."4 Even if, as frequently happens today, the classical expression is attributed to the ubiquitous "Anonymous," Niebuhr students recognize the hand of the master. In one of the flurry of articles that responded to Richard Fox's badly flawed biography5, William Lee Miller reported a finding in respect to RN's continuing appeal with which many of

*By Franklin H Littell, UTS 1940 (B.D.), Yale 1946 (Ph.D.); the 1990 Niebuhr Lecture at Elmhurst College, 18 April 1990 us can concur: "There are always some, a small minority to be sure, who even yet are gripped, influenced, or persuaded, and often quite deeply..."6 In my last twenty years of teaching, one of the most impressive experiences was when a group of graduate students pressed me to take on a non-credit seminar, above and beyond my regular teaching load and their normal matriculation, which led to two semesters of work on RN's Gifford Lectures, The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941, 1943). While it is true that "one swallow does not make a Spring," and a flurry of books and articles does not make a renaissance, there is no doubt but that - to switch metaphors - RN is a hardy perennial. Many in my generation of churchmen would join George Kennan, referring to the membership of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department after the war, in calling RN "the father of us all."7 One of my most moving experiences in recent years was to participate in the International Conference on the Work of Reinhold Niebuhr, held September 1984 on the initiative of Richard Harries, then Dean of King's College London, and hear the words of British clergy and teachers of my generation. They spoke with fervor of the way in which his occasional addresses to SCM and other university groups just before the war, given while he was in the UK for the Gifford Lectures, appeared to them like the water of an oasis in a desert of political confusion.

RN and the Jewish People Niebuhr: Master of Apologetic Appreciated by civic activists, Christian and secular and Jewish, and by a vigorous minority of both churchmen and political leaders, RN carried the witness of his faith to the world - and the concerns of the world to the churches' centers. In this role his style was very different from that of his brother Richard, who was more removed from the political arena. Richard favored the ascetic approach, while Reinhold - after he left the Fellowship of Reconciliation and founded the Fellowship of Socialist Christians - was always critical of withdrawal which - following Troeltsch - he considered the "sectarian" strategy8. What is especially strange is the fact that his insights in correction of traditional Christian preaching and teaching about the Jewish people have yet to be given serious attention by most ( American seminary professors. The recent volume of his writings in public affairs edited by Larry Rasmussen, with a long Introduction, fails to publish any of his substantial writings on Jewry - and of course also neglects to talk about that subject in discussing RN's theological contributions.9 Yet that was one of Niebuhr's most fundamental contributions, one much appreciated by Jewish spokesmen, and one that shoots an arrow straight into the golden center of American Kulturprotestantismus.

There is only one point where Rasmussen identifies a "Jewish issue" in RN, and that is a negative where he writes in criticism of what he considers RN's emphasis upon individual and heroic self-sacrifice to the neglect of mutuality and community:

' RN and the Jewish People 3 "This is doubly ironic in light of Niebuhr's deep appreciation of Judaism. He often said he appreciated the fact that Jews spoke less about salvation than about the saved society. Had Niebuhr's understanding of Jesus emphasized more the Jewishness of Jesus, with its communitarian theology, Niebuhr might have come to a different perspective on his chief moral norm, agapecic love, and perhaps on his anthropology indebted as it is even more to Kierkegaard than to Buber."10 Whether RN's doctrine of the church was deficient may be debated, and often is11. But it seems passing strange to categorize as pietistic and insufficiently "Jewish" the cardinal points in the thinking of a man who early rejected the role of a systematic theologian and affirmed that "theology is to aid 'the ethical reconstruction of modern society' by forging a religious imagination which sustains a strong commitment to public life and guides policy decisions that represent the leading edge of justice."12 Among Jewish communal leaders there has not been much doubt as to where RN stood. No other Christian theologian was so well known in Jewish circles as RN. In his memorial statement Professor Seymour Siegel of Jewish Theological Seminary concluded: "Niebuhr's great achievement was to relate the realm of the here and now to the realm of ultimate mystery. In a measure unequalled by any other man of American religion, he succeeded. He will be sorely missed."13 To cite a another illustrative case, a recent review in The Jerusalem Post discusses an autobiography just published in Hebrew by Elihu Elath, pioneer Israeli diplomat. The reviewer

I RN and the Jewish People 4 notes with satisfaction that a chapter was devoted to RN, "this great man, who was a devoted friend of the Jewish people and the Zionist idea. His views were not popular in some of the most influential Protestant circles..."14 RN's views are still not popular in denominational and other establishment circles. In America, it has taken us longer to get the point of his message of crisis; in fact, there is great doubt whether our "mainline denominations" have left the comfortable repose of culture-religion - with its deeply dyed stain of - even yet. Certainly most of the American church judicatory statements on Christian/Jewish relations, frequently avoiding altogether the two most important religious events of recent centuries ( and a restored ), are still plainly pre-Niebuhr. In 1939 in Britain they were already caught up in a life and death moment of crisis and decision, and for those who listened for a message of Christian apologetic that made sense of both faith and politics, RN was a most dramatic presence. With the fogs of "non-intervention" and the illusions of "peace in our time" still swirling in British universities and parishes, RN's words cut through to the central issues in a way they still recalled - after 45 years - as most helpful and inspiring.

Speaking to Britons, whose leaders a few years back had sacrificed the Spanish Republic to fascism in the name of "non­ intervention, " whose politicians and but a few months before had

RN and the Jewish People 5 sacrificed the Czechoslovak Republic to in the name of "peace in our time," RN staked out the field. His choice of democracy over dictatorship was unshaken: "Whatever may be the moral ambiguities of the so- called democratic nations, and however serious may be their failure to conform properly to their democratic ideals, it is sheer moral perversity to equate the inconsistencies of a democratic civilization with the brutalities which modern tyrannical states practice. If we cannot make a distinction here, there are no historical distinctions which have any value."I5 He knew how eagerly his fellow-Americans seized upon the failures of the democracies to sit "even-handedly" between the Allies and the Axis, and he would have none of it. He would have had none of the "even-handedness" of those Americans who today find it simply too difficult to make a choice between the government of a democratic but imperfect Israel and the totalitarian regimes that rule Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya... While defending the cause of the democratic countries over against the fascist threat, RN struck powerful blows against injustices and wrong-doing at home. Not seldom, during the sometime victories of the rightwing populism of the last two decades, one of the American torch-bearers with feeling has muttered to himself or a friend, "Reinie, thou shouldst be living at this hour... Church and country have need of thee!" To some of us, his 1934 chart for a way out of the miasma of American culture-religion is as sound today as it was when he first enunciated it:

I RN and the Jewish People "In my opinion adequate spiritual guidance can come only through a more radical political orientation and more conservative religious convictions than are comprehended in the culture of our era.u1^

In 1934, that year of decision for European Christendom17, our socially established churches in America were in fact as poorly prepared for the Church Struggle as were the legally established churches of Europe. Niebuhr saw things in crisis, and it was his judgment that "the Christian Church in America has never been upon a lower level of spiritual insight and moral sensitivity than in this tragic age of world conflict."18 In looking back, dispassionate observers tell us that RN's "lasting legacy was that he provided a theological framework for social , grounding its analysis in the soil of the central doctrines of the Christian faith,"19 and that his "prime intellectual contribution was to weld together the tragic sense of life and the quest for justice. "20 But for those of us who sat at his feet in the years of the Great Depression, with the threat of the Nazi Empire lowering in the distance, the atmosphere of his sermons and class lectures was electric with something more demanding than calm observation and systematized theology. Like all great preachers and teachers, he pursued truth with a passion and appealed to his listeners to be changed in their minds and hearts. Stasis and RN were sworn enemies.

( RN and the Jewish People His aphorisms pass from person to person, from meeting to meeting. Who has not heard RN's comments on the prospect for eliminating sin and evil by "education" and rationality? "Why," said RN of the that embraced Hitler and Nazism, "there were more brains per square head in Germany than anywhere else in the world..." That RN is sorely missed today on the American religious scene is evident also in the thrashing around that marks the churches' attempt to deal honestly with centuries of Christian antisemitism, and to correct our preaching and teaching in the shadow of the Holocaust21. Nowhere is his prophetic critique more needed than in respect to the general failure of the churches to affirm Jewish survival, including the survival and well-being of the State of Israel.

Jewish Survival: Missions to the Jews What is the present message of the churches on Jewish survival? With the targetting of Jews for conversion one of the sorest points in the Christian/Jewish encounter today, a leading evangelical Protestant theological seminary (Fuller) has just announced the founding of an Institute of Hebrew Christian Missions. By and large the churches in America are just beginning to do away with the negative teaching of contempt, and have made little positive progress.

I RN and the Jewish People In positive affirmations of Christian responsibility toward the Jewish people the American churches are far behind, for example, the Protestant Church of the Rheinland's declaration of January, 1980: "the continuing existence of the Jewish people, its return to the Land of Promise, and also the creation of the State of Israel are signs of the faithfulness of God toward God's people..."22 By 1958, and again in 1966, RN had already gone public in opposition to targetting the Jews for evangelization, attributing his insight at this point to his brother Richard23. However, arecent discovery makes it possible to place RN's insight on that issue much earlier. A German student - Dieter Splinter- recently discovered in the Niebuhr Papers at the Library of Congress the notes of a sermon which RN preached on 10 January 1926 questioning the missionizing of Jews and calling for a I partnership between prophetic Christianity and prophetic Judaism. Some of the phrases in the sermon are memorable: "If I were a self-respecting Jew I certainly would not renounce the faith of the fathers to embrace a faith which is as involved as Christianity is with racialism, Nordicism and gentile arrogance. If we want to approach the Jew at all we need a new strategy, a strategy in which repentance and love are mingled... we can not look upon Judaism as a missionary field in the same sense in which we regard Africa as a mission field.... What we need is an entente cordiale between prophetic Judaism and prophetic Christianity in which both religions would offer the best they have to each other..."24 This discovery by a German researcher indicates even more dramatically the remarkable way in which he anticipated two

RN and the Jewish People generations ago the critical post-Auschwitz issues between Christians and Jews, issues which the American church leaders are only now beginning to take up.

RN and Antisemitism RN's antennae for picking up overt antisemitism were developed early. In an autobiographical memo written in 1962, he mentioned his encounter with overt antisemitism during his 1921 visit to his ancestral home. The German pastor was invited to the family reception, and he turned out to be the kind of pietist perfectionist that aroused RN's wrath even then. A self-righteous moralist, the Pfarrer separated the masses from those he counted "saved" among his flock. An ignorant antisemite, the pastor attributed Germany's woes to the presence of a Jew in the cabinet of the . The Jew was Walther Rathenau, then one of RN's heroes. As he later recalled, his explosion ruined the family party25. During the years of testing and maturing at Bethel Church in Detroit, he lived and worked in the shadow of the antisemitism of Henry Ford of Dearborn and Father Charles Coughlin of the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak. He was sickened by the acculturation and accomodation of the Christian establishment, which accepted so readily the economic despotism of Ford. He was just as much repelled by the individualistic pietism which the safe pulpits substituted for the Biblical word that hits like

I RN and the Jewish People 10 hammers and burns like fire. As he had noted earlier in Germany, Christian Kulturrelioion and antisemitism fitted into each other neatly. He was becoming alert to the more subtle levels of antisemitism, as well as to its blatantly overt manifestations. Two friends who then influenced him especially were Jews. The first was Fred Butzel, a close associate in matters of social justice and civic uprightness. RN often repeated the remark of his friend the Episcopal bishop, Charles Williams, that in the weightier things of the law there were only two Christians in Detroit "and both of them were Jews."26 His statement in Pious and Secular America that the Jewish capacity for civil virtue equals or surpasses the Christian capacity was a conclusion to which he had come thirty years before, during his preaching ministry in Detroit27. A decade later he made a similar | statement: "My appreciation of the Jewish capacity for civil virtue and social justice was not a belated, but an early insight."28 It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that what RN called his "long love affair with the Jewish people" was simply a function of his revulsion against antisemitism or his friendly alliances with Jews in civic and political causes. His conviction was rooted and grounded in his Biblical theology, with the social dimension which came to him in part directly from the Bible and in part was mediated from the Bible through the Social Gospel's emphasis on the Kingdom of God. According to Ursula

RN and the Jewish People i1 Niebuhr, his copies of Walter Rauschenbusch's A Theology for the Social Gospel and Christianity and the Social Crisis were heavily marked in sections which indicated the contribution of the Hebrew prophets29. Christopher Niebuhr called my attention to a section in the latter volume that RN had underlined30: "It is important to note further that the morality which the prophets had in mind was not merely the private morality of the home, but the public morality on which national life is founded. They said less about the pure heart for the individual than of just institutions for the nation."

There is another note, too, seldom recognized. As his position in several theological controversies shows, when it came to a choice between the Lutheran and the Reformed elements in his Unierte background, RN often chose the latter. Niebuhr consistently resisted the Christocentrism of Barth and Barthianism. This choice seems to me evident also in his view of the covenant of faith. In contrast to Lutheranism, in the Reformed tradition the covenant does not begin with Jesus Christ, and the Scriptures are not broken between an Old Testament in the shadow of the Law and a New Testament illuminated by love and grace. Rather the covenant of faith begins with Abraham at Schechem, and in the life, work and death of Jesus of Nazareth the believing gentiles are brought upon history's stage with the Jews - to the place where the action is. RN's theology of history was not dominated a motif requiring brokenness between dispensations or between peoples: history remains of one piece31.

< RN and the Jewish People 12 Jewish Survival: the Nazi Third Reich ( In an appreciative article on "Reinhold Niebuhr and the Jews," Egal Feldman has reviewed RN's position on the key issues affecting Christian/Jewish relations. He stresses that RN was among the first of American Protestants to perceive the significance of Nazi antisemitism, and he agrees with Roy Eckardt's judgment that it was RN's concern for the plight of the Jews of Europe that led him to advocate American intervention in the war with Germany32. In 1941, the same year that he founded Christianity and Crisis, RN helped found the interventionist Union for Democratic Action. RN was not only "among the first of American Protestants to perceive the significance of Nazi antisemitism," he was the most prominent American churchman by far in his concern for Jewish survival in the face of the Nazi assault. In the English-speaking world, of that generation only James Parkes wrote more concentratedly on the matter of Christian/ Jewish relations. One of the graduate students in my 1959 Graduate Seminar at Emory University - a seminar on the German Church Struggle and the Holocaust - established in his research paper that Niebuhr wrote more articles and editorials on the subject of the Nazi assault on the Jews than any other American Christian. More remarkable yet, he identified issues that are even today central in the seminars, conferences and publications on Christian theology after Auschwitz. He understood, as few do

RN and the Jewish People 13 even yet, that the assault on the Jewish people was ipso facto an assault on true Christianity.

Niebuhr's friend Stephen S Wise already in 1933 perceived that the epoch-making scale of the Nazi assault on civilization was earnest for Christians as well as Jews. Addressing a group of New York ministers, Rabbi Wise said that "it is the very heart and fabric of Christianity that will ultimately, has indeed already, come under attack." Reinhold Niebuhr's concern for the other community complemented that of his friend. Speaking to the National Convention of Hadassah, addressing the plight of the Jews under Nazism, he entitled his speech "My Sense of Shame."33 "First of all I should like as a Christian speaking to Jews to express my genuine admiration for the Jewish spirit and my sense of shame that an allegedly Christian civilization can sink to such depths of cruelty." When, in 1936, a collaborating church government in headed by Wilhelm Zoellner appealed to the churches of the world for support of Hitler in his service in raising a bulwark of Christian civilization against Bolshevism, Niebuhr wrote: "...the same state which the Christians of the world are asked to regard as their protector is engaged in the systematic task of corrupting and rooting out Christianity among its own people."^ Suspicious of captive Protestant establishments, RN had no use either for the 's praise of Mussolini's conquest of

Ethiopia35 and the Spanish hierarchy's adulation of Franco36.

Later, with the war engaged, he was to write with equal moral fervor about the servile conduct of the French Roman Catholic bishops toward Marshal Petain in Vichy France. RN and the Jewish People 14 RN's sources of information - including the close personal contacts with refugees like and Eduard Heimann and younger ecumenical leaders like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Willem Visser't Hooft - were too good for him to be deceived or engage in the self-deception so widespread in the American churches37. By February of 1933 he had already published his conclusion as to the Nazi intention relating to the Jewish people, a conclusion that ten years later was still resisted by most American Jews and virtually all American Christians: "They are bent upon the extermination of the Jews."38 The American churches were deaf to the issue - both religiously and politically. In 1940, four years after the Aryan decrees had robbed German Jews of their rights as citizens, three years after Martin Niemoeller had joined hundreds of thousands of Nazi opponents in the concentration camps, two years after the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia and the Party-sponsored atrocities of Kristallnacht, and with the Battle of Britain in full swing, a neutralist appeal was issued by the Federal Council of Churches. Although several of his friends in the Student Christian Associations had helped prepare the appeal for non-intervention, RN responded vigorously. He quoted the neutralist appeal: '"'We are convinced that there is ground for hope that a just peace is now possible by negotiation. It is important for the welfare of mankind that the conflict end, not in a dictated but in a negotiated peace based upon the interest of all persons concerned.'"

i RN and the Jewish People 15 His answer, as was now so often the case, punctured the high­ flying balloon of universalistic moralism with a missile from ground level: "This statement, which was commended by the leading Christian journal in America as containing the very essence of Christian counsel in the war situation was completely divorced from all political realities."39 Nowhere was the theological inadequacy and political self- deception more evident than in the leading liberal Protestant journal The Christian Century, to which RN had long been tied by professional activity and personal friendships. His break with Charles Clayton Morrison and his founding of Christianity and Crisis was due in part to the failure of The Christian Century to perceive the political and military danger of an expansive Third Reich; this is the point usually noticed by students of politics. But it was also due to something which theologians and churchmen generally might reflect upon: The Christian Century'slong-standing demand that American Jews cease to be "hyphenated citizens," assimilate, and become loyal members of American society40. RN preferred pluralism to the "melting pot" theory, and Jewish survival to Jewish "death by assimilation."41 Niebuhr opposed Christian antisemitism in both its conservative ("conversionist") and liberal ("assimilationist") manifestations. His occasional advice to Jews who came seeking pastoral advice is often cited. A case in point was , who on leaving the Trotskyite faith came questing

I RN and the Jewish People 16 Christianity. Both RN and Will told June Bingham, among others ( intimately concerned, that RN instructed his younger friend to turn to study of the Judaism he had never rightly learned. Herberg went on to become one of the leading Jewish intellectuals on the American scene The first issue of Christianity and Crisis came out in February of 1941. Was it "theology" or "political ethics" that made RN in the following May challenge John T Flynn's isolationist politics? They were debating on NBC Radio's "Town Meeting of the Air," and Flynn was expressing the even-handedness of the neutral. Niebuhr's message was down to earth: "I remember a publisher friend of mine telling me some time ago, before the war began, that he was going to publish a German book, until he got the contract. He discovered that in this contract it was demanded that no Jew should have anything to do ( with the manufacture of the book. This is the kind of clause which would be written into all kinds of contracts. That is just a small matter, but that is the kind of world we would have to live in."42

His direct ethical perception was impelled by both high religion and sound politics; in exegeting RN, no choice between "theology" and "ethics has to be made.

Jewish Survival: Israel In one of his essays he wrote that "the collective survival impulse [is] as legitimate a 'right' as an individual one."43 This conviction was expressed in his support of a Jewish state as well as his opposition to targetting Jews for evangelization.

RN and the Jewish People RN's essays on "Jews After the War" (1942), "Our Stake in the State of Israel" (1957), and "The Unresolved Religious Problems in Christian-Jewish Relations" (1966) are among his most important - though usually neglected - shorter writings. Of the 1942 articles on Jewish statehood, his friend Felix Frankfurter wrote: "I know nothing in print that faces the Jewish problem more trenchantly and more candidly."44 As usual, RN's religious and political convictions were articulated in practical organizational work, in this instance in voluntary efforts that finally converged in the American Christian Palestine Committee.45 On the founders of the prototype committee of ACPC, Carl Hermann Voss wrote, "Outstanding among them all, Reinhold Niebuhr, the preeminent theologian in , on that occasion, as in many other instances and throughout the remaining 29 years of his life, Niebuhr's word on Zionism, Jewry, and Judaism was forthright and sane."

Niebuhr was not a "Christian Zionist," that is, a Christian whose theology required the return of the Jewish people to the homeland for history to be consummated. His position was taken as a logical development of his awareness of the fate of Jews without power. The failure of American churches to act responsibly even toward the refugees whom the Nazis called "non- Aryan Christians," where the Christian committee to rescue baptized Jews received more money from American Jews than from

( RN and the Jewish People 18 American Christians46, undoubtedly intensified his certainty that the Jews had to depend upon themselves for survival. RN's Christian realism puzzled many of his former allies, untrained as they were in dialectical thinking47. They could not understand why he vigorously supported the forces arraigned against Hitler and Nazism - and still reserved the right to criticize saturation bombing and the demand of "unconditional surrender."48 They could not understand his generally critical stance against nationalism, while he was at the same time supporting the founding of a Jewish state.

Nevertheless, it was precisely the Jewish insight and the Biblical style of paradox that made it possible for him to support the Allied cause while warning the victors, as German and Japanese cities lay in rubble, that the nations executing the judgment of the Lord come under divine judgment in their own season49.

The massive attack of surrounding nations ruled by tribal chieftains and modern dictators, attempting in 1948 to throttle the infant nation in its crib, reinforced his- partisanship of Israel - which remained constant, though not uncritical. Israel was then no longer one more manifestation of nationalism among many, just as antisemitism was no longer for RN simply another form of "race prejudice." Although no dispensationalist, RN's

RN and the Jewish People 19 theology - Biblical in grounding and prophetic in style - left room for the mystery and the offense of the return of the Jewish people to a place of power among the ooyim. RN was of course aware of what some German theologians - for example, Paul Althaus and Emmanuel Hirsch - had done to accomodate Christianity to the voelkisch ideology which undergirded the positives Christentum of Article 24 of the NSDAP Platform. He knew well the way the Deutsche Christen had supported the Nazi measures calculated to make the German nation and its Deutsche Volkskirche free (Judenrein) of the taint of Jewish blood. They had developed a political theology in which the Volk was primary and Christian universalism was excluded- the universalism for which RN's young friend Dietrich Bonhoeffer risked and found his death. If Jewish "chosenness," why not Teutonic chosenness? If German nationalism be rejected as a "second revelation," how could a Jewish state be affirmed? With Heschel's encouragement, RN had moved to the necessary post-Enlightenment awareness. Beyond "liberal" abstractions and universals, beyond "fundamentalist" propositions, he came to affirm the truth that God has permitted to Zion a task that is withheld from the gentile peoples. The task of the Jewish people is different from the assignment to believing gentiles. In the difficult struggle to find a meaningful dialectical tension between particularism and universalism, RN reached the latest station in the highway which he had opened up in repudiating missions that targetted the

I RN and the Jewish People 20 Jews: the affirmation of Jewish self-definition, including the ( option of nationhood. He was of course aware that Israel was the only democracy in the Middle East - and as such the object of constant threats from both Arab tyrants and, at least during his lifetime, from Russian imperialists5^. In a typical piece, during the Suez crisis he had strongly criticized the highly verbal but impotent politics of John Foster Dulles, commenting that through him "the same powerful nation whose President seeks standby authority to resist Communist aggression in the Middle East is meanwhile confused by cooperating with the pawns of Russia to destroy our only secure bastion in this troubled area."51

Most of all, however, he came to his political conviction in support of Israel as a result of two premises: first, the harsh political realities during and after the war, so far as Jewish survivors and survival were concerned; second, belief in the Jewish right of self-definition.

When, as during the Eichmann trial, RN expressed unease about the demanded death penalty, he yet avoided the custom of Christian triumphalism to sieze upon any available escape mechanism: he asked the question, but then asked who we are to lecture Israel's judges52. In sum, he did not believe politically that "the Jews" should be subject to a double standard of judgment, just as theologically he did not believe

RN and the Jewish People 21 ( that they should be consigned to role-playing in someone else's passion play.

Niebuhr and Heschel In coming to an understanding of the place "the land" had in the "Jewish trinity" of People, Torah and Land, his friendship with was important. In a lecture on RN and Heschel in October of 1983 at the College of St Benedict (St Joseph MN)53, Urusula Niebuhr mentioned a letter in which Rabbi Heschel addressed RN as "beloved and revered friend." Heschel, in Florida to recover from an illness, thought that climate might be good for RN. "Miami Beach may be intellectually America's Siberia, still the climate has proved beneficial." He went on that he was "eager to renew our walking and talking on Riverside Drive." This was late in RN's life and produced no trip south. According to Ursula Niebuhr, the acquaintance which began about 1952 was a warm friendship by the time the Niebuhrs left UTS on RN's retirement. "For the last twelve or fourteen years of his life, Abraham was really my husband's closest friend." As she remembered their walking and talking, "As Reinhold's own strength decreased in the latter sixties, he became more obviously lame on his left side, but I would watch them - Reinhold over six feet, leaning a bit like the Tower of Pisa, and Abraham, himself not too strong, and a good deal shorter - would he be able to hold Reinhold up if he tilted?" Without Heschel, Niebuhr certainly would have repudiated antisemitism in its overt and covert forms, condemned Hebrew Christian missions, affirmed the importance to Christians of RN and the Jewish People 22 Jewish survival, and defended Israel's right to exist in security / and well-being. In dialogue with Heschel, he came to a richer philosophical and theological appreciation of the matter of "the land."

A story may be worth relating here. My former Chief in the Religious Affairs Branch of American Military Government in Germany, C Arild Olsen, wrote me of an incident when the Olsens, Heschels and Niebuhrs were all living as close neighbors on Riverside Drive. The three men were visiting on the corner at the end of one day, and Dr Olsen left to complete his errand. When he returned an hour later, he found Niebuhr and Heschel still energetically carrying on their discussion.54 Of such stuff are true myths made! At this distance, the thought of extended conversations between Niebuhr - towering, . forceful, witty - and Heschel - small, fiery, dynamic - is itself entrancing. We know in any case, from several witnesses outside the Niebuhr and Heschel families and from the written record as well, that the dialogue was extended and of enduring effect.55

RN owed a good deal to his friendships with Jews such as Fred Butzel, Felix Frankfurter, Will Herberg and others. And Heschel, the author of Israel: An Echo of Eternity (1969), had an important impact on RN's thinking during the years of the book's gestation.

In Conclusion Although the concept of "the Holocaust" never became a central theological issue during Niebuhr's prime, and the terms RN and the Jewish People 23 Shoah or "Holocaust" rarely appeared until the 1960s, in his prophetic criticisms of American Protestant Kulturreligion and in his understanding of the way the issue of Jewish survival puts the question to Christian triumphalism RN anticipated the most important questions confronting Christian intellectual discipline and witness today.

The denominational and inter-denominational journals that reflect the spiritual and intellectual condition of American Protestantism - including the journal Christianity and Crisis which he founded to offset the lability, the fadism, of The Christian Century - are still confessionally (if that term can be used appropriately in connection with them) reflective of the last great unshaken bloc of nineteenth century Kulturprotesantismus left in the world.

Some years ago RN's widow, Ursula, was moved by its publication of a particularly unfair attack on Israel to request the removal of his name from the masthead of Christianity and Crisis. As this is written, that journal has announced a summer conference featuring the author of one of the most vicious attacks on Israel and the Jewish people to be published in many years56.

No, there is not yet a Niebuhr renaissance: American culture-religion, with its built-in antisemitism, is still relatively intact. But in the day to come when we are pushed to engage again in real spiritual wrestling, in the time when we

RN and the Jewish People 24 have again a higher regard for the Biblical foundations of our / faith than for the spirit of the times, in the season when our church conferences shall no longer run gasping to catch up with the latest popular trend, we shall find in the writings and work of Reinhold Niebuhr the starting points for a spiritual and intellectual recovery worthy of those who after Auschwitz - still bow the head and call themselves "Christian." In that day we shall move along another path from the false start of Christendom, with its theological triumphalism and cultural antisemitism, and be liberated to practice that fraternity with the other people of the covenant - of whom the One we call Lord was a native son.

(

RN and the Jewish People 25 < END NOTES

1. 46 Christianity and Crisis (1986) 2:35 2. Patterson, Bob E, Reinhold Niebuhr (Waco: Word Books, 1977), p 13 3. Morgenthau, Hans, "The Influence of Reinhold Niebuhr in American Political Life and Thought," in Landon, H R, ed., Reinhold Niebuhr: A Prophetic Voice in Our Times (Greenwich CT: Seabury Press, 1962), p 109 4. Cited in Scott, Nathan A, Jr, ed., The Legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr (: Press, 1975), Introduction, p 3 5. Fox, Richard W, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986); see the excellent critical review by Langdon Gilkey in The Journal of Religion (April, 1988), volume 68, pp 263-76 6. 46 Christianity and Crisis (1986) 2:21 7. Bingham, June, Courage to Change: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1961), p 368 8. Meyer, Donald A, The Protestant Search for Political Realism, 1919-1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), p 283 9. The same deficiency is evident in a recent book by Kenneth Durkin: Reinhold Niebuhr (Harrisburg PA: Morehouse Publishing, 1989), although the book purports to deal systematically with the main themes in Niebuhr's theological work. 10. Rasmussen, Larry, ed., Reinhold Niebuhr: Theologian of Public Life (San Francisco CA: Harper & Row, 1989), footnote 117, pp 292-93 11. See Martin Marty in Scott, Nathan A, Jr, ed., op. cit., pages 16-18 12. Ibidem, p 17 13. Siegel, Seymour, "Reinhold Niebuhr: In Memoriam," American Jewish Yearbook:1972 (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1972), pp 605-10

RN and the Jewish People 26 14. Review by Walter Eytan in The Jerusalem Post for September ( 29, 1989, p 20, discussing Eliahu Elath's Miba'ad Le-arfel Hayamim (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1989) 15. Quoted by Kenneth W Thompson in Scott, Nathan A, Jr., ed., op. cit., p 105

16. From Reflections on the End of An Era, cited in Chrystal, William G, ed., Young Reinhold Niebuhr: His Early Writings. 1911-1931 (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1977), p ix 17. See Nelson, F Burton, "1934: Pivotal Year of the Church Struggle," in IV Holocaust and Genocide Studies (1989) 3:283-97 18. Niebuhr, Reinhold, Christianity and Power Politics (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940), p 33 19. 46 Christianity and Crisis (1986) 2:40 20. Fox, Richard W, op.cit., p 297 21. Cf. my paper at the Sixteenth Annual Scholars' Conference on the Church Struggle and the Holocaust (9 March 1986): "Reinhold Niebuhr, the Church Struggle, and the Holocaust." 22. "Toward Renovation of the Relationship of Christians and Jews," see my translation in XVII Journal of Ecumenical Studies i (1980) 1:211 23. Rice, Dan(iel F), "Reinhold Niebuhr and Judaism," XLV Journal of the American Academy of Religion (March, 1977), Supplement 1, F:126 24. From the Reinhold Niebuhr Papers, Library of Congress, Container XIV, 1, Folder 15

25. Typed Memo provided by Christopher Niebuhr to the writer; see also p 81 in Fox, Richard W, op. cit. 26. Niebuhr, Reinhold, Man's Nature and His Communities (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965), pp 17-18 27. Niebuhr, Reinhold, Pious and Secular America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), pp 91-92. In an essay on "The Relations of Jews and Christians in Western Civilization" in the same volume, he repeated his long-held conviction that Christians should not evangelize their Jewish brethren. Also published by Robert McAfee Brown in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), Chapter 13.

28. RN: Man's Nature and His Communities, p 18 RN and the Jewish People 27 < 29. Letter from Ursula Niebuhr to the writer, 8 March 1984, with Christopher Niebuhr concurring in the judgment on the importance of the Hebrew prophets to RN's Biblical theology 30. On page 8 of the 1907 edition of RN's copy of Rauschenbusch: Christianity and the Social Crisis 31. See Gilkey, Langdon, "Niebuhr's" Theology of History," 54 The Journal of Religion (1974) 4:366-67 32. Feldman, Egal, "Reinhold Niebuhr and the Jews," XLVI Jewish Social Studies (1984) 3-4:293-302, 294 33. Voss, Carl Hermann and Rausch, David A, "A Heritage of Prophetic Ministry," XX Christian Jewish Relations (1987) 2:10-11 34. I Radical Religion (1936) 3:7-8 35. I Radical Religion (1936) 4:3-4 36. II Radical Religion (1937) 4:7-8 37. See Ross, Robert W, So It Was True: The American Protestant Press and the Nazi Persecution of the Jews (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980); Genizi, Haim, American Apathy: The Plight of Christian Refugees from Nazism (Tel-Aviv: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1983 38. RN in The Nation (2/21/33), vol 154, p 214 39. Niebuhr, Reinhold, Christianity and Power Politics (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940), pp 42-43 40. For documentation and additional citations of gentlemanly antisemitism in The Christian Century. see my book The Crucifixion of the Jews (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp 73- 74; Mercer University Press paperback, 1986 41. See Rice, Daniel F, "Felix Frankfurter and Reinhold Niebuhr:1940-1964," I The Journal of Law and Religion (1983) 2:325-426, 336 42. Related in Fox, Richard W, op.cit., p 199 43. Rice: RN and Judaism, p 137 44. Quoted in Rice: Frankfurter and Niebuhr, p 338

( RN and the Jewish People 28 45. Voss, Carl Hermann, "The American Christian Palestine ( Committee," in Urofsky, Melvin I, ed., Essays in American Zionism. 1917-1948 (New York: Herzl Press, 1978), pp 242-62. Further on RN's support of Israel, see Voss, Carl Hermann and Rausch, David A, "American Christians and Israel, 1948-1988," XL American Jewish Archives (1988) 1:41-81. 46. See Genizi, Haim, American Apathy: The Plight of Christian Refugees from Nazism (Tel-Aviv: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1983), pp 73-74 47. On RN's unintelligibility to many in England and America, Davies is probably correct in attributing it to his talent as a fine dialectician; Davis, D R, Reinhold Niebuhr: Prophet from America (New York: Macmillan Co, 1948), p viii. Acute references to RN's dialectical style are found in Donald K McKee's "Philosophic and Cultural Elements in the Rise of Nazism: The View of Reinhold Niebuhr," XII Southeastern Political Review (1984) 1:124,133. 48. Stone, Ronald H, Reinhold Niebuhr: Prophet to Politicians (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972), p 110 49. Niebuhr, Reinhold, Discerning the Signs of the Times (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946), pp 34, 36 50. Niebuhr, Reinhold, "Our Stake in the State of Israel," The ( New Republic (1959), vol 136, pp 9-12 51. Quoted in Rice: Frankfurter and Niebuhr, p 329-33 52. RN in XXI Christianity and Crisis (1961) 5:47-48 53. Niebuhr, Ursula, "Notes on a Friendship: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Reinhold Niebuhr," given at St Catherine's College, St Paul MN in 1983; MSS from the author, citations from pages 2, 3 and 5; the conference report was edited and published by John C Merkle (Macmillan, 1985). 54. Personal correspondence, CAO to FHL, 10/20/84 55. See Kegley, Charles W and Bretall, Robert W, eds., Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious. Social, and Political Thought (New York: Macmillan Co, 1956), Chapter 19 56. Rosemary Ruether's The Wrath of Jonah (1989), announced as a joint effort with her husband Herman

RN and the Jewish People 29 A Bibliography on REINHOLD NIEBUHR AND THE JEWISH PEOPLE?

1• On Nazism 1930 "Church Currents in Germany," The Christian Century (August 6), vol 47, pp 959-60: on the situation in the German church before the War 1932 "Germany: A Prophecy of Western Civilization," The Christian Century (March 2), vol 49, pp 287-89: a political analysis casting doubt on the future of Nazism in Germany 1933 "Hitlerism - A Devil's Brew," The World Tomorrow (April 19), vol 16, number 16, pp 369-70: the economic aspect of German antisemitism "Religion and the New Germany," The Christian Century (June 28), vol 50, pp 843-45: an early warning on the rise of the Deutsche Christen and antisemitism "Notes from a Berlin Diary," The Christian Century (July 5), vol 50, pp 872-73: the political situation in Germany "Germany Must be Told," The Christian Century (August 9), vol 50, pp 1014-15: plea to the American churches to speak out against German antisemitism 1936 "English and German Mentality," Christendom (Spring), vol 1, number 3, pp 465-76: incidental mention of the Jewish input in German culture "German Church Girds for Battle," The Christian Century (August 26), vol 53, pp 1129-30: German church's response to Nazi hostilities Reflections on the End of an Era (New York: Scribner's): "The Significance of Fascism," pp 51-60: RN's reactions to Nazism

*Prepared with the assistance of Rebecca Alpert, in the Graduate Seminar on "The German Church Struggle and the I Holocaust" at Temple University 1938 "Anti-Semitism," Radical Religion (Summer), vol 3, number 3, p 5: editorial on the situation for the Jews in Europe "The Plight of the Jews," Radical Religion (Fall), vol 3, number 4, p 5: editorial follow-up to above 1940 "If American Enters the War," The Christian Century (December 18), vol 57, pp 1578-80: RN's position paper on the necessity to take a Christian stand on the immorality of Nazism (one in a series of 10 articles by different authors) Christianity and Power Politics (New York: Scribner's); Essays as follows: "The War and the American Churches" (pp 33-47): chastisement of the American churches' reticence to attack Nazism; "Germany and the Western World" (pp 49-64): analysis of German Protestant history; "Synthetic Barbarism" (pp 117-30): analysis of Deutsches Christentum; "Hitler and Buchman" (pp 159-65): criticism of Oxford Groups' leader, on England and Germany 1941 Unsigned editorials in Christianity and Crisis, vol 1, numbers 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9-18, 20, 24: calling on America to take a stand on Nazism "The Christian Faith and the World Crisis," Christianity and Crisis (February 10), vol 1, number 1, pp 4-6: basic statement against Nazism, calling for Christians to take a stand "Fighting Chance for a Sick Society," The Nation (March 22), vol 152, pp 357-60: political observations 1942 Unsigned editorials in Christianity and Crisis, vol 2, numbers 2, 3 "The Christian and the War," The Christian Century (December 23), vol 59, p 1589: review of C C Morrison's book on Christianity and pacifism and nationalism 1943 In The Silent War by Jon B Jansen (pseud.), Introduction pp 9-10: position of the German church underground 1944 "The German Problem," Christianity and Crisis (January 10), vol 3, number 23, pp 2-4 "The Christian Faith and the German Problem," The Student World, vol 47, number 1, pp 6-8

RN and the Jewish People 31 < 1945 "Soberness in Victory," Christianity and Crisis (May 28), vol 5, number 9, pi: editorial on America's post- WW II attitude to Germany "The Death of a Martyr," Christianity and Crisis (June 25), vol 5, number 11, p 6: tribute to Bonhoeffer "The Vengeance of Victors," Christianity and Crisis (November 26), vol 5, number 20, p 1: editorial on America's post-WW II to Germany 1946 "The Conflict Between Nations and Nations and Between Nations and God," Christianity and Crisis (August 5), vol 6, number 14, p 2: post-war assessment of the righteousness of war "A Report on Germany," Christianity and Crisis (October 14), vol 6, number 17, p 6: post-war analysis of the effects of Nazism on Germany "Germans who are not Nazis," The Messenger (October 15), vol 11, number 21, p 6.: on Nazism's effect on Germany "Isolation of a Culture," The Messenger (November 26), vol 11, number 24, p 6: on Nazism's effect on Germany "The Guilt of the Enemy," The Messenger (December 24), vol 11, number 26, p 10 1949 Discerning the Signs of the Times: Sermons for Today and Tomorrow (New York: Scribner's): segment on the evils of Nazism (pp 25-38) 1954 "Learning from History," The New Leader (May 10), vol 37, number 19, pp 3-4: will we learn politically from Hitler's rise? 1956 Brief Foreword to book, Dying We Live (New York: Pantheon), pp xiii-iv, on the German resistance 1967 Personal recollections in I Knew Bonhoeffer (New York: Harper & Row), p 165

< RN and the Jewish People 32 2. Zionism and the Middle East 1935 An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York: Harper's), pp 126-27: Palestine as an area of political and moral struggle

1942 "The Jews After the War," The Nation (Feb 21, 28), vol 154, pp 214-16, 253-55: the need for a Jewish homeland 1944 Introduction to Waldo Frank's The Jew in Our Day (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce): the political and religious nature of the establishment of a Jewish state "The Palestinian Problem," The Messenger (August 20), vol 11, number 17, p 6: analysis of the religious dilemma 1948 "Palestine," Christianity and Society (Spring), vol 13, number 2, pp 5-6: unsigned editorial on the Middle East situation "The Future of Israel." The Messenger (June 18), vol 13, number 12, p 6: America's need to defend Israel "The Partition of Palestine," Christianity and Society (Winter), vol 13, numbner 1, pp 3-4: unsigned editorial on the ideological struggle between Jew and Arab "Religion in the State of Israel," The Messenger ( (December 7), vol 13, number 25, p 6: defends the position that Israel has the right to choose to be a secular or a clerical state, favoring the former 1949 "The Christian and the State of Israel," Christianity and Society (Summer), vol 14, number 3, pp 3-5: unsigned editorial discussing the Arab side of the Middle East situation 1956 "New Hopes for Peace in the Middle East," Christianity and Crisis (May 28), vol 16, number 9, p 65: in support of Hammarskjold's attempts at mediation "The Crisis in the Suez Canal," Christianity and Crisis (September 17), vol 16, number 15, p 113: on the political situation 1957 "Filling the Middle East Vacuum," Christianity and Crisis (January 21), vol 16, number 24, p 189: on the political situation "Our Stake in the State of Israel," The New Republic (Feb 4, March 4), vol 136, pp 9-12: in response to a letter, the case for a Jewish homeland ' RN and the Jewish People 33 "The Situation in the Middle East," Christianity and Crisis (April 15), vol 17, number 6, p 42: the failure of American political policy 1961 "The Eichmann Trial," Christianity and Crisis (April 3), vol 21, number 5, p 47: upholds legitimacy of trial but not death penalty 1967 "David and Goliath," Christianity and Crisis (June 26), vol 27, number 11, pp 141-42: commentary on the Six Day War 1968 "Power and Ideology in National and International Affairs, pp 209-12 in Ronald Stone's Faith and Politics (New York: G Braziller, 1959) - on the potential for peace in the Middle East

< RN and the Jewish People 34 3. The Jew in America (

1928 "Confessions of a Tired Radical," The Christian Century (August 30), vol 45, pp 1046-47: on bigotry, with a section on Jews as an ethnic group 1929 Does Civilization Need Religion: a Study in the Social Resources and Limitations of Religion in Modern Life (New York: Macmillan), pp 68, 236: comparison of liberalism in Judaism and Christianity

Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (Hamden CT: Shoe Strong Press), reflections on the racial bias of antisemitism, 1926 (pp 100-03); discussion with a Jew about Christianity, 1928 (pp 180-81); on the Jewish social conscience (pp 187-88) 1935 "Marx, Barth and Israel's Prophets," The Christian Century (Jan 30, March 29), vol 52, pp 138-40, 369-70: some comments on Biblical prophecy 1944 The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defense (New York: Scribner's), pp 141-43: on the ethnic nature of antisemitism 1947 "Our Immigration Policy," The Messenger (March 18), vol 12, number 6, p 6: criticism of America's failure to admit Jewish refugees 1952 "The Spectrum of Religion in America," The Messenger (Feb 26), vol 17, number 5, p 7: on the Protestant- Catholic-Jew configuration in America 1953 "Rosenzweig's Message," Commentary (March), vol 15, pp 310-12: book review of Nahum Glatzer's biography of Rosenzweig, discussing relation of Judaism and Christianity

1956 "Proposal to Billy Graham," The Christian Century (August 8), vol 73, pp 921-22: criticism of revival from a Jewish point of view 1958 Pious and Secular America (New York: Scribner's), pages 86-112: "The Relations of Christians and Jews in Western Civilization" 1960 "On the Election - The Religious Issue," The New Leader (Dec 12), vol 43, number 48, pp 3-4: the Kennedy-Nixon election from the perspective of Protestants, Catholics, Jews

RN and the Jewish People 35 1963 A Nation So Conceived: Reflections on the History of America from its Earliest Visions to its Present Power, with Alan Heimert (New York: Scribner's), pp 45, 51-52: on American antisemitism pp 145-55: "The Religious Situation in America," with reflections on the Jew/Catholic/Protestant structure, pp 145-55 in Harold Stahmer (ed.): Religion and Contemporary Society (New York: Macmillan) 1964 "Prayer and Justice in School and Nation," Christianity and Crisis (May 25), vol 24, number 9, pp 93-96: pluralism's effect on civil rights and prayer cases; comments on a Jewish position "The Ark and the Temple," on the religious symbolism of David's Ark and Solomon's Temple, pp 569-77 in George Brantl (ed.): The Religious Experience (New York: G Braziller) 1965 Man's Nature and His Communities (New York: Scribner's), pp 16-19: personal experience of Jewish social concern; p 95: brief statement on the causes of Christian antisemitism 1965 "Martin Buber, 1878-1965," Christianity and Crisis (July 12), vol 25, number 12, pp 146-51: Buber's influence on Christian and Jewish thought 1966 "The Unsolved Religious Problem in Christian-Jewish Relations," Christianity and Crisis (Dec 12), vol 26, number 21, pp 279-83: the religious aspect of Christian antisemitism

v RN and the Jewish People 36