CHAPTER 2 Religion, Blood and Race from the Perspective of the Study of Religion

In the first decades of the post-war period, the debate over the Third Reich was dominated to a large extent by the polarizing confrontation between the racial antisemitism of National Socialism and the merely religious preju- dice of traditional anti-Judaism. In particular, the so-called historiography of the church struggle promoted the idea – and does so in part to this day – that the racial ideology of National Socialism and Christianity’s universal claim to salvation were in principle incompatible. But the topos of an unbridgeable gulf between National Socialist race materialism and the Christian doctrine of sal- vation equally addressed to all people was able to find its way into the secular study of history as well. In this interpretation, modern antisemitism would be fundamentally different from the Christian antagonism toward Judaism, as this would give Jews a chance to escape persecution by way of conversion. In contrast, racial antisemitism would target all Jews without exception on a sci- entific basis, regardless of their religious affiliation. Replacing largely obsolete forms of a religious hostility towards Jews, the characteristically new quality of modern antisemitism would be a materialistic totalitarianism directed with its biological premises against every true religion. An interpretation of this kind, however, is misleading for several reasons. We need to consider first that the option of baptism offered to Jews rested upon internal religious evidence with a validity limited to Christianity. Only from an implicit or explicit outlook of religious superiority, can Christianity’s salvific universalism appear as a solution to the “Jewish problem.” Most Jews rejected out of hand the idea that they should convert to Christianity as their contribution to solving the “Jewish question.” Considering the missionary interest of the church, a key to overcoming the “Jewish problem” confounds cause and effect. From earliest times the Jews were persecuted precisely for the reason that they firmly and persistently resisted the pressure put on them to convert. Particularly in view of the long history of ecclesiastical triumphalism it would be both historically inaccurate and somewhat immoral, if one wished to use Christianity’s claim to be the salvation of all people as a sort of analytical category against modern racial antisemitism. Second, the racial biologism propagated by National Socialism was an out- and-out fictional construct that had no basis in reality. The mere assumption

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004341883_003 14 CHAPTER 2 of a racial matter cannot be considered as a materialistic negation of religious anti-Judaism. As was discussed in the first chapter, the racial laws of the Third Reich depended fundamentally on religion as the differentiator between Jews and Germans. Without access to the baptismal records of the churches any racial legislation would have been lacking in foundation. As the only possible way to distinguish the Jewish from the Aryan race, baptism was the crucial point for the National Socialist solution to the “Jewish Question.” Third, it was not difficult from a theological viewpoint to interpret race as a natural element of divine creation. Just as conversion would not change a poor man into a rich one, a woman into a man, or, to take another common example from the time before 1945, a “Negro” into a white man, the sacrament of baptism could not turn a Jew into a German. According to church doctrine, a convert remains a member of his natural order in life, which is not cancelled but transcended by baptism. Grace does not destroy nature, but rather com- plements and perfects it: gratia non destruit, sed complet et perficit naturam. Within contemporary research there is a broad consensus that between the two types of antisemitism, the pre-modern and the modern, a close and symbi- otic correlation exists. Instead of an antagonistic relationship, it can be assumed that there is one of mutual influence and interpenetration. In the Middle Ages as well, the prevailing anti-Judaism of tradition and convention was enhanced by contemporary perspectives. Why should the deeply rooted interaction between old and new forms of enmity towards the Jews be cancelled out by racial anti- semitism? Is it realistic to think that a modern, racial antisemite would eschew the use of established religious stereotypes, simply because he does not attend church any more or fails to agree with all points of dogmatic theology? It would be similarly implausible to deny racial ideas any scope of influence on religious anti-Judaism per se. As a mixtum compositum, National Socialist antisemitism was not the first to derive its explosive energy from the ability to concentrate a variety of elements and to compress these into an ideology. The necessary criticism of an overly static concept of religion, which is often fixated on theological patterns of argument, does not of course negate the necessity for historical differentiation. In this regard we need to identify the spe‑ cific particularities of antisemitism over the course of time and to pinpoint them systematically. As long as the assumption of a religious anti-Judaism is not exaggerated and positioned against other forms of antisemitism, that is, used to apologetic ends, it has true legitimacy. It is the great achievement of the academic study of religion to have recognized the narrow interweaving of the religious with the non-religious and to have analyzed this theoretically. The knowledge it has gained in the field of the history of religions should find