The Perennial Either/Or

I argue that the objective contrast between Judaism and Nazism is the perennial either/or between love and hate, humanity and inhumanity, a contrast that Hitler recognized in outline. The foremost natural law for Hitler was Darwinian survival of the fittest, but the basic divide between the biblical God and Hitler’s pantheism resonates through five related pairs of axiological poles and is applicable to both men and women: (1) a transcendent Creator who governs human life with love and justice versus an immanent creator that governs human life with survival of the fittest and will to power; (2) human solidarity based on sharing the image of God versus a master race destined to subordinate and/or eliminate inferiors; (3) universal moral norms binding on all human beings versus elitist privileges applicable only to the dominant few; (4) the relativizing of tribe and bodily instinct versus the valorizing of tribe; and (5) the treasuring of life, especially for the weak and vulnerable versus the celebration of death, especially for the weak and vulnerable.

Naming Good and Evil

Both pseudoscience and pseudo-ethics appear to embrace legitimate means and ends, while actually subverting them. Analogously, Nazism did not simply deny or contradict Judaism; it borrowed from Judaism and twisted it to its own purposes. Here I analyze eight interwoven dynamics of Hitlerite deceit: (1) the appeal to schadenfreude rather than to a sense of justice; (2) the masking of schadenfreude itself as a sense of justice; (3) the appeal to “Nature” rather than to God; (4) the masking of “Nature” itself as God; (5) the rejection of many Jewish and Christian teachings as anti-Aryan; (6) the masking of Jesus himself as an anti-Semitic Aryan; (7) the rejection of Jewish “legalism” as decadent and racially motivated; and (8) the masking of Nazi racism and genocide as itself legal. So many leaps of illogic are involved that some commentators doubt that the Nazi leadership believed what they were saying, but I do not underestimate the aptitude for self-deception at every level of the Third Reich.

Legitimating a Topic as Old as Esther

Here I rebut three fundamental challenges to the idea that Jewish moral monotheism was a primary cause of German anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. The first challenge is the claim that the National Socialist persecution of the Jews was based solely on race, and not on religion. The second challenge is the more sweeping claim that there was nothing objective about the Jews or Judaism—neither race nor religion—that motivated Nazi oppression and murder; these were simply irrational. The third challenge is what I call, echoing Hannah Arendt, “the banality of evil” claim. According to this perspective, most Nazis, including many who were very highly placed (e.g., Eichmann), were without evil intention or malice of forethought toward the Jews and were motivated primarily by mundane concerns, such as power or promotion or simple prudence. I take all three of these positions to underestimate human malice and, by implication, human (and divine) benevolence.

Jesus and the Jews

In this chapter, I explore two specific “parallel paradoxes” between Jesus and the Jews. Though Jesus was sinless, Imperial Rome was right, by its own lights, to execute him for sedition: his message did relativize the Emperor and the Empire. Though the Jews were sinless, Nazi Germany was right, by its own lights, to seek to annihilate them for sedition: their message did relativize der Führer and the volkish nation. Though Jesus was beloved of God and a vehicle of God’s salvation of the world, he experienced the trial of seeming to be forsaken by the Father (and the disciples) on the cross: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). Though the Jews were chosen by God and a vehicle of God’s salvation of the world, they experienced the trial of seeming to be forsaken by the Father (and the world) in the Nazi death camps.

Conclusion

Perhaps the most famous and controversial witness from a victim of the Holocaust is Anne Frank’s: “in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Bruno Bettelheim pounced on this remark as a tragic blindness to and acquiescence in evil: “Anne Frank died because her parents could not get themselves to believe in Auschwitz. And her story found wide acclaim because for us too, it denies implicitly that Auschwitz ever existed. If all men are good, there was never an Auschwitz.” In concluding, I examine Anne Frank’s case and, contra Bettelheim, praise it as emblematic of Judaism generally. Anne was not naïve or in denial about Nazi wickedness; she was, rather, a Suffering Servant, a modern Mordecai. She did not bow down to temporal authority, but she refused to hate even when faced with despite and death. Thus she was a light to the nations.

Nazism and the Western Conscience

I offer here a scale of moral responsibility applicable to members of the Nazi Reich during the Final Solution: (1) oblivious: totally unaware, simply out to lunch or mentally impaired concerning the Nazi attempted genocide of the Jews, invincibly ignorant and without bad faith; (2) bystanding: aware but mute and passive, perhaps in bad faith or denial, concerning the Nazi attempted genocide of the Jews; (3) complicit: aware and publicly and privately supportive of the Nazi attempted genocide of the Jews, but primarily verbally or symbolically; (4) aiding and abetting: aware and more than verbally supportive, actively assisting and participating in the Nazi attempted genocide of the Jews, but short of pulling the trigger or dropping the gas pellets or ordering the same; and (5) directly murderous unto abomination: actually pulling the trigger or dropping the gas pellets or ordering the same, so as knowingly to aim at destroying the Jews as a race and Judaism as a moral and religious creed; in the extreme, also to aim at destroying one’s own conscience.

Introduction

A central and abiding motive for anti-Semitism, I maintain, is the same thing that moved Haman in the book of Esther to plot the genocide of the Jews and that got Jesus crucified by the Romans: the embodiment of an uncompromising allegiance to a righteous Deity who creates, judges, and cares for all people. Whereas the Mosaic God of the Burning Bush warmed and enlightened without consuming, Adolf Hitler eventually sought to make a conflagration of anyone and anything who gestured away from Aryan blood and toward universal Deity, especially the Jews and their ideal of holiness. As believers in moral monotheism, the Jews were considered base and polluted, hence to be burned away with a stunningly rational efficiency. This Holocaust I attribute to a range of causes, but particularly to “original sin”: the tendency of anxious human beings to try to elevate themselves by denigrating others who differ from them or who challenge their erotic instincts.

A Closer Look at Schadenfreude and the Prophetic

I contend that schadenfreude, taking joy over the misfortune of others, can be seen as an offshoot of the formal Nazi project of Kraft durch Freude, finding strength through joy. Schadenfreude generated collective pleasure at the expense of the humanity of the Jews, while Kraft durch Freude produced collective pleasure at the expense of one’s own humanity. In the latter case, individual conscience was bought off with “bread and circuses.” In all cases, the overriding value was power and self-distraction rather than traditional virtue. I am not claiming that moral joys are identical to or utterly indistinguishable from immoral ones, since the two kinds can be evaluated by their fruits as well as by their durability, but I would contend that evil can occasion profoundly pleasant and animating affections, at least for a time, as in the Third Reich. See the smiling faces of German soldiers lynching communists and Jews.

The Evils of Supersessionism

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom writes that “strong poets make . . . [poetic] history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves.” I apply Bloom’s literary theory, mutatis mutandis, to religious history and theology. Even the other monotheistic Abrahamic faiths—Christianity and Islam—resent their dependency on Hebrew Scripture and tradition and aim to make room for themselves by misreading the Jews and Judaism. Christians would define themselves by writing a “New Testament” that supplants the “Old,” even as Muslims would produce a “Final Testament” that supersedes all previous. Bloom describes “six revisionary ratios” by which strong poets would distinguish themselves from their predecessors. My task is to adapt these conventions and to demonstrate that they have more than aesthetic/literary import. Christian and Islamic ethics and theology, and even Nazism as a pagan counter, can plausibly be seen to suffer from the anxiety of influence and to seek to liberate themselves from their Jewish paternity by literal and figurative patricide.