Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust

Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust
Author: Kevin P. Spicer
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2007-05-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0253116740

Thirteen essays exploring the role of antisemitism in the political and intellectual life of Europe. In recent years, the mask of tolerant, secular, multicultural Europe has been shattered by new forms of antisemitic crime. Though many of the perpetrators do not profess Christianity, antisemitism has flourished in Christian Europe. In this book, thirteen scholars of European history, Jewish studies, and Christian theology examine antisemitism’s insidious role in Europe’s intellectual and political life. The essays reveal that annihilative antisemitic thought was not limited to Germany, but could be found in the theology and liturgical practice of most of Europe’s Christian churches. They dismantle the claim of a distinction between Christian anti-Judaism and neo-pagan antisemitism and show that, at the heart of Christianity, hatred for Jews overwhelmingly formed the milieu of twentieth-century Europe. “This volume’s inclusion of essays on several different Christian traditions, as well as the Jewish perspective on Christian antisemitism make it especially valuable for understanding varieties of Christian antisemitism and ultimately, the practice and consequences of exclusionary thinking in general. In bringing a range of theological and historical perspectives to bear on the question of Christian and Nazi antisemitism, the book broadens our view on the question, and is of great value to historians and theologians alike.” —Maria Mazzenga, Catholic University of America, H-Catholic, February 2009 “Sheds light on and offers steps to overcome the locked-in conflict between Jews and Christians along the antisemitic path from Calvary to Auschwitz and beyond.” —Zev Garber, Los Angeles Valley College and American Jewish University, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 Fall 2008

Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism

Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism
Author: Anders Gerdmar
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 697
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004168516

Exploring the link between German biblical interpretation and anti-Semitism, this book is a fresh, comprehensive study of leading German exegetes, concluding that although Nazism brought anti-Semitic exegesis to a head, age-old thought structures provided powerful legitimation for oppression.

Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism
Author: F. Schweitzer
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2005-11-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 140397912X

In this provocative book, Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer analyze the lies, misperceptions, and myths about Jews and Judaism that anti-semites have propagated throughout the centuries. Beginning with antiquity, and continuing into the present day, the authors explore the irrational fabrications that have led to numerous acts of violence and hatred against Jews. The book examines ancient and medieval myths central to the history of anti-semitism: Jews as 'Christ-killers', instruments of Satan, and ritual murderers of Christian children. It also explores the scapegoating of Jews in the modern world as conspirators bent on world domination; extortionists who manufactured the Holocaust as a hoax designed to gain reparation payments from Germany; and the leaders of the slave trade that put Africa in chains. No other book has focused its attention exclusively on a thematic discussion of historic and contemporary anti-semitic myths, covering such an expansive scope of time, and allowing for such a painstaking level of exemplification. Anti-semitism is an essential book that will serve as a corrective to bigotry, stereotype, and historical distortion.

Constantine's Sword

Constantine's Sword
Author: James Carroll
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 774
Release: 2002
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780618219087

A rare book that combines searing passion with a subject that has affected all of our lives. "Chicago Tribune" Novelist, cultural critic, and former priest James Carroll marries history with memoir as he maps the two-thousand-year course of the Church s battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of faith it has sparked in his own life. Fascinating, brave, and sometimes infuriating ("Time"), this dark history is more than a chronicle of religion. It is the central tragedy of Western civilization, its fault lines reaching deep into our culture to create a deeply felt work ("San Francisco Chronicle") as Carroll wrangles with centuries of strife and tragedy to reach a courageous and affecting reckoning with difficult truths."

After the Deportation

After the Deportation
Author: Philip Nord
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 487
Release: 2020-12-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108478905

Examines the change in memory regime in postwar France, from one centered on the concentration camps to one centered on the Holocaust.

Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880-1918

Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880-1918
Author: Robert Nemes
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2014-08-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1611685826

This innovative collection of essays on the upsurge of antisemitism across Europe in the decades around 1900 shifts the focus away from intellectuals and well-known incidents to less-familiar events, actors, and locations, including smaller towns and villages. This "from below" perspective offers a new look at a much-studied phenomenon: essays link provincial violence and antisemitic politics with regional, state, and even transnational trends. Featuring a diverse array of geographies that include Great Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Romania, Italy, Greece, and the Russian Empire, the book demonstrates the complex interplay of many factors--economic, religious, political, and personal--that led people to attack their Jewish neighbors.

Germans, Jews, and Antisemites

Germans, Jews, and Antisemites
Author: Shulamit Volkov
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2006-07-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139458116

The ferocity of the Nazi attack upon the Jews took many by surprise. Volkov argues that a new look at both the nature of antisemitism and at the complexity of modern Jewish life in Germany is required in order to provide an explanation. While antisemitism had a number of functions in pre-Nazi German society, it most particularly served as a cultural code, a sign of belonging to a particular political and cultural milieu. Surprisingly, it only had a limited effect on the lives of the Jews themselves. By the end of the nineteenth century, their integration was well advanced. Many of them enjoyed prosperity, prestige, and the pleasures of metropolitan life. This book stresses the dialectical nature of assimilation, the lead of the Jews in the processes of modernization, and, finally, their continuous efforts to 'invent' a modern Judaism that would fit their new social and cultural position.

Hitler's Willing Executioners

Hitler's Willing Executioners
Author: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 656
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307426238

This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. "Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer

Denial and Repression of Anti-Semitism

Denial and Repression of Anti-Semitism
Author: Jovan Byford
Publisher: Central European University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2008-06-20
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 615521154X

Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović (1881–1956) is arguably one the most controversial figures in contemporary Serbian national culture. Having been vilified by the former Yugoslav Communist authorities as a fascist and an antisemite, this Orthodox Christian thinker has over the past two decades come to be regarded in Serbian society as the most important religious person since medieval times and an embodiment of the authentic Serbian national spirit. Velimirović was formally canonised by the Serbian Orthodox Church in 2003. In this book, Jovan Byford charts the posthumous transformation of Velimirović from 'traitor' to 'saint' and examines the dynamics of repression and denial that were used to divert public attention from the controversies surrounding the bishop's life, the most important of which is his antisemitism. Byford offers the first detailed examination of the way in which an Eastern Orthodox Church manages controversy surrounding the presence of antisemitism within its ranks and he considers the implications of the continuing reverence of Nikolaj Velimirović for the persistence of antisemitism in Serbian Orthodox culture and in Serbian society as a whole. This book is based on a detailed examination of the changing representation of Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović in the Serbian media and in commemorative discourse devoted to him. The book also makes extensive use of exclusive interviews with a number of Serbian public figures who have been actively involved in the bishop’s rehabilitation over the past two decades.