The church and the Holocaust: Daniel Goldhagen's one-dimensional argument fails

A Moral Reckoning: the Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. 363 pp.

In his first book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen places the blame for the mass murder of the European Jews during the Second World War, not merely on a sinister German regime headed by a crazed fanatic, but also on the German people as a whole. According to the Harvard professor, the Germans were filled with such hatred for the Jews that, with few exceptions (the exceptions do not count), they were only too eager to collaborate with their psychopathic tyrant.

This monolithic approach to the riddle of the Holocaust is now repeated in his second work, A Moral Reckoning, with the Roman Catholic Church cast its the arch-collaborator. Pius XI, we are told, was a "committed anti-Semite"; Pius XII watched without a murmur his own bishops and priests "participate in and vocally support the killing of Jews in Croatia and the deportation of Jews to their deaths in Slovakia"; the future Paul VI, then Monsignor Montini, actively assisted Nazi war criminals escape justice following the German defeat.

Masses of lower clergy and Catholic laity hated Jews as well, not only the popes. Indeed, to focus too much on the popes, especially on Pius XII, is to divert attention from the church at large, a church ridden with anti-Semitism, a church that longed to see the Christian world rid of the Jewish pestilence. Although Goldhagen shrinks from the brutal force of his own argument--"I am not saying that the pope (Pius XII) and the clergy in general actively wanted the Jews to die"--the insinuation, its I read his long and remorseless indictment, is that in fact they did. "Given the church's official endorsement of the death penalty, did not the logic of its enmity toward Jews ... suggest the death penalty was an appropriate punishment?"

What is Goldhagen's logic? And on what premises does it rest?

For the writer, Jews in the Catholic scheme of things are themselves murderers, guilty of "grave crimes and offenses," including the most dreadful crime of all: the deicidal immolation of the Son of God. Does not the "Christian Bible" (Goldhagen's term for the New Testament, although actually the Christian Bible includes the Old Testament also) regard this guilt as a sacred axiom? Consider Matthew 27:25: "tits blood be upon us and upon our children!" Does not this blood curse permeate the historic corpus of Christian thought, acquiring the status of a core doctrine in Christian, especially Catholic faith? Is not the Bible, or at least a substantial part of it, a hate-filled document saturated with anti-Semitic dictums on the "abominable nature" of the Jews? Are not Christmas, asks Goldhagen, especially Catholics, taught to despise Jews on the basis of God's "unerring and infallible word?" It is useless for Christian apologists to defend their scriptures by attempting a specious distinction between anti-Judaism (the religious anti-Judaism of antiquity) and anti-Semitism. All forms of anti-Jewish rhetoric and disparagement--ancient, medieval or modern--constitute anti-Semitism, period. Thus, Goldhagen constructs his archetype, effectively welding the "eliminationist" anti-Semitism of the church to the exterminationist anti-Semitism of the Third Reich.

He writes: "If a person believes that Jews are minions of the devil, or Christ-killers, or Bolshevik revolutionaries determined to destroy religion and civilization, malevolent financiers causing global economic depression, or spiritual polluters and corroders of Christian values and goodness ... then he will want someone to solve this ... 'formidable Jewish problem.'"

Exceptions do not matter

Not only were Pius XI and Pius XII anti-Semites, according to Goldhagen's analysis (although Pius XI had a late, inexplicable change of heart), but also such Catholic martyr-victims as Bernhard Lichtenberg, who was dragged to his death because he dared to pray in public for Jews, and Maximilian Kolbe, were anti-Semites, as well. They were eliminationists who simply drew the line at murder. (Angelo Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII, was a mysterious exception; for Goldhagen, however, exceptions do not matter.) The author says it is the post-war Catholic Church that has engaged in an increasingly frantic scramble to protect itself by various "diversionary tactics," such its insincere statements of contrition replete with "historical falsehoods" after the manner of the Holy See's We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah. No wonder most Catholics "cannot abide" a "calm and open" discussion of their recent past, preferring to accuse the church's critics (Goldhagen) of "anti-Catholicism." Instead of trying to conceal the truth, the church should establish a truth commission, perhaps in the form of a Third Vatican Council--in idea that he borrows from writer James Carroll--devoted to moral restitution in keeping with its own moral precepts, which Goldhagen cites at length. Ideally, the church should purge the New Testament of its offensive passages (one thinks of the ancient Gnostic theologian, Marcion) but, if this is impractical, an elaborate neutralizing commentary on every page might suffice.

This, distilled to its essence, is Goldhagen's tract for the times. The book contains a great deal more, of course, describing in considerable detail (mostly borrowed, incidentally, from the research of other scholars) the crimes of Catholic officialdom and individual Catholics during the Nazi era. How much of the author's arraignment is fair? Certainly, he is correct in believing that a dark shadow engulfs both the Vatican and the various Catholic national churches, not to mention the Protestant churches of Germany. This is an incontrovertible fact, and no amount of denial can change it.

He is correct in believing that both the church and European society were infested with anti-Semitism, and that many Catholics in various countries either cast a blind eye or approved or abetted the Nazi slaughters. One only has to recall Vichy, France. He is correct in believing that the Vatican has not explained itself fully and that a total investigation with unrestricted access to its archives is an obligation to Hitler's victims that cannot be resisted without stirring profound suspicions in the public mind. He is correct in believing that the silence of Pius XII remains an unresolved problem, even if his case against the pope, apart from a few lines of conventional prejudice in a 1919 Pacelli letter, rests largely on negative evidence. He is correct in believing that the pre-war church, a political as well as a religious institution, harboured reactionary, anti-Enlightenment sentiments, aligning itself with even nefarious authoritarian regimes as long as they promised to protect Catholic interests. The 1933 papal concordat with Hitler is the obvious case-in-point. He is correct in believing that contemporary Christians, Protestants, its well as Catholics, must reconsider some of their once-seamless teachings and dogma in the greatly changed climate of the post-Auschwitz world as it has been occurring for at least three decades.

Otherwise, Goldhagen is not correct.

The blood curse in Matthew

Let us begin with the blood curse in the Gospel of Matthew, which, beyond question, has been employed by the anti-Semitic imagination in order to oppress Jews and to justify their misery throughout the ages. Is it really a core Christian doctrine? If so, it surely would have been written into the creeds and confessions of Christianity as an article of faith: "crucified by the Jews," Christians would have "crucified in their services Sunday by Sunday. However, the Nicene Creed reads "crucified ... under Pontius Pilate" and the Apostles' Creed reads "suffered under Pontius Pilate." No mention is made of Jews. Indeed, the entire apparatus of anti-Jewish ideas, deicide, malediction, carnality, etc., that the church fathers forged during the spiritual and theological battles of the early centuries and bequeathed to later churchmen was less a fulcrum of basic Christian thought than a tragic aberration. Most certainly, the "teaching of contempt," as Jewish commentator Jules Isaac called it, had a pernicious effect on public attitudes and state policies throughout Western history. But this does not prove that anti-Semitism is the fons et origo of the Christian religion. Even Isaac shrank from that conclusion. Nor does it prove that the New Testament is a manual of Jew-hatred. If it contains an anti-Jewish polemic, this is because it was written (except for Paul's letters) in a divisive period when the ancient world was in a crisis and the Jewish sect called Christianity was plunged into bitter recriminations with its nascent Pharisaic-rabbinic rivals.

Wartime books and their post-war offspring often assume an angry tone, especially after a national disaster. Who is to blame? Goldhagen, who seems acquainted with only vestiges of biblical scholarship, apparently does not realize that the New Testament is largely a collection of Jewish writings. Its so-called anti-Semitism, which is not anti-Semitism at all but one side of an acrimonious conflict between squabbling religious communities, draws its imagery from ancient Jewish sectarianism. The blood curse arises in conjunction with the war. Most likely, "our children" refers to the generation that perished at Roman hands in its bloody devastation.

It is not an imprecation pronounced against all Jews of all times and places, forever and ever. Deicide, the pivot of patristic and medieval anti-Jewish rancour, is a cosmic crime that post-biblical-century writers and preachers foisted on the narrative, turning Matthew's vendetta against the authorities and their hirelings for hounding Jesus to his death into a universalistic determinism. Christians are not wedded to it, nor are they wedded to the notion that the Jews are the children of the devil (Jn. 8:44), another verse grounded in the conflicts of antiquity.

In neither Catholic nor classical Protestant theology does any of this comprise God's "unerring and infallible word." As a Protestant, I believe that the Bible in Catholic eyes is also a human artifact with many flaws and foibles. The perennial task of the interpreter is to distinguish between what is really God's word and what is not. Today, as Goldhagen partially recognizes, a huge effort is being made to undo past harm.

Anti-semitism is not a constant--witness the Danes

Once these facts are understood, the claim that Catholic "eliminationism" is essentially no different from Nazi "exterminationism" starts to crumble. Goldhagen depends too heavily on Carroll's powerful, but uneven book, Constantine's Sword(from which he cites frequently) for his information about the church and Christian theology.

Anti-Semitism is not a constant in historic time: it waxed and waned. If Christians are truly dominated by fixed ideas with murderous connotations, how are the Danish Lutherans, whom Goldhagen praises (because they did not act like German Catholics) to be explained? Lutheran theology was no different from Catholic theology on Jews and Judaism. Moreover, unlike the Catholics, the Lutherans had Luther's ferocious diatribes to encourage them. Instead of enacting what Goldhagen presents as sound, Christian logic, the Danes saved Danish Jewry from the serpent's jaws. Were they merely bad Christians, or has the author missed something? The answer is simple: factors other than religion produced the exterminationist mentality in German society, factors that were absent in Denmark.

A few pre-Nazi, German intellectuals, notably Paul de Lagarde and Eugen Duhring, introduced the concept of Jewish annihilation to German political discourse in their nationalistic dissertations, and Duhring even spoke of a need for arms. Such men belonged to a minority, even in anti-Semitic circles, and perhaps their meaning was more metaphorical than literal, but still, the seeds of future death were sown. German nationalism also contained a Wagnerian vision of revolution and redemption with the Jews cast in the role of arch-enemy: the evil that must be expurgated.

As in the case of all one-dimensional arguments, Goldhagen's thesis proves too much and fails to probe its own assumptions. As a result, he weakens his case by overstating it. Moreover, he makes mistakes. The author never seems to have heard of Reinhold Niebuhr when he writes that serious moral discussion of Western public life flagged significantly during the Cold War. He also does no justice to the existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre. Although Sartre did not know much about Judaism, he knew a great deal about the French Right and their longing for an occult and intolerant France.

Goldhagen's habit of attributing bad motives as well as stupidity to his critics will not endear him to many readers. This is unfortunate because the moral reckoning that he demands is not only due, but overdue.

Alan Davies is emeritus professor of religion at the University of Toronto.

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