THE CHURCH AND THE HOLOCAUST
Paul Gottfried rejects Daniel Goldhagen's latest
outburst, in which he identifies Christianity as the world's greatest source of anti-Semitism
IN 1997 Daniel Goldhagen, a young Harvard academic and son of the German refugee historian Eric Goldhagen, also at Harvard, caused an international sensation with his book Hitler's Willing Executioners. The book attributes the Nazi Holocaust to the `eliminationist anti-Semitism' that allegedly prevailed among the pre-Hitlerian German people. Germans killed Jews not because some Germans were Nazis, but because there was popular enthusiasm in Germany for killing Jews, which the Nazis parlayed into political success. Although Goldhagen's 'facts' fell prey to the Holocaust scholar Raoul Hilberg and to a booklength refutation by Ruth Bettina Birn and Norman Finkelstein, both of whom lost family members to the Nazis, Goldhagen gained worldwide renown for his fearless exposure of what he believes to be congenital antiSemitism. German newspapers, most conspicuously the Frankfurter Rundschau, snarled at Birn and Finkelstein as self-hating Jews; Goldhagen would have been able to retire on the royalties and speaking honorariums he obtained from the Germans alone.
Now Goldhagen has done it again, with A Moral Reckoning: The Catholic Church and the Holocaust in History and Today. This time Goldhagen identifies Christianity as the single greatest source of anti-Semitism in the world. A bitter controversy arose in the United States last month when the New Republic devoted much of one issue to Goldhagen's brief. It is hard to see why the magazine was so generous with its space. The New Republic fervently supports the Israeli Right and has become an outspoken backer of George Bush's extended war on terrorism. Since those fighting in this extended war are, and will continue to be, overwhelmingly Christian, it might seem sensible for the New Republic and its publisher. Marty Peretz, to emphasise Jewish–Christian solidarity in the face of a shared non-Christian foe. This has been the approach of most Jewish conservatives since the late 1980s when commentary, the Jewish monthly, concluded what may be described as a friendship pact with the proIsraeli Christian Right. For example, after Abe Foxman, of Bnai Brith's Anti-Defamation League, attacked the religious Right in a widely distributed polemic in 1994, two
leading Jewish writers, Midge Decter and Irving Kristol, rebuked the anti-Christian Foxman for going after the 'friends of Israel'. Although writers such as Decter and Kristol couldn't give a rap about the narrow theology of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, they did notice that fundamentalists considered the Jewish presence in the Middle East to be God's will. They also observed that conservative Catholics and Orthodox Jews in the United States had become constant political allies against the secularist Left.
It does no honour to New Republic, a magazine that has some claim to intellectual respectability, that it should be peddling Goldhagen's new schlock, especially since he draws uncritically on Hitler's Pope, John Cornwell's book about Pius XII, published in 1999. There is nothing conclusive shown by Cornwell that would discredit the postwar Jewish consensus about Pius as someone who worked heroically, albeit selectively, to save Jews during the second world war. The argument that the Pope might have done even more does not invalidate the fact that he did a great deal on behalf of Italian and Hungarian Jews — indeed far more than he did for the approximately 2.6 million Polish Catholics, including many clergymen, whom the Nazis also slaughtered.
Goldhagen discerns anti-Semitism even in the papal encyclical 'Mit brennender Sorge' that was promulgated in 1937 by Pius XI but written by the papal nuncio in Germany, the future Pius XII. Although the document lashes out against Nazi racism and proclaims the universal scope of 'God's moral law', the author is charged with anti-Semitism for not singling out the specific persecution of the Jews (though Pius XI did declare elsewhere that we are all Semites spiritually'). Goldha
gen, moreover, depicts the entire history of Christianity as a monomaniacal persecution of Jews by a monolithic Christian enemy. In fact, Jews in the early Middle Ages made common cause with Persians and Muslims against Byzantine Christians, and in one bloody episode helped the Persian Zoroastrian emperor to exterminate the Christian population of Jerusalem. While the Catholic Church generally treated Jews wretchedly in the modern period, it treated Eastern Orthodox Christians, particularly in the Fourth Crusade and during the Nazi puppet regime in second-world-war-Croatia, even worse. Protestant heretics before and during the Reformation received less generous treatment than the Jews in Catholic Europe; and one would have to be mad to believe that Jews, after their return to England in the 17th century, lived any worse in that country than did the (non-aristocratic) Catholics or the Irish Catholics under English rule.
The New Republic graces Goldhagen's splenetics with pictures of Croatian nuns following German soldiers, and of unidentified Catholic prelates giving clumsy Nazi salutes (while painfully grimacing). While it is hard to figure out why the nuns are traipsing behind the soldiers (perhaps because they believe that the Germans are liberating them from an unwanted Serb domination), there is no evidence that they are doing so to support the Holocaust. As for the prelates who are in bad company, what Goldhagen fails to mention is that bishops and other Catholic officials — in Munich, Berlin, Cologne, Fulda and Mun
ster spoke out explicitly against Nazi ideology. Polish and other Catholic clergymen did the same and paid with their lives.
Goldhagen is not alone in his antipathy to Christianity. In the United States there are self-identified Jewish publicists and celebrities who have made a career out of flagellating American Christians for their supposedly anti-Semitic history and intentions. Allan Dershowitz, Leonard Dinnerstein, Abe Foxman, Ruth Wisse and Cynthia Ozick, to name just a few, can always be counted on to tell American gentiles how they stand in a terrifying, unbroken tradition of Jew-baiting going back to the New Testament.
That being said, the fact remains that Jews have also been active in ripping apart Goldhagen and his questionable scholarship. Because Jews, except for those on the Israeli Left. are immune to the anti-Western politics of guilt found among liberal Christians, they have no moral scruples about ridiculing its practitioners. My hand does not tremble with anxiety when I go after a fellow-German Jew for the arrant nonsense that Goldhagen and the New Republic dare to present as a 'moral reckoning'. If only Christians would act in the same manner!
Paul Gottfried is a professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and the author of After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton).
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