Content area
Full Text
In Survival in Auschwitz, an autobiographical testimony to systematic cruelty and human endurance, Primo Levi narrates an incident that pinpoints the Christian dilemma in Jewish-Christian relations. Driven by thirst, Levi grabs an icicle hanging outside his barrack's window. But before he can savor its taste, a Nazi guard "brutally snatched it away" from him. "Warum?" Levi asks. The guard replies with these haunting words, "Hier isl kein warum" ("There is no why here").1
In a post-Holocaust2 world, it is imperative that Christians revisit Levi's anguished "Warum?" Although the Nazis murdered millions of other victims, only the Jews were vilified by Christians for centuries and only the Jews were targeted because of their race.3 Elie Wiesel, also an Auschwitz survivor, underscores the unique Jewish predicament: "While not all victims were Jews, all Jews were victims, destined for annihilation solely because they were born Jewish."4
In a post-Holocaust world, anti-Semitism5 in Christianity can no longer be explained away as an accident of history, a misfortune of theology, or a regrettable result of sociological factors. John Gager posits this query at the beginning of his book The Origins of Anti-Semitism:
The experience of the Holocaust reintroduced with unprecedented urgency the question of Christianity's responsibility for anti-Semitism: not simply whether individual Christians had added fuel to modern European anti-Semitism, but whether Christianity itself was, in essence and from its beginnings, the primary source of anti-Semitism in Western culture.6
Catholic feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether declares in her book Faith and Fratricide that the source and origin of Christian anti-Semitism stands "at the left hand of Christology."7 Frank Littell, author of The Crucifixion of the Jews, insists that the Holocaust "remains the major event in the recent church-signalizing...the rebellion of the baptized against the Lord of History...Christianity itself has been 'put to the question.'"8
In a post-Holocaust world, "Warum?" demands an "up or down vote": is Christianity at its very heart anti-Semitic? Tragically, it took the death of six million Jews to force Christians to own their theological and historical complicity. In the words of Father Edward Flannery, author of the classic history of anti-Semitism The Anguish of the Jews, "It became evident that a revised Christian theology of Judaism was imperative, not for the defeat of anti-Semitism alone...