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Over the past several decades historians have turned a critical eye to the complicity of the German churches in fostering poisonous societal attitudes towards Jews on the eve of the Holocaust. 1 Emerging from this research has been the disputed relationship between Christian anti-Judaism and the intense race-based anti-Semitism of the Nazi era. Separating the content and motivation of these two forms of disparagement has allowed Christians to remove themselves from the genocidal equation linked to radical, racist attacks on Jews. 2 Susannah Heschel's The Aryan Jesus tackles this issue by examining the historical backdrop and explicit content of racially motivated attacks on Jews by German Protestants in the years preceding and during the Holocaust. Targeting the Eisenach Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life together with the Institute's leader, Walter Grundmann, her findings may well render obsolete any theoretical dichotomy between religious anti-Judaism and racial anti-Semitism. 3
Setting aside the "tired argument that racism is about biology," 4 Heschel found in the religious-racist discourse of that period a connection between accusations of a degenerate, immoral spirit, and the socially active, physical "embodiment" of that spirit. Her examination of a number of prominent theories touching on race and culture revealed a circular reasoning that "made each the determinant of the other: culture indicated race, and race produced culture." 5 Physical bodies were not dangerous by themselves, but to anti-Semites the Jewish body carried degenerate Jewish morality. 6 For the Institute and Grundmann, this racist perspective provided a platform for an "incarnational theology" 7 in which spiritual characteristics determined the essential nature of the physical. Such a formation of racial identity led Heschel to deduce that "what marks the distinction between Aryan and Jew, in the writings of Institute members, is not physical appearance but spiritual and moral qualities." 8 Her conclusion is significant, for it brings to light the disturbing reality that litanies of spiritual condemnation expressed by the prevalent theological anti-Judaism--even if lacking crass racial overtones or motivation--share strikingly similar conclusions with virulent racial denigration regarding the nature and danger of the Jews.
Heschel's evaluation of Grundmann touches on his admiration for his Tübingen mentor Adolf Schlatter. In an...