American Daily, OH
Aug 6 2004
Defamation Of Christianity – Anti-Semitism, Christendom And The Holocaust
By Bruce Walker (02/13/2004)
We all know that Christian anti-Semitism caused the Holocaust, right?
The story goes something like this: (1) Christians, from the earliest
days, were anti-Semitic; (2) Christians engaged in unprovoked
persecution of Jews in the ancient and medieval world; (3) Christians
encouraged massacres against Jews that desensitized Christendom to
the Holocaust; (4) Men raised as Christians committed the Holocaust;
(5) Christians ignored the Holocaust while it happened and denied the
Holocaust after it happened.
Baseball allows three strikes and `You’re out!’ Football gives teams
four downs to keep their drive alive. But let us be generous and give
this particularly noxious defamation of Christianity five chances to
be right. It is still defamation.
Christians were anti-Semitic?
Christianity has never been `anti-Semitic.’ The first Christians were
Jews. The next Christians were Semitic people, even if they were not
Jews. The model of racial moral superiority adopted by the National
Socialist German Workers Party resembled Judaism, not Christianity
(although Nazi evil was as hostile and incompatible with the
righteousness required by Judaism as with the tolerance required by
Christianity.)
Racism was condemned as sin in human history first by Christians.
Outside Christian theology, racism was the norm. Why, then, describe
the conflicts between Christians and Jews in the ancient and medieval
world as `anti-Semitic’? Simple: it creates the false impression that
differences between Jews and Christians sowed the seeds of Nazi
racial policies.
Christians engaged in unprovoked persecution Jews in the ancient and
medieval world?
The first three centuries of Christianity was one long religious
holocaust by pagan Rome against Christians. When pagan Rome was
scattering the Jewish people in the Diaspora, this vile though grand
empire was torturing Christians to death. Seldom noted is that Jews,
ten percent of the population of the Empire, sometimes helped
persecute Christians.
Constantine the Great may have been converted to Christianity on his
deathbed, but he was profoundly influenced by Christianity years
before, which led him to proclaim the Edict of Milan in 313 A.D. This
edict granted religious toleration to Jews, Christians and all faiths
within the Roman Empire.
The diverse peoples of the Roman Empire were not forced to become
Christians. These cosmopolitan peoples were familiar with many other
moral and metaphysical systems, including Judaism. The many people of
the Roman Empire embraced Christianity as something far better than
they had ever seen before.
This did not lead to perfect moral behavior, but Christian doctrine
denies that we will ever be sinless. What naturally did occur,
however, was an improvement in the moral conditions within the Roman
Empire. Under the increasing influence of Christian morals, Rome did
not inflict upon the Jewish people crimes like the Diaspora and the
destruction of the Second Temple, the Babylonian Captivity and the
destruction of the First Temple, the Assyrian extermination or
disintegration of ten of the twelve tribes of Israel and Judah, or
the Egyptian oppression of Hebrew slaves which led to the Exodus,
Torah and the Promised Land itself.
Christophobes do not even pretend that Roman Christians were
committing these sorts crimes, although these crimes were so common
in the ancient world. Instead Christophobes fast forward to the
Justinian codification of Roman law, which included discrimination
against Jews. Legal discrimination, of course, was ubiquitous in the
ancient world. Almost every people in the ancient world, including
Jews against goyim.
The sort of murderous crimes which smell of religious holocaust,
however, do not appear in a Christian Roman Empire which had large
numbers of subject Jews. The first episode of religious genocide
between these two great faiths took place in 614 A.D., when Jerusalem
was captured by Persians and Jews, who together methodically tortured
and exterminated more than 90,000 Christian men, women and children.
Christians engaged in massacres of Jews which desensitized
Christendom to the Holocaust?
Aside from the Zoroastrian-Jewish extermination of Christians in 614,
other religions did engage in mass exterminations of other peoples
because of their faith. Overwhelmingly, the victimizers were
conquering Moslems and the victims were Jews, Christians,
Zoroastrians and Hindus who had the misfortune to be in the war of
Islam militant.
Yet Moorish Spain is often presented as a model of tolerance,
suggesting that Christian Spain, after the Christian majority had
expelled the Moslem overlords, was somehow kind and gentle and
Christian Spain vicious and coarse. Why? Bat Ye’or, the Jewish
historian who came from Egypt and who is the greatest modern student
of Islamic persecution of others, describes the ideal often presented
in history books of a wonderful, idyllic Islamic Spain as a `pious
lie’ by Jews to make Christians, who never did anything nearly as bad
as Moslems in Spain, look worse than Moslems.
The expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 is described as a comparable
episode, but of course it was not. Isabella and Ferdinand were simply
reimposing edicts made by prior Moslem rulers requiring that Jews
become Moslems, convert or die. The greatest difference is that
Christians did not engage in an organized, sanctioned slaughter of
Spanish Jews.
The tragic massacres of hundreds of Jews in the Rhineland during the
First Crusade are the next `example’ of how dangerous Christianity is
to Jews. The events are not disputed. Mobs of peasants traveled from
town to town killing entire Jewish communities. Seldom noted is that
these mobs were strongly opposed by the bishops and archbishops of
the towns in which these several massacres took place.
Bishops and archbishops took in Jews, hid Jews, and tried in every
way possible to prevent these murders. The mobs tried smashed the
doors of bishoprics and tried to kill Christian clergy. The courage
of bishops and archbishops against the wrath of wild mobs changed the
course of these campaigns: mobs looking for Jews to kill avoided
towns which had a strong Christian presence.
Saint Bernard warned crusaders that killing Jews for being Jews was
like killing Christ. Popes excommunicated those who called for the
murder of Jews. Hardly fodder for holocausts, is it?
Cossacks in the 17th Century engaged in some of the most unspeakable
crimes against Jews in human history. This is also cited as `proof’
that the differences between Christians and Jews led to mass murder
of Jews. The Cossacks, however, were ruthless to virtually everyone,
including other Cossacks. Jews were not the first nor the last
peoples who suffered horribly at the hands of Cossacks. Moreover,
Cossacks were notoriously irreligious.
Salient is the reaction to these crimes within Christendom. Europe in
the 1600s was not yet `modern.’ Nevertheless, Christendom in the
1600s strongly and unequivocally condemned Cossack atrocities against
Jews. There was no denial and no support for this holocaust against
Jews by Christendom.
Men raised as Christians committed the Holocaust
Did men raised as Christian murder millions of Jews? Yes, but what is
unstated matters immensely: men raised as Christians, and who
emphatically and contemptuously reviled Christianity, murdered
millions of Jews. The only people in Europe who opposed the Holocaust
when they could have saved their lives by being quiet were Christians
in Europe. The only people who spoke out against the Holocaust while
it was happening were Christians.
No one in 1945 seriously believed that Christianity `caused’ the
Holocaust, but many people believed that the evil which Hitler
represented was ended by Christians. There are dozens of examples of
the deep gratitude which Jews felt toward serious Christians in this
hellish part of human history, but perhaps one example sums it up
best: Rome has the oldest synagogue, perhaps, on earth; after the war
was won and Nazism was defeated, the Chief Rabbi of Rome converted to
Christianity.
If Christians `caused’ the Holocaust, then who caused the greater
holocaust in the Soviet Union a dozen years earlier? This greater
holocaust was not caused by serious Jews who seriously believed in
the theology of Judaism, but it is worth noting that Judaism and
Jewishness is no more perfect a vaccine against these sorts of crimes
than Christianity.
Lazar Kaganovich, probably the greatest mass murderer in modern
history, the Soviet Himmler, an atheist Marxist, considered himself
Jewish; Kaganovich spoke Yiddish; he was raised as an observant Jew.
Yagoda, the sadistic head of the Soviet secret police, was Jewish.
Men who reject the moral precepts of Christianity and of Judaism will
commit unthinkable crimes against humanity. Kaganovich and Himmler
had the same theology: man is god.
Christians want to deny the Holocaust?
The myth that somehow America and Britain `denied’ or `concealed’ the
Holocaust is more than just odd. Consider what happened on December
17, 1942. Th allied governments of every Christian nation in Europe
and America denounced the mass murder of Jewish in occupied Europe
`in the strongest possible terms.’
This mass murder was described as a `bestial policy of cold-blooded
extermination.’ Anthony Eden introduced the resolution in the House
of Commons, and a Labour MP asked that all members `rise in their
places and stand in silence in protest of this disgusting behavior’
Lord Samuel, a Jewish peer and former Leader of the Labor Party sad
`These events are an outcome of quite deliberate, planned, conscious
cruelty of human beings.’ Is Holocaust denial?
America and Britain (we tend to forget that Britain was not just a
predominately Christian nation, it is a formally Christian nation:
Christianity, specifically Anglicanism and Presbyterianism, are the
government religions of England and Scotland respectively)
deliberately decided that defeating Nazism in Europe was much more
important than defeating Japanese Imperialism in Asia.
Japan had more ability to actually threaten the island democracies of
Anglo-America, because the Japanese fleet and naval aviation were
superb. Japan was exterminating in unthinkable ways millions of
Chinese and other Asian peoples.
If the democracies of Anglo-America were indifferent to that enormous
crime we call the Holocaust – by the way…what do we call the
holocaust of Chinese by Japan? I seem to have forgotten – then these
Christian nations certainly showed that indifference in inexplicable
ways.
Christians as Christians have been condemning the murder of Jews for
more two thousand years. This has often not reciprocated. The first
religious and racial genocide in Europe during the 20th Century was
not the murder of Jews but the murder of Christians within the
Turkish empire.
Almost every horror later used by Lazar Kaganovich against innocent,
overwhelmingly Christian, people, and even later used by Nazis
against innocent, largely Jewish, people were used first against
Christians in this forgotten holocaust.
Packing people into cattle cars, torturing innocents, liquidating
children – all these things happened in Armenia before the Gulag, and
in the Gulag before the Nazi death camps. As with the Holocaust,
Christians who were not in harm’s way risked their lives to save the
innocent. Also, to his enormous credit, an American Jew, Henry
Morgenthau, worked bravely and tirelessly to help these wretched
victims.
But some people also denied this first experiment in racial and
religious genocide. In 1918 Ben Gurion, the first president of the
modern State of Israel, and Ben-Zvi published a book projecting an
Eretz Yisrael in the Ottoman Empire. Future President Ben Gurion says
in that book: `it must be said, to the credit of the Turks, that
their rulers behaved toward the conquered with a degree of tolerance
and generosity which is unparalleled in the history of Christian
peoples of the period.’ Ben Gurion does not mention a single world
about the Armenian genocide.
The extermination of the Christian Armenians had been preceded by
decades of mass murders of Christians in the Turkish Empire. How did
Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, feel the Fifth Zionist Congress
in 1901 should react to these decades of torture and mass murder of
Christians? Herzl urged the Congress to send a message to Abdul Hamid
II (know as the `Bloody Sultan’ for his massacres of Armenians) which
had an `expression of dedication and gratitude which all the Jews
feel regarding the benevolence which his Highness the Sultan has
always shown them.’
The best and the worst moral attitude
Jews should want Christians to be deep and sincere Christians.
Christians should want Jews to take Judaism seriously. Defaming
Christianity does not lead to a safer, kinder world for Jews. It
leads to monsters like Bormann and Eichman. The best protection
against holocausts are men like pious Christians like George
Washington and Pope John Paul II. The best protection is honest,
decent Jews like Henry Morgenthau BatYe’or .
Monsters like Kaganovich, craven and cynical creeps like Ben Gurion
are found in all races, all faiths and every age. Some are CINOs
(Christians In Name Only) and some are JINOs (Jews In Name Only.) One
of the best ways to seed and to nourish this sort of evil is to
defame Christianity – like pretending that the Holocaust is the
logical consequence of serious Christianity.
Bruce Walker has been a dyed in the wool conservative since, as a
sixth grader, he campaigned door to door for Barry Goldwater. Bruce
has had almost two hundred published articles have appeared several
professional and political periodicals.