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Class Prep
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The Aryan Jesus
- Last week, we examined Christian biases against their Muslim "others" from the period of the Reconquista through later colonial conquests in the age of imperialism. We read about the growing importance of limpieza de sangre (cleanliness of blood) as the 16th-century Spaniards sought to root out Muslims and Jews from the Iberian peninsula. We saw how these assumptions of cultural superiority played out with the indigenous people and the criollos in Mexico and in the orientalist assumptions of later European literature, art, foreign policy and legislation.
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- Today we turn to an older form of this prejudice, Christian anti-Judaism, and to one of its offspring, the Aryan Jesus promoted by some German Christians during the Third Reich. The desire to "drain Jesus of Jewishness," as Susannah Heschel titles her chapter, coheres with the Nazi agenda to purify German blood of all "contaminants." But it also depends upon centuries of anti-Jewish pogroms, folklore, and intellectual discourse that quite literally viewed Jews as a threat to Christian blood. The tradition stems from the charge that "the Jews" killed an innocent Christ. It grew into the canard that Jews continued to pose a threat to Christian innocents. The most famous and persistent form of this story is the so-called blood libel, pictured above: that Jews would occasionally kidnap Christian children, drain their blood, and use it for their Passover matzah. The blood of Jesus fuses here with eucharistic symbolism, but this "eating the body of Christ" is the evil counterpart to the Christian last supper. Here, the Jews become cannibals feeding off their Christian foes. As absurd as this charge sounds, it appears regularly in European history from as early as the fifth century on. It concentrates in the Middle Ages when an increasing reverence for the humanity and suffering of Christ spawned charges that Jews stole and desecrated the eucharistic body of Christ (see below) or bled Christian children for their own festival meals.
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- These lies are not a product of any actual Jewish act, but rather the dark side of Christian theological ideas and fears. None of our readings today describes this phenomenon, but we will discuss it more in class as background for the Aryan Jesus.
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- After you read about Christian biases in the New Testament and among European biblical scholars, write your journal reflection on whether Christianity is an anti-Jewish religion. Ponder whether and how the Christian story and theology about Jesus depend on judgments about Judaism that are inaccurate, unfair, and outright dangerous.
- Team 3: How do anti-Jewish beliefs and actions relate to our study of the "other" last week? On what fears or beliefs are they based? (reflection)
- Team 4: What scenes in the New Testament text feed into the anti-Jewish biases of Christians (Swenson)? How did the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life interpret scripture to "prove" that Jesus was an Aryan (Heschel)? (interpretation of scripture)
- Team 1: Heschel traces anti-Semitism in biblical and Jesus studies from the 19th century through the Shoah (Hebrew for catastrophe; the Jewish term for the Holocaust). Evaluate Ernest Renan's reading of Jesus and early Christian origins against our study of it earlier this quarter. Is he right or wrong, and how do you know? Explain how the German appreciation of the Orient (minus Jews, who were their "other") provided opportunities for imagining an Aryan rather than a Jewish Jesus (Heschel's sections on Assyriology and the Galilean Jesus are relevant here). Compare this to the orientalism we discussed in our last class. (historical comparison)
- Team 2: The people described by Heschel are university-trained students and scholars like us. They believed that their studies were objective and factual—in a word, scientific rather than subjective. What criteria can be used to evaluate the accuracy of claims that people make? What social pressures make this difficult? Are there any analogies in our university or our country right now? (ethical evaluation)
- Assigned Readings
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- Primary: Matthew 27:1-26; John 18:28–19:42
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- Secondary: Swenson, Bible Babel 96-8; Susannah Heschel, "Draining Jesus of Jewishness," in The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) 26-66 (Camino)
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- Slides from Lecture
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- Further Reading
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- Bergen, Doris L. Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
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- Cohen, Jeremy. Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
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- Cornwell, John. Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. New York: Penguin, 2008.
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- Dundes, Alan. The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
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- Eco, Umberto. "Fictional Protocols." In Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994).
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- Ericksen, Robert P. Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999.
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- --------. Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1985.
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- Gager, John G. The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes Toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
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- Garber, Zev, ed. The Jewish Jesus: Revelation, Reflection, Reclamation, Shofar Supplements in Jewish Studies. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2011.
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- Heschel, Susannah. The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.
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- Kelley, Shawn. Racializing Jesus: Race, Ideology, and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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- Levine, Amy-Jill. The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.
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- Levine, Amy-Jill and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds. The Jewish Annotated New Testament (NRSV). New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
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- Moore, R. I. The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1987.
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- Stow, Kenneth R. Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992.
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- van de Poll, Wilfred. "The Exile of God: The in Jewish Construction." In From Babylon to Eternity: The Exile Remembered and Constructed in Text and Tradition (ed. Alex Cannengieter, Wilfred van de Poll, Anne-Mareike Wetter and Bob Becking; BibleWorld; London: Equinox, 2010) .
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- Wright, Jonathan R. C. "The German Protestant Church and the Nazi Party in the Period of the Seizure of Power 1932-3." In Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History: Papers Read at the Fifteenth Summer Meeting and the Sixteenth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (ed. Derek Baker; Studies in Church History 14; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977) 393-418.
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- Links
- Der Ewige Jude - "The Eternal Jew," a 1940 Nazi propaganda film that promotes the racist stereotypes of the Third Reich. If you'd like to do an extra credit paper, read the Wikipedia article first, and then watch the film. Then, in your paper, introduce the background of the film, analyze its contents in light of our discussion of orientalism (how is the Jewish other depicted as all that the Aryan race is not? be alert to the fact that religion is only one small component of this "othering"), and evaluate both the film and the Wikipedia piece.
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- Sources
- Photographs:
- "Symon the blessed baby of Trent." In Hartmann Schedel, Weltchronik (1493), a translation of the Nuremberg Chronicle. Image reproduced online at Wikimedia Commons, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/
Schedel_judenfeindlichkeit.jpg.
- From a German woodcut of supposed host desecration by the Jews of Passau, 1477 (Wikimedia Commons, public domain). This panel shows the Jews stealing the hosts and piercing them in a ritual. Subsequent panels in the woodcut display the recovery of the hosts and their miraculous power, followed by scenes of the Jews being arrested, beheaded and tortured with hot pincers. Other Jews are driven out of town naked, bound in a wagon with their feet held to the fire. The final panel shows Christians kneeling and praying. Posted online at "Host Desecration," Wikipedia, online, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_desecration.
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