How did Nazi (or any anti-semetic) Christians view the Old Testament, given that pretty much exclusively follows the history of the Jewish people?

by ifhyr
Georgy_K_Zhukov

The Nazis essentially did mental gymnastics to avoid the Jewish roots of Christianity (and of course, the Nazi's relationship with Christianity can be an entire new question to be covered). Perhaps the most absurd way that they tackled this was through the claim that "Jesus was not a Jew". Rather, they claimed (although not an original idea to them specifically) he was of Aryan descent, paternally descended from members of the Roman Legion who had come to the region. The roots of this theory come from the tradition that Jesus was, in the words of Hitler, the product of "a whore and a Roman soldier", but other theorists changed the generation and noted his grandfather to have been the Legionnaire. The inseey-weensy tiny detail that, you know, the whole point is that Jesus is the son of God, and has no earthly father, is elided over. Anyways though, his Jewish roots dispensed with, Jesus can now be set up as an anti-Jewish crusader, as described here by Hitler:

For the Galilean's object was to liberate His country from Jewish oppression. He set Himself against Jewish capitalism, and that's why the Jews liquidated Him.

The 'perversion' of Jesus' doctrine is laid at the feet of Paul, a 'sick brain', for "purposes of personal exploitation", what he terms at a different time "mobilis[ing] the criminal underworld [to] organise a proto-Bolshevism". During his monologue, Hitler goes further, contrasting the Romans and the Jews:

The religious ideas of the Romans are common to all Aryan peoples. The Jew, on the other hand, worshipped and continues to worship, then and now, nothing but the golden calf. The Jewish religion is devoid of all metaphysics and has no foundation but the most repulsive materialism. That's proved even in the concrete representation they have of the Beyond-— which for them is identified with Abraham's bosom

Circumscribing the Jewishness of ישוע‎ and attempting to Aryanize the origins of Christianity is only part of it. At a later meeting, Hitler focuses his tirade on the Bible, and the Old Testament:

It is a great pity that this tendency towards religious thought can find no better outlet than the Jewish pettifoggery of the Old Testament. For religious people who, in the solitude of winter, continually seek ultimate light on their religious problems with the assistance of the Bible, must eventually become spiritually deformed. The wretched people strive to extract truths from these Jewish chicaneries, where in fact no truths exist. As a result they become embedded in some rut of thought or other and, unless they possess an exceptionally commonsense mind, degenerate into religious maniacs.

I think that it is laid out pretty clear here as to his views of the Old Testament - although his view of the Paul-corrupted , namely that they were slightly negative! Late in this particular discourse, he also calls it "Jewish filth and priestly twaddle" and " Jewish mumbo jumbo", and also laments that the Bible was ever translated into German, noting:

So long as the wisdom, particularly of the Old Testament, remained exclusively in the Latin of the Church, there was little danger that sensible people would become the victims of illusions as the result of studying the Bible.

Now of course, Hitler, while his opinion is perhaps more powerful a voice that any other, is not the only one to look at, and you find this anti-Old Testament sentiment expressed elsewhere. Rheinhold Krause, a German Christian movement leader and Nazi, for instance, was unabashed in his views that Martin Luther's work remained 'unfinished' and that there remained work to be done, namely the completion of the Germanization of the Church, which included elimination of any remaining Jewish influence, and that explicitly included the Old Testament, as well as, previously noted, the influence of Paul. Perhaps one of the few values that the German Christians found in the Jewish tomes was that, for a commited anti-Semite, it stood as illustration of "the inability of the Jews to live up to God’s expectations." During his 1933 speech at the Berlin Sportpalast, it was under the demand:

Away with the Old Testament! A Christianity which still clings to the Old Testament is a Jewish Religion, irreconcilable with the spirit of the German people.

He was hardly alone in his voice. In 1933, Reich‘s Bishop Ludwig Müller proclaimed similarly that "We must emphasize with all decisiveness that Christianity did not grow out of Judaism but developed in opposition to Judaism", and in the 1939 Godesberg Declaration of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, it was stated:

Did Christianity arise out of Judaism being thus its continuation and completion, or does it stand in opposition to Judaism? To this question we respond: Christian faith is the unbridgeable religious contradiction to Judaism.

Now, to be sure, the German Christian movement, which was intimately tied into the racist voelkish movement, didn't speak for all Christians who were German. The Confessing Church, German Protestants who were opposed to growing Nazi influence within the Church in Germany, rejected such a platform and would continue to use the Christian scripture as before, although they couldn't avoid being caught up in the debate, and having to defend their choice. For those Germans who did ascribe to the effort to 'de-Judaize' Christianity, they would publicly smear the Confessing Church as "nothing but diluted Judaism”. This in turn lead to attempts to defend the "Germanness" of the Old Testament, which came in various forms. One popular vein was to focus on Luther's anti-Semitism, and thus argue that if the Old Testament was truely Jewish, Luther would have rejected it. Volkmar Hentrich further argued in his 1935 defense that:

when one considers the zeal with which the ancient Germanics embraced the Old Testament with its stories of war, heroes and an all-powerful God who easily defeats his enemies in battle (1935, p 396). And given the Germanic nature of the Old Testament, a German can read it without fear of being “Judaized.”

And of course, some people out and out rejected either the rejection or the "Germanization", but anyone who did so publicly, of course, was standing in stark opposition to the regime. Writing in 1934, Wilhelm Vischer's "The Old Testament Witness to Christ" was perhaps the most public example of this, where he wrote a stirring defense that “the Christian Church stands or falls with the recognition of the unity of both Testaments” and used the Old Testament stories to make a statement directly in opposition to the Nazis. It perhaps goes without saying that Vischer eventually fled Germany, settling in Switzerland where he worked as an anti-Nazi activist and headed the "Club of Friends of Israel”.

So hopefully that lays things out for you. The Old Testament absolutely presented a conundrum for the Nazis, and to solve it, basically, you see several strains in varying degrees of extremity, from those who adamantly rejected all Jewish influence of Christianity and attempted to give it German/Aryan origins, through those attempting to manage a synthesis, to the other end where people like Vischer or Karl Barth were not afraid to call out such actions.


Sources:

Dean Garrett Stroud (2002) Reading the Old Testament in the Third Reich, Journal of Genocide Research, 4:2, 253-260

Hitler, Adolf, Norman Cameron, R. H. Stevens, and H. R. Trevor-Roper. 2000. Hitler's table talk, 1941-1944: his private conversations. New York City: Enigma Books.

Zakai, Avihu, and David Weinstein. 2012. Erich auerbach and his "figura": An apology for the old testament in an age of aryan philology. Religions 3, (2): 320-338,


Edit: Clarification, while belief in Aryan descent was part of the Nazi conception of Christianity, the precise mechanics of how were not unified.

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Killfile

The Nazi party had a pretty dim view of the Old Testament and the text underwent a fair bit of religious and social re-interpretation during the Nazi era. Later on, of course, even Christianity would come under attack by the Nazi state with an attempt to subvert much of German Christianity with a German Evangelical Church (Deutsche Evangelische Kirche) or "Reich Church" -- so named because it was an official religious organ of the state.

There's a pretty decent article by Doris L Bergen of the University of Toronto (formerly Notre Dame) up at BibleInterp.com which, while I wouldn't ordinarily recommend as a secondary or tertiary source, is reasonably scholarly in this context.

The short version is that a significant chunk of the Nazi party bristled at the thought of, as Reinhold Krause put it, "accept[ing] from the Jew anything that speaks to our soul, to our most intimate religious essence," characterizing the Old Testament as "stories of pimps and cattle traders."

Of course it's not just that the Old Testament follows Jewish history; it elevates it. The Jews are, after all, described as God's "chosen people."

Like many aspects of Nazi propaganda, however, the hatred of the Jewish people simply coexisted mutely alongside transparent references to stories of Jewish figures in the Old Testament. Hitler himself is easily enough cast in the role of Moses, delivering the German people from the wilderness of the post-WWI economic catastrophe into the promised lind of a thousand year Reich. He even appropriates the language of a "chosen people" in Mein Kampf, though of course the German people are "chosen by fate" rather than the Abrahamic God.

Indeed, while Germany held most strongly to Christianity -- of the three major monotheistic faiths -- that does not mean that Nazism as an ideology was at all rooted in or accepting of Christianity (and thus the Old Testament). German even has a word Kirchenkampf (loosely: "Church Struggle") to represent this tension between the Nazi state and the religious institutions of Germany. From 1933 until the fall of the Reich, the Nazi party attempted to curtail the independence of the Churches and supplant traditional symbols of the faith with symbols of the state. This culminated in the 1944 coup attempt, motivated by Christian conscience (among other things) and, upon its failure, the execution of Bonhoffer in 1945. As Hitler's deputy, Martin Bormann wrote "National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable."

Dan_G

The short version is that those folks believe that during the Old Testament, the Jews were the good guys, and that in the New Testament they took a heel turn by rejecting Jesus, making them the new bad guys. So they don't see a contradiction.

The longer version: during the early days of the church, as it grew in political power, it became more and more exclusionary. An early church leader named Origen explained the growing anti-Semitic sentiments in Contra Celsus Book II:

And them explain why it was predicted to the Jews, that although they both heard and saw, they would not understand what was said, nor perceive what was seen as they ought. For it is indeed manifest, that when they beheld Jesus they did not see who He was; and when heard Him, they did not understand from His words the divinity that was in Him, and transferred God's providential care, hitherto exercised over the Jews to His converts from the heathen. Therefore we may see that after the advent of Jesus the Jews were altogether abandoned, and possess now none of what were considered their ancient glories, so that there is no indication of any Divinity abiding amongst them.

In fact, he believed there was evidence of God's wrath against them that all could see:

On account of their unbelief and other insults which they heaped upon Jesus, the Jews will not only suffer more than others in the judgment which is believed to impend over the world, but have even already endured such sufferings. For what nation is in exile from their own metropolis, and from the place sacred to the worship of their fathers, save the Jews alone? And the calamities they have suffered because they were a most wicked nation, which although guilty of many other sins, yet has been punished so severely for none as for those that were committed against our Jesus.

This belief became more widespread as Jews were already "outside" the increasingly Christian culture - they had their own holidays, their own religion, their own food, their own language, and they refused to convert. They'd happily coexist, but not convert. The fact that they were so obviously "cursed by God" into having no homeland anymore only made it seem more clear that these people must be bad people, made even worse by the fact that they were God's chosen people in the Old Testament and had rejected him!

In 388, a Church Father named Ambrose successfully defended a bishop who had burned down a synagogue by proclaiming to the Emperor that a synagogue was "a home of unbelief, a house of impiety, a receptacle of folly, which God Himself has condemned." Around the same time, Archbishop of Constantinople John Chrysostom delivered his Homilies Against the Jews, demanding that Christians refrain from associating too closely with Jews or observing their festivals, and referring to Jews as "inveterate murderers, destroyers, men possessed by the devil."

From there you can follow the rest of Christian history to see the myriad ways anti-semitism has manifested in the 1600 or so years since then, but those early Christian teachings are what set the ball rolling for many who seek to justify their hatred through religion. I would note as an aside that Hitler's anti-semitism, as much as I can understand his reasoning, was grounded much less in religion than it was in racial nationalism and his need to have an economically successful group to pin the problems of the country on. Hitler sometimes couched his language loosely in religion, but it was never really a chief motivator for him. Perhaps someone with more expertise on that subject could weigh in further if the Nazi perspective is of more interest to you than the Christian one.

CaucusInferredBulk

Nazis are a special case, Ill start with the generic "anti-semetic" answer first.

There are sort of two ways to look at this, which intersect closely. Historically and theologically.

One (Note one, not all, not most common) of the theological interpretations of/in Christianity is that the Hebrews were in fact the chosen people, but due to corruption and heresy, God was required to send Jesus to fix things. This fix was the "New Covenant", which replaced the old one, and as part of that replacement, Jews lost their special status. (Along with invalidating much of the Mosaic law).In this viewpoint, the Jews were corrupt and unworthy, and deserving of losing their "chosen people" moniker so that feeds straight into various anti-semetic beliefs. Not to mention "The Jews killed Jesus".

Issues with acceptance of the Old Testament go back to the very beginnings of Christianity, with 1st and 2nd century debates about this type of thing. See Marcionism below. More extreme examples of these viewpoints ultimately died out or were minimized in main-line Catholic and Protestant traditions, but were ultimately revived by the Nazis, and other anti-semetic groups.

Some good sources for analyzing this viewpoint are Rosemary Ruether, Roy Eckardt, and Michael Cook.

Historically, perceived corruption (or at least a desire to upset the status quo) is one of the factors that helped to spread Christianity so quickly. Christianity was largely a poor persons religion, until it gained critical mass and ultimately became the state religion of the Roman empire. This played a bit into a "Occupy Judea/1%" type motif, where the reason you were poor is because the people up top were corrupt, and the people up top were either Romans or the Jewish Theocracy. Since the Romans would crucify you, its easier to blame the Theocracy, and by extension the Jews (though Romans and other pagan regions certainly got their share of blame too, with the martyr-making). Rodney Stark's "Rise of Christianity" is a good starting point for research here. "History of the Decline of the Fall of the Roman Empire" discusses this as well.

However, Nazis took this whole thing further. They weren't especially pro-Christian at all, Hitler in particular had lots of private statements very critical of the idea. But as a nation, he couldn't unilaterally abandon it or prohibit it, and publicly declared himself to be Christian numerous times. So they fundamentally redefined it. "Positive Christianity" and "German Chritianity" . This branch of Christianity explicitly rejected the entire Old Testament (as well as Jewish-aligned parts of the New Testament) (See Marcionism). Part of this required some interesting hair-splitting. Much like the Japanese were dubbed "honorary Aryans", Positive Christianity distinguished Judea from Galilee, in order to build a firewall for acceptable biblical figures/sources. Other interesting changes were things like re-writing the lyrics for Handel's Operas, to remove Jewish victories and accomplishments from the stories. Ultimately the German people rejected this movement (See The Barmen Declaration) , one of the few places where the Nazi regime was unable to persuade the masses. Towards the later years of the 3rd Reich, the Nazis (and especially the SS) became overtly anti-christian entirely, (and thus removing any contradiction) but it didn't matter a whole lot by then.