The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany [Hardcover]

Susannah Heschel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 3, 2008

Was Jesus a Nazi? During the Third Reich, German Protestant theologians, motivated by racism and tapping into traditional Christian anti-Semitism, redefined Jesus as an Aryan and Christianity as a religion at war with Judaism. In 1939, these theologians established the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life. In The Aryan Jesus, Susannah Heschel shows that during the Third Reich, the Institute became the most important propaganda organ of German Protestantism, exerting a widespread influence and producing a nazified Christianity that placed anti-Semitism at its theological center.

Based on years of archival research, The Aryan Jesus examines the membership and activities of this controversial theological organization. With headquarters in Eisenach, the Institute sponsored propaganda conferences throughout the Nazi Reich and published books defaming Judaism, including a dejudaized version of the New Testament and a catechism proclaiming Jesus as the savior of the Aryans. Institute members--professors of theology, bishops, and pastors--viewed their efforts as a vital support for Hitler's war against the Jews. Heschel looks in particular at Walter Grundmann, the Institute's director and a professor of the New Testament at the University of Jena. Grundmann and his colleagues formed a community of like-minded Nazi Christians who remained active and continued to support each other in Germany's postwar years.

The Aryan Jesus raises vital questions about Christianity's recent past and the ambivalent place of Judaism in Christian thought.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Heschel has a remarkable story to tell. Her reliance on primary sources and her objectivity are impressive. One comes away from her account wondering how such apparently intelligent and learned Christian scholars could have been so foolish and craven. -- Daniel J. Harrington, America



The Aryan Jesus . . . is more than a heartbreaking story of principled Christian anti-Judaism. It is also a masterwork of patient archival research. . . . As a history of German anti-Semitism and as an analysis of pronounced themes within Christian theology, Heschel's study is both broad and deep. -- Paula Fredriksen, Tablet



Heschel's book will rank as an important work of intellectual history, one that provides a penetrating analysis of the mind-set of the institute and its supporters in the ranks of the German Christians. -- Mark E. Ruff, Catholic Historical Review



Susannah Heschel traces the evolution of the Institute and its various projects with great skill. . . . As an exercise in archival research it scores very highly. The detail is astonishing, and many intriguing points are made about both the origins of Nazism's Christian manifestations and the consequences of learned theologians spouting nonsense in Forties Thuringia. -- Catholic Herald



Heschel tells the story of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life, showing how politics, theology, racial ideology, and political ambition shaped Nazi-era theological scholarship at one research institute. . . . This well-researched, theologically sensitive book is an important history of a troubling, shameful chapter in Christian history and will be a very important addition for most collections. -- A.W. Klink, Choice



Susannah Heschel's research is exemplary: she has followed up the careers of many theologians who took part in the attempt to rewrite Christianity. She has command over her subject without overstressing her Jewish sympathies; and this often shocking book is of considerable historical interest. -- Margaret Pawley, Church Times



Heschel's fascinating account begins not with the Third Reich but in the middle of the 19th century, when the intellectual foundation was laid for a German Christianity without roots in Judaism. -- Jewish Book World



Some may resist reading another book on the Holocaust. Reacting to the title, they may even presume that its findings would be obvious and that examining its contents is unnecessary. That would be a mistake--with regard to the general attitude about the Holocaust and how it relates to Christian identity, as well as to any misplaced assumptions linked to the phrase Aryan Jesus. -- Henry Knight, Christian Century



Carefully researched, tightly written, this is an important contribution to the study of Christianity in Nazi Germany. . . . This is a book that deserves our attention--whether we are biblical scholars, contextual theologians or church historians. -- Anthony Egan, Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae



Heschel's work is beautifully written and densely packed with countless examples of the ways in which the institute's theologians used their own anti-Judaic theology to support the regime's antisemitic policies, to which they lent considerable support. . . . The book will be essential reading for all scholars of the Third Reich and the role of religion in the National Socialist state. -- Beth A. Griech-Polelle, H-Net Reviews



Heschel's Aryan Jesus is a probing and profoundly disturbing work. Its provocative conclusions invite further research into Christian anti-Semitism, Christian responses to the Holocaust, and the influence of ideology on historical Jesus studies. The text is enhanced by an extensive bibliography and illustrations of Nazi Christian art and architecture. Historians, Scripture scholars, clergy, seminarians, and advanced undergraduates will profit greatly from this outstanding study. -- Peter A. Huff, Anglican Theological Review



Every good book should provoke and The Aryan Jesus does not disappoint. Heschel's book should spark debate, which no doubt will center on her depiction of the Confessing Church. . . . Heschel's mixture of meticulous scholarship and intellectual provocation will hopefully be read widely and, thus, stimulate more discussion of complicity and false martyrdom. -- Kevin Ostoyich, German Studies Review



Original, compelling, and deeply disturbing, this book also dispels several ingrained post-1945 West German myths. . . . [T]he account raises pressing questions concerning the difference between Catholic and Protestant theology and church history with regard to race and the history of the study of Judaism after the war. -- Amos Morris-Reich, Journal of Religion



Heschel's long-anticipated contribution to this historiography is a work that is not only of immense importance and insight empirically but also one that attempts analytically and conceptually to break away from prior narratives. -- Richard Steigmann-Gall, American Historical Review



The Aryan Jesus is a worthy, indeed essential addition to [the] body of scholarship. Heschel has written a dense and multifaceted study. -- Christopher R. Browning, Studies in Contemporary Jewry



Aryan Jesus is not only a clear demonstration of the Christian legitimization of the Nazi Holocaust, but also a provocative entrance into the current debates about the relationship of Nazism and Christianity and the identification of Nazism as a political religion. -- Kyle T. Jantzen, Journal of Church History



In addition to her contributions to Jewish-Christian dialogue, Heschel provides important insights into the collaboration of the professions during the Third Reich. Indirectly, her work also has much to add to the emerging discussion on the religious inflection of German nationalism. -- Shelley Baranowski, The Historian



Historian Susannah Heschel was 'the first American, the first Jew, and the first person with a laptop' to enter the Institute's archives at Eisenach. She did not emerge empty-handed. -- Leslie Jones, Quarterly Review

From the Inside Flap

"Susannah Heschel's The Aryan Jesus is a brilliant and erudite investigation of the convergence between major trends in German Protestantism and Nazi racial anti-Semitism. By concentrating on the history of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life, Heschel describes in forceful detail the Nazification of all aspects of Protestant theology, including the Aryanization of Jesus himself. This is a highly original and important contribution to our understanding of the Third Reich."--Saul Friedlander, University of California, Los Angeles

"Susannah Heschel's fascinating, well-documented study not only reveals how and why German theologians during the Nazi period sought to dejudaize the church; it also exposes a perverted exegesis and theology that is still found, tragically, in pulpit, pew, and classroom."--Amy-Jill Levine, author of The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus

"Based on mostly unknown archival material, this pathbreaking book digs deep into the most sensitive areas of Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews. There can be no doubt that The Aryan Jesus will raise discussion and controversy, and receive a lot of attention."--Michael Brenner, University of Munich

"Widely relevant, The Aryan Jesus is an erudite and thoughtful book based on a massive amount of work and a staggering amount of research. Heschel's sound scholarship makes a valuable and significant contribution to religion and theology, as well as history. This is an important book with a strong--even urgent--sense of purpose."--Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (November 3, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691125317
• ISBN-13: 978-0691125312
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #976,079 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A shameful story, December 28, 2008

By 

Ralph Blumenau (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Hardcover)

The `German Christians', founded in 1932, were a movement inside the Protestant Church of Germany to promote the Nazi ideology within Christian teaching. They eventually set up the `Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life'. This book is the detailed story of the academics associated with it. Its list of sources runs to 34 pages, and there is much repetition in the content; but from it a sordid story emerges clearly.

The twisted `scholarship' of Protestant theologians from bishops through university professors down to pastors, plumbed depths in a racial antisemitism (as distinct from theological anti-Judaism) whose origins can be traced to the 19th century, and which was strongly entrenched in theological faculties and student bodies, especially at the University of Jena even before the Nazis came to power. The academic director of the Institute, Walter Grundmann, was appointed Professor at Jena in 1938 (though the Institute, founded in 1939, was never formally a part of the University).

For these people it was essential to deny that Christianity evolved out of Judaism, and that it had been from the very beginning the very opposite of Judaism. Most Christians down the ages had seen Jesus as an opponent of Judaism, or, rather, taking their lead from St John's Gospel, had seen `the Jews' as an enemy of Jesus. What was new was that 19th century racists were troubled by the idea that Jesus was Jewish, and they invented a theory that, as an Aramaic-speaking Galilean, he was probably racially descended from the `Aryan' Assyrians who had conquered and populated Galilee in the 8th century BC; that his true Aryan teaching, which now found its culmination in Nazi Germany, had been corrupted by the Jewish writers of the Gospels and by the Jewish St Paul to suggest that Christianity was the fulfilment of prophesies in the Old Testament. It was therefore essential not only to exclude the Old Testament from the Bible, but to purge the New Testament, prayers, psalms etc from all Jewish material. Moreover, Christians who were of Jewish ancestry had to be purged from the Church: the teaching that baptism is sufficient to make someone a Christian was rejected. Nor did they stop at calling for the `purification' of the Church: they also espoused the physical destruction of the Jews. One would have thought that they would have found it easier to abandon all pretence of being Christians and whole-heartedly to embrace a völkisch paganism, as some Nazis of course did.

In 1940 the Institute published a `Volkstestament', its own version of the New Testament. The three Synoptic Gospels were amalgamated into one, in the process cutting much of Matthew, the most pro-Jewish of the Gospels, as well as the genealogy of Jesus, his circumcision and all references to his Messiahship. Out went references to his meekness; instead he is presented as a fighter. St Paul was too important to Lutherans to be excluded altogether, but his Epistles were stripped of all autobiographical references to himself as a Jew. Prayer books were purged of concepts like contrition and hope for forgiveness; the expression Divine Service was replaced by Divine Celebration; 1,971 our of 2,300 hymns had Jewish-influenced expressions removed - even from Luther's `A Mighty Fortress is our God' - and more `virile' and militaristic texts were substituted in a new hymnal of 1941. A new catechism in 1941 included such injunctions as `keep the blood pure' and `honour the Führer'.

There was of course some opposition to the `German Christians', most notably from the Confessing Church to which some 20% of Protestant pastors belong (as opposed to `between a quarter and a third' who adhered to the `German Christians'). These would not give racism priority over baptism. But very many of the Confessing Church members were as antisemitic as the `German Christians'. Some wanted to keep the Old Testament because the OT prophets almost always denounced the vices of the Jews. Some defended St Paul's teaching as a sharp refutation of the `Jewish-pharisaic spirit'; some worried that the attack on the roots of the New Testament might turn into an attack on Christianity itself.

For it is interesting how reluctant the Nazi leaders were to give the Institute the whole-hearted backing it had expected - not, of course, because they disapproved of its attack on Judaism, but because they were wary of the churches anyway, and Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologue, was actively hostile to Christianity. The Institute was never formally an organ of the Nazi Party, and some Nazis even mocked it for still being Christian at all; and the display of the swastika or other Nazi emblems inside the churches was prohibited.

All this gave many of its members the possibility to argue after the war that their work had been purely academic and not political, and that they had been loyal members of the Church rather than of the Party which some of them had the effrontery to claim they had opposed - the most they had done was to oppose Nazi paganism. The anti-Judaism of their writings, they said, was after all a classic Christian motif.

Not the least shameful aspect of the whole story is that most of them got away with it: after briefly losing their positions, their academic and pastoral careers in post-war Germany, both East and West, resumed or were even enhanced by promotions. Some of them were helped by even such famous opponents of Nazism as Pastor Niemöller. In 1954 Grundmann was appointed Rector of the seminary in Eisenach, and in 1956 he revenged himself against his former opponents in the Confessing Church, many of whom were now in authority, by becoming a Stasi informer against them. In his voluminous post-war writings, he continued to portray Jesus as an enemy of a Judaism devoid of morality, although we hear nothing more of an Aryan Jesus.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Two Kinds of Nazi-Era German Protestants, October 23, 2009

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Werner Cohn (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Hardcover)

Unlike the Communist movement in Stalin's time, the Nazi movement never achieved a totally uniform party line, not even in its attitudes toward Jews. It can be said that, in general, any view of Jews was permitted, as long as it amounted to rabid anti-Semitism.

Within the Nazi-era German Protestant Church, there were two major competing views of Jews:

a) The "Confessing Church," including famous names like Martin Niemöller, held that present-day Jews are evil, but that the Old Testament, with its Jewish origins, forms a permanent part of the Christian religion. These CC pastors were generally supportive of "non-Aryan" Christians, i.e. Jews who had undergone the Christian baptism.

b) The "German Christians" embraced a more "racial" anti-Semitism. They agreed that Jews are evil, but, in addition, also held that Jesus was not a Jew, and that those portions of the New Testament that say otherwise need to be revised. These pastors of the GC were more enthusiastic supporters of Hitler (although, generally, the Confessing clergy, including Niemöller despite his imprisonment at a certain stage, lost few opportunities to declare their loyalty to the regime). One of the more comical aspects of the story is how each side accused the other of being less anti-Semitic than it should be.

Although the broad outlines have been known for a long time, this remarkable book is the first to study the German Christians in detail, basing itself on archival material that nobody else has studied before. The result is a chilling story of distinguished clergymen and professors of theology who, in pursuit of their eagerness to please the Nazi movement, discovered and in some cases invented sophisticated speculative arguments to bolster a case for a non-Jewish, indeed an anti-Semitic Jesus. The author is particularly strong in showing how academic careerists -- of a type that would nowadays be called academic "operators" -- combined vanity, ideology, and egotism to secure acclaim and high position. In some cases these advantages were retained long into the post-war period.

The great villain of the piece is a certain Reverend Walter Grundmann, the evil genius behind the German Christians' Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence in German Church Life. Grundmann was the author of many learned volumes on the evil of Judaism, but also on complicated issues of New Testament theology. And guess what: after the war, living in the Communist German Democratic Republic, the Rev. Grundmann became a secret agent of the Stasi, the Communist secret police.

I do have some minor reservations about this book. While the author makes it clear that the German Christians contained a great number of influential Protestant leaders, there is no systematic effort to gauge its precise strength as opposed to that of the Confessing Church. Another lack that I found is that the author, though very good in discussing previous work on wartime German churches, fails to mention the indispensable work of Klaus Scholder. Finally, the publisher must be faulted for an inadequate index (Martin and Wilhelm Niemöller are treated as if they were the same individual), and also with poor proofreading of German text. But these minor shortcomings in no way detract from the seminal importance of this important work.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The nuts and bolts of a Nazi religion, January 13, 2011

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Peter S. Bradley "Peter Sean Bradley" (Fresno, California, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Paperback)

Susannah Heschel's "The Aryan Jesus" makes a nice complement to other recent books on the Nazi Christian phenomenon, such as The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 by Richard Steigman-Gall and Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism by Derek Hastings. All three books discuss the Nazi relationship with Christianity. The Hastings and Steigman-Gall books demonstrate that Nazi approach to Christianity was to incorporate a particular strand of post-modern or liberal Christianity. As is typical of post-modern or liberal Christianity, the Nazi approach to religious identity identified the Jesus it wanted to discover - an Aryan fighter against the Jews - and then used the techniques of modern scholarship to find that Jesus. From Steigman-Gall and Hastings, we learned that insofar as the Nazis were Christian, their Christianity was essentially a heretical version of Christianity that would have been unrecognizable in its Marcion-like willingness to amputate such "Jewish" aspects of Christianity as the Old Testament.

Heschel's book offers a nuts and bolts view of how that amputation took place under the Nazi regime. Her focus is on the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on the German Church and its academic director Walter Grundmann. Heschel does the heavy lifting of demonstrating the role that the Institute had in "dejudaizing" the Protestant German Christian churches by such expedients as publishing a bible without the Old Testament and which removed other indications of Christ's Jewish origins, publishing hymnals in which old hymns were made "Teutonic" and holding conferences dedicated to proving that Galilee, and therefore, Jesus were Aryan.

An issue which seemed to concern Heschel is, how important were the activities of the Institute? The Institute was closely identified with the German Protestant Church of Thuringia, rather than with a national body, and it never achieved its dream of becoming the agency which officially mediated Nazism to Christianity and Christianity to Nazism. In fact by the end of its short life (essentially 1939 to 1944), the Nazis had distanced themselves from Christianity, such as by refusing to permit Nazi regalia from being used in Christian services, or allowing the Institute to identify its journal with the Nazi party, and the leaders of the Institute, including Walter Grundmann, had been drafted to serve as soldiers in the German army.

The issue of significance remains somewhat open for me. I think that Heschel made her case by pointing out the large number of "German Christian" (i.e., pro-Nazi) local churches and the control of the German Christian "sect" over various state churches as compared with the Confessing Churches (i.e., those local churches that resisted a full Nazi take-over of the Protestant German Church.) The Institute seems to have been a pillar of support for the German Christian sect and, so, a significant player in what might have been a significance development in Christian theology, and one which certainly shows how a significant development in Christianity - i.e., liberal Christianity - could go so very wrong.

I felt that Heschel was not very helpful in explaining how Protestant Christians of any sort could be persuaded to jettison the Old Testament and otherwise tamper with the language of the Bible. Heschel devotes a few pages to a kind of psychological/sociological explanation of anti-semitism in order to explain that the German Christians really weren't that different from earlier Christian Germans, but this goes nowhere near to explaining how a substantial number of Protestants could be persuaded to adopt a proposal rejected by Christianity during the Second Century when Marcion first raised the idea. I would have been interested in hearing about the roots of the "History of Religions" school - from which the Institute theologians drew their academic background - in order to see if things like the elimination of the Old Testament were a radical departure from their intellectual foundations and, if not, how they justified that move.

Heschel also pointed out the effect "race science" had on the German study of the Bible during the Institute years. I wanted to understand what these people thought they were doing. For us moderns the very idea of "race science" is "crazy" and those who are engaged in "race science" ought to be institutionalized. Obviously, this is a temporally parochial attitude - those scholars didn't think they were crazy. They thought they were using cutting edge science, just like a modern liberal Christian might think that incorporating the findings of physics into their interpretation of the Bible isn't crazy. Unfortunately, apart from being opportunistic Anti-Semites, I never got a real feel for how these scholars justified themselves.

The theme of opportunism seems to be the conclusion that lies just under the book's surface. Heschel points out how certain of the Institute theologians were second-rate or otherwise not properly qualified for their positions, but were advanced because they had the correct attitudes. In a particularly fascinating section on the post-Nazi history of the Institute's theologians, Heschel points out how comfortable Grundmann was with turning into a spy for the Communists in Communist East Germany, albeit while retaining his anti-Semitic prejudices. In fact, the post-war history is almost the most interesting part of the book - or, perhaps, horrifying is a better word - as Heschel points out that the Institute's Nazi theologians were able to avoid censure, but in fact were able to retain their positions. As she points out, often pro-Nazi theologians and pastors were preferred by their former adversaries in the Confessing Church because they could be "controlled" better because of their Nazi associations.

I was originally going to give this book three stars, but after a conversation with someone about Deitrich Boenhoffer, I realized how much the book had taught me about the Confessing Church's adversaries, and, so, I am giving it four stars.