The Origins and Root Causes of the Shoah

Much is known about the mass destruction of our people. Within Israeli society, questions and demands to draw lessons from the events of the past continue to resonate strongly. How could such a tragedy occur? How should modern Israelis relate to the memory of this historical period? How should this be communicated to children, how should it be taught, and is it necessary to do so at all (in the history of the State of Israel, there was a period when the mass destruction of Jews was deliberately left unmentioned to raise a "new man," free of a "victim complex," for whom freedom and confidence in the future were a natural way of life)? What is the attitude toward the lessons of the Holocaust among our closest neighbors? Is it permissible in Israel to perform the music of Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer and, in the eyes of many, a harbinger of Nazism? What can be expected from Europeans in the future in light of the lessons of the past?

The list of such challenging questions could be significantly expanded.

Some, such as Elie Wiesel, consider it unacceptable to construct theories about the Holocaust, arguing that to subject it to analysis is to desecrate and profane the memory of the victims. Yet, even they are generally unable to resist the natural urge to comprehend and explain what transpired.

"It is difficult and unpleasant to plunge into this abyss of evil," reflects the writer Primo Levi. "There is a temptation to turn away with a grimace and shut down one's consciousness. This temptation must not be succumbed to."

Consequently, theories and attempted answers are numerous. From our perspective, the awareness of the Shoah is one of those subjects where universal theories and concepts influence Israeli society. The active discussion surrounding the signing of the Israeli-Polish declaration on the history of the Holocaust in Poland has provided fresh confirmation of this viewpoint.

The mass extermination of a civilian population can only be explained by exceptional cruelty, the causes of which are multifaceted yet synchronized. No single cause can be viewed as primary or decisive. "The numbers are much higher than we previously thought," explained Hartmut Berghoff, Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington. "We knew before how terrible life was in the camps and ghettos, but the figures are simply unbelievable."

In recent publications, researchers from the United States succeeded in cataloging 42,500 Nazi ghettos and concentration camps in Europe where slave labor was utilized, as well as prisoner-of-war camps and so-called "care" centers that operated in Germany and Nazi-occupied territories from 1933 to 1945.

Many researchers argue that there is a clearly traceable connection between traditional anti-Jewish Christian teachings and the National Socialist "Final Solution."

Under Emperor Constantine, Christianity attained the status of the official religion of the Roman Empire. In doing so, the emperor introduced a series of measures designed to restrict the rights of Jews in society. Jews were forbidden from converting Christians to Judaism—such conversion (giyur) was treated as a crime. Jews were prohibited from owning Christian slaves, marrying Christians, serving in the military, or holding public offices where Christians would be dependent upon them.

The Codex Theodosianus (438 AD) guaranteed Jews a certain level of protection in the event of attacks on their homes and synagogues. However, the same code established that any Christians who converted to Judaism lost their right to inherit property. Missionary activity was permitted for Christians but forbidden for Jews. In the 6th century, the Codex Justinianus stripped Jews of most rights granted to them by the Codex Theodosianus—Judaism was deprived of its legal status and was no longer protected by law; those who publicly denied the Resurrection and the Last Judgment were subject to exile.

In 1215, by decree of the Fourth Lateran Council, Jews were ordered to wear distinctive clothing and a distinguishing yellow badge. In 1239, Pope Gregory IX declared the Talmud a "blasphemous" book, and thousands of copies were burned across Europe. A number of new anti-Jewish regulations emerged in the 13th century: the Council of Oxford (1222) banned the construction of new synagogues; a decree by the Synod of Breslau (1267) required Jews to settle in specially designated Jewish quarters; the Council of Basel (1434) prohibited the awarding of academic degrees to Jews.

Although Jesus was crucified by the Romans, the Church traditionally placed the blame for deicide on the Jews and condemned them for their refusal to accept Jesus as the Messiah. The accusations were addressed not only to the contemporaries of Jesus but to all subsequent generations of Jews. Melito of Sardis, living in the 2nd century AD, became the first Christian bishop to accuse the Jews of deicide—by killing Christ, the Jews were deemed guilty of killing God Himself. Many theologians, from Augustine to Luther, held similar views. "The death of Jesus and the death of millions of Jews in our century are irreversibly and tragically linked. Over many centuries, Jews were mocked, persecuted, and blamed for the death of Jesus. The charge of deicide leveled against them became the breeding ground that spawned the evil of Nazism, with all its catastrophic consequences."

Even to this day, such anti-Jewish and antisemitic rhetoric can be heard from clergy of various Christian denominations.

The reality remains that for centuries, Christians held Jews accountable for the death of Jesus. On the evening of Good Friday, Jews would lock their doors and tremble in fear of Christian mobs seeking vengeance for "deicide."

From the earliest years of the Christian Church's formation, Jews were blamed for the death of Jesus, "their Messiah," whom they rejected. In punishment, Christians claimed, God expelled the Jews from Israel. In the Middle Ages, new accusations were added. Jews were labeled "children of the devil," and "blood libels"—false accusations of murdering Christian infants, stealing, and desecrating the Host—gained widespread traction.

For centuries, such fabrications were accepted as indisputable and absolute truths, and Jews became the victims of prejudice and brutal persecution.

During the Crusades, Jews frequently fell victim to pogroms; the crusaders' campaigns were financed with this plundered wealth.

With Christianity established in the Roman Empire, Jews were stripped of all rights. Conversion to Judaism and intermarriage were prohibited under penalty of death. For centuries, Jews were expelled from countries where they had seemingly felt secure—such as Spain, from which they were expelled five centuries ago, in 1492.

Anglican theologian Marcus Braybrooke is convinced that two millennia of Christian anti-Jewish teachings laid the groundwork for Hitler’s "Final Solution": on the night of November 9, 1938, the Nazis organized Jewish pogroms throughout Germany. This night entered history as Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass"). Almost no Christians protested against the pogroms. Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie, addressing this issue, asked: "How could there be such blindness?"

In the interest of historical accuracy, it is worth noting that the Church never formally demanded the physical destruction of Jews; the German fascist regime implemented on a physical level what the Church had for centuries sought to achieve on a spiritual level—the eradication of Judaism.

M. Braybrooke's conclusion is that "centuries of anti-Jewish teachings prepared the ground for Nazism. Although individual Christians risked their lives to save Jews, as a whole, very few Christians resisted Nazism. Eloquent testimony to this is the silence of the Churches."

One of the roots of antisemitism is undoubtedly anti-Jewish church doctrine, asserts Marcus Braybrooke. It contains blatantly absurd concepts, such as blaming all Jews for the death of Christ, yet deeper, more complex reasons also lie at its core: for instance, a "typological" reading of the Hebrew Bible (interpreting it as prophecies of Christ's coming), and the contrasting of the "harsh God of the Old Testament" with the "loving God of the New Testament."

Examining the details of anti-Jewish doctrine, researchers note that "according to Christian theology, it is the Church that is the true heir to the promises made to Abraham. It is the spiritual and universal Israel foretold by the prophets, while the Jews inherited everything that embodied evil in history—blasphemy, apostasy, murder. As a result, the Jews were stripped of their divine election. God's wrath upon them was marked by the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem. The Jews were exiled, and henceforth, a divine curse hangs over them: they are destined for eternal wandering and humiliation until the end of time, when Jesus returns and the Jews must finally acknowledge their guilt."

In 1933, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber stated in a sermon that after the death of Christ, Israel was dismissed from the service of Revelation. "He did not recognize the time of his visitation. He rejected the Anointed of God and led Him to the Cross... The daughters of Zion received their bill of divorce, and since then Jews have been condemned to wander eternally across the earth."

By accusing the Jews, Christians effectively set themselves a grand task: to prove that the debased status of the Jews was evidence of their rejection by God. Under Nazism, the Christian demonization of the spiritual character of the Jews was transformed into a demonization of their biological traits—hence, the Nazi "Final Solution" to the Jewish question, on the path to the thousand-year Third Reich, required not religious conversion, but the physical annihilation of Jews.

It was the Christian tradition that fostered a sense of aversion toward Jews among its followers, as a result of which Christians saw little need to react to their disappearance.

In 1922, Hitler compared himself... to Christ, who drove out the Jewish money changers like a nest of vipers. And in Mein Kampf, we read: "If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is to triumph over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, float through the ether devoid of human life." And further: the Jew "will follow his fateful path until another force opposes him and, in a titanic struggle, casts this rebel against heaven down into the abyss of Lucifer." Hitler envisioned himself as this apocalyptic savior of mankind.

It was only in 1965 that the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate) was published, in which the Catholic Church officially proclaimed a decisive rejection of its former views. Other Churches followed a similar path.

Christianity is not the sole cause of antisemitism

Despite this, we encounter not only Christian-antisemites but devout Christian believers completely uninfected by the "virus" of antisemitism. From this, one can conclude that Christianity is not the exclusive cause of antisemitism.

European culture and the mindset of the common man were permeated with racism and antisemitism long before the Nazi seizure of power. As early as the Middle Ages, European minds debated racial heterogeneity. At a time when European nationalism and imperialism began to play an increasingly prominent role in domestic and foreign policy, such ideas became highly sought after.

In 1854, the French diplomat Arthur de Gobineau published a sensational book on the "inequality of human races," in which he asserted that the so-called Aryan race was superior to all others. The German-born Englishman H.S. Chamberlain, drawing on the then-fashionable ideas of Social Darwinism, asserted in 1899 that the "strong" have the right to lead and even subjugate the "weak," and that the "Aryan race," led by the Germans, was destined to save Christian-European civilization from its enemy—"Judaism."

At the end of the 19th century, F. Nietzsche defined the biblical ethics introduced to the world by the Jewish people as the "morality of the weak": Jews invented God to protect themselves. In his book The Gay Science, he portrays himself as a madman who enters a town, lights a lantern in broad daylight, and cries: "I seek God... Whither is God? I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I... He is dead," and continues: "God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?", implying that faith in God had died and people behave in their daily lives as if He does not exist. If God is dead, then according to Nietzsche's logic, humanistic values have no absolute foundation, and adhering to them is meaningless.

The Nazis asserted that the salvation and rebirth of Germany were possible only through the principles of "racial biology," "eugenics," and antisemitism applied to state policy. They declared their goal to be the construction of a "racially pure," homogeneous society in which "natural" differences between people are recognized. Full civil rights could be enjoyed only by "persons of German or related blood." The lawyers who drafted these laws believed that "against the doctrines of universal equality, National Socialism opposes the difficult but necessary recognition of the fundamental differences between peoples..."

The peoples and governments of Western nations barely reacted to the intensifying discrimination and persecution of Jews by the Nazis. As has become widely known in recent years, by 1941, leaders of the Allied coalition were aware of the facts surrounding the Nazi extermination of Jews in occupied territories. Yet, practically no measures were taken; furthermore, such information was kept strictly confidential. It is possible that certain traits of the "German character"—widespread antipathy toward Jews, a readiness to obey authority, a sense of superiority, and bureaucratic fanaticism—played a significant role.

Psychologists formulated a thesis on the Holocaust as a psychological method, whereby the fate of groups destined for destruction serves as an example of human insignificance to others (both inside and outside the camps). The consciousness of such insignificance was instilled and reinforced through deportations to concentration camps and mass "liquidations."

Another socio-psychological perspective views the genocide of the Jews as a revived ritual of mass human sacrifice from the Bronze Age; through this, the "German national community" relieved psychological tension, as well as economic and political anxieties. It was precisely for this purpose that the Nazis attempted to de-Christianize Germany, rejecting biblical ethics and returning to pagan myths and symbols.

Hitler fought against a specific spirit, a specific mode of thought and feeling. The target of his hatred was a particular ethic. It was the Jewish-derived core of biblical ethics—the commandments of love for one's neighbor, justice, equality, and, above all, the unconditional protection of the sanctity of human life—that he sought to eradicate from the German consciousness, asserting that "conscience is a Jewish invention."

Liberation from the "Jewish spirit," according to the Führer, would make the Germans the undisputed favorites in the eternal war of all against all. The ultimate goal was to secure world domination for Germany, to provide "living space" by clearing it of the surplus "subhumans" residing there. To achieve this task, it was necessary to cultivate a capacity for ruthless cruelty within the "master raceist" population, freeing them from pangs of conscience during the extermination of civilians.

In 1943, Hitler remarked to Goebbels: "The Jew is an entirely intellectual being." By destroying the Jews—the "People of the Book," who value intellectual achievements above all else and have produced a disproportionately large number of them—Hitler may have sought to return humanity to a more primitive, pre-historical stage of development, to halt or reverse the "intellectualization of the world," the increasingly powerful expansion of ratio and its accompanying complexities.

The most extensive category of "Holocaust theories" is sociological. Use of the First World War marked a turning point in European history, the significance of which cannot be assessed solely by examining the political or military aspects of Germany's defeat. The war became the central link in the breakdown of the most stringent prohibitions that had been cultivated in European culture for centuries.

The burden of bitterness and disappointment brought home by demobilized soldiers, the difficulties of finding a place in post-war reality outside the familiar framework of the military, and unemployment aroused deep discontent among the German people. All of this led to the emergence of a new value system. With the decline of traditional authorities, a need arose for new ones that would restore to people a sense of order, security, and a defined place in society.

Some researchers attribute the causes of the Holocaust to the capitalists' desire to expropriate Jewish property and exploit the forced labor of ghetto and camp inmates, to distract the German public from domestic state crises, and to eliminate rural overpopulation by shifting surplus labor to cities—thereby purging the modern world of a calcified relic of a vanished Middle Eastern civilization embedded within the structure of modern Western Christian civilization.

Other researchers suggest that Hitler sought to destroy the Jews as carriers of the ideas of modernization based on rationalism, democracy, and internationalism.

A number of political theories frame the genocide of the Jews as a struggle against Bolshevism, which Hitler viewed as the greatest threat to Germany and the world, initiated and led by Jews. Hitler's statement in a conversation with M. Planck is well known: "All Jews are Communists." German propaganda used the alleged exceptional brutality of "Jewish Bolsheviks" to instill fear, creating the image of the "Jewish commissar"—a symbol of the horrors of revolution, war, and Stalinist repression.

In recent decades, anti-Israel propaganda has generated theories of the Holocaust as a "Zionist-fascist conspiracy." For example, the long-standing PLO representative in Germany, A. Frangi, claimed that Hitler and the Zionists reached a tacit agreement to destroy the majority of European Jews in order to compel the survivors to emigrate to Palestine.

The uniqueness of the Holocaust cannot be evaluated solely by the number of victims, their murderers, and accomplices. According to estimates by American sociologist R. Rummel, since 1900, governments worldwide have murdered (apart from wars and military conflicts) 119 million people. The uniqueness of the Tragedy of the Jewish people lies in the fact that the objective was to destroy an ethnic group entirely, on a global scale, in a meticulously planned, theoretically justified, and systematically covert manner. To achieve this objective, comprehensive theories, propaganda techniques, and methods of human destruction were developed. Yet, in remembering the victims, modern Israel also honors the "Righteous Among the Nations"—non-Jews who risked or sacrificed their lives to save Jews. Thus, the universal character of the Holocaust possesses many facets.

Dr. Haim Ben Yakov, Director General of the EAJC