In the very early stages of the Christian faith, many Jews regarded
Christians as members of a Jewish sect. The first Christians, after all,
still observed the Jewish law. They had merely added a few nonessential practices, such as baptism, to their religious life. But their view was changed abruptly when Christ was elevated to Godhood. The Jews
have only one God. This God is indivisible. He is a jealous God and
admits of no other gods. He is not Christ, and Christ is not He. Christianity and Judaism have since been irreconcilable. An acceptance of Christianity has since signified an abandonment of Judaism.
In antiquity and in the Middle Ages, Jews did not abandon Judaism
lightly. With patience and persistence the Church attempted to convert
obstinate Jewry, and for twelve hundred years the theological argument was fought without interruption. The Jews were not convinced.
Gradually the Church began to back its words with force. The Papacy
did not permit pressure to be put on individual Jews; Rome prohibited
forceful conversions.2 3 4 However, the clergy did use pressure on the
whole. Step by step, but with ever widening effect, the Church adopted
“defensive” measures against its passive victims. Christians were “protected” from the “harmful” consequences of intercourse with Jews by rigid laws against intermarriage, by prohibitions of discussions about
religious issues, by laws against domicile in common abodes. The
Church “protected” its Christians from the “harmful” Jewish teachings
by burning the Talmud and by barring Jews from public office.’
These
measures
were
precedent-making
destructive
activities.
How little success the Church had in accomplishing its aim is revealed
by the treatment of the few Jews who succumbed to the Christian
religion. The clergy was not sure of its success—hence the widespread
practice, in the Middle Ages, of identifying proselytes as former Jews;2
hence the inquisition of new Christians suspected of heresy;’ hence the
issuance
in
Spain
of
certificates
of
"purity”
(limpieza).
signifying
purely Christian ancestry, and the specification of "half-new Chris-
2. This prohibition had one weakness: once converted, even though forcibly, a tew
was forbidden to return to his faith. Guido Kisch, The Jews in Medieval Germany
(Chicago, 1949), pp. 201-2.
3. Actually, non-Jews who wished to become Jews faced formidable obstacles. See
Louis Finkelstein, “The Jewish Religion: Its Beliefs and Practices," in Louis Finkelstein,
ed.. The Jews: Their History, Culture, and Religion (New York. 1949). vol. 2, p. 1376.
4. Kisch, Jews in Medieval Germany, p. 315.
6
PRECEDENTS
tians,” “quarter-new Christians," “one-eighth-new Christians,” and so
on.‘
The failure of conversion had far-reaching consequences. The unsuccessful Church began to look on the Jews as a special group of people, different from Christians, deaf to Christianity, and dangerous
to the Christian faith. In 1542 Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, wrote the following lines:
And if there were a spark of common sense and understanding in them,
they would truly have to think like this: O my Cod, it does not stand and
go well with us; our misery is too great, too long, too hard; Cod has
forgotten us, etc. I am no Jew, but 1 do not like to think in earnest about
such brutal wrath of God against this people, for I am terrified at the
thought that cuts through my body and soul: What is going to happen with
the eternal wrath in hell against all false Christians and unbelievers?6 7 8
In short, if he were a Jew, he would have accepted Christianity long
ago.
A people cannot suffer for fifteen hundred years and still think of
itself as the chosen people. But this people was blind. It had been
stricken by the wrath of God. He had struck them “with frenzy, blindness, and raging heart, with the eternal fire, of which the Prophets say: The wrath of God will hurl itself outward like a fire that no one can
smother.’’*
The Lutheran manuscript was published at a time of increasing
hatred for the Jew. Too much had been invested in twelve hundred
years of conversion policy. Too little had been gained. From the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, the Jews of England, France, Germany, Spain, Bohemia, and Italy were presented with ultimatums that gave
them no choice but one: conversion or expulsion.
6. Cecil Roth, “Marranos and Racial Anti-Semitism—A Study in Parallels,” Jewish
Social Studies 2 (1940): 239-48. New Christian doctors were accused of killing patients, a
Toledo tribunal handed down a decision in 1449 to the effect that new Christians were
ineligible for public office, and In 1604 new Christians were barred from the University of
Coimbra (ibid.). Anyone who was a descendant of Jews or Moors was also ineligible to
serve in the “Militia of Christ,” Torquemada's army, which tortured and burned ''heretics.” Franz Helbing, Die Tortur—Gesckichte der Folter im Kriminaiverfahren alter Vdlker und Zeiten (Berlin, 1902), p. 118.
7. Martin Luther, Von den Jueden und Jren Luegen (Wittenberg, 1543), p. Aiii.
Page numbers in the original edition of Luther's book are placed on the bottom of every
second or fourth page, as follows: A, Aii. Aiii, B, Bii, BUI, to Z, Zii, Ziii, starting over
with a, aii, aiii.
8. Luther, Von den Jueden. p. diii. The reference to frenzy is an inversion. Frenzy
Is one of the punishments for deserting the one and only God.
PRECEDENTS
Expulsion is the second anti-Jewish policy in history. In its origin, this
policy presented itself only as an alternative—moreover, as an alternative
that was left to the Jews. But long after the separation of church and state,
long after the state had ceased to carry out church policy, expulsion and
exclusion remained the goal of anti-Jewish activity.
The anti-Semites of the nineteenth century, who divorced themselves from religious aims, espoused the emigration of the Jews. The anti-Semites hated the Jews with a feeling of righteousness and reason,
as
though
they
had
acquired
the
antagonism
of
the
church
like
speculators
buying
the
rights
of
a bankrupt
corporation. With
this
hatred, the post-ecclesiastic enemies of Jewry also took the idea that
the Jews could not be changed, that they could not be converted, that
they could not be assimilated, that they were a finished product, inflexible in their ways, set in their notions, fixed in their beliefs.
The expulsion and exclusion policy was adopted by the Nazis and
remained the goal of all anti-Jewish activity until 1941. That year marks
a turning point in anti-Jewish history. In 1941 the Nazis found themselves in the midst of a total war. Several million Jews were incarcerated in ghettos. Emigration was impossible. A last-minute project to ship the Jews to the African island of Madagascar had fallen through.
The “Jewish prob
lem” had to be “solved” in some other way. At this
crucial time, the idea of a “territorial solution” emerged in Nazi minds.
The “territorial solution,” or “the final solution of the Jewish question
in Europe,” as it became known, envisaged the death of European
Jewry. The European Jews were to be killed. This was the third anti-
Jewish policy in history.
To summarize: Since the fourth century after Christ there have
been
three
anti-Jewish
policies:
conversion,
expulsion,
and
annihilation. The second appeared as an alternative to the first, and the third
emerged as an alternative to the second.
The destruction of the European Jews between 1933 and 1945 appears
to us now as an unprecedented event in history. Indeed, in its dimensions and total configuration, nothing like it had ever happened before.
As a result of an organized undertaking, five million people were killed
in the short space of a few years. The operation was over before
anyone could grasp its enormity, let alone its implications for the future.
Yet, if we analyze this singularly massive upheaval, we discover
that most of what happened in those twelve years had already happened before. The Nazi destruction process did not come out of a void;
PRECEDENTS
it was the culmination of a cyclical trend.’ We have observed the trend
in the three successive goals of anti-Jewish administrators. The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed:
You have no right to live among us. The German Nazis at last decreed:
You have no right to live.
These progressively more drastic goals brought in their wake a
slow and steady growth of anti-Jewish action and anti-Jewish thinking.
The process began with the attempt to drive the Jews into Christianity.
The development was continued in order to force the victims into exile.
It was finished when the Jews were driven to their deaths. The German
Nazis, then, did not discard the past; they built upon it. They did not
begin a development; they completed it. In the deep recesses of anti-
Jewish history we shall find many of the administrative and psychological tools with which the Nazis implemented their destruction process.
In the hollows of the past we shall also discover the roots of the
characteristic Jewish response to an outside attack.
The significance of the historical precedents will most easily be
understood in the administrative sphere. The destruction of the Jews
was an administrative process, and the annihilation of Jewry required
the
implementation
of
systematic
administrative
measures
in
successive steps. There are not many ways in which a modem society can, in
short order, kill a large number of people living in its midst. This is an
efficiency problem of the greatest dimensions, one which poses uncounted difficulties and innumerable obstacles. Yet, in reviewing the documentary record of the destruction of the Jews, one is almost immediately
impressed
with
the
fact
that
the
German
administration
knew what it was doing. With an unfailing sense of direction and with
an
uncanny
pathfinding
ability,
the
German
bureaucracy
found
the
shortest road to the final goal.
We know, of course, that the very nature of a task determines the
form of its fulfillment. Where there is the will, there is also the way, and if
the will is only strong enough, the way will be found. But what if there is
no time to experiment? What if the task must be solved quickly and
efficiently? A rat in a maze that has only one path to the goal learns to
choose that path after many trials. Bureaucrats, too, are sometimes
caught in a maze, but they cannot afford a trial run. There may be no time 9
9.
A regular trend is unbroken (for instance, an increase of population); a cyclical
trend is observed in some of the recurring phenomena. We may speak, for example, of a
set of wars that become progressively more destructive, depressions that decline in
severity, etc.
PRECEDENTS
for hesitations and stoppages. This is why past performance is so important; this is why past experience is so essential. Necessity is said to be the mother of invention, but if precedents have already been formed, if a
guide has already been constructed, invention is no longer a necessity.
The German bureaucracy could draw upon such precedents and follow
such a guide, for the German bureaucrats could dip into a vast reservoir
of administrative experience, a reservoir that church and state had filled
in fifteen hundred years of destructive activity.
In the course of its attempt to convert the Jews, the Catholic
Church had taken many measures against the Jewish population. These
measures
were designed to
“protect”
the Christian community from
Jewish teachings and, not incidentally, to weaken the Jews in their
“obstinacy.” It is characteristic that as soon as Christianity became the
state religion of Rome, in the fourth century a.d., Jewish equality of
citizenship was ended. “The Church and the Christian state, concilium
decisions and imperial laws, henceforth worked hand in hand to persecute the Jews.”1“ Table 1-1 compares the basic anti-Jewish measures of the Catholic Church and the modern counterparts enacted by the
Nazi regime."
No summation of the canonical law can be as revealing as a description of the Rome ghetto, maintained by the Papal State until the occupation of the city by the Royal Italian Army in 1870. A German
journalist who visited the ghetto in its closing days published such a
description in the Neue Freie Presse.10 11 12 The ghetto consisted of a few
damp, dark, and dirty streets, into which 4,700 human creatures had
been packed tightly (eingepfercht).
To rent any house or business establishment outside of the ghetto
boundaries, the Jews needed the permission of the Cardinal Vicar.
Acquisition of real estate outside the ghetto was prohibited. Trade in
industrial
products
or
books
was
prohibited.
Higher
schooling
was
prohibited. The professions of lawyer, druggist, notary, painter, and
architect were prohibited. A Jew could be a doctor, provided that he
confined his practice to Jewish patients. No Jew could hold office.
following: (1) a yearly stipend for the upkeep of the Catholic officials
who supervised the Ghetto Finance Administration and the Jewish
10. Stobbe, Die Juden in Deutschland, p. 2.
11. The list of Church measures is taken in its entirety from J. E. Scherer, Die
Rechtsverhältnisse der Juden in den deutsch-österreichischen
Ländern (Leipzig, 1901),
pp. 39-49. Only the first date of each measure is listed in Table 1-1.
12. Carl Eduard Bauemschmid in Neue Freie Presse. May 17, 1870. Reprinted in
Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums (Leipzig), July 19, 1870, pp. 580-82.
10
T A B L E 1 - 1
CANONICAL AND NAZI ANTI-JEWISH MEASURES
Canonical Law
Nazi Measure
Prohibition of intermarriage and of
Law for the Protection of German
sexual intercourse between Chris
Blood and Honor, September 15,
tians and Jews, Synod of Elvira,
1935 (RGB I I, 1146.)
306
Jews and Christians not permitted to
Jews
barred
from
dining
cars
eat together. Synod of Elvira, 306
(Transport
Minister
to
Interior
Minister, December 30,
1939,
Document NG-3995.)
Jews not allowed to hold public
Law for the Re-establishment of the
office, Synod of Clermont, 535
Professional Civil Service, April 7,
1933 (RGB1 I, 175.)
Jews not allowed to employ Christian
Law for the Protection of German
servants
or
possess
Christian
Blood and Honor, September 15,
slaves, 3d Synod of Orléans, 538
1935 (RGB11, 1146.)
Jews not permitted to show them
Decree authorizing local authorities
selves in the streets during Passion
to bar Jews from the streets on cer
Week, 3d Synod of Orléans, 538
tain days (i.e., Na2i holidays), December 3, 1938 (RGBI I, 1676.)
Burning of the Talmud and other
Book burnings in Nazi Germany
books, 12th Synod of Toledo, 681
Christians not permitted to patronize
Decree of July 25, 1938 (RGBI I,
Jewish doctors, Trulanic Synod,
969.)
692
Christians not permitted to live in
Directive by Goring providing for
Jewish homes, Synod of Narbonne,
concentration of Jews in houses,
1050
December 28, 1938 (Bormann to
Rosenberg, January 17, 1939, PS-
69.)
Jews obliged to pay taxes for support
The “Sozialausgleichsabgabe” which
of the Church to the same extent as
provided that Jews pay a special in
Christians, Synod of Oerona, 1078