The publication of the second edition of The Holocaust and the Christian World couldn’t be more timely. Holocaust scholars were stunned last year by the results of the April 2018 survey of Americans and the Holocaust, according to which 31% of all Americans believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed during the Holocaust, while 41% of Americans cannot say what Auschwitz was. Additionally, 22% of millennials haven’t heard or are not sure if they have heard of the Holocaust.
The volume’s contributors are among the leading Holocaust scholars of their generation. Two impulses drive the text: the frank admission of the role played by Christianity in the Holocaust and the current project of completely ridding Christianity of all anti-Judaism. They paint the institutional anti-Judaism of Christian churches, the negative depiction of the Jewish people in Christian preaching and liturgy, and the process by which the Jew became ‘the other.’
Although the authors clearly state that Christianity cannot be seen as the cause of the Holocaust, they nonetheless convince readers that Christianity prepared the way and then allowed it to happen. As a result, the Shoah is accepted here as part of Christian history, indeed as ‘a Christian tragedy.’
Having clearly established the anti-Jewish bias of traditional Christianity, the text then moves to the contemporary task of ridding Christianity of its anti-Judaism. It explains what has been done since 1945 and what still needs to be done now in the 21st century. The book’s authors offer several strategies to strengthen interfaith dialogue and enable Jews and Christians to move forward together in hope.
The authors discuss the importance of Holocaust education, developing Christian liturgy on the Holocaust, and the faithful observance of Yom HaShoah. They examine problematic New Testament passages and their antisemitic potential, address issues of conversion, and emphasize the churches’ responsibility to condemn criminal acts by legitimate governments.
The text concludes with discussion of Pope Pius XII and the announcement that Vatican archives regarding his pontificate will be opened for consultation by researchers in March 2020. The Holocaust and the Christian World never seems excessively accusatory, recognizing that responsibility lies in the present, in the creation of a world where another Auschwitz would be unthinkable.