The Cross & the Swastika
Roberto Rivera on Christianity & Anti-Semitism
“What Would Jesus Have Done?” was the question posed by a cover story in The New Republic in January 2001. In it, Daniel Goldhagen continued the argument he first made in his book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: that for at least two centuries prior to Hitler, the German people were in the thrall of what he calls “exterminationist anti-Semitism.” Thus, Hitler’s contribution to the Holocaust did not consist so much in creating a murderous ideology as in providing the means for the German people to do what they had always wanted to do.
And at the heart of this “exterminationist anti-Semitism” was Christianity. As Goldhagen writes, “[It is important] for us to focus on the Christian churches when trying to understand the nature of anti-Semitism in Germany during the Nazi period.”
To put it mildly, Goldhagen’s thesis is controversial, even among Holocaust scholars. Many of them point out that Goldhagen has not uncovered any new facts, just given old ones a contentious new spin. The best riposte to Goldhagen came from Clive James in The New Yorker, who said that Goldhagen, in effect, lets Hitler “off the hook” by treating the Holocaust as the product of historical forces and not the evil of one man and the demonic ideology he spawned. As James famously put it, it is impossible for Goldhagen to fathom that “in the form of Hitler, Satan visited the Earth, recruited an army of sinners, and fought and won a battle against God.”
Another Book
Five years later, Goldhagen has, to paraphrase Father Richard Neuhaus, committed another book. This one is called A Moral Reckoning: The Catholic Church During the Holocaust and Today. Goldhagen’s 27,000-word New Republic article previewed the argument of the book. If anything, he has created an even bigger controversy this time around. Using books such as Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews by James Carroll and Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII by John Cornwell as a springboard, Goldhagen goes beyond indicting the pope and the Church for failing to act in a way that was commensurate with the evil of the Holocaust.
He does not even stop at blaming the Church for contributing to the anti-Semitism that was a prerequisite to the slaughter of six million Jews. No, according to Goldhagen, the Church “prepared the social soil eventually tilled by others for Nazism to flourish.” He writes that the Church was “greatly sympathetic to the Germans’ eliminationist impulses. . . .” Readers are told that “there is no difference in kind between the Church’s ‘anti-Judaism’ and its off-shoot European ‘anti-Semitism.’”
And what about those statements that indicated sympathy for European Jews? Charades! When a Catholic newspaper urged its readers to “show Christian charity to the Jews,” it was being insincere. And the 1939 papal encyclical that condemned Nazism and doctrines of racial purity was actually a form of what Goldhagen calls “soft Nazism.” In the end, as Andrew Sullivan concluded, Goldhagen does not stop until one is left with the conclusion that “there was no relevant moral difference between Nazism and Catholicism in the 1930s and 1940s,” and that “the cross and the swastika are interchangeable.”
It is worth noting that this time, as last time, Goldhagen’s critics include Jewish writers and scholars. Sam Schulman, writing in the Jewish World Review, compares Goldhagen to a “badly educated prosecuting attorney” who ignores crucial evidence, such as the Nazis deriding Pius XII, back when he was Vatican Secretary of State, as a “Jew-loving cardinal” for his 55 protests against the treatment of Jews.
Rabbi David Dalin, a fellow at Princeton’s James Madison program, goes even further. Writing in The Weekly Standard, Dalin says that Goldhagen’s “polemic” against Catholicism “fails to meet even the minimum standards of scholarship” and calls Knopf’s decision to publish the book “an intellectual and publishing scandal.” (Goldhagen’s work, he suggests, “seems to be turning into a staple for leftists whose hatred of Catholicism derives from the Church’s opposition to abortion and the rest of the liberationist agenda.”)
Other writers have noted that even scholars critical of the pope’s public statements admit that his personal efforts saved scores of thousands of Jews (even Goldhagen admits that he helped save many Jews in Hungary). If, as the pope’s critics say, his efforts were “too little, too late,” Michael Novak asks, “was not what Schindler and Raul Wallenberg did also too little, too late, and yet altogether noble?”
Roberto Rivera is a Fellow at the Wilberforce Forum at Prison Fellowship. His work has appeared in Books & Culture, and he is also a regular contributor to the web magazine Boundless. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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