The provocatively polemical book “Teuflische Allmacht” by Tilman Tarach has two central arguments, one to my mind incontrovertible but familiar, the other more reductionist and dubious. The indisputable case is that antisemitism is a “Bestandteil der europäischen Kultur” (p. 16) because the historic centerpiece of that culture is the Christian religion, which breathed antisemitism virtually from the moment of conception, already in the synoptic Gospels, but most viciously in that of John. The more problematic contention is that antisemitism always had been essentially identical and continuous, rooted in perceived threats to religious identity, sustained by images of betrayal and deceit derived from Scripture, and imbued with the assumption that Jews possess an inherited and evil ‘nature’ impervious to improvement.
For the argument regarding the relentlessly antisemitic nature of Christianity, the principal evidence that Tarach repeatedly cites are two scriptural verses: Matthew 27:25, in which a Jewish mob takes responsibility for Christ’s death (“Da rief das ganze Volk: Sein Blut komme über uns und über unsere Kinder”) and John 8:44, in which Jesus says to the Jewish Pharisees in the Temple “Ihr habt den Teufel zum Vater.” These are the points of origin for Christianity’s recurrent demonising of Jews as Christ-killers in league with Satan. The passages indicate that by the end of the first century of the common era, Christianity had smoothed the way for its expansion under the Roman empire by exonerating that regime for the murder of Christ and convicting the Jews of it, thus spreading “die erste große antisemitische Verschwörungslegende” (p. 48). Once the gambit succeeded sufficiently to make the new faith Rome’s and ultimately Europe’s official religion, a host of rituals, images, fantasies, and social practices developed to marginalise and dehumanise Jews. These burned their guilt “ins kollektive Unbewusste” (p. 24) and provided Adolf Hitler and Julius Streicher with propaganda sources of which they and their acolytes and allies later made ample destructive use. The supposedly more modern or pseudo-scientific trappings of 19th and 20th century antisemitism (e.g., depicting Jews as germs or bacilli or conspiring for world power) are nothing more than adaptations of ancient fears of contamination or attack (e.g., well-poisoning or ritual murder).
Tarach’s chief concern appears to be countering the apologetics of the Catholic Church, which long drew a distinction between its opposition to Judaism and antisemites’ animosity to Jews, contending that the Church’s openness to conversion and its condemnation of murder fundamentally differentiated its religious stance from racism, both in theory and practice. Tarach has no patience with such hairsplitting, and I sympathise. He thinks hatred of beliefs and believers always has been interwoven, and in making that case he echoes many of the convincing findings of such scholars as Robert Wistrich, David Nirenberg, and David Kertzer. But Tarach also flattens out much inconsistency in the record. He largely ignores St. Augustine and the ways that his doctrine of witness led Church figures to defend Jews from persecution in some parts of the medieval world. His emphasis on Spanish and Jesuit rules concerning “purity of blood” implies that Church teaching about the redemptive effects of conversion “gehört also ins Reich der Legenden” (p. 105), a view that is blind to the lives of the canonised Edith Stein and of Aron Lustiger, who became Cardinal Archbishop of Paris. He quotes Pius XII’s lamentable address to the College of Cardinals in December 1942 declaring that “Jerusalem” had resisted God’s truth with stubbornness and slander “die es auf dem Weg der Schuld bis hin zum Gottesmord geführt haben” (p. 187), but he makes no mention of Pius XI’s remarks four years earlier that the swastika is “the enemy of the cross of Christ” and that “spiritually, we are all Semites.”
The teachings of Christianity bear a good deal of responsibility for the stigmatization of Jews in Western society, but they do not fully account for it or its persistence. Especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, backlashes against the Industrial and Bolshevik revolutions created arguments for the vilification of Jews—and audiences for these arguments—that overlapped with previous ones but were not identical to them. Instead of seeing these developments as purely lineal descendants of their predecessors, as this book does, historians tend to see them as layers of hostility with their own sources and supports. Antisemitism is hard to combat not only because it is a sort of original sin of Western culture, but also because it is an effective shape shifter.
In the latter half of the book, Tarach takes up two issues that bear mentioning: the putative irrationality of the Holocaust, and the relationship between Christianity and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. On the first, Tarach makes the accurate point that killing the Jews was an essential and logical part of the Nazi war effort because the regime viewed their eradication as a precondition for victory. But then he repeats the erroneous cliché that “Noch kurz vor Kriegsende hatten die Züge nach Auschwitz Priorität gegenüber militärischen oder ökonomischen Belangen” (p. 139). That was not true then or even earlier for that matter. The Holocaust was ideologically central to the ‘Third Reich’, but it was practically peripheral, as it required few resources of men or material and paid for itself. Deportation trains did not divert equipment from other pressing needs, and they had the lowest priority of all railroad traffic. On the second issue, Tarach connects contemporary Church attitudes with the presence of Christians in the Palestine Liberation Organisation and suggests that anti-Zionism is as characteristic of Christianity today as antisemitism was in former times. Here, too, one senses oversimplification. In short, the argumentative passion that animates this book commands attention and respect, but not necessarily agreement.