Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  To Maccoby, the repetition of the Judas story—centuries and centuries of Christian children being indoctrinated with that primal tale of mercenary Jewish blood-money betrayal—had, by the time of the Holocaust, cumulatively built up a profound and deeply embedded thirst for Jewish blood, a vengeful thirst once satisfied by periodic pogroms but easily manipulated by Hitler into complicity with extermination.

  I asked Maccoby if there was, in the story of the “field of blood,” of the blood of the Jew soaking the landscape, an anticipation of or sanction for the fields of blood that Hitler’s camps became.

  “It is the story, yes, people are much more affected by a story than they are by theology or creeds. And children who are taught a story in which from the earliest years the Jew is the hateful figure—Judas Iscariot and the Jews generally are hateful figures—will hate Jews from then onwards, without even knowing why they hate the Jews. And if they lose their Christian belief, that hate will still remain with them. They’ll find some other reason for hating Jews. Like Hitler himself, for example.”

  “You feel the Judas story was directly responsible for Hitler’s anti-Semitism?” I asked Maccoby.

  He emphasizes that in two of the Gospel accounts of Judas’s betrayal, he is “entered by Satan” (Luke) or “taken possession by the Devil” (John) before he betrays Jesus, forever inscribing an image of the Jews as the people of the Devil on the hearts of children who hear the story in a state of primal receptivity.

  “Hitler was brought up to hate the Jews, particularly to hate the Jews as the people of the Devil,” he insists. “He lost his Christian faith, but he retained the hatred of the Jews as the people of the Devil.” Maccoby is here deliberately undercutting the argument of those who attempt to exempt or exculpate Christianity as a source of Hitler’s Jew-hatred by citing various anti-Christian remarks Hitler made over the years.

  An instance of this can be found in a newspaper column by Pat Buchanan. In attempting to repudiate Jesse Jackson’s inflammatory remark that a “Christian coalition” in Nazi Germany provided “a suitable scientific theologic rationale” for Hitler, Buchanan declared: “Hitler loathed Christianity. In Louis Snyder’s Hitler’s Third Reich: A Documentary History, Hitler is quoted as saying ‘Antiquity was better than modern times because it didn’t know Christianity and syphilis.’”

  Of course, Hitler was all over the map with his pontifications on Christianity, often attacking it as Judaism under another name, but just as often uttering pieties about the importance of the church to national morality.

  Maccoby’s point is that however many anti-Christian quotes from Hitler you find, they came from the adult Hitler; the true relevance of the anti-Jewish animus of Christianity to Hitler’s psyche was its effect on Hitler’s impressionable imagination as a child. That the emotional indoctrination of the Judas story was a powerful, poisonous legacy that ran deeper than any later disagreements Hitler might have over the political and social role of the Christian church in Germany. In the ongoing controversy over the origin of Hitler’s anti-Semitism and the cause of its virulence, then, Maccoby seems to be envisioning a far earlier starting point than most.

  “Are you saying it began at the Benedictine monastery, then?” I asked him, referring to Hitler’s early schooling in the Benedictine friars’ school at Lambach.

  “Yeah, well, you may say lots of people who [received similar education] didn’t turn into Hitlers. But it was certainly that, combined, of course, with a particularly obsessive personality, which made this the center of his thinking. I’m quite sure that his personal upbringing had a great deal to do with it—if he hadn’t had a Christian upbringing he would have been probably a sick personality anyhow, but his sickness would’ve fastened onto some other kind of hatred. But having had that Christian upbringing, his sick personality centered on the traditional enemy. And particularly in the circumstances of the defeat of Germany, there is the need for a scapegoat—the tendency of people to turn to the traditional scapegoat in times of great distress.”

  I asked Maccoby what his reaction was to Hitler’s own account in Mein Kampf of a later transformative moment in his perception of Jews: that moment in the Vienna street some ten years later than Lambach when he “first” glimpsed a Jew in alien-seeming black caftan and black earlocks.

  “Well, he’s kidding himself, I think,” Maccoby says. Or kidding us: “Hitler has an interest in portraying anti-Semitism as something he developed rather than grew up with. I think he saw this figure, but why was he filled with such hatred for this figure? I mean, if it had been Amish, for example, and also dressed in rather unfamiliar black garb, he wouldn’t have felt a sense of hatred at all.”

  I mentioned to Maccoby a doctoral thesis I’d seen (by Helmut Schmeller) that argued that, growing up in Linz, Hitler was most likely reading the extremely anti-Semitic newspaper the Linzer Fliegende Blätter, which would suggest an anti-Semitic awareness of oft-caricatured black-caftaned Jews long before the alleged revelatory encounter with that apocryphal wandering Jew in the streets of Vienna.

  “So he’s lying about that. Or at the very least this was something that probably went back so early in his life he can’t remember when it started.”

  “And what about all the millions of Christians indoctrinated in the same way who didn’t become Hitler?” I asked.

  “He was very unique in a way—in the sense that he embodied a certain aspect of Christian civilization which, in other people, is diffused and has many other things to counterbalance it. But he struck a chord with that aspect in others. He was himself a human being who contained that chord. He embodied it single-mindedly. He was the focal point of a kind of evil which grew to a head, like a boil, in him.” It was that common chord that united the German people with Hitler in their partnership in genocide, he believes.

  “The criticism of your point of view,” I said to Maccoby, “has been that Hitler’s was a racial, not a Christian anti-Semitism. Am I right in thinking that what you’re saying is that racial anti-Semitism as the Nazis and Hitler formulated it was something that had been around for maybe a century? But there were eighteen centuries of Christian—”

  “Right, absolutely. The point is, you see, that you build up a fund of hatred against a certain group of people. The fact that that fund is backed by certain dogmas doesn’t mean that when those dogmas left, the hatreds left. The hatred’s still there. And it has to be backed up by newer theories. I mean, if the Jews are no longer hated because they are the people of Satan who killed Jesus, then some other theory works—in the case of the Nazis it was a racial theory; with Karl Marx, the Jews played the role of the archetypal capitalist. This is what I call post-Christian anti-Semitism”—a continuation of Christian anti-Semitism in a different guise, as opposed to Daniel Goldhagen’s concept of “eliminationist anti-Semitism,” for instance, which Goldhagen defines against Christian anti-Semitism.

  For Maccoby, it all comes back to the Gospels, to the emotional power of the blood curse. “The Gospels really worked up this picture of the Jews as murderous deicides.”

  In fact, I came to think that in Maccoby’s insistent emphasis on the emotional power of the blood curse and the blood rhetoric of the Gospels, he was doing something very powerful and emotional. He was reversing the poles of the notorious blood libel, so long and so murderously leveled at Jews, to say: We are not guilty of the bloodthirsty ritual murder of Christian children we’ve been accused of. But you Christians are guilty of, accomplices to, paved the way for, the ritual murder of the Jews. Our blood is on your hands.

  In his book on the Judas question, The Sacred Executioner: Human Sacrifice and the Legacy of Guilt, Maccoby offered an anthropological analysis of the way the Crucifixion is transformed into the ritual murder of the Jews. “Jews are killed because of Christian guilt,” he wrote. “Guilt for their [the Christians’] need for a human sacrifice to make their salvation possible” (the sacrifice of Jesus to atone for their sins).

  “The fact that
the powers of evil [the Jews] bring about the [necessary, redemptive] death of the sacrifice doesn’t excuse [the Jews] in any way,” he told me. “They’re still hated. In fact, the more you hate them, the more you are saved yourself, because you therefore can wash your hands like Pilate and you’re no longer implicated in the death [of Jesus], which was done for your sake [for your sins]. You benefit by the death of Jesus because you’re saved, but you have no part in the death. Guilt for it is displaced to the Jews who can then be killed with impunity.”

  Jews are, in Maccoby’s interpretation, dragged into the Gospel story to perform a function (killing the necessary sacrifice) and then are themselves slaughtered to absolve the guilt of those who really benefited from the killing of Christ, the Christians. The blood is really on Christian hands, Maccoby believes—they’re the ones guilty of the ritual murder.

  Frankly, I’m not sure Maccoby’s psychoanthropological analysis is necessary or adds anything to his Judas-based case against Christianity. But he’s attached to it, as he’s attached to that case. Maccoby isn’t unaware of how transgressive, indeed offensive, this analysis will sound to devout Christians. He’s thought about the consequences of what comes close to indicting Christianity for Hitler’s murder of the Jews, but he believes it has to be said, Christians have to be confronted with what he sees as the hatred at the heart of the Gospels. He also knows that his insistence on this is disturbing, even offensive, to many Jews.

  He talks about a 1989 clash at a symposium at New York’s City University Graduate Center with the American Jewish ecumenicist Rabbi Marc Tannenbaum. “He was very much against my whole line of approach. He was involved in Jewish-Christian relations in a very big way. And he was involved particularly with talks with the pope to try to get the Vatican to recognize Israel. And he felt that this line that I was adopting was counterproductive. But I reject that line of thought,” he continued. “It’s what I call pusillanimous. Here we [Jews] are, for the first time for many centuries, we’re able to speak out. Before we couldn’t speak out because we’re going to get killed if we speak out. Now supposedly we mustn’t speak out because it’s bad taste to speak out. One way or another, there’s some gag on us. I said if we don’t speak out now, when are we going to speak out? We can’t speak out in time of persecution because we’ll be persecuted. But in times when we’re not being persecuted, we mustn’t speak out because that would show lack of gratitude to people for not persecuting us? So when do we speak out? Never?”

  “On the other hand,” I suggest, “your view is fairly bleak in the sense that it doesn’t hold out any ecumenical hope of some reconciliation between Jews and Christianity, because you’re saying at the very heart of Christianity is the sanctioned hatred and murder of Jews.”

  “Well, as I always say to people who say ‘You’re calling for the end of Christianity in the sense that it depends on the ritual murder of Jews,’ I say, ‘No, I don’t think so, I’m supporting a certain strand in Christianity against official Christianity. I’m saying that throughout the centuries there have been Christians who have actually protested against Christianity. People like Pelagius who protested against Augustine. People who believed in the humanity of Jesus, not in the divinity of Jesus. Who didn’t want to think of the death of Jesus as being a sacrifice, a theological sacrifice, but simply the martyrdom of a great man in the cause of freedom. He was fighting against Rome, not against the Jews. People who think of Jesus as a model teacher. And Jesus would be in the same position then, in Christianity, that Moses is in Judaism, as Mohammed is in Islam, a human teacher. There’s nothing antireligious in this.”

  “It’s not a position, then, that Christianity, if it were self-aware, has to abolish itself? It’s more that there is a kind of Christianity that does not have implicit in it hatred of the Jews?”

  “Right. In other words, that instead of concentrating on Jesus’ death they would concentrate on Jesus’ life.”

  It is, however, a Christianity that would be recognized as such by only a small percentage of those calling themselves Christians, mainly Unitarians and the like.

  In response, Maccoby points out that there are some post-Holocaust Christian theologians such as Rosemary Ruether who tend to agree with him—who feel so troubled by the implication of Christian anti-Semitism in paving the way for the Holocaust that they have begun to call for mainstream Christianity to reevaluate or revise its core beliefs to exorcise anti-Jewish animus.

  I wondered if he was also referring to the strand of post-Holocaust German Christian theologians who have attempted to incorporate the Holocaust into the Gospel story of the Crucifixion by positing that the Jews of Europe were in some way on the cross, that they were the victims of the Crucifixion, the true body of Christ in some mystical, atemporal way.

  He rejects it as pernicious. “I object very strongly to that kind of Christianization of the Holocaust by which the Jews become a kind of Christ figure suffering for the Christians’ sins.” He sees a tricky theological rationalization going on here which still reifies or recuperates the notion of a sacrificial crucifixion by a sacred executioner—here Hitler assumes the role of Jewish crucifier, driving the nails into the body of the Jewish people. It ends up, in effect, renewing the crucifixion story with fresh blood, so to speak, and “blaming the Jews in a more sophisticated way,” Maccoby says.

  Blaming the Jews in a more sophisticated way: This is exactly what Maccoby believes George Steiner is doing. Of all the attacks on Steiner following the publication of his Hitler novel, Maccoby’s (which appeared in Encounter) was the most thoroughgoing, cut closest to the bone, and was the one Steiner’s allies have gone to the greatest lengths to refute. In part, because Maccoby knows Steiner’s work all too well; knew the sources of Hitler’s speech in Steiner’s earlier work; could cite the way Hitler in Steiner’s novel “becomes a full blown Steinerian . . . expressing views taken word for word from Steiner’s other writings.” Maccoby’s verdict is also the most severe, going so far as to characterize Steiner’s novel as a “misleading piece of anti-Jewish propaganda of a regrettably contemporary kind which may prove of aid and comfort to anti-Semites for years to come.” He accuses Steiner of not merely giving Hitler as a person “a cosmic dignity” but serving to “dignify Hitler by elevating him into a metaphysical principle.”

  Part of Maccoby’s animus seems to stem from the fact he is reacting not only to the publication of the novel but to the 1981 stage production of the novel at London’s Mermaid Theatre, the production staged by Christopher Hampton, the one with a Hitler who “scared the hell” out of Steiner himself. But Maccoby’s attack was on more than the speech of Steiner’s Hitler character, it was on Steiner’s whole oeuvre, on Steiner’s character, for what he called a “colossal miscalculation” produced by intellectual “vanity.”

  I wondered, after an attack like that, if the two had ever met and confronted each other.

  “Well, I do come across him sometimes,” he said. “I don’t see a lot of George Steiner, but I do from time to time. We don’t really see eye to eye very much,” he says with seeming mildness before taking a rather sly swipe at him: “I’ve never come to criticize him in the way some people have and call him a charlatan and so on. I admire some of his work. But I do think when he gets into Jewish topics, he falls into a trap.”

  Falls into several traps, according to Maccoby. But before moving on to them, let us take note of the acidulous “I’ve never . . . call[ed] him a charlatan” remark, which has the effect of propagating the idea that the charlatan notion is widespread while distancing himself from such an uncharitable view in the guise of generosity toward his foe. Although I suspect it’s a view Maccoby really does share.

  The primal “trap” Steiner falls into, both personally and in his Hitler novel, Maccoby tells me, involves not so much his image of Hitler but his image of Jews. “He falls into a trap, which is to think of the archetype of the Jew being the Wandering Jew.”

  And, in fact, just a few day
s before, Steiner had spoken to me in a very heartfelt way of his identification with the Wandering Jew, with Jews who wandered, outcasts and dissidents such as Freud and Leon Trotsky—Trotsky in particular, the inventor of a system, cast out by the monster state he helped create (another kind of Frankenstein story), forced to become the haunted, controversial provocateur in exile.

  But there is a profound problem, Maccoby believes, in Steiner’s—in any Jew’s—identification with the Wandering Jew. “The Wandering Jew is not a Jewish image but a Christian image.” He’s referring to the origin of the Wandering Jew legend in Christian apocrypha as the story of an encounter between Jesus and a Jew on the streets of first-century Jerusalem. Jesus, dragging his cross, bleeding from his crown of thorns, about to be crucified, asks the Jew for something for his thirst. The Jew rejects him and as a punishment is condemned to wander the world, forever after an outcast, condemned to a living eternity of remorse. Later, in legends and novels, the Wandering Jew becomes a more ambiguous, even heroic figure. But at its core it is, Maccoby insists, “A Christian image of an ideal kind of Jew”—a Jew who acknowledges his guilt over rejecting Christ and implicitly acknowledges the justness of the persecutions inflicted on him by Christians.

  “It’s saying that Christians would like Jews to accept the role of the people who brought about the death of Jesus,” the role of murderer in effect. “And to do so in a spirit of repentance,” acceptance even, of the punishments inflicted upon them. Up to and including the Final Solution?

  Maccoby didn’t go on to make the connection between the Wandering Jew’s acceptance of his implication in his fate and Steiner’s apparent argument for the Jews’ implication in their genocide in his Hitler novel.

  I’d argue that Steiner’s image of the Wandering Jew owed much more to the modern intellectual’s preference to be seen as the alienated outsider and to existentialist philosophy’s elevation of guilt into something not to be ashamed of but rather something to aspire to—as a higher, more acute and authentic form of consciousness in a fallen world. But Maccoby might be onto something in the sense that Steiner may have fewer qualms about imputing guilt to the Jews for the Holocaust because this guilt gives the Jews a tragic ironic chosenness Steiner seems to relish as much as he rejects the conventional, triumphalist concept of the Chosen People.