The Grey Book | Page 5

is to save the German nation and the whole world from Jewish domination and from the moral depredation of the Jewish race. Christianity is not yet fully cognizant of the gravity of the problem, and it deceives itself when it thinks that baptism or conversion is a gratuitous deliverance from native corruption, for the Jew's aberrations are not religious but biological and hence incorrigible. The Jewish question, Marr concludes, is a racial question for the infidelity of the Jew is essentially biological, and hence Christianity is in no position to save the world from the perils of the Semitic-Jewish race. [17]
We here encounter a primary distinction between the doctrines of racial anti-semitism and those of the Christian Heilsgeschichte, a contradiction that awoke the Church to the dangers of Nazism when, in 1933, it opposed the "Arierparagraph". This racial law rejected the notion that the Jews could still hope for redemption, and for a renewed status of election, assured them in the New Testament (Rom. 9-11) on condition that they acknowledge their error and accept the redeeming truth of Christianity. Even in the early years of racial anti-semitism, in the seventies and eighties of the last century, we already find this inner contradiction between a racial theory that regards Jews as the ontological embodiment of an ineradicable evil and the views of the Heilgeschichte that believes this evil to be remedial if only the Jews could be persuaded that salvation comes from the Savior who was sent first of all to the Jews themselves, and who atoned for the sins of all mankind. It is this inner tension between the recalcitrance of the Jew and the incorrigibility of Judaism that refuses to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah, already conspicuous in the change that took place in Luther's attitude to the Jews between 1523 and 1543, which charactarizes the theological and political attitude of Adolf Stoecker, court preacher in the Bismarck era and one of the leading figures of modern anti-semitism. Until recently historians concentrated much on his importance in preparing the ground for racial and political anti-semitism. It is true that without his powerful influence during the last decades of the 19th century the rise of modern political anti-semitism would be incomprehensible. A more balanced approach has been taken lately, as may be seen in the instructive study by Walter Holsten on the part played by Stoecker in the rise of modern anti-semitism. The author shows that many phases of Stoecker's anti-semitism had their roots in the conservative tradition of Lutheranism and at the same time were opposed to the anti-Christian tendencies of racial anti-semitism. [18] The early phases of Stoecker's activity already reveal the ambivalent nature of his attitude to the Jews and to Judaism, an ambivalency that characterized the anti-Christian elements in antisemitic "Christian" ideology throughout the days of the Third Reich. In his speeches after the political defeat of his Christian Social Labor Party in the summer of 1878, Stoecker insisted on making a distinction between the anti-Jewish attitude that arises in conjunction with or flows from Christianity and the antisemitic attitude which at the same time also impugns Christian ethics. In his well-known antisemitic speech as early as 19.9.1879 Stoecker warns his listeners:
"We can already detect here and there a hatred directed against the Jews that is contrary to the Gospels". [19]
Even in his most violent speeches against the Jews Stoecker did not draw the extreme biological consequences of his racial theories and continued to maintain that conversion was the only authentic solution to the Jewish question that would complete the universal mission of Christianity and that only baptism could save the Jews from their ignominious belief in the validity of the halacha after the coming of Jesus. The salvation promised to the Jew then is to be saved from his Judaism. The final redemption, however, will not raise the Jews above the nations of the world, as promised in the Old Testament, but this position of eminence and election will pass, or actually has already passed, from the Jews not just to the Christians but to Christian Germany. The redemption promised to the Jews is thus to be attained by way of the baptismal font at the entrance to the Church: "All Israel will be saved when the fullness of the heathen shall have come to an end. This was Paul's promise to his beloved people - final salvation and not a future glory that will raise Israel above the other nations as proclaimed in the Old Testament... and every believing Christian knows well what a rejoicing there will be in the Kingdom of God when the people of the Old Testament finally acknowledge their sin against Christ and repent. This event will be hailed by all Christendom and by the angelic hosts