The Grey Book | Page 5

[16]
Most additional factors in the rejection of Judaism, Marr continues, go
beyond the attack directed against Christianity as a system of beliefs
and superstitions that demoralizes man and corrupts his nature.
Anti-semitism is not only called to combat religion and Christianity; its
chief aim 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