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Susannah Heschel's The Aryan Jesus: A Response

Peter Head Journal for the Study of the New Testament 2010 32: 421 DOI: 10.1177/0142064X10365262 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jnt.sagepub.com/content/32/4/421

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JSNT 32.4 (2010): 421-430 The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav http://JSNT.sagepub.com DOI: 10.1177/0142064X10365262

Susannah Heschels The Aryan Jesus: A Response* Peter Head

Faculty of Divinity, West Road, Cambridge CB3 9NL, UK. pmh15@cam.ac.uk

Abstract
This appreciative and critical review briey summarizes the contents of Susannah Heschels book, The Aryan Jesus and probes four areas of engagement and disagreement with Heschel: the incomplete portrayal of Grundmann, the question of the inuence of Grundmann and his Institute, the question of the common elements of anti-Judaism shared by the Confessing Church and the German Christians, and the nature of Christianity itself.

Keywords
Susannah Heschel, Walter Grundmann, German Christians, Aryan Jesus, antiSemitism, anti-Judaism.

In the present book Susannah Heschel describes the history and theology of a group of pro-Nazi theologians in the years up to and during the Second World War. This group contained a number of New Testament scholars who were engaged in removing any traces of Judaism from Jesus and constructing and promulgating an Aryan version. The book focuses on the background, personalities and wartime activities of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Inuence on German Church Life established in 1939, dissolved in 1945. She traces the history of the Institute, its relationships with leaders in church and Reich; she describes its literary productions, specically its Germanized (dejudaized) New Testament, hymnal and catechism. At the centre of the Institute stood its academic director, Walter Grundmann (19061974), and sustained attention is given to his background, inuences, career in Jena, the Institute and his career after the war.
S. Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
*

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In terms of content, the main bulk of the book is made up of six chapters. Chapter 1, Draining Jesus of Jewishness (pp. 26-66) works fairly rapidly through some of the background issues behind the invention of the Aryan Jesus, including the development of racial theory, of German nationalism, Ernst Renan, the Germanic Jesus of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, political movements in German church life, discussions about the racial makeup of the Galilee, and whether Jesus eschatological teachings could or should be described within a Jewish framework (or as a Galilean Son of Man as distinct from a Jewish messiah gure). Chapter 2, The Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Inuence on German Church Life, 1939 to 1942 (pp. 67-105), describes the founding of the Institute and its early years, beginning with the Glaubensbewegung Deutsche Christen (Movement for Germanic Christianity), various proposals for the work of dejudaizing the church, the Godesberg Declaration of the German Christians of March 1939 which declared that Christianity is the unbridgeable religious opposition to Judaism, the opening of the Institute on 6 May 1939, its name, purpose, management, membership, and the various working parties and conferences set up in its early years. Chapter 3, Projects of the Institute (pp. 106-65) discusses the three publications of the Institute: an anti-Jewish revision of the New Testament, Die Botschaft Gottes, and its reception; the dejudaized hymn book, Grosser Gott wir loben dich!; and the Institutes catechism, Deutsche mit Gott: Ein deutsches Glaubensbuch. Other activities included working groups on Catholicism, Teutonic and Nordic sources of German piety, and the problem of Paul. Lengthy attention is given to Grundmanns view of Jesus. Chapter 4, The Making of Nazi Theologians (pp. 166-200) backtracks a little chronologically to describe the scholarly and theological backgrounds of some members of the Institute with special attention to Grundmann and two of his teachers, Adolf Schlatter and Gerhard Kittel. Also loosely related to the general chronology of the book is chapter 5, The Faculty of Theology at the University of Jena (pp. 20141), which traces the extensive impact of Nazism on the Faculty as reected in the personnel (including the recruitment of Grundmann, one of the few theologians who, with complete self-consciousness, makes National Socialism the foundation of his scholarship [p.224 citing Meyer-Erlach, Dean of the Faculty and Rector of the University]), curriculum and student dissertations. Chapter 6, The Postwar Years (pp. 242-78) investigates the post-war careers of Grundmann and other members of the Institute.

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While some aspects of this sad story have been told before,1 Heschel has gathered an impressive amount of material, both archival and published, into a full and compelling history of the Institute (including new material from Grundmanns days as a Stasi informer). Grundmann and his colleagues were willing to jettison just about any part of their Christianity in order to make common ground with the Nazis. From the Hebrew Bible itself, through the covenant history of Israel, to the messiahship of Jesus and the New Testament appeal to the Old Testament, all the way through to the use of Hallelujah in prayer, all of this could be counted as rubbish compared with the surpassing worth of pleasing Hitler. It is only partly a story about the Aryan Jesus; it is more fully a story about the attitudes to Judaism fostered in pre-war Germany and unleashed on the world and Jews in particular during the war. It is a shocking story, a story that in various ways continues to inform contemporary scholarship,2 and a story that is worth reading. I have writtenalthough not with any particularly great enthusiasmon some aspects of this subject before (Head 2004), and I think it is a subject with which New Testament scholars could be more familiar. Susannah Heschels book will help in that, but it probably will not be the last word, since it does not really address questions of New Testament exegesis and history very fully or directly. It also has some problems, or general areas where questions could be raised. The rst issue for me is Walter Grundmann himself. In this story he is the main character, and we learn about his external career, but we get little or nothing that allows us to make sense of his motivations and thoughts (both before the war and after). Some of this is clearly beyond reach, or perhaps beyond comprehension; but it should not be beyond investigation and discussion. His unpublished autobiography is cited occasionally, but generally only for points of detail rather than for motivation or reection. Why was it entitled Erkenntnis und Wahrheit (Insight and Truth)? What about his claimed post-war repentance? Heschel assumes it was supercial or insincere, and is able to show some common strands which connect his post-war publications with his war-time writing, but that does not account for all the differences. What about opinions and recollections of colleagues and students? Why was he in demand as a teacher and writer? The portrayal of Grundmann himself seems to me as yet incomplete.
1. Earlier important publications by Heschel include Heschel 1994, 1995 and 1999. On New Testament scholarship more specically, see Johnson 1986 and Head 2004. On the broader movement, see Bergen 1996. 2. Cf. Georgi 1992; Marsh 1997.

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Secondly, I have a question about the inuence of Grundmanns war-time writings and the Institute. I appreciate that there is an almost instinctive reaction to thinking of them as complete extremists, a kind of lunatic fringe, an example of how bad things can get when an alien godless ideology controls your approach to the New Testament, but without real purchase in the history of ideas. One of the arguments that Heschel is intent to make through her telling of this story is that scholars had previously underestimated the impact and importance of the Institute and its work (pp. 6 and 18). The blurb on the ap of the book claims that:
Heschel shows that during the Third Reich, the Institute became the most important propaganda organ of German Protestantism, exerting a widespread inuence and producing a nazied Christianity that placed antiSemitism at its theological center.

The claim is thus made that the Institute was larger in its membership and inuence than had been assumed before I began my study (p.6). The surprising thing about the book from this perspective is that Heschel never does argue her case for a broader inuence of the Institute, or that it was the most important propaganda organ of German Protestantism. To some extent she perhaps assumes that the narrative as given will demonstrate the importance of the Institute, and to some extent this works, albeit based on anecdotal types of evidence; at point after point, however, the author is forced to admit that measuring inuence is difcult or impossible (e.g. at p. 71). In 1934 the Deutsche Christen claimed 600,000 members of their organization, a gure that, if accurate, would correspond to around 1 percent of the Christian population of Germany.3 The inuence of the Deutsche Christen clearly increased later, although details seem hard to come by.4 Specically in relation to Die Botschaft Gottes, the Germanization of the New Testament produced at the Institute, she notes, how many regional churches altered their lectionary to accord with the new version is not known (p.112). In relation to Grosser Gott wir loben dich!, the revised hymnal, she notes that the reception of the hymnal, Grosser Gott, is difcult to judge
3. See Bergen 1999: 40 (and 193 n. 3); cf. Heschel, Aryan Jesus: 3. 4. Based on a study of Deutsche Christen inuence in Protestant churches in Berlin, Heschel suggests that between a quarter and a third of Protestant church members may have been attracted to the Deutsche Christen (Heschel, Aryan Jesus: 3-6; based on Gailus 2001). Heschel mentions at one point that only a minority of theology students throughout the Reich became members of the German Christian movement (p. 205, with reference to Grttner 1995: 436).

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(p.125), and in relation to the revised catechism, Deutsche mit Gott, she notes whether the catechism was introduced in many churches remains unclaried; there is evidence, however, of discussions of catechetical reform in churches afliated with the German Christian movement (p. 127). To this we might add the observation that the Nazis did not seem to think of the Institute as inherently inuential. Heschel cites a report of the Nazi secret service that the German Christians were not reaching their goal with their present-day efforts (p.149), and that the State Ministry for Church Affairs refused recognition to the Institute or aid from the Nazi party (p.149; cf. p.150 reporting Grundmanns own view that neither the Nazi party nor the Reich ofcials had offered public appreciation for his work). Thirdly, Heschel argues that both Confessing Church Christians and German Christians, for all their differences in relation to Nazi ideology, state interference in church affairs, and Christian doctrine, shared a similar broadly based theological anti-Judaism. After the war Grundmann claimed that the conclusion that Jesus stood in opposition to Judaism was not a politically motivated position, since it was in fact shared by a number of non-German scholars (pp. 252-53). Heschel shows how among the scholars who inuenced Grundmann, both the conservative Schlatter and the scholarly Kittel shared extremely negative portrayals of Judaism which moved from a kind of theological anti-Judaism to a more personal anti-Semitism. We are, I suppose, all familiar with some of the peculiarities of early twentieth-century views of Judaism in Germany.5 Beyond the scholarly works, Martin Hengel offers a telling memoir (I was just six years old then Hitler came to power on January 31, 1933) which recalled that both state schools and church life contributed to anti-Jewish viewpoints which allowed a shift from theological anti-Judaism to acquiescence to deadly anti-Semitism:
It was when I entered school that I rst encountered anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda, mixed with a distorted picture of German history and a strong nationalistic tendency: the Nazis used the national depression following the end of World War I as a vehicle for their racist ideology, which was at rst not very popular. Even the youngest schoolchildren had to learn die Juden sind unser Unglck (the Jews are our misfortune), as the Jews were declared the main culprits of the German defeat in 1918 with its catastrophic consequences (national misery, hunger, unemployment, ination) and were later to be held responsible for world-wide depression

5. Moore 1921; Sanders 1977.

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and plutocratic capitalism, as well as for Bolshevist communism in Russia and the persecution of Christians there. I had been educated in school and inuenced by the mass media (both of which were state monopolies) to fear and to hate the Jews ... The monopoly of ofcial education and information poisoned the spirit of the youth and prepared the way for disaster. I remember very well that when I was in primary (i.e., elementary) school, between six and ten years of age, I had a rather long walk to schoolabout two milesand every day I had to pass a public newsstand displaying the Strmer, the worst anti-Semitic weekly, edited by Julius Streicher (who was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946). I naturally read its sensational and often heart-rending stories with a bewildered interest. My parents, while they themselves had little personal experience of Jewish people, disliked racial Nazi ideology, especially this smearsheet, which was not only anti-Jewish butin a somewhat moderated tonealso anti-Christian. My father had some business contacts with Jewish customers, but even on his part there was some anxious reluctance. (Dont have too much contact with these people, they are too successful in business.) But he deeply disliked anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda, because he knew his Bible well: For he who touches you touches the apple of his eye (Zech. 2.8 [12]; cf. Deut. 32.10). Like many simple, devoted Christians he expected that after the return of Christ at the millennium (Rev. 20.1-10) the Jews would become fervent missionaries of the Messiah according to Zech. 8.23 and Romans 11.12, 15. For the time being, however, they lay under the verdict of Matthew 27.28 and 1 Thessalonians 2.15, and it seemed better not to have too close contact with them. I remember that more than once he said that all peoples who persecuted the Jews had been punished by God, but also that the same could happen to those who allied themselves too closely with them. I believe that, for many Christians in prewar and wartime Germany, this uneasiness about Jews was the reason they did not really acknowledge the great injustice, crying to heaven, that was committed against the Jews from the very beginning of Nazi government and which ended in naked terror and mass murder.6

The fact is, however, that the arguments used by Heschel to implicate Confessing Church Christians with the charge of anti-Judaism are routinely quite weak and do not operate with any sense of the possibility of a nuanced position. For example, Heschel discusses Hans von Sodens published responses to the Godesberg Declaration (p.85), Die Botschaft Gottes (p.112), and Grundmanns Jesus der Galiler (pp. 160f.). Each time she notes the manner in which von Soden labels the Deutsche Christen approach as Jewish or Pharisaic, which she interprets as exemplifying the spirit of competition between the Confessing Church
6. Hengel 1992: 68-70.

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and the German Christian movement over who could be more strongly anti-Jewish (p.112). On a later occasion she writes:
Von Soden reveals what was shared by the Confessing Church and the German Christians: both asserted that Jewishness represented a real threat to Christians but differed in their denitions of Jewishness. For von Soden, the threat came not from the Old Testament, Hebrew words, and other elements within traditional Christian theology, but from what he saw as an antispiritual, materialistic theology promoted by Grundmann and his German Christian colleagues. The shared assumptions about the evils of Jewishness illustrate ... the pervasiveness of racist ideas among theologians, such that supporters and opponents of Nazism cannot easily be distinguished.7

To me this movement goes beyond both the available evidence and common sense. Firstly, on the common-sense level, if two groups differ in their denition of Jewishness, and are opposed to these different denitions of Jewishness, then their anti-Jewishness should not simply be identied, since on any basis they are opposing different things. Secondly, taking von Soden as an example, here is a scholar who afrmed that Christianity arose out of Judaism, that the early Christians were Jewish, and that Christianity should not be understood as the unbridgeable religious opposition to Judaism (all on p.85); he taught at Marburg which was in many ways the exact counterpoint to Jena in terms of relations to the Nazis. It does not seem to make a lot of sense, certainly not on the basis of the evidence given, simply to identify his views of Judaism with those of Grundmann, as racist anti-Semitism. Without some more nuance to the denitions this does not really advance our understanding of what people really thought and taught.8 A fourth area of concern is the way in which, arising out of the previous observation, Heschel attempts at times to move from the actions of
7. P. 161 with reference to Tal 2004. 8. Heschel offers an interesting example in her own reaction to R.Deines. In criticizing Deiness interpretation of Grundmanns war-time writings she states: Even more striking, Deines criticizes Grundmann for his literalistic pedantry, a euphemism for Pharisaism in traditional Christian anti-Jewish rhetoric, thus reiterating an image frequently invoked by Grundmanns own opponents who mocked his dejudaization efforts as Pharisaic in order to tar him with the label of the despised Jew (p.18). This seems to be a blatant over-reading on Heschels part, but also raises the possibility, not mentioned directly when discussing von Soden, that the labelling of Grundmann as Pharisaic is part of a deliberate attempt at mockery on the part of von Soden. For more on von Soden, see Kummel 1981; Dinkler, Dinklervon Schubert and Wolter 1986; Kinzig 2001.

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these admittedly extreme German Christians to implicate Christianity more broadly in a racial anti-Semitism. This may be reected in the sub-title Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, and comes across, oddly enough, both by occasionally defending Grundmann as working out the implications of Christian theology and from the ambiguity of the term German Christians. Sometimes Heschel uses the translation Germanic Christianity (e.g. p.70), a helpful one which claries that these were not simply Christians who happened to be German, but people committed to rethinking Christianity in Germanic ways (see pp. 45-47 for precursors). Most of the time Heschel simply uses German Christians (without the quotation marks), but this does lead to some problems and ambiguities which she is not particularly careful to avoid. One example of taking a general Christian group and labelling them as German Christians occurs on p.184 where she notes something that Kittel wrote as a 1926 publication of a German Christian student group. The problem here is that the Kirchenbewegung Deutsche Christen did not exist in 1926; this was a student Christian group. But the other movement also occurs, more frequently, when ideas or people associated with the Kirchenbewegung Deutsche ChristenGerman Christians in a particular senseare discussed in somewhat ambiguous ways. Sometimes, perhaps surprisingly, Heschel defends Grundmann and the German Christians against the charge that they have abandoned Christianity. For example, Heschel characterizes the Institutes work as shifting attention from the humanity of God to the divinity of man, but comments that the theological shift from Gods humanity to human divinity was not an abandonment of Christianity (p.165). Here, however, granted all the difculty that arises when one attempts to dene the limits of what qualies as Christianity, it seems to me that what Heschel presents as a shift of emphasis or attention was in fact a rejection of traditional incarnational theology in favour of the divinization of the German Volk. It seems to me that actually there is a sense in which one abandons Christianity if another controlling ideology determines that one cannot afrm the incarnation, the messiahship of Jesus, his compassion for outcasts and his salvic suffering for sin (among a myriad of other things). That is obviously a personal judgment, but it seems to have been shared by Grundmann, who wrote in 1942: I cannot return to the old church (cited on p.151). In another place Heschel asserts that Christianity is inherently racist, and that the German Christians might actually be perceived as a kind of racist renewal movement:

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HEAD Susannah Heschels The Aryan Jesus

The racialization of Christianity that came to the fore with the rise of German nationalism and Nazism can thus be seen as appealing to preexisting, early Christian currents as theologians, especially those linked to the vlkisch movement, sought a Germanic Christianity. Eliminating the Jewish from Christianity constituted a renewed racialization, Christianitys reassertion of itself as a racial religion (p.21, my italics).

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Heschel speaks of the idea of a non-Jewish Jesus as the secret hope of a strain of Christian theology since the days of the second-century Christian theologian Marcion (p.26). She writes:
The ultimate impossibility of Christianizing nonwhites highlighted the problem of race at the heart of Christian theology. Missionary efforts recapitulated Christianitys fundamental supersessionist aw: the effort to Christianize Judaism was a theological miscegenation (p.28).

I confess that these statements bother me on a couple of different levels. It especially bothers me that they are presented without a shred of supporting evidence from any primary text relevant to the study of the history of Christianity. This book can be recommended as an exploration of one of the darker times for New Testament studies. Through her research into archival sources and war-time publications, Heschel exposes the work of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Inuence on German Church Life and its academic director, Walter Grundmann, to the light of day. Some of the broader issues that Heschel brings to and draws from her studies will, as I have suggested, be debated, but for the light she has shone into the darkness we shall be truly grateful. References
Bergen, D.L. 1996 Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press). 1999 Storm Troopers of Christ: The German Christian Movement and the Ecclesiastical Final Solution, in R.P. Ericksen and S. Heschel (eds.), Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: Fortress Press): 40-67. Dinkler, E., E. Dinkler-von Schubert and M. Wolter (eds.) 1986 Theologie und Kirche im Wirken Hans von Sodens: Briefe und Dokumente aus der Zeit des Kirchenkampfes 19331945 (AkZ, A 2; Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Gailus, M. 2001 Protestantismus und Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Durchdringung des protestantischen Sozialmilieus in Berlin (Cologne: Bhlau).

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Georgi, D. 1992 Grttner, M. 1995 Head, P.M. 2004 Hengel, M. 1992

The Interest in Life of Jesus Theology as a Paradigm for the Social History of Biblical Criticism, HTR 85: 51-83. Studenten im Dritten Reich (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schningh). The Nazi Quest for an Aryan Jesus, Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 2: 56-90. A Gentile in the Wilderness: My Encounter with Jews and Judaism, in J.H. Charlesworth (ed.), Overcoming Fear between Jews and Christians (New York: Crossroad): 67-83. Nazifying Christian Theology: Walter Grundmann and the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Inuence on German Church Life, CH 63: 587-605. Making Nazism a Christian Movement: The Development of a Christian Theology of Antisemitism during the Third Reich, in B.R. Rubenstein and M. Berenbaum (eds.), What Kind of God? Essays in Honor of Richard L. Rubenstein (Studies in the Shoah, 11; Lanham, New York, London: UPA): 159-74. When Jesus Was an Aryan: The Protestant Church and Antisemitic Propaganda, in R.P. Ericksen and S. Heschel (eds.), Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: Fortress Press): 68-89. Power Politics and New Testament Scholarship in the National Socialist Period, JES 23: 1-24 Evangelische Patristiker und christliche Archologen im Dritten Reich, in Beat Nf (ed.), Antike und Altertumswissenschaft in der Zeit von Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus: Kolloquium Universitt Zrich 14.17. Oktober 1998 (TSSH, 1; Mandelbachtal: Cicero), 535-629. Hans von Soden als Theologe. In Dankbarkeit zu seinem 100. Geburtstag, TRu 46: 199-205. Quests of the Historical Jesus in New Historicist Perspective, BibInt 5: 403-37. Christian Writers on Judaism, HTR 14: 197-254. Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (London: SCM Press). Religious and Anti-Religious Roots of Modern Antisemitism, in Tal, Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Third Reich: Selected Essays (London: Routledge): 171-190.

Heschel, S. 1994

1995

1999

Johnson, M.D. 1986 Kinzig, W. 2001

Kummel, W.G. 1981 Marsh, C. 1997 Moore, G.F. 1921 Sanders, E.P. 1977 Tal, U. 2004

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