Here is our list discussion of Daniel Goldhagen's (now) new book on the Holocaust, _Hitler's Willing Executioners_. The discussion was intense and led to a debate about the overall relationship between Christianity and Judaism. Posts included here by: Alan Young (4) Roger Eden (7) Bernie Banet (2) Jordi Sod Hoffs (4) Hans Leander (6) Bobby in Illinois Larry Stillman Norm Rosenblatt Michael Kleiner Jane Goldhamer (3) Dennis Geller (2) Harold Black Rivka Gates (2) Steve Shemin (4) Bert Rothschild Henrik Rasmussen Bob Wolfe (3) Titus Mendell (2) Mike Prival (2) Alison Jerris Walter Hellman Lewis Gollub From RQHQ47A@prodigy.com Fri May 31 20:52:26 1996 Date: Mon, 01 Apr 1996 21:33:06 EST From: ALAN YOUNG To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Goldhagen's book Has anyone read Daniel Goldhagen's book on the Holocaust? The NY Times calls it a landmark work in Holocaust studies. His thesis is that no one had to coerce the average German to kill Jews. He killed with pleasure, with maximum sadism and often invited the family along to watch. This book has completely shaken my world view and I'm sure it will do the same for yours. Please read and comment. Alan Young rqhq47a@prodigy.com ........................................................................ From eden@siftac.easynet.co.uk Fri May 31 20:52:26 1996 Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 08:38:01 +0100 From: Roger Eden To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ The banality of Evil, and Goldhagen (apologies for length) To Hans and Jordi (Hans, as Jordi will no doubt tell you, he is a fella!). Thank you for offering some psychological explanantions for the holocaust, I myself have a degree in Psychology. I find the anecdotes and attempt at explanation obscene, and I could certainly give many other stories each pointng to a different explanation. Neither of you address my main point, the observation (not explanation) that all holocaust participants were Christian. During WWII we demonised the Germans as a whole (and the Japanese!), after we wanted to be friends, Hollywood made war films in which the Germans were noble and brave, but unfortunately saddled with a few psychopathic, heel clicking Nazis. The French were always depicted as bravely resisting. The truth is that France was governed by the Vichy French, who rounded up their own (Jewish) citizens, and created their own camp (Drancy). The Ukranians guarded Auschwitz and elswehere. The Romanian Iron Guard, Hungarian Arrow Cross, Croation Ustashe, all perpertrated their own verson of the Shoah. Not everyone was caught up in a crowd, and quite typical is the British Chanell Islands, where the British Governer wrote obsequiously to the German garrison commander that he has "the pleasure to inform him that the British police have rounded up all the Jews and they await collection", an initiative he took without much prompting, and contrary to the culture of the 1940's British, which was to bravely stand up to the Nazi threat, remember Churchill's stirring speeches "We shall fight them on the beaches..." and "Never in the field of human endeavour has so much been given to so many, by so few" The last was said of the Air Force who denied the Germans an invasion opportunity. Yet just a few miles away as soon as a small part of the UK came under German rule, they collaborated without problem, coercion or prompting, as they did everywhere else. The tragedy is how few even thought it wrong, let alone acted against it. The holocaust is a grotesque failure of Christianity, not an aberration, but a culmination. Cultural/moral/civilising systems, which monotheism and others (Hindu, Shinto etc.) aspire to be, should be capable of placing some limits on the aberrant behaviour of their adherents. The evidence is, that more than any other system, (certainly more than Islam), throughout history Christians revert to barbarism with monotonous regularity. They still do. To imply that we could all get caught up given the right circumstances, flies in the face of history. Do you see burning Magen Davids as you used to see KKK crosses? We all have our hotheads, but for most systems they remain a minority of extremists, only in in Christianity have they regularly been the majority. Have you compared the behaviour of the Christian medieval Crusaders with their Moslem Saracen foes? Who behaved civilised and who were barbaric? Time we asked Christianity to come to terms. This is not a prejudice, just an observation. I enjoy the debate! Roger Eden British Community for HJ eden@siftac.easynet.co.uk ........................................................................ Date: Thu, 4 Apr 96 11:29 WET From: Bernie Banet To: Roger Eden Cc: HJ@teleport.com Subject: Re: HJ/ The banality of Evil, and Goldhagen (apologies for length) Roger, regarding your statement: >Neither of you address my main point, the observation (not explanation) that >all holocaust participants were Christian. Granted there are Christian roots of the Holocaust, just as there are Christian teachings and institutions that can be appealed to to prevent future holocausts. If Christianity is UNIQUELY barbaric, however, why have many of this century's worst instances of government-sponsored massacres of citizens, and of inter-communal killing, occurred in the least Christian areas of the world or under anti-Christian auspices: China and USSR under the Communists, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the Indian subcontinent as the British Raj ended, Indonesia, Africa? And wasn't it largely a group of Jewish scientists who invented nuclear weapons, for the specific purpose of killing the civilian populations of whole cities? Human beings apparently can easily kill other humans because of their group identity if one's group is seen as threatened by the other group. It happens in street gangs, in soccer stadiums, in wars, in revolutions, in terrorism, and in genocide. The key seems to be perceived threat, not whether it is real. Clearly some humans get sadistic pleasure out of such killing, and others do it as a repugnant duty. But we do it. We humans. To prevent other holocausts, must we not understand that mass killing, including killing of civilians, and demonization and dehumanization of the Other are NOT potentials ONLY within German or European or Christian culture, though tragically they have been realized all too starkly in those contexts? ===Bernie= Bernard A. Banet Phone: 313 665-7842 Fax: 313 665-7872 838 Heatherway Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104-2734 bab@optimation.com ........................................................................ From jordi@mail.internet.com.mx Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 22:35:23 -0600 From: Jordi Sod Hoffs To: hj@teleport.com Subject: Re: HJ/ Goldhagen's book Alan Young writes: >Has anyone read Daniel Goldhagen's book on the Holocaust? The NY Times >calls it a landmark work in Holocaust studies. > >His thesis is that no one had to coerce the average German to kill >Jews. He killed with pleasure, with maximum sadism and often invited >the family along to watch. > >This book has completely shaken my world view and I'm sure it will do >the same for yours. Please read and comment. I would like to discuss this with care, but in the meantime, you folks might want to read an article published in TIME (I saw it in Pathfinder) which I'm attaching. Brrr, Jordi. ------------------ TIME Magazine April 1, 1996 Volume 147, No. 14 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Return to Contents page --------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT DID THEY KNOW? And when did they know it? A fierce new book argues that ordinary Germans were deeply complicit in the holocaust JOHN ELSON It is the common view of Hitler's Germany that the mass murder of 6 million European Jews was primarily carried out by Nazi zealots. Ordinary Germans, we like to think, knew little or nothing about the Holocaust; if they participated in the killings, they did so under duress, subject to orders that could not be disobeyed. Utter nonsense, argues Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, an assistant professor of government and social studies at Harvard. In an explosive new book, Hitler's Willing Executioners (Knopf; 622 pages; $30), he contends that the perpetrators of the Final Solution were, by and large, ordinary men and women, workers, merchants and so on, who, millions strong, ravaged the ghettos, brutally supervised the death camps and enthusiastically carried out Hitler's plan to destroy world Jewry. Based in part on German archives that have been neglected or ignored by other scholars, Hitler's Willing Executioners is as relentless as a trip-hammer, sometimes irritatingly repetitive and loftily dismissive of contrary judgments that Goldhagen believes lack sufficient evidence. The book will be published this month in the U.S. and Britain, and in Germany in August; it will be the subject of a symposium at the Holocaust Museum in Washington on April 8. Goldhagen's indictment focuses on the citizenry's complicity in three specific "institutions of mass killing": Germany's police battalions; the so-called work camps in which Jews were incarcerated; and the death marches from those camps by prison guards and their charges near the end of the war. The police battalions, which played a major role in rounding up the Jews of Eastern Europe and shipping them to death factories like Auschwitz and Treblinka, were mostly composed of military reservists. Of the 500 or so officers and men who served in 1942 with one typical unit that Goldhagen details, Police Battalion 101, only 21 belonged to the Nazi elite force known as the SS. That year the battalion participated in a roundup of Jews from the Lublin region of Poland. Thousands were hunted down and slaughtered in execution orgies that left the police splattered with the blood and brains of their helpless victims. Were the men of Battalion 101 cowed or coerced into taking part? No, insists Goldhagen. One of the battalion's commanders, Trapp by name, offered to excuse the squeamish from killing duty. Only a handful of guards took up the offer. Far from hating their work, the men of Battalion 101 even took pictures of the roundup, which they proudly mailed to wives or girlfriends, who would not have been too surprised by evidence of such brutality. Germany, Goldhagen writes, was "saturated" with prison camps where Jewish inmates were in essence worked to death under conditions scarcely better than those of the Eastern European killing fields. In the small state of Hesse alone there were 606 such camps, or one every 35 sq. mi. By 1944, with the war lost, German troops gradually abandoned the prison camps in Eastern Europe. SS chief Heinrich Himmler decreed that even Jews should be treated decently--presumably to erase the evidence of war crimes. Instead, camp guards embarked on the notorious death marches, forcing emaciated, sickly Jewish prisoners to walk barefoot, sometimes through snow, for 15 miles a day or more. "Jewish survivors report with virtual unanimity German cruelties and killings until the very end," Goldhagen writes. It's a pretty sweeping indictment, one that Goldhagen supports by noting that from medieval until modern times, German culture was suffused with what he calls an "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that demonized Jews as the source of all social ills. For instance, the church-inspired vision of Jews as "Christ killers" fueled countless pogroms over the centuries. Thus, in Goldhagen's view, the Final Solution represented the logical fulfillment of ordinary Germans' own long-standing dreams. He quotes one 19th century anti-Semite as predicting that "the German Volk needs only to topple the Jews" in order to become "united and free." Hitler's Willing Executioners is bound to be severely criticized--at least in Germany--since it confronts the postwar alibi that average citizens of the Third Reich either did not know about the Holocaust or disapproved of it. Some historians may also question whether anti-Semitism, while prevalent in pre-Hitler Germany, was as viciously eliminationist as the author argues. The 19th century English writer Lord Acton believed that historians should be hanging judges, exercising their right to condemn the sins of the past. By this stern standard, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has done his job with a pen in one hand, a noose in the other. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- From hleander@pbfreenet.seflin.lib.fl.us Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 12:44:22 -0500 (EST) From: Hans Leander To: hj@teleport.com Subject: Re: HJ/ The banality of Evil, and Goldhagen On Thu, 4 Apr 1996, Roger Eden wrote: > ... I find the anecdotes and ATTEMPT [my highlighting/Hans] at > explanation obscene, ... > Neither of you address my main point, the observation (not explanation) that > all holocaust participants were Christian. I disagree that an attempt, in itself, to explain (anything), is obscene. While there may be philosophical differing opinions about cause and effect, normally we think that everything has an explanation, even if we do not know it. Second, are you, Roger, really claiming that you point out that all holocaust participants were Christians just as an observation, not implying that there is something in Christianity that made its adherents be holocaust participants? If this is so, why are you making this observation? This is all I can manage at this time, since Beth Adam has its seder dinner in a few hours, its Board meeting on Saturday, and a lecture by Tammy Feldstein (who is leading us today) on Sunday. I will try to address your main point later, Roger. A good Passover (what's left) to you, and to all list members, whose contributions have brought additional knowledge and much joy into my life (no, I am not exaggerating). By the way, thanks for the many kind comments on my "journey". Hans Leander ........................................................................ Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1996 06:52:27 +0100 From: Roger Eden To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Goldhagen Jordi brings to our attention a book that claims Germnas rather than simply Nazis were culpable for the Holocaust. It's a step in the right direction. Surely it was Christianity that perpetrated the Holocaust? The perpetrators came from every country, they were not united in politics (were not all Nazis) were not united in language, there was no country that did not supply enthusiastic perpetrators, in every single country the majority stood idly by, and watched the Jews rounded up. Only one thing united them all - they were baptised Christians. It is time we ceased to relate to the Holocaust as a Jewish problem, it is a Jewish tragedy, but it is major problem for Christianity, that has yet to come to terms with this. I think we inadvertently connive in letting them off the hook. Time they were confronted with their idea that they are the inheritors of Jewish ethics, where's the evidence? I do not think that there has been a single moment in 2,000 years of Christianity (including this moment), when some Christian is not behaving barbarically as a Christian - Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Serbia, Croatia, the fanatics in the USA seige are waiting for their opportunity. Very convenient if it was only Germans, but just ain't so! Roger Eden British Community for HJ eden@siftac.easynet.co.uk ........................................................................ From jordi@mail.internet.com.mx Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1996 13:14:24 -0600 From: Jordi Sod Hoffs To: hj@teleport.com Subject: Re: HJ/ Goldhagen (long) Roger Eden comments: >Jordi brings to our attention a book that claims Germnas rather than simply >Nazis were culpable for the Holocaust. It's a step in the right direction. >Surely it was Christianity that perpetrated the Holocaust? The perpetrators >came from every country, they were not united in politics (were not all >Nazis) were not united in language, there was no country that did not supply >enthusiastic perpetrators, in every single country the majority stood idly >by, and watched the Jews rounded up. Only one thing united them all - they >were baptised Christians. True enough, but although Christian prejudice may help to "understand" (the Shoah is beyond understanding) what caused people to murder millions, it is not, in my opinion, the crucial point. There are two books that have transformed the way I see other people. One is Elias Canetti's famous _Crowds and Power_, the other is George Klein's now-really-famous _Pieta_. Both make statements that might help us understand why "normal, ethical" people are capable of unspeakable atrocities. In a nutshell (may Canetti forgive me), Crowds and Power says among other things: people have an instinct that draws them to the crowd, for in the crowd they can lose themselves, lose their self-conciousness. Then they unleash their drives, which become unstoppable. Let me quote page 20 ("Destructiveness") of a recent Noonday edition: "... In the crowd the individual feels that he is transcending the limits of his own person. He has a sense of relief, for the distances are removed which used to throw him back on himself and shut him in. With the lifting of these burdens of distance he feels free; his freeedom is the crossing of these boundaries. He wants what is happening to him to happen to others too; and he expects it to happen to them. An earthen pot irritates him, for it is all boundaries. The closed doors of a house irritate him. Rites and ceremonies, anything which preserves distances, threaten him and seem unbearable. He fears that, sooner or later, an attempt will force the disintegrating crowd back into these pre-existing vessels. To the crowd in its nakedness everything seems a Bastille. Of all means of destruction the most impressive is _fire_. It can be seen from far off and it attracts ever more people. It destroys irrevocably: nothing after a fire is as it was before. A crowd setting fire to something feels irresistable; so long as the fire spreads, everyone will join it and everything hostile will be destroyed. After the destruction, crowd and fire die away." I ask you to picture Kristallnacht, or the bombing of Dresden. George Klein's _Pieta_ deals among other things with the atrocities of the Holocaust. The author, an oncologist, escaped from Hungary during the war. He is now a Swede. When discussing a famous Holocaust survivor, he says (p.140, MIT Press): "According to Vrba, the driving forces for the Nazis were greed and the desire for a comfortable life. Vrba saw many signs of this among the SS personnel in Auschwitz. Nopbody had to work in the camp against his will. A simple request for transfer was always granted, even if it usually meant service at the front. But the 'burgeois have a tendency to go berserk whenever they can satisfy their own avarice,' Vrba said, and he proceeded to illustrate his point with a series of harrowing anecdotes. I will recount only one such episode. A non-Jewish doctor, Ella Lingens-Reinert, who became an assistant minister of health in Asutria after the war, was sent to Auschwitz for having harbored a Jew in ther home in Vienna. As a non-Jewish prisoner, she had a privileged position and was respected even by the SS women. One day he was standing with an SS woman whose husband also worked at Auschwitz, watching a long line of children, women, and old or incapacitated men waiting in front of the gas chamber. She asked the SS woman, 'Do you like working here?' 'No, Frau Doktor,' answered the woman, 'I don't really like it.' 'But then why do you do it? You could be transferred if you wanted.' 'Yes, but you see, it is like this. My husband and I both come from very simple families, we are hard-working people, and for many years we have been hoping to live in a better area. We want to have pleasant and respectable neighbors and friends. It is only now that we have been able to buy a house in a nice suburb. It is almost ready, but the kitchen is still far from finished. If we work here for only six more months, we can have it finished and then invite our neighbors. Then we will stop working here'. No she did not like her job, but the kitchen was far more important. " There is no single reason why people killed so unconciously, but I believe that the thrill of the crowd and the complete dissociation between what people were doing and why they were doing it help understand the horror. (_The Tin Drum_ deals with this second aberration in full detail.) >It is time we ceased to relate to the Holocaust as a Jewish problem, it is a >Jewish tragedy, but it is major problem for Christianity, that has yet to >come to terms with this. I think we inadvertently connive in letting them >off the hook. Time they were confronted with their idea that they are the >inheritors of Jewish ethics, where's the evidence? I do not think that >there has been a single moment in 2,000 years of Christianity (including >this moment), when some Christian is not behaving barbarically as a >Christian - Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Serbia, Croatia, the fanatics in the >USA seige are waiting for their opportunity. >Very convenient if it was only Germans, but just ain't so! All fundamentalisms kill, all demagogueries kill. >Roger Eden >British Community for HJ >eden@siftac.easynet.co.uk Jordi Sod. Mexico City jordi@mail.internet.com.mx ........................................................................ From hleander@pbfreenet.seflin.lib.fl.us Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1996 15:05:51 -0500 (EST) From: Hans Leander To: Hj List Subject: HJ/ Goldhagen I wish to support Jordi Sod in her attempt to bring in psychological and sociopsychological factors into our discussion and our attempts to understand why the Holocaust happened. There is a large body of research done on how people function in crowds and how people can permit themselves to inflict pain in others under certain circumstances. We all have our instincts well intact, I believe, and while we also differ in how we deal with them, circumstances are very important. The hungrier you are, the more your behavior will probably deviate from normal. Many people are hostile against trying to explain in terms of psychology and sociology, but I believe that if we do not admit that we have a psyche, and unconscious mind, etc., we will run around in circles. The Holocaust cannot be excused by any explanation, but we sure have a much better chance to avoid a repetition if we understand the real underpinnings of this and other atrocities. Hans Leander ........................................................................ Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 23:06:44 -0600 From: Jordi Sod Hoffs To: hj@teleport.com Subject: Re: HJ/ The banality of Evil, and Goldhagen (apologies for length) Roger, Bernie Banet pretty much expressed my objections to blaming the Shoah on Christianity as such. Nevertheless, I must say that I felt your language went too far. You state: >To Hans and Jordi (Hans, as Jordi will no doubt tell you, he is a fella!). >Thank you for offering some psychological explanantions for the holocaust, I >myself have a degree in Psychology. I find the anecdotes and attempt at >explanation obscene, and I could certainly give many other stories each >pointng to a different explanation. Obscene!? Roger, I deeply disagree with your views on Christianity, for that matter. That does not mean we cannot discuss issues civilly. This is a difficult subject for all of us, so we should try to keep a cool head. To try to understand the Holocaust (and history as such) we need to approach the issues from different sides. History is too complex, too irrational, to give in to simple answers. We are all deeply troubled by the Shoah. It's a wound that can never stop hurting. Let us remember that we are all on the same side, trying to find answers that will help us live with this pain. Respectfully, Jordi Sod. ........................................................................ From eden@siftac.easynet.co.uk Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Fri, 5 Apr 1996 09:43:43 +0100 From: Roger Eden To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Is Christianity unique? [The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set] [Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set] [Some characters may be displayed incorrectly] First, a profuse apology if I expressed myself too strongly, I was trying to be objective. Why do we expect soul searching of Communists, Jews, Moslems, Khmer Rouge etc.? Of course Christians are not unique in committing atrocity, but somehow when they do, we say, atrocity is part of human nature. I disagree. I think some philosophies although not directly responsible, make it easier than others, and apparently so do you (that's why you mention the list above). We surely think that Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir were products of a misguided philosophy, and we take some communal responsibility. The uniqueness of Christianity is that no-one even considers such a possibility. Moslems around the world are expressing how alien is the current violence to true Islam, at least they consider the problem. Note how amongst the Jews, observance and propensity to violence seem to overlap, and we search our souls. Is Christianity irrelevant to the Holocaust, to the Crusades, to Shatila, to Salem, to Northern Ireland, to Serbia, to Croatia, to the militias in America? There is violence between Israel and her neighbours, but does it reach the proportion (at both individual and communal level) of Northern Ireland, where they are all proudly Christian. Can we explain violence as the unfortunate activities of victors, as Daniel suggests? Who is the victor in Ireland, or Serbia? Does Christianity not even have a small part to play? Can you imagine Buddhists or Humanists waging a religious war? We treat Christianity uniquely as above all this, and it is not in their interest, and certainly not in ours. Again apologies, and I'll keep an open mind, but I think that the -evil in us all- approach is a clich*, which seems especially to apply when the barbarians happen to be Christian. Roger Eden British Community for HJ ........................................................................ eden@siftac.easynet.co.uk From eden@siftac.easynet.co.uk Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Sun, 7 Apr 1996 09:38:17 +0100 From: Roger Eden To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ My last word on Goldhagen I entered the discussion when the book of Godhagen was brought to our attention by Alan Young. The book gives evidence that ordinary uncoerced Germans participated in the Holocaust. I made - what seems to me - the uncontroversial statement that the Holocaust was perpetrated by Christians. The heavy debate that followed, maybe says more about us than about Christianity? As an undergraduate I was asked to design a study that could show prejudice, a typically impossible task given to psychology students. I took the two paragraphs from the bible about Joshua at Jericho, and made a second version where Joshua became Hsua-Hshow-Shing, trumpets became cymbals (basically changing the nouns and place names to Chinese) etc, but otherwise kept the story. Essentially we had two stories of early bronze age foreign barbarians committing genocide because their God commanded them - and they utterly destroyed everything that lived in the city, man, woman, child, ox, ass, everything was put to the sword - this same essential sentence in both versions. We then had a questionnaire with 120 questions but amongst them were 10 concerning their feelings about wiping out the town. Some read about Joshua, some about Hsua-Hshow-Shing, the former was condoned, the latter condemned - Why is it that a few hundred non-Jewish university students think that Joshua is OK, but a Chinese doing the same is not? A rather inconsistent attitude to genocide. Do Jews still think that Joshua is a role model? If Christians are offended by the fact of their holocaust participation, should we all pretend that it isn't true? Because all religions have hypocrisy, should we ignore it? Is our attitude to Christianity similar to Islam? Even in these columns I see the occasional demonising of Islam, and now a great reluctance to grasp more substantial evidence on Christianity. Little protest when Arab houses are blown up as collective punishment, but Goldstein's and Amir's house still stand! By all means lets assume that the Holocuast was a Nazi/German problem, but lets be consistent, without it we cannot have integrity! So if we curfew the West Bank, I vote we curfew Yeshivot, for the same period. When I suggested that, I was also accused of prejudice, as in this case against Christians. So I conclude that to be without prejudice means to apply ethics selectively - surely not so? Without consistent ethics there is no future for Diaspora Jewry. Roger Eden British Community for HJ eden@siftac.easynet.co.uk ........................................................................ From bobj2361@mcs.net Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Sun, 07 Apr 1996 08:04:30 CST From: bobj2361@mcs.net To: Hj List Subject: Re: HJ/ Christianity and the Holocaust I have been having real problems with this subject. I'm not a kid (60 to be exact), but I think people were responsible for the Holocaust not a particular religion or group. To group all Christians in this group is both unfair and "against" the ideas of humanism, I think. People spread antisemitism. I think we are furthering antisemitism by continuing this particular discussion. Bobby in Illinois bobj2361@mcs.net hdi2361@TheRamp.net FAX 312-842-2646 ........................................................................ From l.stillman@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Sun, 7 Apr 1996 21:22:55 +1000 (EST) From: Larry Stillman To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Christians To get in my two bob's worth: I really think there is a bit of overly enthusiastic anti-Christian prejudice, in the worst sense going on here. Is it really necessary? Does it progress the cause of humanism? 'They' had fun over the centuries picking on the Talmud and Jewish religion too. ********************** Larry Stillman "mar sharrukin" Melbourne, Australia l.stillman@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au ************************** ........................................................................ From nrosenbl@interserv.com Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Sat, 6 Apr 1996 22:48:28 -0800 From: nrosenbl@interserv.com To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Christianity & The Shoah Gut Yontiv, I have followed the recent thread regarding Christianity and the Shoah with particular interest. I will be speaking on this very subject, that is, the roots of anti-Semitism, on Yom haShoah. I believe that Christianity must take the blame for European anti-Semitism, and therefore, ultimately, for the Shoah. It was Christianity which created the "Jewish Question," and is therefore responsible for its "Final Solution." The Shoah was not the first holocaust inflicted by Christians on Jews. The major warm-ups were 1) the Crusades beginning in 1096 (14,000 Jews murdered by Christians); and, 2) the Chmielnitsky Massacres in 1648 (200,000 to 400,000 Jews murdered by Christians). The fact is that since 592 CE, when the Christian church became the only legal religion in the Roman Empire, it has waged unremitting war against the Jews. But the more interesting fact is that Judaism has also been guilty of the same sorts of behavior. The treatment of the Samaritans and the Karaites being just two examples. What about the 3000 Israelites murdered by Moses? Or was it Yahweh who did the murdering? Islam, too, has waged its share of religious wars, including wars against the Jewish tribes of Arabia while Mohammed was yet alive. Perhaps any religion that claims exclusive truth must end by murdering those who refuse to accept that truth. Two interesting references are: "A Short History of Anti-Semitism," by Vamberto Morais (a Catholic), and "Semites and Anti-Semites," by Bernard Lewis (a Jew). Any thoughts? Norman Rosenblatt ........................................................................ From MKLNORWAY@aol.com Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Sun, 7 Apr 1996 13:24:14 -0400 From: MKLNORWAY@aol.com To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Christianity and WWIIPart2 I had started my post and never finished and it got sent before I could complete it. First, I want to make it clear that I don't absolve the countries, Christians or individuals who stood by or helped round up Jews. We shouldn't overlook the Christians, who drawing from their religion, did perform acts of courage. But, returning to Norway which I started to discuss in my first post. In Samuel Abrahamsen's book, "Norway's Response to the Holocaust," he writes that "...The Church became a focal organization in guiding the Resistance Movement. The role of the Church became crucial; it was to protect the Chirstian values which the Nazis aimed at destroying...The views of the Church were instantaneously approved by the majority of the Norwegian population. Throughout the occupation, it was the pulpit that became the most commonly utilized means of communication in opposing Nazism...Seven bishops resigned on Feb. 24, 1942 strongly protesting the Jewish persecutions. In a Nov. 10, 1942 letter to Minister-President Quisling, the bishops stated 'Jews...were being deprived of their properties without warning...punished as the worst criminals solely because they were Jews...They pointed out that Quisling had emphasized that his party would protect the basic Christian values, and one of them was now being endangered: the Christian commandment to 'love thy neighbor,' the most elementary legal right for any human being...The Church cannot remain silent when God's commandments are being trampled underfoot...Stop the persecution of Jews and stop the race hatred which, through the press, is being spread in our land.' The letter was supported by many theologians, 19 church organizations and six non-state church religious societies, 60 signatures from all sections of Norway's Protestant communities, but not the Catholic Church, which argued instead for the protection of Jews who had been baptized and become Catholics. In Protestant churches, prayers were said for Jews from the pulpit." 797 of 858 incumbent clergy resigned, with the support of the congregations. The bishops and 55 clergy were interned. In 1943, Bishop Lars Froeyland of Oslo, a Quisling appointment, but not a member of the Nazi Party: "...our behavior toward people of another race and another belief within our own borders is a disgrace. I feel bound by conscience to say this. And I do this even if it shall cost me ever so much. Is it correct to judge everyone the same way, and to punish the innocent with the guilty? We are, after all, Norwegians! We are, after all, Christians!" Swedish bishops also reacted. Theologian Natanael Beskow told a large protest in Stockholm: "...A ship that left Oslo Harbor had a freight of anguish on board. We cannot imagine how much these human beings, men, women and children are suffering ...We cannot call them back. They go to their death or to slavery...If we can do nothing else we can try to be the voice of the condemned ...let them through us call forth their anguish and accusations..." Domprost Olle Nystedt, Gothenburg Cathedral, Nov. 22, 1942: "...the churches in Sweden cannot remain silent when such things happen on our borders. If we are silent the stones will cry out. We are shaken to our innermost, thinking of the suffering of the unfortunates. This is a breaking of God's law and a violation of the basic values of our civilization...The Swedish government should increase efforts to rescue Norway's Jews." In addition, after Kristallnacht in 1938, the Norwegian government and other organizations helped Jews esacpe from Germany and Czechoslovakia. The teachers in Norwegian schools staunchly refused to teach Nazism and were sent to camps, and the government refused to surrender to the Nazis. The people did not follow Quisling. He was hanged after the war. I find these statements and the efforts on the part of Scandinavians fascinating, particularly when one considers the small Jewish populations in those countries. For those interested, "Norway's Response to the Holocaust" by Samuel Abrahamsen is published by the Holocaust Library in New York. Michael Kleiner ........................................................................ From goldhamr@teleport.com Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Sun, 7 Apr 1996 14:04:23 -0700 (PDT) From: return To: Humanistic Judaism Subject: HJ/ The Christianity Issue In all our discussion about the culpability of Christians/Christianity, one fairly obvious fact has not been brought up: that there are AT LEAST as many different kinds of Christians as there are different kinds of Jews. We have fundamentalists, moderates, and liberals (several varieties of each) when it comes to interpreting our Bible as the infallible word of god or the fallible words of men; when it comes to believing that one's own way is the only right way and thaat everyone should follow it, or that there are many paths and one should follow one's own conscience and reason; when it comes to condoning violence in the name of religion, or condemning it. So, too, Christianity is a broad term covering literalist fundamentalists who study and believe every word of the Bible (which should be confusing to them, since there are so many conflicting messages!), to the majority who aren't Bible-literate (true of many Jews, too!), to a sizeable number of intelligent mainstream Protestants who find the literal Bible material embarassing (they can't really believe in Immaculate Conception, Virgin Birth, Original Sin, Vicarious Atonement, Resurrection, Life After Death, etc.) and are more comfortable with the nobler sentiments of the Old Testament prophets (the same sentiments WE choose) and the utterances of Jesus as reported in the New Testament: the "Social Gospel." Picking and choosing is something we all do: moderate and liberal Jews ignore the Biblical atrocities in the name of religion and go for the great ethical values. On the recent Purim holiday we celebrated the Jews' being saved from the anti-Semitic Haman, without dwelling on the slaying (including "both little ones and women") by the Jews of 75,800 people and the hanging of Haman's ten sons who may or may not have been guilty. On Passover we overlook the killing of over 70,000 Hebrews for some religious infraction or another, during the trek to the Holy Land from Egypt. We view the directives to stone adulteresses and homosexuals as early barbarisms not pertaining to us or OUR religion. So, too, with mainstream Christian denominations in this more enlightened time--Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Disciples of Christ, some Baptist groups (there are several), many Roman Catholics, and some who aare somewhat fundamentalist. Here, in fact, we find a lot of the "guilty white liberals" who agonize over racism and prejudice and intolerance and poverty aned social injustices of all kinds, and do their best to atone. Roger's initial posting on this subject was such that, if "Jews" or "Judaism" had been substituted for "Christians" and "Christianity," it would have been rightly viewed as virulent anti-Semitism. I wonder if there is some projection going on: those who are the most fearful/disliking of Christians impute their own emotions to the Christians vis a vis the Jews. But my main point is that sweeping generalizations are inappropriate unless one intends to be a stereotyping bigot; people and religions come in too many varieties. Some of my best relatives are Christians, and they don't fit the evil stereotype at all. (As has been said, Power Corrupts, and possibly it's our long history of powerlessness which has saved us from behaving like the Christians of the Crusades and the Inquisition. I do not include the Christians and non-Christians of the Nazi era, because such behavior seems to me impossible for Jews under any circumstances. ?) Jane Goldhamer, Humanistic Jews of Greater Portland ........................................................................ rom AYoung3991@aol.com Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Sun, 7 Apr 1996 18:55:05 -0400 From: AYoung3991@aol.com To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ goldhagen's book When I originally asked people's opinion of the book I thought someone would go out and read it. It is not for nothing that the NY Times reviewer calls it a landmark book in Holocaust studies. Please read this book. Its thesis is that in Germany your average Joe (or Fritz) did not have to be coerced to kill Jews. Pay special attention to the chapter on Police Battalion 101 about how members of these Einzatzgruppe, military misfits because of infirmities or advanced age - men with wives and children at home, entered a Polish town at night and rounded up the women and children. Each man accompanied a woman or a child, just the two of them, a short distance into the woods. ordered the woman or the child to lie face down on the ground and blew the back of their skull off with a rifle bullet, and then returned to get another for a total of ten to twelve trips. Some refused to do this work because it was too gruesome for family men. They were given other duties. None refused to do it because they felt some moral or ethical compunction not to kill innocents. And lastly, according to the best documentation we have, no one lost any sleep over it. None of their medical people reported anything that could even be remotely contrued as post- traumatic stress syndrome. Then, after you've read the book, come back to the list and tell us if you still feel the same way about Germany and the Holocaust. Alan Young ayoung3991@aol.com ........................................................................ From DENNIS@epub.ziff.com Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Mon, 08 Apr 1996 11:21:22 -0500 (EST) From: DENNIS GELLER To: nrosenbl@interserv.com Cc: hj@teleport.com Subject: Re: HJ/ Christianity & The Shoah Norman Rosenblatt wrote: >I believe that Christianity must take the blame for European anti-Semitism, >and therefore, ultimately, for the Shoah. It was Christianity which created >the "Jewish Question," and is therefore responsible for its "Final Solution." Recently Sherwin Wine visited Kahal B'raira and mad ethe observation that aboyt the time of the "Enlightenment" anti_Semitism changed from being a religious phenomenon (Jews don't worship Jesus; Jews killed Jesus; ...) to a socioeconomic one (Jews are the bankers; Jews have too much power; ...) While I tend to agree that Christianity made this later flavor possible -- as Norman points out >Perhaps any religion that claims exclusive truth must end by murdering those >who refuse to accept that truth. -- I think it is difficult to attribute later anti_semitism in Europe to Christianity because there was nothing else around in Europe -- where's the control group? I also think that German popular culture of the beginning of the century was uniquely violent (the originals of the Katzenjammer kids, for example) and also helped set the stage. >But the more interesting fact is that Judaism has also been guilty of the same >sorts of behavior. The treatment of the Samaritans and the Karaites being just >two examples. What about the 3000 Israelites murdered by Moses? Or was it >Yahweh who did the murdering? The more telling parallel is found in the possibility of atrocities committed against the Arab population of Israel and the occupied lands, if there has been such. I think it isn't TOO trite to suggest that humans have developed the ability to evolve through culture and society. Like any evolution, it isn'ty in the least bit one way, or goal oriented, although we'd like to imagine that. I'm not shocked by what Moses of the Romans or Abraham and his boys did; what shocks me are indications that the general civilizing impulse is still pretty much at a surface level, and not at all widespread. Yes, for Christians -- who ostensiubly believe in pece and love -- to collaborate in the Holocaust is not a good reflection on the religion, but I think the greater failure is with the religious organization, which may have allowed itself to maintain power by preaching goodness without actually encouraging it. That, alas, is not unique to Christianity. Dennis Geller Kahal B'raira (offered for identification only, not as representative of a position of the congregation ) ........................................................................ From hb0001@epfl2.epflbalto.org Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 15:36:44 -0400 From: HAROLD BLACK To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Christianity While it is true that early anti-semetism was religiously oriented, this is no longer the case. All a Jew had to do was convert and he was A O.K. The Germans and other European philosophers changed the basis of the hatred. They now blamed the Jewish blood for the faults of Jews. Even if you became a christian you didn't wipe out these faults. Hitler killed as Jews people who had any Jewish heritage at all. Certain things are imputed to Jews such as being too capitalistic or too communistic. That they create all the problems in society. When times are good theses hatreds simmer just below the surface. In times of depression or tumult people have to have someone to blame. Voila, what was just below the surface now surfaces. Remember Germany was falling apart when Hitler came on the scene and used Jews as the scapegoat. That was like throwing a match on dormant combustibles. This same condition applies to the U.S. Good times and a blanket is put over anti-semitism. It will flare a little here and a little there. But give us bad times and watch what will happen. Before WWII Jews couldn't work in the auto plants, couldn't work for large gentile firms, couldn't teach in universities. That's why so many of us became civil servants. . We haven't had a really bad time since then. But people are now becoming worried about their jobs. I see the possibilities of a growth of anti-semitism. Harold Black, Machar, HJ of Greater Washington, DC ........................................................................ From RchayaG@aol.com Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 18:06:30 -0400 From: RchayaG@aol.com To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Holocaust While we are brining up the countries who did nothing. It can't hurt to bring up the copuntries and people who did. Denmark and the non-Jews who did do something. A minority sure, but still there. Also my comment on the laws of return if they can split the religion it is a good deal easier, at least in my mind, to start saying we're not Jews and that the Reform aren't Jews. Rivka ........................................................................ From AYoung3991@aol.com Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 19:26:37 -0400 From: AYoung3991@aol.com To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Re:goldhamer's book In a message dated 96-04-08 11:29:57 EDT, you write: >- -- I think it is difficult to attribute later anti_semitism in Europe to >Christianity because there was nothing else around in Europe -- where's the >control group? > >I also think that German popular culture of the beginning of the century was >uniquely violent (the originals of the Katzenjammer kids, for example) and >also >helped set the stage. Difficult to attribute antisemitism to Christianity? Are you joking? The Katzenjammer kids? Vey iz mir. Please, read the book, then we'll talk. Alan ayoung3991@aol.com ........................................................................ From hleander@pbfreenet.seflin.lib.fl.us Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 20:40:40 -0400 (EDT) From: Hans Leander To: Hj List Subject: Re: HJ/ goldhagen's book In order to discuss Goldhagen's book, one would have to read it. But if one assumes that the average Fritz (what about Gretchen?) did what the book, according to Alan Young, says he (she?) did, one must, in my view, draw the conclusion that forces much stronger than what any mid-1900th European country's culture and religion could exert must have been at work. It is one thing to be swayed by a fuehrer, being easily led, yearning for authority, and quite another to shoot children in cold blood. We must look at which factors make people do such things. What were the circumstances in Germany, the German satellites, My Lai (Vietnam), Rwanda, and Bosnia? There were and are obviously willing butchers at any time and in any country. (Lynchings also come to mind.) We must remember Stanley Milgram's experiments in obedience to authority (1963), where study participants obeyed the experimenter's directives that they shock (electrical) a protesting victim to the point of maximum punishment. I am sure that the prevailing situation in a country affects how people behave, but situations have a tendency to change, and the people with them. As Dennis Geller pointed out, the evolution of cultures are not goal-driven! We are not necessarily moving towards a better world (and what is "better" anyway? Your or my version?). While I do not want to diminish the importance of Goldhagen's book (which I will not have time to read for a while), I do not want to put too much efforts into shaping my view of the Germans either. I know that I hate the Nazis, I loathe passive bystanders and collaborators, and regret that so many do not want to deal with their prejudices. But I must yield to facts, and see that man is capable of great harm, great good, and everything in between. So, I want to concentrate on other things (while not ignoring the reasons and the guilt connected to the Holocaust). The economic genocide of the 80's, diminishing parental control and care, marketing of products through our children, TV's tremendous impact in showing us what we should have but don't, and its willingness to live our lives for us (sitcoms, soap operas, etc.), in addition to, for instance, exponentially increasing populations, are problems that must be tackled, and if we humanistic Jews believe we have something to offer, we should get to work! To build on our strengths, we must know our weaknesses. We must learn how people functions, and why. And we must never lose track of the fact that actions are carried out by people, by individuals, who are different, and who reacts differently in similar situations. Establishing guild and meting out punishment are necessary to modify behavior, but as I heard the other day that the percentage of the GNP for our judicial/penal system is now larger that the educational part, I think we have to start concentrating on raising our children and creating a society such as to provide some happiness (the pursuit of which we in the USA have the constitutional right to), which unfortunately means that the adults have to change (yes, change, because if we were the way we needed to be, society would look very differently already, and because our societies are made up of and developed by INDIVIDUALS). In the end, it starts with you and me! Hans Leander hleander@pbfreenet.seflin.lib.fl.us ........................................................................ From shas@primenet.com Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 19:34:42 -0700 (MST) From: shas To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Dr.Goldhagen Dr. Goldhagen was a guest on National Public Radio this morning. I learned that the Dr. is the son of a survivor, and a prof at Harvard. His father is also a professor, specializing in Holocaust Studies. Goldhagen spoke of his research and took a wide range of telephone calls,surprisingly none of the calls were "off the wall." Goldhagen did answer a query that Hans brought up, regarding the l963 Milgram experiment in which most student volunteers willingly applied electrical shocks, when ordered to do so upon 'subjects.' Goldhagen pointed out that orderly conclusions could not be drawn in comparison to the legions of Germans and their E.European sympathizers who shot and gassed Jews voluntarily, again and again and again. I am reading a current and chilling book, IDEOLOGY OF DEATH-WHY THE HOLOCAUST HAPPENED IN GERMANY by John Weiss an Austrian Catholic, The "works" of Martin Luther were very significant as the seed of Germany's unique brand of hatred of all things Jewish. Steve Shemin ........................................................................ From MPrival@aol.com Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Tue, 9 Apr 1996 02:32:25 -0400 From: MPrival@aol.com To: HJ@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Christianity/violence and antisemitism -------------------------------------------------------- SUBJECT: Christianity/violence and antisemitism IS CHRISTIANITY INHERENTLY VIOLENT? Roger Eden (4/4/96) wrote: >The evidence is, that more than any other system, ... throughout >history Christians revert to barbarism with monotonous >regularity. They still do. ... Time we asked Christianity to >come to terms. This is not a prejudice, just an observation. I tend to agree with the many people who have responded that this is an unfair generalization. "Christendom", the most technologically advanced civilization in the world, has used its power and technology to inflict great harm on others and on itself. I remain unconvinced that non-European peoples are inherently less violent--though they may have historically lacked the tools necessary for war and mass murder on the Christian/ European scale. The requirement to commit genocide is an important part of Jewish biblical law (Deuteronomy 20:16-18) as well an important part of early Biblical Jewish "history". We can only wish (and it may be true) that this early history of vicious conquest was fabricated centuries later, but even if this is so, its fabrication is the glorification of terrible (even if fictional) violence. There are now over 40 wars occurring in the world, few of them involving Christians (which is why we have never heard of most of them). They are mostly low-tech affairs, but involving terrible atrocities by many people on a face-to-face basis. IS CHRISTIANITY INHERENTLY ANTISEMITIC? Roger Eden (4/3/96) wrote: >Jordi brings to our attention a book that claims Germans rather >than simply Nazis were culpable for the Holocaust. It's a step >in the right direction. Surely it was Christianity that >perpetrated the Holocaust? The perpetrators came from every >country. ... Only one thing united them all - they were >baptized Christians. There can be no doubt that Christianity right from the onset was anti-Jewish, or, more specifically, anti-Judaism. It is presented in the New Testament as an extension and a refutation of Judaism. If your whole religious/philosophical outlook is based on rejection of someone else's, it's a very short step to hating the other person as well as that person's religion. Thus primitive Christianity was as inherently antisemitic as primitive Judaism was anti-pagan (I use the word "pagan" to mean polytheism, without any pejorative connotation). The Hebrew Bible is a chronicle of the rejection of polytheism and its replacement by monotheism. In recent centuries, however, Jews haven't had to deal much with pagans, and Jews haven't had the power to make much trouble for anyone, anyway. Christians, on the other hand, have continued to have Jews in their midst as a constant reminder that all people have not accepted Jesus. Also, Judaism is a tribal religion that doesn't really care too much about what other people think; though it wants all people to recognize Yahveh as the only god, it's not going to kill those who don't (unless they are Jews--e.g. Deuteronomy 13:2-12; 17:2- 7). Christianity, on the other hand, is a universal religion, which insists that all people should accept its tenets. This desire to spread its doctrine makes it (like Islam) more intrinsically aggressive, particularly against its oldest opponents--the Jews. Does that mean that all the nice, sweet people we live and work among are just waiting for a chance to kill us? I think not. Christianity, like Judaism, has developed liberal, tolerant sects over the past century or two. If a religious leader in a typical Episcopalian, Church of Christ, or Presbyterian church (at least in the USA) uttered an antisemitic statement in a sermon, that person would very quickly be out of a job. This is not true of all Protestant sects, even today, and you can hear some preachers on television going on and on about the errors of the Jews; such teachings can be easily turned into antisemitism when (as Harold Black pointed out) times get hard. Michael Kleiner has described at great length for us the attempts of Norwegian Christians, and particularly the clergy, to save the Jews of their country. The more successful Danish rescue of Jews was similarly led by the clergy (and the physicians, as well). I believe that this clergy was specifically Lutheran--the same denomination whose leaders in Germany remained silent, at best. The argument that the Protestant clergy led the Scandinavian resistance cuts both ways. The fact that Christian religious leaders would, often at great personal risk, stand up to the Nazis in some countries makes their failure of moral leadership elsewhere even more glaring by comparison. The Danish clergy were acting both as leaders and as reflectors of the attitudes of the Danish people, regardless of the anti-Jewish origins of Christianity and teachings of Martin Luther. They, like the modern liberal, tolerant Protestant sects that I am familiar with in the United States, evolved far beyond their narrow, bigoted origins. (Just like the Reform call for legalization of same-sex marriages shows evolution beyond the homophobic teachings of the Torah which make homosexual sex a capital crime--Leviticus 20:13.) (I should point out, before someone does it for me, that Judaism has been "liberalized" for many centuries in the sense that rabbinic Judaism has generally rejected the enforcement, at least by the death penalty, of the Biblical laws I have cited above). We can only hope for, and, when possible, promote, the liberalization of all religions. It is too much to expect that most people will soon become Secular Humanists. Liberal religion, with its inherent tolerance of dissenting ideas, is the best we are going to get. This is why (to respond again to Roger Eden) many of us are so critical of Islam in particular; Islam has yet to develop mainstream sects that are liberal and tolerant of others in the same sense that Reform and Conservative Judaism or some of the Protestant denominations are. (Salman Rushdie said, at one point, that he was only trying to lay the groundwork for a humanistic approach to Islam--and look where it got him). Mike Prival Machar The Washington D.C. Area Congregation for Humanistic Judaism ^Z ........................................................................ From BRoths@aol.com Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Tue, 9 Apr 1996 07:39:05 -0400 From: BRoths@aol.com To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Christianity? In a message dated 96-04-08 11:29:57 EDT, you write: >Perhaps any religion that claims exclusive truth must end by murdering those >who refuse to accept that truth. As I have pointed out, the history of humanity is bloody. Don't forget Ghengis Khan, and Tammerlane, etc. Both sides use their religion to justify their position and to help the soldiers continue to kill others. Another, PC way to think about it, is to accuse white men (that includes many of us) as causing all he world's trouble. Think of the blood-letting potential in that perspective. So far, all systems designed to bring peace and harmony have failed. All depends on who has the sharp stick, and who has the eye. ........................................................................ From BRoths@aol.com Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Tue, 9 Apr 1996 07:39:07 -0400 From: BRoths@aol.com To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Christianity and the holocaust In a message dated 96-04-08 11:29:57 EDT, Roger Eden: > Why is it that a few hundred non-Jewish university >students think that Joshua is OK, but a Chinese doing the same is not? A >rather inconsistent attitude to genocide. Roger, that is a totally predictable outcome. If the bible says something is OK, then it's OK, period. Do you know the Milgram studies in which naive undergraduate students were willing to torture people because it was in the context of a psychological experiment? Ethics exist primarily to justify behavior. ........................................................................ From DENNIS@epub.ziff.com Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Tue, 09 Apr 1996 08:31:54 -0500 (EST) From: DENNIS GELLER To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ HJ: re: kidding? >Difficult to attribute antisemitism to Christianity? Are you joking? Hardly, but perhaps I was unclear. I was saying that since everyone in Europe was Christian, and anti_semitism was nearly as prevelant, the correlation is guaranteed, but not necessarily causitive. Not that I doubt that the Church aided and abetted anti-Semitism, but I'm not willing to draw a direct line between what most chritians would think of as the core message of their religion and the practice of anti-Semitism. Perhaps someone wiser than I can demonstrate with Euclidean certainty that the postulates of Christianity lead to the theorems of anti-Semitism, but aside from a few significant lemmas like blaming the Pharisees for demanding the death of Jesus, I tend to believe that many Christians are attracted to a message that, although m,ixed with blather about afterlife and salvation, contains some essential core of the authentic Jesus, who was within the rather wide bounds of contemporary Judaism. >The Katzenjammer kids? Vey iz mir. Are you suggesting that Prussian culture was not a prime fertilizer that made the creation of a mass murder machine a bit easier in Germany than it might have been elsewhere. >Please, read the book, then we'll talk. It's on my list. However, I never bought into the "following orders" or "we all good Germans, raelly, but we can't openly oppose our government" theories of the Holocaust to begin with. What nonsense! (See, for example, Sinclair Lewis' "It can't happen here"). Dennis ........................................................................ From hleander@pbfreenet.seflin.lib.fl.us Fri May 31 20:52:27 1996 Date: Tue, 9 Apr 1996 17:23:33 -0400 (EDT) From: Hans Leander To: Hj List Subject: HJ/ Goldhagen & German/Christian guilt Again, Mike Prival has presented an excellent comment on our discussion and its topic. I would like to mention only one thing that may be of importance, and that is that religion and the church is different in Europe and the USA. Of course, Europe is diversified, and my experience is limited to Sweden, but most churches in Europe are state churches (God is handed down), while the churches in the USA are "congregational", that is, the congregants are much more involved. I was born during the war, so I do not know what the religious differences were in even Sweden before and after the war, but I would like to offer a guess that religion does not and did not play a terribly important role in most people's lives in (northern?) Europe even before the war. The churches definitely had more power, and that is probably of importance, but if I am correct, it weakens the argument that religion itself played a big role in the Holocaust. As Mike Prival said, people are not eagerly waiting to slaughter others, and I think that circumstances bring out fear and resentment in people, and if there will be no consequences in acting in a way that normally would be criminal, people will sometimes act in such a way. We seem to ignore the huge body of research that exist on when moral and ethics, and our resistance to hurting others, break down. I think Goldhagen's dismissal of Milgram's 1963 experiment (see message from Steve Shemin) is only that -- a dismissal. I understand that in Rwanda, people clubbed down their neighbors' children in some cases, very soon after the war broke out. Our "isms" sure provide a framework for our thoughts and emotions, but in view of my life experience, I will categorically claim that if we do not concentrate of individuals, we are never going to change this world for the better. It is individuals who produce, invent, write, and peddle. And it is individuals who react to what is produced, invented, written, and peddled. It starts with the individual, and it ends with the individual. Hans Leander hleander@pbfreenet.seflin.lib.fl.us ........................................................................ From henriko@lmd.ens.fr Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: Wed, 10 Apr 1996 00:35:36 +0200 (MET DST) From: RASMUSSEN Henrik To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/Holocaust - Christianity I hope I am not repeating a previous message here, but I think it is undeniable that Christianity predisposes people to anti-semitism. ( e.g., murder of Christ, `demon spawn'). There is plenty of evidence: the rantings of Martin Luther - which are remarkably similar to those in `Mein Kampf', - the fact that the Crusades were often preceded by attacks on Jews, the attitudes of Catholics, in particular the Pope, during WWII etc. Of course, Christianity alone is not enough, but if you then find a Xstian suddenly with a mind to murder someone, well.... Henrik Rasmussen ........................................................................ From goldhamr@teleport.com Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: Wed, 10 Apr 1996 08:38:56 -0700 (PDT) From: "M. Michael/Jane Goldhamer" To: Humanistic Judaism Subject: HJ/ Two replies In re. Holocaust complicity, Roger Eden asks what are the circumstances that enable such behaviour. Soon after WWII, a book called "The Authoritarian Personality" came out (Theodore Reich main author, I believe). The purpose of the book was to provide an answer to that question; it was a research effort which concluded that people who are apt to buy into such things as Naziism have certain personality traits which come from their rearing. Still good reading, I think. In re. YomHaShoah observances, Bernie Banet asks what various groups are doing. The Humanistic Jews of Greater Portland are co-sponsoring a community-wide service (theistic, of course, but we're glad to do it in the name of participation in the community). The service is advertised in the 1 April issue of the Jewish Review, and lists sponsors prominently as the Oregon Holocaust Resource Center, Congregation Neveh Shalom (conservative), Congregation Beth Israel (reform), Congregation Shaarie Torah (traditional), Humanistic Jews of Greater Portland, the American Jewish Committee, and Mittleman Jewish Community Center. Judith Meller, our member who is a survivor of Auschwitz, is one of the presenters. We paid $100 to be a co-sponsor, as well as being on the program through Judith. Among those not sponsors are Chabad Lubavitch, Cong. Havurah Shalom (nonaffiliated, sort of reconstructionist), the Gesher congregation (reform, outreach), P'Nai Or (Jewish renewal), Cong. Kesser Israel (orthodox), the Eastside Jewish Community, South Metro Jewish Community, and Southeast Washington (Vancouver) Jewish Community. Also Ahavath Achim (sephardic). So we're in a small select group of sponsors! Jane Goldhamer, HJGP - Oregon ........................................................................ From SVMC08A@prodigy.com Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: Wed, 10 Apr 1996 14:04:49 EDT From: MR ROBERT D WOLFE To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Christianity I just returned from vacation to discover several dozen messages on the subject of Christianity and the Holocaust. I would like to congratulate Roger Eden for telling the truth and add a few remarks of my own: (1) I find it shocking and revealing that not one single person has mentioned that the central ritual of Christianity is something called "the Eucharist" (also "the Mass" and "the Lord's Supper"). This is a ritual in which Christians take bread, which is supposed to represent the flesh of Jesus, and eat it, and then take wine, which is supposed to represent the blood of Jesus, and drink it. What is this ritual except pretending to eat a Jew? Couple this with the pictures of a tortured, bleeding Jew all over the Christian world, couple this with the unending blame of the Jewish people throughout the New Testament, and what do you have? An evil cannibal cult. (2) I am well aware that many Christians bend over backwards to avoid facing up to the implications of their own religion. Many Christians aided Jews during the Holocaust and in modern America, many Christians try as much as they can to substitute Santa Claus and the Easter bunny for the traditional Christian cycle of the birth, torture, death and ritual consumption of the One Good Jew. But when you are all finished listing all the ways in which Christians try to be nice, the fact remains that Christians as a group have sadistically tortured the Jewish people both in fact and in fancy for close to 2000 years. (3) The clear, simple and obvious reason why so many people on this list tried so hard to negate Roger's comments is because we live in a Christian-dominated society and have to find some way of adapting to it. I too don't tell every Christian that I meet just what I think of their religion. But it is one thing to kid others, quite another to kid yourself. Neither human nature in general nor religion in general is responsible for the crimes of Christianity. Christianity is responsible, and the Jewish people will never be free of anti-Semitism until Christianity is cleansed of all rituals revolving around killing and eating a male Jew. Bob Wolfe ........................................................................ From 73517.3133@CompuServe.COM Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: 10 Apr 96 21:51:07 EDT From: "Titus C.R.Mendell" <73517.3133@CompuServe.COM> To: Humanist List Subject: HJ/ German Guilt/Christian bases Before I beginn I must give you some background. I was born in Vienna. My father was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, captured on the Russian Front and spent several years in a prision camp in Siberia. He was personally decorated by the German Kaiser with the Iron Cross for defending a vital sector on the Russian Front. He often told me how when he was at the University he often had to defend himself in duels with Schlaeger (long swords)where real blood was spilled (he lost part of an ear and had a large scar on his skin.) because he was a jew. He said he wanted to be part of the pan german movement and saw no point in dueling for a religion which he disliked, so he converted to Christianity, c choosing the Zwingly oriented Evanelical Reformed Church). After being a journalist he became a business man in partnership with Karl Bondy. I was raised as a Christian, we had a Christmas Tree. MY mother's mother who was Jewish wanted us to learn hebrew and I can remember the most terrible fights with father. He as someone on this list pointed out objected to the stoning of adultersess, the tearing apart of bodies and the mass killing of oponents which flourish in the old testament. He also reeterated many times that mankind created God and that perhaps God was necessary as part of the human experience. There have been some references about the communion feast and that it represents eating a Jew and drinking the blood of a good Jew. I have never been taught that in any Sunday School which I attended. Christian's believe that like the sacrificial lamb, Jesus Christ died on the Cross for their sins and they take holy communion in remembrance of the Crusifiction. They also believe that by believing in him their sins are forgiven and they then are eligible for eternal life. During the reformation period there was great debate whether one was saved by works and faith or by faith alone. There various combants Zwingly, Calvini, etc were not above burning people on the stake for being heretics. As with everything there are some good and some bad. My aunt, my mothers sister, was married to an aryan and protected by his family throughout the nazi period. Generalizations bother me because they are used so often in political discourse to ascribe characteristics to whole groups. The current condemnations of immigrants as thieves of jobs of native american's comes to mind. Christians beliefs that Jews cruzified their Christ certainly were used by the Nazi propagndists and some clerics as justification for their antisemitism, this also was true of the Reverend Winrods, McIntire and Coughlin in the thirties and forties. But historicaly as Rabbi Wine pointed out in a class I took from him in the 1980s antisemitism predated christianity. If my memory serves my right the earliest record dates back to Alexandria. Are all Germans guilty, and did ordinary germans participate in the cruelties of that period. Let me ask you, who were the Nazis, invaders from an other planet. Of course millions of germans were involved, the exterminations process required a large army of masons, electricians (Siemens was a main contractor in doing the electrical work in the camps, clerks, carpenters etc. I never separated Nazi's from Germans they are one and the same. I also act on this, since I don't know what the leadership of Mercedes, or BMW or Krupp did during the period of 1932 to 1945 I don't buy their product lest I contribute to the income of those responsible for murder. And this brings to mind what was the relationship of General Motors to the Nazi Regime since they owned Opel during the Nazi period? I have never seen anyone raise this point. Now a little experiment to help you understand to very small degree why germans may not generally have oppossed the Nazis. Our Congress is about to pass legislation to deny medical care and education to the children of illegal immigrants ( the original version applied to all immigrants legal and illegal.). Have all of you expressed your opposition to this bill which is as evil as the Nurenberge laws, or have you rationalized your silence in some 1984 type language, Silence is Consent. The real problem of course are the employers who hire the illegals paying them slave labor wages. Or have you expressed yourself on the hypocrasy of sanctioning the Peoples Republic of Cuba but doing business with Communists China. I am currently a member ot the Birmingham Temple since 1980 and retired from Mich Civil Service, also 12 1/2 teaching. 5 YEARS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND 7 YEARS AS A CHARTER MEMBER OF THE iNTERLOCHEN ARTS ACADEMY. I live in Mesa AZ during the winter and in Dearborn MI in the Summer. I will return to Dearborn on June 1. Titus Mendell ........................................................................ From MPrival@aol.com Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: Thu, 11 Apr 1996 00:20:02 -0400 From: MPrival@aol.com To: HJ@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Eucharist/Wolfe/Cantor --------------------------------- SUBJECT--Eucharist/Wolfe/Cantor Bob Wolfe (4/10/96) wrote: > I just returned from vacation to discover several dozen >messages on the subject of Christianity and the Holocaust. ... > > I find it shocking and revealing that not one single >person has mentioned that the central ritual of Christianity is >something called "the Eucharist" (also "the Mass" and "the >Lord's Supper"). This is a ritual in which Christians take >bread, which is supposed to represent the flesh of Jesus, and >eat it, and then take wine, which is supposed to represent the >blood of Jesus, and drink it. What is this ritual except >pretending to eat a Jew? Couple this with the pictures of a >tortured, bleeding Jew all over the Christian world, couple this >with the unending blame of the Jewish people throughout the New >Testament, and what do you have? An evil cannibal cult. ... > >...the Jewish people will never be free of anti-Semitism until >Christianity is cleansed of all rituals revolving around killing >and eating a male Jew. I have been wondering how all of this discussion on Christian antisemitism had occurred without a contribution from Bob Wolfe, since this is a topic on which he has written extensively. Now I see that it was only because he was away. The point Bob expresses above is the central theme of his book "Christianity in Perspective", from which I learned a great deal. I don't mind plugging the book even though I strongly disagree with its main point (as I have discussed in my review of it in the Winter 1995 issue of "Humanistic Judaism"). The notion that Christians (actually Catholics are the real focus here since for them the conversion to flesh and blood are literally true, not symbolic) think of the Eucharist as the eating of a Jew (cannibalism!) makes no sense to me. They think of partaking of the body and blood of their god, and thus perhaps becoming like him in some way--incorporating him into themselves. They may be thinking that it is the Jews who caused his flesh to be torn and his blood to be spilled, but not that his flesh and blood are themselves Jewish. To focus on reforming the Eucharist to eliminate Christian antisemitism is, in my opinion, a totally misguided suggestion. I'm sure that anyone interested can purchase the book directly from Bob. While I'm on the subject of Bob Wolfe's books, his more recent book "Remember to Dream", which discusses and documents the role of Jews as radicals in recent centuries, is also filled with important and provocative information and ideas. Though I disagree with some of the specifics in this book, its central theme is worthy of real consideration and discussion, and is similar to some of the ideas in Norman Cantor's more recent book "The Sacred Chain". These eccentric (a word that I use more positively than pejoratively--implying reflection of the individuality of the authors) books by Wolfe and Cantor will upset and anger many of us, in part because they are totally outside our mainstream views of history and they often offend our liberal outlook. They are, however, honest attempts to present history (Jewish and Christian) from a purely secular point of view, free of religion-inspired sentimentality, and are thus of great interest to us as Secular Humanistic Jews. Mike Prival Machar The Washington D.C. Area Congregation for Humanistic Judaism ........................................................................ From SVMC08A@prodigy.com Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: Wed, 10 Apr 1996 14:04:49 EDT From: MR ROBERT D WOLFE To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Christianity I just returned from vacation to discover several dozen messages on the subject of Christianity and the Holocaust. I would like to congratulate Roger Eden for telling the truth and add a few remarks of my own: (1) I find it shocking and revealing that not one single person has mentioned that the central ritual of Christianity is something called "the Eucharist" (also "the Mass" and "the Lord's Supper"). This is a ritual in which Christians take bread, which is supposed to represent the flesh of Jesus, and eat it, and then take wine, which is supposed to represent the blood of Jesus, and drink it. What is this ritual except pretending to eat a Jew? Couple this with the pictures of a tortured, bleeding Jew all over the Christian world, couple this with the unending blame of the Jewish people throughout the New Testament, and what do you have? An evil cannibal cult. (2) I am well aware that many Christians bend over backwards to avoid facing up to the implications of their own religion. Many Christians aided Jews during the Holocaust and in modern America, many Christians try as much as they can to substitute Santa Claus and the Easter bunny for the traditional Christian cycle of the birth, torture, death and ritual consumption of the One Good Jew. But when you are all finished listing all the ways in which Christians try to be nice, the fact remains that Christians as a group have sadistically tortured the Jewish people both in fact and in fancy for close to 2000 years. (3) The clear, simple and obvious reason why so many people on this list tried so hard to negate Roger's comments is because we live in a Christian-dominated society and have to find some way of adapting to it. I too don't tell every Christian that I meet just what I think of their religion. But it is one thing to kid others, quite another to kid yourself. Neither human nature in general nor religion in general is responsible for the crimes of Christianity. Christianity is responsible, and the Jewish people will never be free of anti-Semitism until Christianity is cleansed of all rituals revolving around killing and eating a male Jew. Bob Wolfe ........................................................................ From 73517.3133@CompuServe.COM Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: 10 Apr 96 21:51:07 EDT From: "Titus C.R.Mendell" <73517.3133@CompuServe.COM> To: Humanist List Subject: HJ/ German Guilt/Christian bases Before I beginn I must give you some background. I was born in Vienna. My father was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, captured on the Russian Front and spent several years in a prision camp in Siberia. He was personally decorated by the German Kaiser with the Iron Cross for defending a vital sector on the Russian Front. He often told me how when he was at the University he often had to defend himself in duels with Schlaeger (long swords)where real blood was spilled (he lost part of an ear and had a large scar on his skin.) because he was a jew. He said he wanted to be part of the pan german movement and saw no point in dueling for a religion which he disliked, so he converted to Christianity, c choosing the Zwingly oriented Evanelical Reformed Church). After being a journalist he became a business man in partnership with Karl Bondy. I was raised as a Christian, we had a Christmas Tree. MY mother's mother who was Jewish wanted us to learn hebrew and I can remember the most terrible fights with father. He as someone on this list pointed out objected to the stoning of adultersess, the tearing apart of bodies and the mass killing of oponents which flourish in the old testament. He also reeterated many times that mankind created God and that perhaps God was necessary as part of the human experience. There have been some references about the communion feast and that it represents eating a Jew and drinking the blood of a good Jew. I have never been taught that in any Sunday School which I attended. Christian's believe that like the sacrificial lamb, Jesus Christ died on the Cross for their sins and they take holy communion in remembrance of the Crusifiction. They also believe that by believing in him their sins are forgiven and they then are eligible for eternal life. During the reformation period there was great debate whether one was saved by works and faith or by faith alone. There various combants Zwingly, Calvini, etc were not above burning people on the stake for being heretics. As with everything there are some good and some bad. My aunt, my mothers sister, was married to an aryan and protected by his family throughout the nazi period. Generalizations bother me because they are used so often in political discourse to ascribe characteristics to whole groups. The current condemnations of immigrants as thieves of jobs of native american's comes to mind. Christians beliefs that Jews cruzified their Christ certainly were used by the Nazi propagndists and some clerics as justification for their antisemitism, this also was true of the Reverend Winrods, McIntire and Coughlin in the thirties and forties. But historicaly as Rabbi Wine pointed out in a class I took from him in the 1980s antisemitism predated christianity. If my memory serves my right the earliest record dates back to Alexandria. Are all Germans guilty, and did ordinary germans participate in the cruelties of that period. Let me ask you, who were the Nazis, invaders from an other planet. Of course millions of germans were involved, the exterminations process required a large army of masons, electricians (Siemens was a main contractor in doing the electrical work in the camps, clerks, carpenters etc. I never separated Nazi's from Germans they are one and the same. I also act on this, since I don't know what the leadership of Mercedes, or BMW or Krupp did during the period of 1932 to 1945 I don't buy their product lest I contribute to the income of those responsible for murder. And this brings to mind what was the relationship of General Motors to the Nazi Regime since they owned Opel during the Nazi period? I have never seen anyone raise this point. Now a little experiment to help you understand to very small degree why germans may not generally have oppossed the Nazis. Our Congress is about to pass legislation to deny medical care and education to the children of illegal immigrants ( the original version applied to all immigrants legal and illegal.). Have all of you expressed your opposition to this bill which is as evil as the Nurenberge laws, or have you rationalized your silence in some 1984 type language, Silence is Consent. The real problem of course are the employers who hire the illegals paying them slave labor wages. Or have you expressed yourself on the hypocrasy of sanctioning the Peoples Republic of Cuba but doing business with Communists China. I am currently a member ot the Birmingham Temple since 1980 and retired from Mich Civil Service, also 12 1/2 teaching. 5 YEARS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND 7 YEARS AS A CHARTER MEMBER OF THE iNTERLOCHEN ARTS ACADEMY. I live in Mesa AZ during the winter and in Dearborn MI in the Summer. I will return to Dearborn on June 1. Titus Mendell ........................................................................ From MPrival@aol.com Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: Thu, 11 Apr 1996 00:20:02 -0400 From: MPrival@aol.com To: HJ@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Eucharist/Wolfe/Cantor --------------------------------- SUBJECT--Eucharist/Wolfe/Cantor Bob Wolfe (4/10/96) wrote: > I just returned from vacation to discover several dozen >messages on the subject of Christianity and the Holocaust. ... > > I find it shocking and revealing that not one single >person has mentioned that the central ritual of Christianity is >something called "the Eucharist" (also "the Mass" and "the >Lord's Supper"). This is a ritual in which Christians take >bread, which is supposed to represent the flesh of Jesus, and >eat it, and then take wine, which is supposed to represent the >blood of Jesus, and drink it. What is this ritual except >pretending to eat a Jew? Couple this with the pictures of a >tortured, bleeding Jew all over the Christian world, couple this >with the unending blame of the Jewish people throughout the New >Testament, and what do you have? An evil cannibal cult. ... > >...the Jewish people will never be free of anti-Semitism until >Christianity is cleansed of all rituals revolving around killing >and eating a male Jew. I have been wondering how all of this discussion on Christian antisemitism had occurred without a contribution from Bob Wolfe, since this is a topic on which he has written extensively. Now I see that it was only because he was away. The point Bob expresses above is the central theme of his book "Christianity in Perspective", from which I learned a great deal. I don't mind plugging the book even though I strongly disagree with its main point (as I have discussed in my review of it in the Winter 1995 issue of "Humanistic Judaism"). The notion that Christians (actually Catholics are the real focus here since for them the conversion to flesh and blood are literally true, not symbolic) think of the Eucharist as the eating of a Jew (cannibalism!) makes no sense to me. They think of partaking of the body and blood of their god, and thus perhaps becoming like him in some way--incorporating him into themselves. They may be thinking that it is the Jews who caused his flesh to be torn and his blood to be spilled, but not that his flesh and blood are themselves Jewish. To focus on reforming the Eucharist to eliminate Christian antisemitism is, in my opinion, a totally misguided suggestion. I'm sure that anyone interested can purchase the book directly from Bob. While I'm on the subject of Bob Wolfe's books, his more recent book "Remember to Dream", which discusses and documents the role of Jews as radicals in recent centuries, is also filled with important and provocative information and ideas. Though I disagree with some of the specifics in this book, its central theme is worthy of real consideration and discussion, and is similar to some of the ideas in Norman Cantor's more recent book "The Sacred Chain". These eccentric (a word that I use more positively than pejoratively--implying reflection of the individuality of the authors) books by Wolfe and Cantor will upset and anger many of us, in part because they are totally outside our mainstream views of history and they often offend our liberal outlook. They are, however, honest attempts to present history (Jewish and Christian) from a purely secular point of view, free of religion-inspired sentimentality, and are thus of great interest to us as Secular Humanistic Jews. Mike Prival Machar The Washington D.C. Area Congregation for Humanistic Judaism ........................................................................ From goldhamr@teleport.com Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: Thu, 11 Apr 1996 17:30:57 -0700 (PDT) From: "M. Michael/Jane Goldhamer" To: Humanistic Judaism Subject: HJ/ Goldhagen's book Today's Oregonian newspaper carried a Knight-Ridder News Service article by Carol Rosenberg, which some of you have probably seen in your own newspapers. To quote from it: On a somber stage haunted by the ghosts of the Holocaust, scholars from 4 continents spent hours this week condemning a new book that claims to unlock a mystery that has bedeviled historians for decades, {description of Goldhagen's thesis follows} Almost everyone who spoke at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in the extraordinary symposium this week said Goldhagen's book was arrogant in its decisiveness. Several, including Hebrew University Professor Yehuda Bauer, Jerusalem's Holocaust expert who has published 11 books on the topic, accused the author of starting with an assumption and then selectively manipulating facts to support his argument. "The question is there. But his answer is totally wrong," said Bauer, who midway through his criticism stopped calling the 36 year old author "Dr. Goldhagen" and pointedly referred to him as "Danny." "I want to tell you something, Danny," Bauer said, "When you write about the Holocaust, remember that you are writing and talking in the presence of burning children." Michael Berenbaum, director of the U.S. Holocaust Research Institute, said he organized the event to discuss Goldhagen's "deliberately provocative work" by bringing together "men of distinction" who have "confronted the same darkness." So this week's panel and the overflow crowd of 550...included some of the world's leading experts on the era, Jewish and Gentile scholars, German journalists and students, as well as Holocaust survivors Four-plus hours of polited but pointed debate took place... Australian scholar Konrad Kwiet said the book contains "a perspective which I find more than frightening." He largely dismissed Goldhagen's claim that the book was ground-breaking as "worthless over-hype." Former Fulbright scholar Christopher Browning, who has written 4 books on the Holocaust...slammed Goldhagen as engaging in "keyhole history"--too focused on certain facts. [On the other hand, Jerry Muller, a Catholic University professor, stood up in the audience to accuse the panel of "jealousy, resentment and pettiness...resentment that this book has gotten more attention than other scholars on the subject have received." This seems to indicate that he was defending Goldhagen's work.] Jane Goldhamer, Humanistic Jews of Greater Portland, OR goldhamr@teleport.COM Public Access User --- Not affiliated with Teleport ........................................................................ From hleander@pbfreenet.seflin.lib.fl.us Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: Thu, 11 Apr 1996 22:44:19 -0400 (EDT) From: Hans Leander To: hj@teleport.com Subject: Re: HJ/ Goldhagen's book On Thu, 11 Apr 1996, M. Michael/Jane Goldhamer wrote: > Today's Oregonian newspaper carried a Knight-Ridder News Service article > by Carol Rosenberg, which some of you have probably seen in your own > newspapers. To quote from it: > >... > [On the other hand, Jerry Muller, a Catholic University professor, > stood up in the audience to accuse the panel of "jealousy, resentment and > pettiness...resentment that this book has gotten more attention than other > scholars on the subject have received." > > Another great argument in favor of this book! Hans Leander ........................................................................ From eden@siftac.easynet.co.uk Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: Thu, 11 Apr 1996 12:35:17 +0100 From: Roger Eden To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Soul searching within HJ In February this was a typical posting, prompted by the Republican Party Presidential candidate election (a direct quote): Is blatant anti-humanism (setting aside the undertones of anti-semitism for the moment) on the part of the groups that control one of the major American political parties something that humanist groups should be actively combatting in a more obvious way? The religious right (which seems to include the Catholic Buchanan as well as the predominantly Protestant Pat Robertson/Ralph Reed crowd...... In April this was a typical posting, prompted by the debate on Christianity and the Holocaust (a direct quote): ....but I think people were responsible for the Holocaust not a particular religion or group.... from a different posting...I really think there is a bit of overly enthusiastic anti-Christian prejudice here.... Can I quote without fear of being accused of some prejudice - he who is not confused by this, has misunderstood something! Roger Eden British Community for HJ eden@siftac.easynet.co.uk ........................................................................ From JERRISA@carleton.edu Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: Sat, 13 Apr 1996 01:06:09 -0600 (CST) From: JERRISA@carleton.edu To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Christianity, Anti-semitism, and Personal Responsibility If the entire subject does not appear on your screen, it is Christianity, Anti-Semitism and Personal Resposnsibility. I have been listening to the discussion that has been occuring for many weeks and I have been incredibly upset and dissapointed by the discussion that has been occuring. Almost every one of you has in the past week or so enabled every christian who ever was anti-semitic. You have given them a excuse that we will accept to throw away there personal responsibility for their actions and blame their ignorance and hatred on their belief in god. This evening I saw an extremely disturbing movie, the recent release with Morgan Freemand and Brad Pitt, SEVEN. THis is a warning along with a recommendation, it is disturbing to the point that I do not think that I will sleep this evening. BUt basically, it is the story of a serial killer who leaves a puzzle and clues about his killings. He bases all of his killings (seven) on the seven deadly sins, outlined in the christian religion. At one point during the movie, Brad PItt asks the killer if he believes that he is on a holy crusade. MOrgan Freeman interjects that he would not get so mych joy in his killing if he believed he was forced by a christian god to right the dealy sins of society. THis is the entire point. Even if these serial killers were trying to right the deadly ssible for his actions. Anti-Semistism, while it may be fueled by christianity, is an individual ignorance and hatred. People who perpetuate ANti-Semitism are personally responsible for their actions. One of the basic tenents of humanistic judaism is personal responsiblilty, not divine responsibility. We should no longer intellectualize that Anti-Semitism is caused under divine conditions and make people be individually responsible for their input to societies faults. - aj alison jerris carleton college northfield mn ........................................................................ From hleander@pbfreenet.seflin.lib.fl.us Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: Sat, 13 Apr 1996 16:40:36 -0400 (EDT) From: Hans Leander To: Hj List Subject: HJ/ Christianity, Anti-semitism, and Personal Responsibility (fwd) On Sat, 13 Apr 1996, Alison Jerris wrote: "... Anti-Semistism, while it may be fueled by christianity, is an individual ignorance and hatred. People who perpetuate ANti-Semitism are personally responsible for their actions. One of the basic tenents of humanistic judaism is personal responsiblilty, not divine responsibility. We should no longer intellectualize that Anti-Semitism is caused under divine conditions and make people be individually responsible for their input to societies faults. - aj" I will reiterate that it is important to understand all the reasons for why something happens if we are to be able to prevent bad things from happening (and good thing to happen). Finding reasons does not prevent blame and punishment. Look at our legal system (where mitigating circumstances are considered, though). We punish to change behavior, to prevent repetition, so protect potential victims, and, in my view, for revenge (emotional satisfaction or not to leave victims and others with a feeling of unfairness, which could be detrimental to human relations). However, punishment for any of these reasons does not add understanding of the causes, and neither does punishment seem to reform the punished. I also believe that potential perpetrators are emotionally too removed from the crimes and punishments of others for punishment to have any significant effect, at least for certain crimes and in certain circumstances. Most of us probably avoid crimes because we are taught to early in life (as children; although I wonder what kind of message our cartoons send our kids -- hit everyone in sight, because you are the good guy/gal?). The more our emotions are engaged in a particular case, and the Holocaust is, of course, very emotional, the more difficult do we all have to accept explanations. However, if we realize that it is the purpose of offering explanations that might be suspect, then the explanations themselves may seem more acceptable. And they are necessary! Hans Leander ........................................................................ From: bab@optimation.com (Bernie Banet) Date: Sat, 13 Apr 96 18:45 WET DST Subject: Re: HJ/ Christianity, Anti-semitism, and Personal Responsibility Alison Jerris, regarding your statemet: You have given them a excuse that >we will accept to throw away there personal responsibility for their actions >and blame their ignorance and hatred on their belief in god. Not sure I understand your point, Alison. Are we not all agreed that "God made me do it" or "I did it for Christ" or "for the glory of Allah" are not legally or morally acceptable excuses for murder, assassination, terrorism, or attempted genocide? I think you are reminding us of that, but I don't think that is the source of disagreement. Also, can we not agree that "individual responsibility" does not exculpate groups, organizations, governments, corporations, ideologies, religions, etc? As an example, I hold personally responsible the German soldier who shot my grandmother (unfortunately, not a hypothetical example), but I thereby do not cease being concerned both morally and more dispassionately, historically, with the involvement of such entities as Nazism, the teachings of Luther, the role of the Pope and the Catholic Church, the New Testament's depiction of Jews, the German government, and individuals such as Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, etc. who did not literally pull the trigger but whom the soldier, no doubt, would have said ordered him to do it. "I was only following orders" either from Hitler or God does not excuse murder. But neither does it excuse Hitler or "God." I think that Hans Leander has expressed well the importance of understanding the reasons that terrible things happen, even if these reasons do not excuse individuals from their moral responsibilities. And I believe that if you examine your notion of "individual responsibility" it does not really prohibit discussion of cultural and social reasons that people commit terrible crimes in the name of groups and ideologies. Please note, though, that asking "What role did Christian teachings and churches play in European antisemitism and the Shoah?" is not the same as saying, as Roger Eden has been doing, that Christianity is the necessary cause of antisemisitm and genocide (wherever you have either of these evils it was caused by Christians), or, as Bob Wolfe has been arguing, that Christianity is the sufficient cause for antisemitism (whereever there is Christianity or a Christian you will find antisemitism). Neither of these follow from the facts or from the questions we have been discussing. But I don't understand why discussing the role of religions and ideologies is giving anyone an excuse for crimes against humanity. Could you explain further . ===Bernie= Bernard A. Banet Phone: 313 665-7842 Fax: 313 665-7872 838 Heatherway Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104-2734 bab@optimation.com ------------------------------ From RchayaG@aol.com Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: Sat, 13 Apr 1996 19:01:27 -0400 From: RchayaG@aol.com To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Holocaust, why Just to bring this into a slightly differant light, the U.S. is very bigoted in many ways and at the moment we (the U.S.) have several differant scapegoats than just the Jews, who aren't really scapegoats as much in the U.S. any more. To name a few Arabs and GAYS. Although the U.S. is very down on gays it would be in error to say that being from the U.S. makes you dislike or hate gays. I do know that it isn't just the U.S. but I used it for an example. Rivka Also, Islam was also a rejection of Judaism but they didn't do the Holocaust. Islam is easily as prone to being used to say Jew are bad as Christianity if not more so. ........................................................................ From RQHQ47A@prodigy.com Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: Sat, 13 Apr 1996 11:53:17 EDT From: ALAN YOUNG To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ goldhagen My latest HJ digest has a letter critical of Goldhagen's book (actually a report of the symposium that discussed it)by Jane Goldhamer and a brief rebuttal by Hans Leander. What I have not seen on the HJ list is a letter from someone who has actually read the book. Today (Sunday) the NY Times book review has a new review of the book. Whereas last week a reviewer called it a landmark work, this reviewer only calls it a 'tour de force'. Don't you think it is about time that you got off your duffs and into the book store and begun to read what is probably the most significant work on the holocaust ever written? Incidentally, I saw the symposium live on Cspan and I thought that Prof. Goldhagen (aka Dannyboy) defended his thesis admirably against all critics. Alan Young rqhq47a@prodigy.com ........................................................................ From: eden@siftac.easynet.co.uk (Roger Eden) Date: Sun, 14 Apr 1996 08:52:06 +0100 Subject: HJ/ Ethnocentricity and HJ Some have used Milgram to come to the opposite conclusion from my own understanding, that if you or I were amongst his volunteers, we too would probably have behaved in the same way, as all the others. So that behaviour is not the result of social misfits, or some other individual trait, but the result of the environment Milgram created - social experiment on a University campus conducted by white coated scientists, and a very effective system too as most particiapted. And they weren't all undergrads. It seems to me that Milgram (having proved that this behaviour is not an individual thing) poses the question - what social system enables this. Is HJ capable of developing into a system which does not enable such behaviour? In Israel, where the majority live effectively in an informal HJ culture, I believe that it does. I find the behaviour of most Israelis, with an abundance of guns everywhere, in almost every private home, and with many serving as soldiers of occupation, that the general behaviour both in Israel and with the Arabs is remarkably restrained. I have often expressed the desire to generate some messianic zeal on this issue of formalising such a system, because of its importance to us and the world. We have some way to go, if we do not agree on the lessons of Milgram. Maybe I am wrong? There are many other studies, Zimbardo's simulation of a prison environment where warders were vicious and prisoners were cowed (although volunteers were arbitrarily assigned), the summer camp of 14 year olds, where the red and blue groups became the Bulldogs and Red Devils (and quite vicious to each other), and the Asch amusing experiment in conformity, all showing that social systems create the environment for aberrant (and with Asch - obviously illogical) behaviour in ordinary individuals. As with my own study of Joshua, where Christians are ethnocentric about ancient Jews but not Chinese, are we ethnocentric about Christianity? Roger Eden British Community for HJ ....................................................................... eden@siftac.easynet.co.uk From eden@siftac.easynet.co.uk Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: Sun, 14 Apr 1996 09:13:45 +0100 From: Roger Eden To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Not guilty! I did not say what Bernie claimed that I said. Roger Eden ........................................................................ From SVMC08A@prodigy.com Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: Sun, 14 Apr 1996 10:26:37 EDT From: MR ROBERT D WOLFE To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Eucharist In response to the restrained (Mike Prival) and intemperate (Bernie Banet) criticism which I received for my remarks on Christianity and the Eucharist, I would like to make the following points: (1) The Eucharist is the central ritual of the Christian religion. All those who partake in eating bread at "Holy Communion" are considered part of the "fellowship of Christ"; all those who do not are not. Virtually all Christians practice this ritual, including most of the Protestant sects. (2) All Christians are taught that the bread and wine which are consumed at "Holy Communion" are symbolic of the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. The Catholics formally teach that the bread and wine which are consumed are actually the real flesh and the real blood of Jesus Christ, due to a miraculous "transubstantiation" which takes place during the ceremony. This is called the doctrine of "the Real Presence". The Protestants treat the bread and wine merely as symbols, but there is no ambiguity as to their belief that they are symbols of the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. (3) Since all Christians believe that Jesus Christ was born a Jew, it is impossible to deny that the Christian ritual of consuming bread and wine at "Holy Communion" amounts to pretending to eat a Jew. It is no doubt true, as Mike Prival points out, that most Christians do not have this thought in their mind while they are taking part in "the Eucharist". But whether they think so or not, they are in fact pretending to be cannibals. Eating another human being is commonly called cannibalism; pretending to eat another human being is pretending to be a cannibal. And even if they call this human being "God" and execute people for doubting this, he is still a human being. They themselves make a big point of his humanity with their "God-man" theology. (4) Finally, to get back to the original issue of Christianity and the Holocaust, consider the following. On the one hand we have a religion which pretends to eat a Jew, blames Jews for rejecting this practice and has throughout its history slandered, persecuted and murdered Jews. On the other hand we have a group of people called Nazis who were raised as Christians and built their political movement on slandering, persecuting and murdering Jews. Isn't the connection obvious? I am sure that all kinds of lengthy, complicated arguments can be devised on the differences between Nazis and Christians, the role of some Christians in aiding Jews, etc., etc. The fact remains that every single group - Jews, Gypsies and Communists - whom the Nazis targeted for total extermination consisted of non-Christians, while conversely, most of the organized Christian groups in Europe either actively supported or passively accepted the Nazi assault on the non-Christians. The Catholic Church in particular was so heavily identified with the Nazis that it went to great lengths to enable hundreds of Nazis to acquire false ID papers and escape to Latin America after the war. Most of the guards in the death camps also came from Catholic backgrounds, as did Himmler and Hitler himself. It is the Catholic Church, please remember, that to this day still teaches that its members consume the real flesh and drink the real blood of a real Jew at "Holy Communion". Bob Wolfe ........................................................................ From shas@primenet.com Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: Sun, 14 Apr 1996 09:37:04 -0700 (MST) From: shas To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Bob Wolfe's comments I must support Bob Wolfe's notes of April 14 wholeheartedly. I am reading and recommend, a 1996 book, called;IDEOLOGY OF DEATH-WHY THE HOLOCAUST HAPPENED IN GERMANY by JOHN WEISS. Weiss' chapter23, "Complicities' speaks of the,"disaster of Pope Pius 12, (the pope thru WW2 until his death in l958,)for even the popes of the Crusades protested the murder of Jews, "not that Pope, nor but a small, very small number of Protestant clergy objected to Nazi slaughters, for Christianity in Germany w a s pro-Nazi. The Pope was indeed pleased "when Catholic France was invaded, .. for he detested French republicanism and was glad to see it replaced with a reactionary, racist, Catholic "puppet state in l940. It was not Hitler's charisma that swayed the masses, Christianity planted the seeds over hundreds of years, Hitler merely fanned the flames. Steve Shemin ........................................................................ Date: Sun, 14 Apr 1996 17:24:49 -0700 (PDT) From: Walter Hellman To: Jordi Sod Hoffs Cc: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Christianity/Holocaust Hello All, I have not come into this discussion because I have been somewhat overwhelmed by the breadth and implications of it. Others may be in the same boat. This is also a painful discussion for humanists of any stripe. By definition, we believe in humanity, and yet a large part of the discussion here has condemned significant portions...if not the majority...of our fellow human beings. That said, we still cannot hide our heads in the sand and pretend problems do not exist. The issues are legitimate ones for discussion. I do feel good that in many other places, topics as "loaded" as the ones we are discussing here would result in a loss of civility. While some positions presented here might be considered extreme, they have been argued from a rational basis. My sense of the prevalent view of what has been said on the list recently includes the following: 1. Christianity did not cause the Holocaust. Its underlying core doctrines made it easier for the Church to tolerate and its members to aid in the Holocaust, but clearly, there were other factors at work in Germany and in German culture of the time. 2. Any religion which holds belief in an all powerful God which only favors those who believe in that religion's particular doctrine, will hold as inferior those not believing the doctrine. The many massacres and unspeakable acts carried out since Biblical times in all areas of the world bear sad testimony to this fact. 3. The core doctrines of Christianity relating to Jesus, salvation through only through Jesus, and morality for the sake of Jesus, is completely at odds with Humanistic Judaism. But other aspects of Christianity, such as emphasis on the Golden Rule, charity and humanitarian acts, do deserve our respect. 4. It is unfair to characterize and condemn all Christians because fundamentalist interpretations of Christianity are so anti-humanist. The real danger is religious fundamentalism of any kind. Having said this, I agree with Roger that a mission of HJ should be to fight fundamentalism by providing an good alternative to it. Walter Hellman hellman@teleport.com Internet Public Access User Hillsboro, Oregon USA ........................................................................ From shas@primenet.com Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: Sun, 14 Apr 1996 13:28:27 -0700 (MST) From: shas To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ respect Jordi, hi, which aspects of Christianity do you respect? Steve Shemin ........................................................................ From jordi@mail.internet.com.mx Fri May 31 20:52:28 1996 Date: Sun, 14 Apr 1996 11:33:30 -0600 From: Jordi Sod Hoffs To: hj@teleport.com Subject: Re: HJ/ Bob Wolfe's comments Steve Shemin comments: >I must support Bob Wolfe's notes of April 14 wholeheartedly. Does this mean that you consider Christianity to be a cannibalistic cult, or that Christianity has an anti-semitic element? Regarding the "cannibalistic element", Robert Wolfe has completely misconstrued the meaning of the Eucharist, IMHO. The Eucharist an attempt to partake of the divinity. Since God was made flesh, by eating "flesh", you have God within yourself, partaking of his infinite goodness. Now, is that all that bad? Furtnermore, Jesus offered his own body OUT OF HIS OWN FREE WILL, as a way of SYMBOLICALLY sharing his self. Think of mother's milk; the mother is freely giving away part of her substance to nurture the child. Likewise, Christ is "giving away" his own body as a way to nurture his flock. The Eurcharist is a way to symbolize Christ's sacrifice and infinite love for humanity. To complicate things further, there is more than one kind of cannibalism, and some kinds of cannibalism have respectable connotations. Among certain groups in Borneo (?), a soup is made with the loved one's ashes, which is consumed by his/her relatives. In this way, one's loved ones become part of one's own body; one is preserving them by having them be part of the living. "You are not dead; you live in me." [Remark on Pius XII's anti-semitic, anti-democratic stand] > It was not Hitler's charisma that swayed the masses, Christianity planted >the seeds over hundreds of years, Hitler merely fanned the flames. Steve Shemin That Pius XII was a reactionary, an antisemite, an opportunist, and an all-around SOB I do not deny. That this can be used as a universal indictment of the Catholic Church I find ludicrious. Take John XXIII, who "removed certain words offensive to Jews from the official liturgy of the Church. On one notable occasion, he intriduced himself to a group of Jewish visitors with the biblical words, 'I am Joseph your brother,' referring to the Old Testament story of the meeting of the sons of the opatriarch Jacob at the court of Egypt." (Enc. Britannica) There's a saying in Spanish "ni tanto que queme al santo ni tanto que no lo alumbre" = "(don't put the halo) so close that it burns the saint nor so far that he gets no light." There is some truth in that elements within Christianity predisposed people against Jews. To blame the holocaust on Christianity as such is a completely different business. To answer Roger Eden's remark that the Holocaust was perpetrated in Christian lands, well, that's because Hitler did not gain firm control of the entire Mediterranean basin. Had Hitler won, you could expect countless Muslims giving over their Jewish populations to ovens in Syria, Egypt or Morocco. Why did the holocaust happen in Christian lands? Because Germans had the power and the technology to murder people by the millions. Furthemore, they were right in the middle of Christian Europe (place Germany in the Balkans, and then ask yourself what would have have happened to Syrian Jews). Jews were despised because they were DIFFERENT. People feel threatened, bothered, by having to live next to the Other. Let me remind you which other groups were targeted for extermination: Gypsies, gays, the mentally sick. Why the Gypsies? Why gays? Why retards? Surely not because they had killed Christ! The were sent to their deaths because they were not in the mold of the perfect (straight, stud, white, "normal") Aryan. BTW, have you consideed that Hitler and his minions were strongly attracted to the old Nordic religions? They not only exploited Christ for their purposes; they enrolled Wotan, Thor, and the rest of the gang too. It was not so much Parsifal that they used as theme music on their radio broadcasts; they used Walkyries more often. Christianity deserves more respect than we are giving it. An expression of a large part of humanity, it is far too complex to declare it good or bad. Just as men gave good and evil in them, so do man's creations. Respectfully, Jordi Sod. ........................................................................ Date: Mon, 15 Apr 96 14:42:13 EDT From: Lewis Gollub To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Goldhagen and "Ordinary Germans" Goldhagen has been taking a lot of flak for his documenting the role of non-Nazi Germans in the Holocaust. This issue is not new, although he must get credit for accumulating a greater wealth of evidence than earlier authors had. I was looking through Leni Yael's "The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, " and found the following. She describes the beginning of the killing operations by the Einsatzgruppen and the Order Police (ORPO) and Police Leaders (HSSPF) in Eastern Europe. Following a description of the killing methods (familiar to viewers of Schindler's List, but more frightening and tragic as I read the cold words printed black on white), she says: But, to the surprise even of the SS, the army cooperated of its own volition, and in certain areas army units played a very active role in mass murder. (P. 256) ........................................................................ From shas@primenet.com Fri May 31 20:52:30 1996 Date: Sun, 21 Apr 1996 16:03:44 -0700 (MST) From: shas To: hj@teleport.com Subject: HJ/ Milgram Problematic? Sure. Psychological research opens up interesting areas that might be further explored. Very few turn out to the critical experiement that alters understanding in significant ways. But, in such experiments, they are real people responding in ways that for them made sense. To argue that social psychological factors were significant misses the point that they are always a factor, whether in a student in college or a citizen. Such experiments show what is possible under the appropriate circumstances. The recent book on the complicity of German citizens in the Holocaust certainly goes along with Milgram's findings, that decent people can be coerced into doing things they would otherwise eschew. Bertram Rothschild Re: the above note from Bert... The Goldhamer book and Prof. Goldhamer himself speaking on NPR, explicitly stated that Milgram's findings had little to do with German actions in the first half of the 20th Century. Goldhamer says that the German populace was n o t coerced into their distainable behavior, rather they, (not all, most) followed their heart and their head. Steve Shemin