How Beliefs Paved the Way for the Holocaust

While working on a project today, I went back and reviewed some notes I had taken when reading these books (I would recommend them to everyone):

(1) The Holocaust, The Church, and the Law of Unintended Consequences by Anthony J. Sciolino

(2) Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945 by Raul Hilberg

(3) Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

In The Holocaust, The Church, and the Law of Unintended Consequences, Anthony J. Sciolino recorded the following events. I placed them in chronological order so you will be able to follow the beliefs about the Jews as they evolved through Christianity. While you read them, consider how many of the actions promoted found their way into the Nazi plans against the Jews:

● Origen (185-254) -- “The blood of Jesus falls not only on the Jews of that time, but on all generations of Jews up to the end of the world.” (p. 15)

● Council of Elvira (306) – “Christians and Jews are forbidden to engage in sexual intercourse, intermarry, or even eat together.” (p. 26)

● First Council of Nicea (325) -- “Easter and Passover would be celebrated on different days.”

● In 337 – “marriage of a Jewish man to a Christian woman became punishable by death.” (p. 26)

● In 339 – “converting to Judaism became a criminal offense.” (p. 27)

● Gregory of Nyssa (380) -- “Murderers of the Lord, assassins of the prophets, rebels and detesters of God . . . companions of the devil, a race of vipers, informers, malicious utterers of false statements, darkeners of the mind, pharisaic leaven, Sanhedrin of demons, accursed, detested . . . enemies of all that is beautiful.” (p. 15)

● John Chrysostom (347-407) archbishop of Constantinople and Doctor of the Church – “The Synagogue is a brothel, a hiding place for unclean beasts . . . Jews are the most worthless of all men (who) are lustful, greedy and gluttonous . . . deceitful murderers of Christ and for killing God there is no expiation possible, no indulgence or pardon. Christians may never cease vengeance . . . Jews must live in servitude forever . . . God always hated Jews. It is incumbent upon all Christians to hate Jews.”

● Third Synod of Orleans (538) – “Jews were not permitted to show themselves on the streets during Holy Week.” (p. 27)

● Synod of Toledo (681) – “ordered the burning of the Talmud and other Jewish books.” (p. 27)

● Trulanic Synod (692) – “Christians forbidden to patronize Jewish doctors.” (p. 27)

● Third Lateran Council (1179) – “Jews could not be plaintiffs or witnesses against Christians in court cases and forbade them to disinherit their descendants who had converted to Christianity.” (p. 27)

● Fourth Lateran Council (1213) – “required Jews to wear distinctive markings on their clothing.” (p. 28)

● Council of Oxford (1222) – “prohibited the construction of new synagogues.” (p. 27)

● Synod of Breslau (1267) – “instituted compulsory ghettos for Jews.” (p. 27)

● Thomas Aquinas (1270) – “Jews sin more in their unbelief than do pagans because they have abandoned the way of justice after knowing it in some way.” (p. 27)

● Synod of Often (1279) – “forbade Christians from selling or renting real estate to Jews.” (p. 27)

● Synod of Mainz (1310) – “declared that Jewish converts who reverted to the practice of Judaism were guilty of heresy.” (p. 27)

● Council of Basel (1434) – “Jews could not obtain university decrees.” (p. 27)

● Martin Luther (1543) – “Jews are Christ killers and criminals bent on ruling the world. . . Jews were a “base, whoring people, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth. . . They were full of the devil’s feces . . . which they wallow in like swine . . . The synagogue was a defiled bride . . . an incorrigible whore and an evil slut. . . their synagogues and schools be set fire, their prayer books destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, their homes razed, and their property confiscated. . . they should be shown no mercy or kindness, afforded no legal protection, and these poisonous envenomed worms should be drafted into forced labor or expelled like mad dogs from the land for all time.” (pp. 39-41)

● Adolph Hitler (1923) – “Today, I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew. I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” (p. 83)

In Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust Daniel Jonah Goldhagen wrote:

The beliefs that were already the common property of the German people upon Hitler’s assumption of power and which led the German people to assent and contribute to the eliminationist measures of the 1930s were the beliefs that prepared not just the Germans who by circumstances, chance, or choice ended up as perpetrators but also the vast majority of the German people to understand, assent to, and, when possible, do their part to further the extermination, root and branch, of the Jewish people. The inescapable truth is that, regarding Jews, German political culture had evolved to the point where an enormous number of ordinary, representative Germans became — and most of the rest of their fellow Germans were fit to be — Hitler’s willing executioners. (p. 454)

Now let’s return to The Holocaust, The Church, and the Law of Unintended Consequences by Anthony J. Sciolino:

Religious affiliation in Nazi Germany 40 percent Roman Catholic and 54 percent Protestant – a nation that was 94 percent Christian. Nazi Germany was more Christian than the United States of America. . . How could one of the worst catastrophes in human history have started in one of the most Christian countries of Christian Europe, birthplace of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation? . . .Father Michael McGarry, a Paulist priest and rector of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem articulates this most disconcerting reality:

`We Christians need to remember that studying the Shoah (Holocaust) is not simply reading about what happened to the Jews, but what some Christians – some still worshiping, others long drop-outs from the Church – did to the Jews. The Shoah is part of Christian history. It is part of our history if we are Christian. This is frightening, this is sickening, this is, for many, unbelievable. But the first thing we Christians need to recognize is that we study the Shoah because it is part of our history, as well as part of Jewish history. Not only do we study what happened to them but what happened to us Christians.’ (pp. xix, 2)

What can we learn from this? What beliefs that promote hatred against others are simmering in American Belief Systems today? Will a charismatic leader like Adolph Hitler come forth and fan the flames of those beliefs -- and inspire another generation of willing executioners?

The answer will be “Absolutely Not!!!” – “If our highest values are “protecting life, preserving life, making life more functional and improving the quality of life.”  

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Shalom,

Jim Myers

Our Belief Choices Either Build Barriers or Bridges

THE TOV CENTER

Resolving Conflicts With People With Different Beliefs

Remarkable Story of the Power of TOV over Institutionalized Hatred

The power of TOV over institutionalized hatred is seen in Not by the Sword by Kathryn Watterson. She tells the story of Michael Weisser, a Jewish cantor, his wife, Julie and Larry Trapp.  The following is from Bruce Η. Lipton and Steve Bhaerman’s book Spontaneous Evolution: Our positive future (and a way to get there from here).

Michael and Julie Weisser had recently moved to their new home in Lincoln, Nebraska, in June 1991 when their peaceful unpacking was interrupted by a threatening phone call. Shortly afterward, they received a package of racist flyers with a card that announced -- “The KKK is watching you, scum.”

The police told the Weissers it looked like the work of Larry Trapp, a self-described Nazi and local Ku Klux Klan grand dragon. Trapp had been linked to fire bombings of African American homes in the area and a center for Vietnamese refugees. The 44-year-old Trapp, leader of the area’s white supremacist movement, was wheelchair bound and had diabetes. At the time, he was making plans to bomb B’nai Jeshuran, the synagogue where Weisser was cantor.

Julie Weisser, while frightened and infuriated by the hate mail, also felt a spark of compassion for Trapp, who lived alone in a one-room apartment. She decided to send Trapp a letter every day with passages from Proverbs. When Michael saw that Trapp had launched a hate-spewing TV series on the local cable network, he called the Klan hotline and kept leaving messages: “Larry, why do you hate me? You don’t even know me.”

At one point, Trapp actually answered the phone and Michael, after identifying himself -- asked Trapp if he needed a hand with his grocery shopping! Trapp refused, but a process of rethinking began to stir in him. For a while, he was two people -- one still spewing invective on TV – and the other -- talking with Michael Weisser on the phone, saying, “I can’t help it, I’ve been talking like that all my life.”

One night, Michael asked his congregation to pray for someone who is “sick from the illness of bigotry and hatred.” That night, Trapp did something he’d never done before. The swastika rings he wore on both hands began to itch, so he took them off.

The next day, Trapp called the Weissers and said, “I want to get out, but I don’t know how.” Michael suggested that he and Julie drive to Trapp’s apartment so they could “break bread together.” Trapp hesitated, but then agreed.

At the apartment, Trapp broke into tears and handed the Weissers his swastika rings. In November 1991, he resigned from the Klan and later wrote apologies to the groups he had wronged. On New Year’s Eve, Larry Trapp found out he had less than a year to live, and, that same night, the Weissers invited him to move in with them. Their living room became Trapp’s bedroom, and he told them -- “You are doing for me what my parents should have done for me.”

Bedridden, Trapp began to read about Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and to learn about Judaism. On June 5, 1992, Trapp converted to Judaism — at the very synagogue he had once planned to blow up. Julie quit her job to care for Larry Trapp in his last days. When Larry Trapp died on September 6, 1992, Michael and Julie were holding his hands.

TOV is the Hebrew word that describes acts that -- protect life, preserve life, make life more functional and improves the quality of life. It is the Standard the Creator used to describe His acts in the Creation accounts recorded in the first book of the Torah in Genesis chapters 1-10.

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Shalom

*SOURCE: Spontaneous Evolution: Our positive future (and a way to get there from here) by Bruce Η. Lipton and Steve Bhaerman © 2009 by Mountain of Love Productions and Steve Bhaerman; New York, NY; pp. 349-350.