specifically on this limpieza de sangre.72 Statutes enacted in Toledo in 1449 also
focused on blood purity as a means to discriminate against Jews who had
converted but were not Spaniards by "blood."
As even Jewish scholars have noted, many biblical figures can be interpreted
as advocating forms of eugenics before the term was even invented. Rabbi Max
Reichler, one of the authors of ,newish Eugenics and Other Essays tells us:
To be sure eugenics as a science could hardly have existed among ancient
Jews; but many eugenic rules were certainly incorporated in the large
collection of Biblical and Rabbinical laws. Indeed there are clear
indications of a conscious effort to utilize all influences that might improve
the inborn qualities of the Jewish races and to guard against any practice
that might vitiate the purity of the race or "impair the racial qualities of
future generations" either physically, mentally, or morally... The very
founder of the Jewish race, the patriarch Abraham, recognized the
importance of certain inherited qualities, and insisted that the wife of his
"only beloved son" should not come from "the daughters of the
Canaanites," but from the seed of a superior stock.73
D'Souza provides really nothing comparable, other than a secondary reference to
Weikart, that would show that Darwin's On the Origin of Species had any
notions of blood purity or eugenics even close to this. As it is, D'Souza seems to
be confusing natural selection, the main concept behind On the Origin of
Species, with artificial selection which was an essential part of Nazism.
If we look at Hitler's own racialist rationales, we find that he appeals to the
Bible, not to On the Origin of Species, for support. One example is this
statement from Mein Kampf concerning race mixing:
... it is one of those concerning which it is said with such terrible justice that
the sins of the fathers are avenged down to the tenth generation... Blood sin
and desecration of the race are the original sin in this world ...74
But whence comes Hitler's notion that blood desecration is a sin down to the
tenth generation? It is not from any of Darwin's works. Rather, it is from
Deuteronomy 23:2-3 (RSV):
No bastard shall enter the assembly of the LORD; even to the tenth
generation none of his descendants shall enter the assembly of the LORD.
No Ammonite or Moabite shall enter the assembly of the LORD; even to
the tenth generation none belonging to them shall enter the assembly of the
LORD for ever.
Hitler adds that "To bring about such a development is, then, nothing else but to
sin against the will of the eternal creator." 75
And where do we find the notion that race mixing is a sin? It is not from On
the Origin of Species. But it is in Ezra 9:1-2 and 12:
The people of Israel, the priests, and the Levites have not separated
themselves from the peoples of the lands with their abominations ... For
they have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and for
their sons. Thus the holy seed has mixed itself with the peoples of the lands,
and in this faithlessness the officials and leaders have led the way...
Therefore give not your daughters to their sons, neither take their daughters
for your sons, and never seek their peace or prosperity, that you may be
strong, and eat the good of the land, and leave it for an inheritance to your
children for ever. [emphasis mine]
Notice that the purpose of endogamy is "so that you may be strong," which
exemplifies a classic eugenic concept of improving some desired trait through
proper breeding. Thus, Mein Kampfindicates that it is the Bible, not On the
Origin of Species, that seems to be the more direct influence for Hitler.
RACIAL STRUGGLE PART OF CHRISTIANITY
Weikart tags as particularly Darwinian the notion of history as a racial struggle.
Weikart has repeatedly used the following quote from The Descent of Man to
support this contention:
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the
civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace
throughout the world the savage races 76
But this quote is out of context. The proper context is a lament for this
extinction-not an endorsement of it. This lament is even clearer if one reads
further, where Darwin observes that, in fact, "savages did not formerly waste
away" until modern civilizations (not modern races) encroached upon them,
since in classical times "there is no lament in any writer of that period over the
perishing barbarians."77 Hence Darwin believed superior culture and
technology, not inferior blood, was exterminating "the savage races."
And history as a racial struggle is very much part of Christian history. Already
in 1853, and a few years before Darwin's On the Origin of Specieswas even
published, George Fitzhugh, the American proslavery advocate, had a racial
struggle framed in a survival-of-the-fittest matrix when he said:
Members of Congress of the Young American party, boast that the Anglo-
Saxon race is manifestly destined to eat out all other races, as the wire-grass
destroys and takes the place of other grasses.78
And contrary to Weikart's claim that the spiritual orientation of Judeo-
Christianity resisted such racialist ideas, Robert Knox, the famous Scottish
racialist writer, says:
Now, whether the earth be overpopulated or not, one thing is certainthe
strong will always grasp at the property and lands of the weak. I have been
assured that this conduct is not at all incompatible with the highest moral
and even Christian feeling.79
Indeed, John Campbell, a proslavery Christian writer, saw racial struggle as an
essential part of the history of mankind, and he quotes Knox for part of his 1851
essay, "Negro-Mania":
The antagonism of races is working itself out in every instance where two
races are put in collision by the quicker or slower extinction of the inferior
and feebler race ... Knox has shown us everywhere the white blood treading
down and exterminating the darker races. "The Saxon (he remarks) will not
mingle with any dark race, nor will he allow him to hold an acre of land in
the country occupied by him ... There is no denying the fact that the Saxon-
call him by what name you will-has a perfect horror for his darker
brethren."80
In general, Weikart seems blissfully unaware of an abundance of PreNazi
Christian racialist literature that would show that Nazism is not a departure from
Christian history whatsoever.
CONCLUSION
D'Souza fails spectacularly in his efforts to paint Nazism as an "antireligious
philosophy" responsible for ten million deaths. First, D'Souza provides almost
no documentation for his claims, and what he does provide comes mostly from
secondary sources. He is apparently unable to read primary German sources in
the original language. He also confuses any efforts against organized Christianity
with antireligionism. But even in Table Talk, a questionable source used by
D'Souza, Hitler makes clear that being against Christianity is not the same as
being against belief in God.
D'Souza's numbers game simply hides the fact that both theistic and
nontheistic morality can result in genocide. Any differences in the number of
deaths is more an accident of history than a difference in a principle that can
justify the killing of groups based on ethnicity, race, nationality, or religion. By
the United Nations standards, Christian acts of genocide have failed just as much
as those of Maoists or Stalinists because they were all equally devoted to the
extermination of 100 percent of their respective target groups.
But the most significant problem with D'Souza's argument is his convenient
amnesia about a long history of Christian anti Judaism before Hitler and Darwin
were even born. The calling for the extermination of heretics and Jews in France
by Pope Innocent III in the Middle Ages did not need Darwinism. And Luther's
murderous seven-point plan, which is nearly identical to that of Nazism, proves
beyond a doubt that Darwinism certainly was not "necessary" to achieve a Nazi
vision (see chart below). Nazism, indeed, was very much at home in a long
tradition of Christian anti Judaism.
A COMPARISON Of, HITLER'SANTI-JEWISH POLICIES AND POLICIES
ADVOCATED INANY OE THE WORKS OF MARTIN LUTHER AND
CHARLES DARWIN
NOTES
1. Dinesh D'Souza, Whats So Great about Christianity (Washington, DC:
Regnery, 2007), p. 215.
2. D'Souza, Whats So Great, p. 215. D'Souza is particularly responding to the
arguments of Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of
Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell•
Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006); and Richard
Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).
3. D'Souza, Whats So Great, p. 214.
4. Hector Avalos, Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005), pp. 325-34.
5. See especially, Tatiana A. Chuinachenko, Church and State in Soviet
Russia.Russian Orthodoxy from World War II to the Krushchev Years, trans.
Edward E. Roslof (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002).
6. Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler Evolutionary Ethics Eugenics, and
Racism in Germany (New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2004).
7. A Summary of the United Nations Agreements on Huinan Rights at:
http://www.hrweb.org/legal/undocs.html#CAG.
8. For recent discussions on theories of ethnicity, see Richard H. Thompson,
Theories of Ethnicity: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989).
For ancient Israel, see Kenton Sparks, Ethnicity and Identity in Ancient Israel-
Prolegomena to the Study of Ethnic Sentiments and Their Expression in the
Hebrew Bible (Winona Lake: IN: Eisenbrauns, 1998).
9. See further, Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth
Century (New York: Hermon Press, 1966); Kenneth R. Stow, Catholic Thought
and Papal Jewry Policy, 1555-1593 (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of
America, 1977).
10. Stow, Catholic Thought, p. 295; Latin (p. 291): quos propia culpa perpetua
servituta submisit.
11. D'Souza, What:r So Great, p. 208.
12. Jose M. Sanchez, Pius XII and the Holocaust-Understanding the
Controversy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002), p.
70.
13. Martin Luther, "On the Jews and Their Lies," trans. Martin H. Bertram in
Luther:r Works: The Christian in Society IV, ed. Franklin Sherman
(Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1971), pp. 268-72.
14. Martin Luther, "On the Jews," p. 268 n. 173. See also William
Montgomery McGovern, From Luther to Hitler: The History of Fascist Nazi
Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1941).
15. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheirn (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1971), p. 213; German (p. 232): Neben Friedrich der Grossen stehen
bier Martin Luther sowohl als wie Richard Wagner. Our German text is from
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munchen: Muller, 1938). Henceforth, we refer to this
source as "German (page number)."
16. On the Council of Elvira, see Louis H. Feldman, ,dew and Gentile in the
Ancient World-Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to ,7ustinian
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 373, 380, 398.
17. For a Catholic scholar's view of this period, especially in light of Vatican
II, see Edward A. Synan, The Pope and the Jews in the Middle Ages (New York:
Macmillan, 1965).
18. John Y. B. Hood, Aquinas and the Jews (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1995), p. 25.
19. See Robert Chazan, In the Year 1096 The First Crusade and the Jews
(Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1996), p. 129.
20. Shlomo Eidelberg, The Jews and the Crusaders: The Hebrew Chronicles
of the First and Second Crusades (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1977), p. 31.
21. D'Souza, Whats So Great, p. 218.
22. Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, p. 133; Latin text on p. 132. Innocent
(Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, pp. 92-93) paradoxically also subscribed to
the Augustinian idea of keeping some Jews alive as a sign of unbelief, and so he
also believed that one should "not destroy the Jews completely" (Latin: ne
deleveris omninoJudeos). On this latter idea, see Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters
of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999).
23. For this aspect of Nazism, see Gotz Aly, Peter Chroust, and Christian
Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene, trans.
Belinda Cooper (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
24. Paul R. Sweet, ed., Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945,
from the Archives of the German Foreign Ministry (Washington, DC: United
States Printing Office, 1949), series C, vol. 1, p. 347.
25. Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (New York: De
Capo Press, 2000), p. 51.
26. Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 65 / German (p. 70): So glaube ich heute im Sinne
des allmachtigen Schopfers zu handeln: Indem ich mich des ,7uden erwehre,
kampfe ich fur day Werk des herrn.
27. D'Souza, Whats So Great, p. 217.
28. Ibid.
29. Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 562 / German (p. 630): Denn Gottes
WillegabdenMen-sehen einst ihre Gestalt, ihr Wesen and ihre Fahigkeiten. Wer
sein Wert zerstort sagt damit der Schopfung des hernn, dem gattlichen Wollen,
den kampf an.
30. Sweet, Documents on German Foreign Policy, series C, vol. 1, p. 347.
31. D'Souza, What:r So Great, p. 217.
32. Richard SteigmannGall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of
Christianity, 1919-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 221.
For a study of the anti-Jewish receptivity of the German masses, see Daniel
Goldhagen, Hider:r Willing Executioners.- Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
(New Yor
k: Little, Brown, 1996).
33. Alfred Rosenberg, Das Parteiprogramm: Wesen, Grundsatze and Ziele der
NSDAP (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1922 [25th edition, 1943]), p. 13:
Die Partei als solche vertritt den Standpunkt eines positiven Christentums, ohne
rich konfessionell an ein bestimmtes Bekenntnis zu binden. Sic bekampft den
judisch-materialistischen Geist... [my English translation].
34. Alfred Rosenberg, DerMythus des 20, Jahrhunderts: Ewe Wertung der
seeliseh-geistigen Gestaltentkampfe unserer Zeit, ('Munchen: Hoheneichen
Verlag, 1938). SteigmannGall (The Holy Reich, pp. 92-93) contends that
Rosenberg's book was not highly regarded within the Nazi Party. However,
Albert Speer (Inside the Third Reich, trans. Richard and Clara Winston [New
York: Macmillan, 1970], p. 115), Hitler's personal architect, says that "the public
regarded the book as the standard text for party ideology."
35. Rosenberg, DerMythus, p. 74.
36. Ibid., p. 78: Day positive Christentum gegenuber dem negativum der auf
der etrusco-asiatische Vorstellung zuruckgehende Priesterherrschaft and des
Hexenwahns.
37. Alfred Rosenberg, Race and Race History and Other Essays, ed. Robert
Pois and trans. Jonathon Cape (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 180.
38. See Harry M. Orlinsky, "Nationalism-Universalism and Internationalism
in Ancient Israel," in Translating and Understanding the Old Testament Essays
in Honor of Herbert Gordon May, eds. Harry Thomas Frank and William L.
Reed (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1970), pp. 206-36, especially pp. 210-11.
39. Rosenberg, Der Mythus, p. 75. My translation of the German: Gegen these
gesamte Verbastardierung, Verointalisierung and Verjudung des Christentums
wehrte rich bereits day durchaus noch aristokratischen Geist atmende
7ohannesevangelium. Robert Pois's edition (Race and Race History and Other
Essays, p. 70) translated johannesevan-gelium as "evangelical teachings of St.
John," which obscures Rosenberg's more specific reference to the book we call
the Gospel of John.
40. For illustrations of Nazi road signs with this verse, see Robert P. Ericksen
and Susannah Heschel, Betrayal-German Churches and the Holocaust
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999), fig. 6.
41. For a history of the canon and Marcionisin among Anabaptists, see my
article "The Letter Killeth: A Plea for Decanonizing Violent Biblical Texts,"
journal of Religion, Conflict, and Peace 1, no. 1 (Fall 2007):
http://www.plowshares project.org/journal/php/article.php?
issu_list_id=8&article_list_id=22.
42. D'Souza, What:r So Great, p. 217.
43. Frederic W. Farrar, The Life of Christ as Represented in Art (London:
Adam and Charles Black, 1901), p. 84.
44. See further, Susannah Heschel, An Aryan,7esus. Christian Theologians
and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
45. My quote is from the minutes of a meeting of the Nazi government on July
14, 1933. My source is Walther Hofer, ed., Der Nationalsozialismus.•
Dokumente 1933-1945 (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1976), p. 130.
46. Mit Brennender Sorge, at http://www.newadvent.org/library/docs_pi 11
mb .htin.
47. Telegram from Diego von Bergen to Eugenio Pacelli as preserved in
Raymond James Sontag et al., eds., Documents on German Foreign Policy,
1918-1945, from the Archives of the German Foreign Ministry (Washington,
DC: United States Printing Office, 1949), series D, vol. 1, p. 991.
48. See Richard Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 45.
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