Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  But Maccoby himself—as we’ll see in the next chapter—is also not averse to “playing with fire.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Singling out Christianity: The Passion Play of Hyam Maccoby

  In which a Jewish scholar offers the explanation that dare not speak its name

  It’s the beginning of holiday season in London; the crowds bustling through the bracing December chill are exhibiting the conventional Dickensian cheer, bearing festive rolls of wrapping paper and ribbon home. But deep in the basement of the Sternberg Library of the Leo Baeck Institute for Jewish Studies, the combative scholar Hyam Maccoby was exhibiting a very different kind of holiday spirit.

  “People go on about this jolly festival of Christmas,” he was saying to me. “But I think Christmas is a sinister festival.”

  Sinister?

  “Because what is it? The sacrifice has been born. Let us rejoice. The Christian doesn’t think about Easter now, but somewhere in the back of his mind, Christmas is leading him to Easter. In the back of everybody’s mind is, Why are we celebrating this birth with such joy? We are garlanding the sacrifice. Because he’s due for a horrific death.” A horrific death the Jews will pay for, have paid for. To Maccoby, the dark truth beneath the cheer, the skull beneath the skin of the holiday spirit, is the responsibility Christianity, even Christmas, bears for the horrific death of the Jews.

  “Christians say the Holocaust is part of the evil of humanity,” Maccoby remarked to me later in our conversation. “It isn’t the evil of humanity. It’s the evil of Christendom.”

  And Hitler? “He embodied a certain aspect of Christian civilization which in other people is diffused,” he told me later on in our conversation, when he spoke of Hitler as “the boil” in which the poisons of “Christian society” came to a head.

  This is extremely strong stuff, another example of how attempts to explain Hitler drive the most mild-mannered and scholarly types, like Maccoby, to rhetorical and philosophical extremes. Sitting behind his desk in the book-lined office set in the corner of the library stacks, Maccoby has the demeanor of a retired clerk, but his words carry the fiery conviction of the warrior priests, the Maccabees, whose name he bears.

  Maccoby’s is not the emotional partisanship of a religious fanatic. An Oxford-educated literature scholar turned historian of religion, his serious convictions arise from a lifetime of study and scrupulous research. He is, he believes, merely expressing painfully uncomfortable truths that other Jews refrain from expressing for fear of offending the primarily Christian society in which they live. But for Maccoby, the Hitler explanation that dare not speak its name must be expressed, the Christian roots of genocide must be exposed. When Maccoby says, “Christmas is a sinister festival,” he’s not saying, “Bah, humbug”; he’s saying, in effect, “Bah, Holocaust.”

  To some extent, the dispute between George Steiner and Hyam Maccoby conjures up the great disputations of medieval Europe. Those disputations were, in fact, terrible Inquisitional torments inflicted on Jews in the guise of theological debates. The disputations could be seen as the intellectual crucifixion of Jewish faith. A prominent figure of Jewish learning or rabbinic scholarship would be compelled—often dragged—to the cathedral to take part in a “debate” with a leading Christian theologian over the crude proposition: Which religion has the truth: Judaism or Christianity?

  Needless to say, the fight was fixed, the judging rigged, the Jews subjected to catcalls and verbal and physical abuse while trying to maintain with dignity beliefs they had no wish to subject to debate—often against converted, renegade Jews who claimed to know insidious and shameful fallacies and secret distortions in Jewish doctrine. Maccoby himself has written a play based on one of the most famous of these, The Disputation, a play one Jewish critic described as “a Jewish Passion play.”

  While the conflict between Steiner and Maccoby has some elements of the grand medieval disputations, it’s more a battle of equals, both brilliant and impassioned partisans. But ultimately the crux of the debate comes down to the stark choice of Judaism versus Christianity. Which is more to “blame” for Hitler? Steiner finally blames Judaism’s “blackmail of transcendence” for making the Jews an object of murderous hatred. Maccoby blames what he believes is the blood hate at the heart of the Christian Gospels for sanctioning, preparing the ground for, what in his view amounts to the Christian ritual murder of the Jewish people.

  For Maccoby, a trim, distinguished-looking man who was close to seventy when I saw him, this has become a deeply ingrained article of faith but one he insists is the product of reason, years of painful immersion in the history of the Christian-Jewish relationship. The executive director of the Sternberg Library in the Leo Baeck Institute (a distinguished London center for the study of German Jewish culture), Maccoby is the author of half a dozen scholarly books, but he’s most well known in America through his combative polemics in Commentary, which challenge Jews to cut through the warm fog of ecumenical hopes and cast a cold eye on the responsibility of Christian culture and Christian belief for the Holocaust.

  For someone with Maccoby’s views on the responsibility of Christianity, George Steiner’s elaborate speculations about the responsibilities of Judaism are not merely misguided, they are patently offensive. He goes so far as to accuse Steiner of “glorifying Hitler” by giving him that final unrefuted speech of blame-the-Jews self-justification in The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H. Maccoby’s tone in speaking of Steiner ranges from the acidulous (he does “not consider him a charlatan,” although he implies others do) to the contemptuous: He accuses Steiner of “playing with fire” in giving Hitler’s incendiary speech such rhetorical power. He makes it sound as if Steiner were an irresponsible child playing with matches.

  But there is a sense in which Maccoby himself can be seen as “playing with fire,” burning bridges—the fragile bridges of ecumenicism that link Christians and Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust—by insisting Christianity is irremediably infected with a murderously evil hatred in its very essence.

  When I raised the question, Maccoby’s response was, “Forget ecumenicism, one can’t be ecumenical with a faith whose essence is sanctioned hatred of Jews.”

  Maccoby knows that what he’s doing is breaking a taboo, that pronouncing aloud the explanation that dare not speak its name can be as troubling to Jews as it is to Christians. He’d first advanced the notion that Christianity (not just some Christians) must bear responsibility for the Holocaust—that it was not an aberration of Christian principles but a culmination of some malevolent essence—in a piece in Commentary that created an uproar on the Jewish magazine’s letters page.

  “Your position was attacked almost as if it were a breach of decorum—of an unspoken rule that Jews have to be nice about not saying such things,” I suggested.

  “Oh very much so,” he said. “You could see the extent to which what I said horrified many people, Jews as well as Christians. But I felt that people were concerning themselves so much with Jewish-Christian relations they were sweeping things under the carpet which needed to be talked about. All these people will say, ‘Yes, yes, there have been Christians that have been anti-Semites, and it’s unfortunate that it’s spread among the people as a kind of misconception of Christianity, but it was never really the true meaning of Christianity, it was never shared by the leaders of Christianity.’ And my argument was just the contrary: that people remained for centuries unaffected by anti-Semitism. It took the indoctrination by the leaders over the entire course of eighteen centuries to make the people anti-Semitic enough to accept Hitler.”

  Maccoby is not anti-Christian per se: He speaks well of certain variants that don’t emphasize “the human sacrifice” of the Crucifixion, as he calls it, and the concomitant need to scourge the Jews as the “sacred executioners” of God. But he does believe that the impulse to hate and to murder Jews, the impulse that Hitler tapped into, is not an aberration but an essence of mainstream Christianity.

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nbsp; It is a straight line, “a direct connection,” Maccoby believes, “between Judas and Hitler.” Between the hate-filled portrait of a treacherous betrayer of the Lord, who became the archetypal Jew in Christian consciousness for eighteen centuries, and the culmination of that indoctrination in Jew-hatred: the readiness of Christian nations, Christian people to become complicit in the murder of the Judas people when incited and empowered to by Hitler.

  Perhaps considering his preoccupation with Judas, it should not come as a surprise that betrayal is a recurrent theme of Maccoby’s discourse: One senses that part of his anger at George Steiner derives from his feeling that Steiner (like one of those medieval disputationist Jews who argued the Christian side) has betrayed his own people—become a Judas to the Jews—in the service of his intellectual vanity. And Maccoby’s account of the evolution of his own personal antagonism to Christianity began with what he describes as a personal betrayal: his betrayal by T. S. Eliot.

  “I come to the whole subject as a British Jew rather than, let’s say, someone personally involved in the Holocaust,” Maccoby told me. “My family are all part of that Russian Jewry which moved to Western Europe and America as a result of the [turn-of-the-century] pogroms. It’s very possible that some of my family were lost in the Holocaust, but I don’t know because we lost touch with our Russian relatives.”

  He was, however, personally involved in the war against Hitler. “I served in the British army, but that’s the extent of my involvement.” He was too young to see combat before the war ended. He speaks of the “underestimation syndrome” in Britain in the prewar era of his childhood, “which wanted to regard Hitler as a normal kind of politician who might have been extreme in one way or another, but as time went on, rational considerations would take over. I mean, people even are talking on those lines today. There’s [John] Charmley now,” the author of a recent biography of Winston Churchill that argues that he was too fanatically obsessed with Hitler and that the British might have been better off making a “peace of equals” with Hitler in 1940 or 1941.

  “I think that’s all wrong. I mean, people just didn’t understand how extreme Hitler was and how mad he was.” He speaks of his own first intimations of that in his first year at Oxford in 1942. “When I was a student at Balliol [College], people were beginning to hand round pictures, evidence of what was going on in Hitler’s death camps. And there were one or two big meetings held at various parks in London and in Oxford to make people aware of what was going on. But people weren’t aware, the general public was not aware.”

  His own awareness had not yet begun to affect his cultural preoccupation. He’d embraced the Western canon at the roots, the fount of Balliol. “I studied classics at Oxford—that is, Latin and Greek. And then I went on to study philosophy, and, in the end, English literature became my main study.”

  As much as he embraced Western literature and Western culture, he could not help but begin to feel a growing disturbance at one aspect of it. “I think the first time I encountered that was in the writings of G. K. Chesterton, which I got very interested in when I was a teenager. I loved his writing, but then there was the streak of anti-Semitism running through it. And also Hilaire Belloc. His writing was even worse.” Something about the difference between Belloc’s and Chesterton’s anti-Semitism made Chesterton seem somehow more sinister to Maccoby.

  “With Chesterton, it didn’t seem to come too naturally to him. He seemed to pick it up from his religious belief rather than from the kind of inbred anti-Semitism that Belloc’s was. I became interested in the relationship between Christian doctrine and anti-Semitism. I’d always been interested because I was brought up in a very rabbinical family. My father’s father was, and my uncle was, a serious student of the Talmud. So I was brought up in the study of Judaism at its most scholarly. And I read quite deeply in the history of Christianity in my early years. And I came back to it after I started getting deeply into the study of English literature, because the author whom I was particularly interested in—whom I wrote many articles and did research on—was T. S. Eliot.

  “And here we’re back to the same syndrome of Christianity: an author whom I admired as a writer and who, at the same time, seemed to have anti-Semitism not just as something peripheral to his writing, but one that seemed to go right to the depth of his personality and the heart of his beliefs as a Christian.”

  To his dismay, Maccoby came to feel that it was the kind of writer who felt his Christianity most deeply, writers such as Chesterton and Eliot, who were more likely to feel impelled to disparage Jews and Judaism. And, Maccoby came to believe, in doing so they weren’t necessarily misunderstanding Christianity; they might have been understanding the anti-Semitic impulse within it all too well.

  It’s an impulse Maccoby believes emanates from, above all else, the Judas story in the Gospels, the identification of Judas as the archetypal Jew and the incitement to hatred in his portrayal. While Judas isn’t singled out for his Jewishness in the New Testament (all the disciples were at least nominally Jewish), the identification was made official by papal pronouncement as early as the fifth century when Pope Gelasius I denounced Judas as “a devil and the devil’s workman [who] gives his name to the whole race” of Jews.

  Unofficially, elements of the Judas story in the Gospels have lent themselves—or helped create—the most pernicious stereotypes of the Jew: his treachery was mercenary (he sold Jesus to the authorities for thirty pieces of silver), he was a greedy embezzler (in the Gospel of John, he’s filching from the disciples’ funds for the poor), and, above all, he is a dishonest, deceitful traitor, a smiling villain who kisses Jesus on the mouth while stabbing him in the back. Indeed, one can hear incendiary anti-Semitic echoes of the Judas story in the stab-in-the-back accusation Hitler manipulated to convince the German public that the heroic German army had not lost the First World War but had been betrayed, stabbed in the back, by treacherous Jews and Jewish-paid politicians on the home front. Judasness is central to the vision of Jewishness in Hitler’s rhetoric.

  In his focus on the Judas story, Maccoby differs from much of the previous discussion of the sources of Christian anti-Semitism, which has tended to focus more on the early “anti-Judaizing” shift in Christianity’s self-definition—from a faith that saw itself fulfilling the promises of Judaism to a faith that “superseded” its Jewish origins. The focus of this school of thought is less on Judas than on the powerful anti-Judaizing supersessionist ideology of Paul, the Jewish persecutor of Christians who became the Christian purger of Jewishness from Christianity. Some see Paul’s doctrinal predisposition as sanctioning popular rage against Jews for denying and crucifying Jesus.

  Maccoby emphatically disagrees. While there are anti-Jewish elements in Paul’s doctrine and in the rhetoric of the Pauline Epistles, “my main point is that it’s not so much a question of doctrine. It’s a question of the imaginative image that is produced by the Judas story itself. There’s no credo in Christianity saying you have to be anti-Semites. The figure of Judas plays no part in the Christian creed, but in the Christian story it plays a very important part because he personifies the figure of the Jews.”

  I was somewhat skeptical of Maccoby’s position initially. Having recently reread the Pauline Epistles, I’d been shocked at the kind of insidious, incendiary incitements Paul uses against the Jews in certain of them. But I made a point, after speaking with Maccoby, to look again at the Judas passages in the New Testament. In part, their anti-Semitic potential derives from the fact that Judas is not the abstract people that Paul rails against but a vividly embodied flesh-and-blood Jew—one Christians had not only heard of and read about but had actually seen, the sneaking, despicable betrayer familiar to centuries and centuries of Christian audiences: the Jew in the Passion play.

  What struck me also in reading the Gospel accounts of Judas is the exterminationist imperative embedded at the very heart of the story in the words, the curse, of Jesus himself. Knowing, at the Last Supper, that Ju
das has already betrayed him, Jesus issues this curse: “Woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would have been better for that man if he had never been born” (emphasis added). A curse that struck me more forcefully for having recently heard George Steiner speculate that it might have been better if the Jewish people had disappeared or never existed, had never been born. It is virtually a wish for retroactive extermination, which in Maccoby’s thesis paved the way for Hitler’s proactive extermination.

  Perhaps the emotional power of the Judas story has something to do with its pervasive rhetoric of blood. The thirty pieces of silver Judas has taken from the temple authorities to betray Jesus becomes “blood money”; when a cravenly remorseful Judas slinks back to the temple to try to return it to his paymasters, even they reject it because it’s tainted with blood. Those cursed silver coins are used by the temple authorities to buy a field that later becomes known as the Field of Blood. A place that becomes (in another variant of the story) the place where Judas meets his bloody end. It’s a field he bought with his blood money and, while surveying his purchase, he suffers a violent fall—a plunge that resulted in his intestines bursting out of his body, bathing the ground in blood, turning it into a “field of blood” in fact as well as name.

  The pervasiveness of blood in the Judas story finds its reflection, Maccoby believes, in the pervasiveness of blood in the most incendiary and murderous of anti-Semitic legends: the so-called blood libel—the persistent legend that Jews practice the ritual murder of Christian children (a kind of recapitulation of the Crucifixion) in order to obtain blood for use in Passover rituals.