Prominent Jewish Historian Lectures at Fuller
By Stephen Dove

A well-known Jewish historian's insights into the understanding of Jesus in Nazi Germany drew several members of local synagogues, as well as Fuller faculty and students, to Travis Auditorium on Monday, January 10. Sponsored by the President's Office, the event featured Susannah Heschel, chair of the Jewish Studies Program and the Eli Black Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College.

In her lecture on Protestant theologians in Nazi Germany, Heschel traced the German Protestant theological movement that eventually worked hand-in-hand with the Third Reich. She argued that this process took root the century before Hitler's regime, as many liberal German religious thinkers began peeling away Jesus' Jewishness and replacing it with an Aryan identity.

Heschel explained that many well known theologians of the period began reacting against works by Jewish theologians that compared Jesus' faith to that of the emerging Reformed Synagogues and the Pharisees of the New Testament. Specifically, they disavowed any links between Jesus and Jews, developing a popular theory that Galilee had been settled by Aryans, not Jews. This, she said, was a departure even from previous German ideas that Jesus set an example for other Jews on how to convert racially from Jewish to being Aryan.

Heschel explained that this view of Jesus as Aryan became necessary because of the way Germans of that time period understood racism. "Racism is looking at the body for clues to the soul," Heschel said. "The nose isn't the problem (to racists); what it represents is the problem."

By re-envisioning Jesus as Aryan, German theologians laid a religious framework for the Nazi movement to eliminate Jews, Heschel said. This movement was brought to a halt in 1945 with the end of World War II, but Heschel concluded her presentation by pointing out the ramifications of this movement for post-war Germany.

Although the new leaders of the Church in Germany disavowed the Aryan Jesus theology, nearly all ministers active after the war were trained in seminaries between 1933 and 1945 when this theology prevailed. Few, if any, of these pastors had received Hebrew or Old Testament training because of the links between those disciplines and the supposedly inferior Jewish race. These residual effects, Heschel said, slowed the ability of contemporary theologians to reopen the exploration of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism.

Heschel's numerous publications include the award-winning book Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, and a forthcoming book on Protestant theologians in Nazi Germany. She is also the daughter of renowned Jewish philosopher and theologian Abraham Heschel.

Stephen Dove is a first-year MDiv student from Madison, Mississippi.