Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust: The Weight and Consequences

The idea that Christianity was in any way related to the racial antisemitism that informed the Holocaust was widely resisted in the early years following the Second World War. Christian apologetics rang forth from the Protestant and Catholic arms of the Church in efforts to distinguish the anti-Judaism of Christianity from Nazi racial antisemitism. Statements condemning antisemitism called attention to its unChristian nature, stressing that the Church judged harshly all forms of injustice and hatred. While openly confessing that some members of the churches had fallen prey to antisemitism, the Church itself was seen and portrayed as irrefutably distanced from the antisemitic ideology that underwrote the M**der of European Jews. Yet before the end of the Holocaust century, major bodies of Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, had labelled traditional Church attitudes toward Jews as fuel for 'fires of hatred' and called on the Church to 'submit her own history to critical examination'. By the turn of the millennium, formal confessions had been made throughout western Christendom for historical denigration of Jews and Judaism, for silence in the face of Nazi perpetrations, and for causal relations between Christian teachings on Jews and Nazi antisemitism. Looking retrospectively at what is now in its eighth decade of development and scholarly study, this seminar addresses some of the historiographic, philosophical, and theological complexities and challenges surrounding the issues and implications of Christian complicity in antisemitism during the Holocaust years.

Chair: Tony Kushner

Carolyn Sanzenbacher, 'Solving the Jewish Problem through Conversion: Anti-Judaism or Antisemitism?'

John K. Roth, 'What is Antisemitism?'

John T. Pawlikowski, 'Uprooting Antisemitism from Christianity: What Needs To Be Done'

John T. Pawlikowski, OSM, is a Catholic priest of the Servite Order and Professor Emeritus in Social Ethics at Catholic Theological Union, University of Chicago, where he directed the Catholic-Jewish Studies Program for 48 years. He has held visiting professorships at Cambridge University (UK), Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley (California), and lectured at over a hundred universities in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Australia and the Middle East. He has authored/edited some fifteen books including Christ in the Light of the Christian-Jewish Dialogue and over a hundred articles. He served four board terms by U.S. Presidential appointment at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where he chaired what is now the Committee on Ethics, Religion and the Holocaust. He served for six years as President of the International Council of Christians and Jews based in Heppenheim, Germany, and in 2014 was awarded the John Courtney Murray Award by the Catholic Theological Society of North America. In 2019 a Festschrift titled Righting Relations After the Holocaust and Vatican II was released in his honour.

John K. Roth is the Edward J. Sexton Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Claremont McKenna College, where he taught for more than forty years and was founding director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights (now the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights). In addition to serving on the United State Holocaust Memorial Council and the editorial board of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, he has authored or edited more than fifty books, including The Failures of Ethics (2015), Sources of Holocaust Insight (2020), Warnings: The Holocaust, Ukraine, and Endangered American Democracy (2023), and Stress Test: The Israel-Hamas War and Christian-Jewish Relations (forthcoming 2025). Holocaust related appointments have included Visiting Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa (Israel), the Koerner Visiting Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and an Ina Levine Invitational Scholar at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is the holder of several honorary degrees and a recipient of the Holocaust Educational Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award for Holocaust Studies and Research.

Carolyn Sanzenbacher is an Honorary Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations at University of Southampton. She is a founding member of the International Network for Interreligious Research and Education (INIRE) inaugurated at Duke University Kenan Institute of Ethics in 2017, and past chair of the panel on the Church and the Holocaust at the European Academy of Religion. She holds PhD, MA, and BA degrees in history, philosophy, and liberal studies, with research focus on the instantiations, transitions, convolutions and patterns of Christian teachings on Jews in the history of antisemitism, and is currently writing an historiography on the Church and the Holocaust. She is the author of Tracking the Jews: Ecumenical Protestants, Conversion, and the Holocaust (Manchester University Press, 2024).

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