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“The New Testament is the most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.” Christian Antisemitism in the 20th Century

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)

“The New Testament is the most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.” Christian Antisemitism in the 20th Century

By Manfred Gailus, Technischen Universität Berlin; Translated by Lauren Faulkner Rossi, with the assistance of DEEPL

This text originally appeared in German in Der Tagesspiegel, 7 February 2025, pg. 12-13.

There is a portrait of the former court and cathedral preacher Adolf Stoecker in the reserve room of Berlin Cathedral. For a long time, the huge painting hung in the sacristy of the church, where the clergy prepare for their sermons. Together with other portraits of cathedral preachers, the painting was taken down years ago, wrapped in packing paper and tied up tightly. This has symbolic power: Stoecker, the Christian-social co-founder of modern German antisemitism, has been made to disappear for the time being.

Stoecker died in 1909 and was buried with great expressions of condolence by the Protestant congregation. The renowned theologian Reinhold Seeberg from Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin gave a memorial speech for the deceased and paid tribute to him as a powerful, strong man of great gifts: a “pious child of God” and “gentlemanly man” at the same time. The cathedral preacher and the professor of theology were kindred spirits. With justification, Seeberg can be counted among the main guardians of Stoecker’s spirit. In 1922, he gave a lecture on Judaism and the church to the Central Committee for Inner Mission: the fight against the “Jewish spirit” is to be waged as a struggle against an orientation hostile to Christianity and Germanness. Seeberg saw Judaism as a foreign body that promoted the “dissolution of the historical and national life of the peoples”. The poison that “the Jew” served to others – so the theologian believed – was not injurious to himself. However, Seeberg rejected the unleashing of a “racial struggle” against Jewry with the aim of expulsion. One could not resort to the methods of Bolshevism. Anti-Jewish measures of violence, such as those recommended by Luther in his writings on the Jews, no longer made sense for that time.

Court and cathedral preacher Bruno Doehring spread similar resentment. Previously he had mixed his aggressive war sermons with racial antisemitic vocabulary. In his cathedral sermon on April 25, 1924, he declared that the “national question” now so burning in Germany had been awakened by the “shameless behavior of Judaism, which is hostile to Christ”. Ancient Jews could have become “the people of the earth”, but they had stoned their prophets and nailed Christ to the cross. As a people, they had thus condemned themselves to die. The clergyman proclaimed to his ever-growing audience in the cathedral that the Jews had become the “typical negative” of the world. With such convictions, the political preacher agitated in organizations such as the Evangelical League, in other associations, through a flood of newspaper articles, and as a member of the DNVP in the Reichstag.

A third important Protestant representative was also inspired by Stoecker. As a theology student, Otto Dibelius had attended a celebration of the Association of German Students in 1900, heard Stoecker’s speech, and spontaneously joined the antisemitic association. This marked the beginning of his career as an antisemitic publicist. In 1922, he complained of an “undesirable mixture of blood” due to the excessive immigration of “Eastern Jews.” In June 1927, now as general superintendent of the Kurmark in the rank of bishop, he wrote in the Berlin Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt: “The Jewish question is not primarily a religious but a racial question. The proportion of Jewish blood running through our national body is much higher than the religious statistics show.” Dibelius associated the political rise of the NSDAP after 1930 with expectations of a re-Christianization following the end of the “godless Republic” of Weimar. Accordingly, he welcomed the rise of Hitler’s party to power in alliance with the German Nationals. In the aftermath of the Nazi boycott of Jews, on April 1, 1933, which he justified, he made a more fundamental statement on the “Jewish question”: the “Jewish element” had played a leading role in all the dark events of the last fifteen years. The strong influx of Jews from the East had endangered “German national life.” No one could seriously object to the current suppression of Jewish influence. In order to solve the “Jewish question”, Germany’s eastern border had to be strictly sealed off.

Professor Seeberg, Cathedral Preacher Doehring, General Superintendent Dibelius – these voices are not outsiders, but represent the center of national Protestantism in the Weimar era. Their hybrid antisemitism combined theological anti-Judaism with set pieces of political and cultural antisemitism, while at the same time their speech about “the Jews” was mixed with völkisch ideology. With Hitler’s rise to power and the advance of the German Christian (Deutsche Christen – DC) movement, Protestant antisemitism became seriously radicalized. The publication Die Judenfrage (1933) by the renowned Tübingen New Testament scholar Gerhard Kittel should be singled out from the wealth of corresponding creeds. With his writing, he wanted to give the fight against Judaism a Christian meaning: the “meaning of our antisemitic struggle” must be to place Jews under strict immigration law again. The Christian also had his place in this battle. Jews were once the people of God, but they were no longer. Because they crucified Jesus, they had become homeless. In the New Testament, Kittel recognized the “most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.” The “calamitous mixing of blood and race” since the Enlightenment had caused a “putrefaction” of the German people and had to be corrected through strictly nationalist policies.

Where the German Christians predominated as they did in Berlin, they erased traces of Jewishness in theology, liturgy and songs. “Non-Aryan” pastors were ousted. Church hymns had to be rewritten; for the future, no “Zion” and no “Hosanna” were to be heard in the German church. Lectures on “Luther and the Jews” or Adolf Stoecker were the order of the day. In March 1937, the Berlin superintendent Schleuning* was thankful for the special edition on the “Jewish question” issued by the inflammatory newspaper Der Stürmer. He proudly emphasized that the Nuremberg Laws that Hitler gave to the Germans had their precursors in the church’s own Jewish legislation.

Now, the German Christians were not the only ones who represented the Protestants during the Nazi era. There were other, more moderate groups – or, like the Confessing Church (BK), there was church opposition. But even there, opposition to Nazi Jewish policy remained an exception – such as the high school teacher Elisabeth Schmitz‘s memorandum, “On the situation of German non-Aryans” (1935), or the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. On the contrary, ambivalence predominated in the church opposition camp: alongside sympathy and support for the persecuted, there were also explicitly antisemitic voices.

The churches were generally silent about the November 1938 pogroms, with some DC regional bishops even explicitly welcoming the outbreaks of violence. Critical voices were few and far between. Open protest against the state’s Jewish policy was dangerous. The reformed theologian Helmut Hesse preached in Wuppertal in June 1943: the church had to resist all antisemitism, testify to the salvation-historical [heilsgeschichtliche] importance of Israel in the face of the state, and resist any attempt to destroy Judaism. He was imprisoned and later sent to Dachau concentration camp, where he died at the end of 1943 at the age of 27.

After Hitler and the Holocaust, hybrid Christian antisemitism was not immediately overcome. The racist antisemitism of the German Christians was no longer present in the church public. But where had the many Nazi pastors gone? What about traditional religious anti-Judaism? The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt of October 1945 made no mention of the persecution of Jews, in which the church itself was partly involved. The Württemberg Bishop Theophil Wurm, who was the first Chairman of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), defended the severely incriminated Tübingen “Jewish researcher” Gerhard Kittel in an expert opinion (April 1947): it had been part of Kittel’s ecclesiastical teaching assignment to point out the “divine causes of the rejection of the people of Israel.” Kittel’s theologian friends in Tübingen even said that, with his writings, Kittel had “resisted in the most pronounced sense” in the area of the “Jewish question.”

The “Hoff case” was shameful: in 1943, the Berlin provost Walter Hoff* had boasted in writing that he had participated in the liquidation of Jews during the war in the East. After he had initially been stripped of his clerical rights, growing calls within the church leadership to rehabilitate the alleged Holocaust pastor reached Otto Dibelius, who had risen to become bishop of Berlin. The consistory’s decision in February 1957 restored the former provost’s full pastoral rights.

Only a few voices spoke plainly. Theological revisions of the Christian-Jewish relationship took a long time. As a religious mentality, the anti-Jewish spirit of Stoecker was deeply ingrained and outlasted the caesura of 1945. Leading churchmen such as Theophil Wurm, Bishop Hans Meiser in Bavaria and Otto Dibelius remained influenced by it throughout their lives. Ultimately, breaking away from this unfortunate tradition was a generational issue. The critical zeitgeist of the 68ers brought a breath of fresh air, in theology as well as in the churches. In January 1980, the Rhineland Regional Church adopted a groundbreaking declaration on the renewal of Christian-Jewish relations. It acknowledged its shared responsibility for the Holocaust, condemned all anti-semitism and renounced the mission to the Jews. A significant step was the Day of Repentance sermon by Wolfgang Huber, then bishop of Berlin, in 2002, which was dedicated to remembering the fate of Christians of Jewish origin. According to Huber, the Confessing Church as an institution had also failed at the time.

Through synod resolutions, the appointment of commissioners on antisemitism, and various other activities, the member churches of the EKD have distanced themselves from antisemitic traditions and are engaged in interfaith dialogue with Jewish communities. The painful issue is not closed. Uncompromising church self-education about its own antisemitic past in the twentieth century remains an important prerequisite to convincingly oppose any spread of völkisch ideas in the church and in politics and society today. Adolf Stoecker has now been taken down in Berlin Cathedral, firmly packed away in the storeroom. Thank God, one might say. May he remain there forever.

Notes:

* Translator’s note: Johannes Schleuning, superintendent of Berlin-Lichtenberg, was a Russian-German chaplain and journalist.

* Translator’s note: well-known for his antisemitism, Walter Hoff was provost of St. Peter’s Church in Berlin beginning in the mid-1930s. During the Third Reich, he was a member of the German Christians (DC) and the Nazi Party. He served in the Wehrmacht during the war.

Chapter Note: Karl Schwarz on Gerhard Kittel

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Chapter Note: Karl Schwarz on Gerhard Kittel

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University (Emeritus)

“Sie haben [. . .] geholfen, den nationalistischen Einbruch in unsere Kirche abzuwehren.” Anmerkungen zu Gerhard Kittel und dessen Lehrtätigkeit in Wien

This chapter by Karl Schwarz appeared under the above title in Uta Heil and Annette Schellenberg, eds., Theologie als Streitkultur, Vienna University Press (as published by Vandenhoek & Ruprecht), 2021, 319-339. This volume also serves as the entirety of the Wiener Jahrbuch für Theologie, vol. 13, 2021, “Herausgegeben im Auftrag der Evangelisch-Theologischen Fakultät der Universität Wien.”

Karl Schwarz, author of this chapter, has spent his career as a member of the Protestant Theological Faculty at the University of Vienna, while also filling important administrative positions at the university in several stages of his career. In addition, he has been a long-time member of the multi-national editorial board at Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, which is how I met him decades ago. In the early 1990s, Schwarz contributed a chapter on the Protestant Theological Faculty at Vienna in the important volume edited by Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz and Carsten Nicolaisen, Theologische Fakultäten im Nationalsozialismus, (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1993).[1] In the chapter reviewed here, Schwarz revisits a portion of that topic, focusing on Gerhard Kittel and the years from 1939 to 1943. This was a time when Kittel, famous as the founding editor of the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, took leave from his position at Tübingen, moved with his family to Vienna, and lectured as a visiting member of the Protestant Theological Faculty at the University of Vienna.

Schwarz touches upon several aspects of this Viennese moment in Kittel’s career. For example, the Protestant Theological Faculty at the University of Vienna, since 1938 within German borders, imagined that it might become an enlarged, more important institution as a “Borderland Faculty” (“Grenzlandfakultät”), reaching out to the “volksdeutsche Diaspora” in southeastern Europe.[2] Adding someone with the stature of Gerhard Kittel might have been useful, and both the Theological Faculty and Kittel seemed to have had this in mind. However, Schwarz then highlights another issue in this piece. That is the contrast found between one major portion of Kittel’s oeuvre, his very harsh work regarding Jews and Judaism, ongoing during those years in Vienna, and the glowing letters of support and admiration he received from Bishop Gerhard May and others during his postwar confrontation with denazification.

Schwarz’s chapter appears under a title that begins with this direct quote, taken from a letter Bishop Gerhard May of Vienna sent to Gerhard Kittel on 29.11.1946: “You have … helped protect us against a nationalistic attempt to take over our church.” Kittel then used this letter along with several others (e.g., from the theologian Hans von Campenhausen, postwar Rector at the University of Heidelberg) as character references appended to Kittel’s own Meine Verteidigung.[3] That latter document, sent to numerous friends and colleagues to convince them (and denazification authorities) of his innocence, followed eighteen months of postwar experience that suggested his guilt: his arrest by French occupation troops at the end of World War II, his removal from his professorship at Tübingen, his six months in prison, his eleven months of internment, and then his “sort of ‘Klosterhaft’” at Beuron, a form of ongoing confinement at a monastery near Tübingen.[4]

For purposes of Kittel’s denazification defense, Gerhard May’s letter could be understood as a “Persilschein,” the sort of postwar attestation named for a famous brand of German soap. These testimonies were given the nickname to identify their main goal: to wash clean a person’s Nazi past and get him or her past the denazification process. Despite the “Persilschein” term, with its satirical implications that we might be tempted to apply to Gerhard May’s letter, it is possible, of course that Bishop May had something important and appropriate to say in Kittel’s defense. He was Kittel’s bishop during those years from 1939-1943 when Kittel lectured at the University of Vienna and he and his family lived in Vienna. May in this letter made the claim for Kittel that he, as a professor of New Testament in the Theological Faculty at Vienna, worked hard to protect the Theological Faculty and the Protestant Church from the worst excesses of Nazi ideology and practice.

That claim provides the essence of the question that Karl Schwarz pursues. Were Bishop May and other important figures in the Protestant Church in Austria (an integral part of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945) accurate in their defense of Gerhard Kittel? Were they correct postwar in separating professors of theology from Nazis? Were real Christians not Nazis? Did May’s description of Kittel as a fellow Christian really establish him as one who stood up for his faith and for his co-believers against Nazi encroachment? (Among other things, Bishop May in his postwar remarks repeatedly referred to the Confessing Church, almost certainly exaggerating its level of support in Austria as well as its actual level of opposition to Hitler and National Socialism.) Kittel did in fact grow up in a pietist family and continued that tradition within his own family. He also taught the normal things for a Protestant professor of theology. In his four years at Vienna, he lectured on the synoptic Gospels, as well as on various books of the New Testament: Romans, Ephesians, Philemon, etc.[5]

However, Kittel also held a second position at Vienna, giving lectures in the Faculty of Philosophy. That is where he dealt most directly with his theories about Jews, Jewishness, and the role of Jews in history and in Germany. In particular, Kittel presented his own theory, identifying a dramatic change from traditional Jews in the Old Testament to the diaspora Jews of the modern world. This distinction about Jews allowed Kittel to accept the Old Testament and its place in the Christian Bible, when many “Deutsche Christen” wanted to exclude it. He thus stayed within the boundaries of normal Christian beliefs. It also allowed him to accept the career of his father, Rudolf Kittel, a famous professor of Old Testament and the translator of a modern version that became well known. Kittel justified his respect for Jews of the Old Testament by developing a theory that modern Jews had changed entirely during the diaspora. From about 500 BCE to 500 CE, he argued (in line with modern antisemitic prejudice), Jews lost their healthy roots in the soil of their homeland and their occupation as farmers. They then spread out in all directions, becoming the uprooted, money-oriented, disreputable, and noxious Jews of medieval and modern Europe.[6]

Kittel presented this idea in his keynote talk at the opening conference in November 1936 of the Nazi-oriented Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands. It was here that Kittel described the alleged transformation from biblical Jews to modern Jews, how “the admirable Jews of the Old Testament degenerated into the loathsome Jews of the modern world.” This lecture, “Die Entstehung des Judentums und die Entstehung der Judenfrage” [“The Origin of Judaism and the Origin of the Jewish Question”], soon appeared in the first issue of Forschungen zur Judenfrage, the new journal of research on “the Jewish question” supported by the Reichsinstitut.[7] This journal published a total of seven annual volumes, with Kittel becoming the single most active contributor. It was the sort of work and alleged expertise that helped make him seem a suitable scholar also to work on the propaganda exhibition, “The Eternal Jew” in 1938 in Vienna, and “The Physical and Mental Appearance of the Jews” in 1939.[8]

Karl Schwarz considers two seemingly contradictory explanations for Kittel’s attitude toward Jews, either a Christian antijudaism with its 2000 years of history and its basis in religious belief, or a modern antisemitism with its more recent history, its racist underpinnings, and its significance within the now discredited Nazi Germany. The former could be the sort of distinction that might allow Bishop May—whether honestly or surreptitiously—to ignore the antisemitic side of Kittel’s academic work. Was Kittel simply a pious Christian, researching and writing a spiritual critique against Jews? That could be explained as part of a long Christian tradition, not least including a quite vicious version contributed by Martin Luther. From this point of view, Kittel was simply a professor of theology. Bishop May’s claim that Kittel had always tried to protect Christianity and the church, implied that he actually held an “anti-Nazi” stance. By this argument, it was only in his role in the Faculty of Philosophy–a role ignored by Bishop May–that he indulged in antisemitism, the sort of thing for which Nazis postwar were being condemned.

Throughout the balance of Schwarz’s chapter, he pursues the abundant evidence that Kittel both participated in and contributed to the racial antisemitism of the Nazi regime. I recently noted in a publication about Kittel, edited by Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals in 2020, that Gerhard Kittel returned to Vienna in the summer of 1944 for a guest lecture on “The Race Problem in Late Antiquity and Early Christianity” [“Das Rassenproblem der Spätantike und das Frühchristentum”] In that lecture he described “Christianity as a bulwark against the Jewish threat” [“das Christentum als Bollwerk gegen die jüdische Bedrohung;” which I then described as proof of his “complicity in the Nazi persecution of Jews” [“Mittäterschaft an der Judenverfolgung der Nazis”]. I was pleased to see that Karl Schwarz quoted those two passages and affirmed my conclusion.[9]

I believe that Kittel describing Adolf Hitler as late as 1944 as a “twin bulwark” alongside the Christian church, saving Christian Europe from the Jewish menace–indeed from the Enlightenment as a whole–tells us all we need to know about where Kittel’s allegiance can be found. Karl Schwarz seems to agree. Though the title of his chapter begins with Bishop May defending Gerhard Kittel as a good Christian and an important defender of Christian culture, Schwarz concludes,

The most recent publications, calling back to memory a scholar with a worldwide reputation, show how he allowed himself, pushed by the spirit of the times, to instrumentalize the antisemitic politics of National Socialist rule—and indeed, they show how the proclamation of antijudaism turned into a Christian antisemitism. Added to that, the years of his work in Vienna register clear signals that no character references from the side of the church could hide.[10]

[Die jüngsten Publikationen rufen einen Wissenschaftler von Weltruf in Erinnerung; sie zeigen, wie er sich vom Zeitgeist getrieben für die antisemitische Politik der nationalsozialistischen Machthaber instrumentalisieren liess—und wie in der Tat aus dem proklamierten Antijudaismus ein christlicher Antisemitismus geworden war. Dazu sind auch in den Jahren seines Wirkens in Wien deutliche Signale zu registrieren, über die auch die Leumundszeugnisse der Kirche nicht hinwegtäuschen können.]

This chapter by Schwarz is a very useful treatment of the four years in which Kittel was based at the University of Vienna and also a part of the Protestant church in that region. It is interesting. It is important. And, as Schwarz shows, it confirms that the broad and deep critique of Gerhard Kittel that has developed in the past four plus decades is accurate and justified.

Notes:

[1] Additional publications by Schwarz on the Protestant Theological Faculty at Vienna include “’Haus der Zeit.’ Die Fakultät in den Wirrnissen dieses Jahrhunderts,” in Karl Schwarz and Falk Wagner, eds, Zeitenwechsel und Beständigkeit: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Evangelisch-Theologischen Fakultät in Wien 1821-1996, Schriftenreihe des Universitätsarchiv 10, Vienna 1997, 125-204; Karl Schwarz, “Zwischen kulturpolitishen Kalkül und theologischem Interesse: Die Ehrenpromotion von Nichifor Crainic an der Universität Wien,” ZBalk 56 (2020), 69-85; and Karl Schwarz, “Bejahung—Ernüchterung—Verweigerung: Die Evangelische Kirche in Österreich und der Nationalsozialismus,” JGPrÖ 124/125 (2008/2009), 18-38.

[2] Schwarz, 324-327.

[3] For a recent treatment of Kittel’s defense statement, see Matthias Morgenstern and Alon Segev, Gerhard Kittels Verteidigung: Die Rechtfertigungsschrift eines Tübinger Theologen und “Judentumsforscher” vom Dezember 1946, Berlin 2019.

[4] Schwarz, 320. Kittel died in the summer of 1948 at the age of 59, without having been given permission to return to his home (much less his position) in Tübingen.

[5] Schwarz, 330.

[6] Loyal to Nazi norms, Kittel also emphasized in his Nazi publications that the “pure” racial identity of Old Testament Jews was destroyed by sexual mixing during the diaspora. Several of his contributions to Forschungen zur Judenfrage tried to identify and prove this proclivity, in line with bizarre Nazi ideas about the imagined racial purity of “Aryans,” and hence, the special danger of racially mixed (and even sexually predatory!) diaspora Jews. See my chapter on Kittel in Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch (Yale University Press, 1985), especially 61-68. See also my first article on Kittel, “Theologian in the Third Reich: The Case of Gerhard Kittel,” Journal of Contemporary History, 12 (1977), 595-622.

[7] See Robert P Ericksen, “Schreiben und Sprechen über den ‘Fall Kittel’ nach 1945,” Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Christlicher Antisemitismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Der Tübinger Theologe und “Judenforscher” Gerhard Kittel (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2020). The actual quotation here comes from this chapter of mine, note 7, p. 33 in the Gailus and Vollnhals volume. This volume by Gailus and Vollnhals, based upon a conference on Kittel they convened in 2017, is a very important recent contribution on the “case” of Gerhard Kittel.

[8] Schwarz, 319.

[9] Schwarz, 333, and Ericksen, “Schreiben und Sprechen,” 27, note 7.

[10] Schwarz, 338.

Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Christlicher Antisemitismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Der Tübinger Theologe und ‚Judenforscher‘ Gerhard Kittel

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Christlicher Antisemitismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Der Tübinger Theologe und ‚Judenforscher‘ Gerhard Kittel (Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2020), 276pp. ISBN: 978-3-8471-0996-9.

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, University College

Even those with only a cursory knowledge of the history of the churches in Nazi Germany know the name Gerhard Kittel. The Tübingen New Testament scholar is as well-known for his anti-Judaic and antisemitic rhetoric in Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question; 1933) as he is for being the editor until 1945 of the influential Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament). Many may not be aware, though, that in 1930 Kittel participated in the conference of a Jewish mission society the goal of which included not only Jewish mission but also Jewish-Christian dialogue (Martin Buber gave a two-hour lecture titled “The Soul of Judaism”); or that in 1942 he gave an expert opinion in the show trial of Herschel Grynszpan, the Polish Jewish teenager who fatally shot Ernst vom Rath in November 1938, an event that was used as the pretext for the Reich pogrom (Kristallnacht) that followed. This volume of essays about the theologian and ‘Judenforscher’ provides nuggets such as these and fills in some gaps in his biography and bibliography.

In a wide-ranging introduction, the editors skillfully contextualize the issues surrounding Protestant anti-Judaism and antisemitism during the Third Reich. Gailus and Vollnhals use the national reactions to the commemoration of the 500^th anniversary of the German Protestant Reformation as a jumping off point. These 2017 commemorations included – for the first time in a Luther jubilee year – critical analysis of the reformer’s “Judenschriften,” of which the deeply anti-Judaic and antisemitic Von den Juden und ihren Lügen (On the Jews and Their Lies) stands out. Very soon after these commemorations ended, a group of historians, church historians, theologians, and religion scholars met in Dresden to assess Kittel’s biography, work, and legacy (7), which occasioned the present volume. Though Luther and Kittel lived and worked in vastly different historical contexts, their oeuvres stir similar debates about animus toward Jews and Judaism in Protestant theology and their real-world effects (8). Despite some overlap and repetition, the essays that follow address these issues in a comprehensive and satisfying fashion.

In his fascinating essay, “Schweigen und Sprechen über den ‘Fall Kittel’ nach 1945,” (Silence and Talk about the ‘Kittel Case’ after 1945), Robert Ericksen both recapitulates the development, impetus, and major conclusions of his own seminal work on Kittel, which is well-known to our readers, and reflects with noteworthy frankness and humility on his conversations and scholarly dialogue with the late Tübingen church historian Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, who contributed substantial scholarly works about the relationship between Kittel, Protestant theology, National Socialism, and Judaism from the 1970s until her untimely death in 1999. Contrasting his position as an American historian in the 1970s and early 1980s with hers as a church historian in the very same theology faculty to which Kittel had belonged several decades earlier, Ericksen intones, “Now I understand that she was right when she told me that a more critical, more comprehensive account on Kittel would not have been published and would have damaged her career” (38).

Clemens Vollnhals’s chapter, titled “Nationalprotestantische Traditionen und das euphorische Aufbruchserlebnis der Kirchen im Jahr 1933” (National Protestant Traditions and the Euphoric Awakening Experience of the Churches in 1933), sets the euphoric reactions of Protestants to the ascent to power of Hitler and the Nazi regime against the backdrop of longstanding Protestant traditions, especially the “close connection between religious and national feeling, the identification of emperor, empire, and Protestantism” (46) that had infused Protestant circles since the unification of Germany in 1871 and the “traumatization” brought on by the collapse of the German Empire in the wake of the First World War (45-49). The essay provides important context for an understanding of the changes brought about in Protestant circles during this momentous and tumultuous year, changes which had important ramifications for the twelve years of Nazi rule in Germany.

Gerhard Lindemann sketches Kittel’s family origins, education, and early years as a scholar. Gerhard Kittel’s father Rudolf, one of the leading Old Testament scholars of his time, rightfully looms large in this discussion. Lindemann’s conclusions are necessarily calibrated, as Kittel’s attitude toward Jews and Judaism in his early career was deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, he utilized a wide variety of Jewish sources and could often treat them in the 1920s with a certain degree of respect. On the other hand, he could accept racist categories and employ völkisch antisemitism in his analysis of a purportedly tainted “modern Judaism” (82). The essay demonstrates (as does Vollnhals’s) the importance of viewing Kittel and Protestant theology during the Third Reich through a wider chronological lens.

After sketching German Protestantism from the Kaiserreich to the Nazi era, Horst Junginger’s essay covers Kittel’s works on Jews and Judaism during the Third Reich and his lengthy 1946 “defense” of his actions toward both Jews and the Nazi regime. Junginger pulls no punches, describing Kittel’s output from 1933 to 1945 as “Judengegnerschaft in Wort und Tat” (Antisemitism in Word and Deed) (87-96). During this period, Kittel, for example, wrote Die Judenfrage, an occasional work that reached a wide audience and which combined scholarly – if often anti-Judaic – analysis with politicized and antisemitic speech (87-90); used his scholarly reputation to become a leading light of “Judenforschung” – the politically motivated denigration of Jews and Judaism via “scholarly” means (90-92); and gave an expert opinion in the show trial of Herschel Grynszpan, in which, despite the fact that Grynszpan wasn’t especially religious, Kittel portrayed his murder of vom Rath as “the act of a Talmudic Jew controlled by international Jewry” (95).

The Theologische Worterbuch zum Neuen Testament (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, or TDNT) has been so identified with Gerhard Kittel that the multi-volume work of biblical and theological philology is often referred to by the shorthand “Kittel.” Martin Leutzsch’s critical appraisal of the work labels its anti-Judaism and antisemitism a “Wissenschaftliche Selbstvergötzung des Christentums” (Scholarly self-idolization of Christianity). Helpfully, Leutzsch offers a detailed discussion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Protestant re-evaluations of Christianity as a religion eminently superior to Judaism, indeed one that is more “enlightened” in the rational, Enlightenment-era sense of that term (106-110).

Indeed, the relationship between Judaism and Christianity was marked in this era of Protestant theology by a series of newly created oppositional concepts. For example, diaspora Judaism could now be reckoned as “Spätjudentum” (late Judaism) in opposition to “Urchristentum” (early Christianity) (108-109); Judaism as a “national religion (with a national god)” v. Christianity as “universal religion” (112-113). Seen in this broader context, Leutzsch’s conclusion about the content of the TDNT (for which he offers a significant amount of evidence) is unsurprising yet nuanced. “What the reading of TDNT shows throughout is the ideological functionalization of philology and comparison of religions for the thesis of the superiority of Christianity” (118). Because of this pre-determined and “self-idolizing” approach, a fair comparison of Christianity with Judaism (or any other religion) is made impossible in the work.

Oliver Arnhold examines the connection between Kittel’s students and the “Eisenach ‘De-Judaization Institute.’” The ostensibly academic Institute for Research into and Elimination of Jewish Influence in German Church Life was a group that sought a comprehensive de-Judaization of Christianity, as demonstrated by their constant attacks against the canonicity of the Old Testament and their publication of Bibles, hymnals, and catechisms that were stripped of their Jewish elements. Arnhold reveals that a significant number of Kittel’s students (and, e.g., students of Johannes Leipoldt) who worked on TDNT were also members of the Eisenach Institute (e.g., Herbert Preisker, Rudolf Meyer, Carl Schneider, Gerhard Delling, Walter Grundmann, and Georg Bertram).

Arnhold argues that Kittel did not participate in the Eisenach Institute at least in part because he affirmed the Old Testament while Institute members largely rejected it and affirmed the “Aryan” Jesus theory. These were bridges too far, even for Kittel (131). It is also worth noting that Kittel had experienced great success as a “Judenforscher” in Walter Frank’s Nazi-approved Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands (Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany). As the Eisenach Institute was not an officially approved institution of the Nazi State, Kittel might not have craved its imprimatur. Arnhold affirms Dirk Schuster’s interpretation – essentially, that Kittel and Grundmann affirmed a view of “the Jew” that was “allegedly” based in “race research” as well as other problematic positions and practices “in order to remove Christianity from its Jewish context and to make it compatible with the Nazi ideology” (131-132)

Lukas Bormann’s essay examines Kittel’s relationships with scholars outside of Germany and the international reception of his works, from his early career to his death in 1948. Bormann begins with an analysis of the state of the Kittel archives. Given the amount of ink that has been spilled about his life and work, it is perhaps surprising that there are significant gaps in the sources. Bormann notes, “While there are publicly accessible and archival estates for the other named personalities [Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Dibelius], there is no such estate from Kittel …” Further, archival collections at Leipzig, where Kittel taught from 1917 to 1921, and from Kohlhammer Press, which published the original German version of TDNT, were destroyed in the war (135-136).

Because of his support for the Nazi State, Kittel was able to travel more freely than, e.g., Dibelius or Bultmann. Because of these same political commitments, no British universities granted him an honorary doctorate, while they did so for Barth and Bultmann largely, so Bormann, because of British support for the Confessing Church (150). Yet, despite reservations about Kittel’s known anti-Jewish, pro-Nazi views, Bultmann’s support for TDNT lent it international credibility (151). From 1937 to 1939 especially, Kittel reached the highpoint of his international influence. Bormann avers, “He had known how to use the political and ecclesiastical conditions for himself in such a way that he was perceived and addressed at home and abroad, by friend and foe as the most influential and effective New Testament scholar in Germany” (155).

In the final essay of the volume, after summarizing the last three years of Kittel’s life, Manfred Gailus summarizes and analyzes the lengthy document “Meine Verteidigung” (My Defense; 1946), which Gailus regards as Kittel’s attempt at the justification of a “heavily compromised theologian.” Gailus presents the document in a generally nuanced fashion. Resisting the temptation to read the entire document as a cynical ploy, he notes that Kittel of course would try to defend himself – he was in a potentially dire position with “the court of public opinion” at least mixed, if not convinced of his guilt, at least about his antisemitism and collusion with regime-favored figures to advance Nazi anti-Jewish policies (172-174).

Yet, Gailus also notes Kittel’s use of self-serving language, his omissions of material from The Jewish Question that made him look guilty (in My Defense, he cites passages from the lecture version, rather than the subsequently published version, which included, e.g., citations of Hitler from Mein Kampf and Kittel’s personal embrace of an “antisemitic struggle” (175)). Kittel also tried to make his cooperation with anthropologists who really were racial “scientists” – e.g., Walter Frank, Wilhelm Grau, Eugen Fischer, Otmar von Verschuer – seem “harmless” while adopting their terminology in “numerous publications” from the late 1930s through the war (176).

In his conclusion, Gailus widens the net of culpability from Kittel to include the numerous Christians (Protestant and some Catholic) who came to his defense because of his supposedly “legitimate” anti-Judaism while affirming his self-styled “rejection” of “vulgar antisemitism.” Gailus argues that, in a certain sense, it was not only Kittel in the dock in 1948; there also was “the question of legitimacy of a Christian anti-Judaism in the early twentieth century, and its theological, moral, political and legal evaluation after Hitler and the Holocaust” (181). Such a question, so Gailus, “arguably would have overwhelmed any court to decide and … hardly seems judicial in the sense of criminal law” (181).

Though Gailus is right about the broader implications of Christian anti-Judaism in a post-Holocaust world, perhaps he has, with respect to this conclusion anyway, let Kittel – and the churches – off a bit too lightly where the preceding era is concerned. It is not as if Christian anti-Judaism (and antisemitism) had not been confronted (often with dire consequences) by, e.g. Eduard Lamparter, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the “Büro Grüber,” and Julius von Jan in the decades leading up to and including the Shoah.

The remaining third of the book consists of some tools and sources that will be especially useful for Kittel specialists. These include the text of Kittel’s advisory opinion regarding Herschel Grynszpan, an excerpt from My Defense that deals with “the question of Kittel’s indirect complicity in the persecution of Jews,” (195-202), a thorough biographical outline of Kittel in its political and ecclesiastical context, and a comprehensive bibliography of Kittel’s works.

This excellent collection of essays both presents Kittel through a wide chronological lens and answers some very particular questions about his life and work. Taken together, the work synthesizes existing research and fills historical lacunae about one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century German Protestantism. Students and scholars who study religion, theology, antisemitism, Jewish-Christian relations, and the Holocaust will find the volume extremely valuable; for Kittel specialists, it will be indispensable.

Article: “Simultaneously Devout Christian and Antisemite: The Tübingen Theologian and ‘Jewish Researcher’ Gerhard Kittel”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Article: “Simultaneously Devout Christian and Antisemite: The Tübingen Theologian and ‘Jewish Researcher’ Gerhard Kittel”

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

This article was originally published in zeitzeichen, November 2020, p. 50-52. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the publisher. You can view the original German article with images here.

The renowned Tübingen New Testament scholar Gerhard Kittel (1888-1948) was an ardent enemy of Jews. His life’s work was the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT) — Generations of theology students have engaged with this standard work. The historian Manfred Gailus writes about a theologian who never showed remorse, even after the war.

Christians, it is often heard and read today, could not also be antisemites at the same time. This idea is false. Gerhard Kittel (1888-1948), the renowned New Testament scholar from Tübingen, was certainly a devout Christian. As a New Testament theologian, he confessed to being passionately anti-Jewish and repeatedly called the New Testament the “most anti-Jewish book in all the world.” As a völkisch-thinking contemporary of the Hitler era, he was also explicitly antisemitic. There is no denying his pious Christianity, which emerged biographically out of Swabian Pietism. But his genuine antisemitism is also without doubt.

In his 1942 memorandum on “The Position of Jewish Studies within the Framework of General Scholarship,” (“Die Stellung der Judaistik im Rahmen der Gesamtwissenschaft”), Kittel judged: Judaism is a disease affecting the German national body, the severity of which does not allow for “Romantic harmonization and idealization.” As soon as Jewish research ceases “to see its subject matter as a non-type, as the absence of type, as a sickness and perversion,” it offends against its purpose to be a servant of the knowledge of nature, of what is genuine, of what is healthy. Precisely because of its singularity and “essential perversion of the genuine national existence,” an independent academic Jewish Studies is necessary. Only on the basis of an accurate Jewish Studies will it be possible to determine the essential appearance of Judaism and to banish the “Jewish danger.”

Kittel wrote these lines in the fourth year of the war, 1942, when the Holocaust was well underway and the annual number of Jewish victims was reaching its zenith. One hesitates to attribute Kittel’s just-cited positions simply to Christian anti-Judaism.

Professor at Age 33

Born in 1888 in Breslau as the son of the renowned Old Testament writer Rudolf Kittel from Württemberg, Gerhard Kittel followed early in his father’s footsteps: theological studies, doctorate, habilitation. It all happened very quickly—at 33 he was professor of New Testament in Greifswald, a little later (1926) holder of the Schlatter chair in Tübingen. Like so many Protestants, Kittel had his genuine Protestant experience in 1933, the year Hitler came to power: joining the NSDAP, participating in the antisemitic German Christians, and writing lively journalism in the völkisch zeitgeist.

Kittel’s booklet “The Jewish Question” (June 1933) can be considered one of the most influential Protestant statements of the epoch. The Christian, too, he said, must have his place in the current front of the antisemitic struggle. Even though he used the term “race” sparingly and rather implicitly, in this book, as in many future publications, he lamented a disastrous “mixture of blood and race” in Germany and saw in it a “poison” that had brought about the “degradation” of the German Volk since the emancipation of the Jews in the eighteenth century and which could only be corrected again through a tough, völkisch policy. Through baptism, the theologian emphasized, a Jew willing to convert does not become a German, but remains a “Jewish Christian.”

Already in 1933 Kittel voted for a ban on Christian-Jewish mixed marriages, mentally anticipating the Nuremberg Race Laws of September 1935. He cautiously distinguished himself from the explicit racial antisemitism of leading Nazi ideologues and advocated what he believed to be ‘better,’ a more academically-based and more strongly Christian-inspired antisemitism.

Kittel’s work was complex. There was the genuine theological researcher with academic contributions to early Christianity and ancient Judaism, which found international recognition. There was the ordained theologian who proclaimed his Christian faith from the pulpit. There was the ethno-political “Jew researcher” who collaborated with the Hitler party and the Nazi state.

The real center of his life’s work, however, was the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT), the first four volumes of which were published under his editorship from 1933 to 1942. Generations of theology students have worked with this standard work. For obvious reasons, the question arises to what extent Kittel’s decided anti-Judaism and his ethnic antisemitism were reflected in the contributions of the TDNT. The latest analysis by the Paderborn theologian Martin Leutzsch shows that dedicated antisemitism only occurs marginally in the scientific articles. However, the dictionary is permeated throughout with a structural modern Christian anti-Judaism, in order to develop a Christian “narrative of superiority” vis-à-vis Judaism.

Collaboration with the Nazi Regime

Kittel’s political and ideological collaboration with the Nazi regime was expressed primarily through his participation in the “Research Department of the Jewish Question” of the leading Nazi historian Walter Frank. As a renowned theologian and expert on ancient Judaism, he took part in all four annual conferences of this institute (1936-1939) and published consistently in its antisemitic series of publications. At an event accompanying the Munich exhibition “The Eternal Jew,” Kittel gave a lecture in December 1937 on “The Racial Development of Judaism.” He took part in the Nuremberg Rally in 1938 as “the Führer’s guest of honour.”

In December 1941, Kittel wrote a report on the Paris assassin Herschel Grynszpan, who was imprisoned in Berlin, and presented his Parisian act of violence in November 1938 as the act of a “Talmudic Jew” controlled by international world Jewry. In an article on “Talmudic Thinking and Judaism” (published October 1941), Kittel wrote: “In Talmudic terms, only the Jew actually deserves to be called a person. The gentile is to the Jew as the chaff is to the wheat, like the dust to the pearl, like the miscarriage to the living child, like the animal to the human being. Even the dog still deserves preference over the non-Jew.”

Preparing the Way for the Holocaust

According to Kittel’s postwar account, it was not until the beginning of 1943 that he found out about the systematic killing of Jews in the East through his son Eberhard, who was on military leave in Tübingen. Kittel certainly did not take an active part in the Holocaust. And he must have reacted in horror to the terrible news from the East. The Tübingen theologian will, however, have to be counted among the ones who spiritually paved the way for the Holocaust.

On May 3, 1945, the French occupation forces, which had moved into Tübingen, arrested eight professors from the Eberhard Karl University, including Gerhard Kittel. Six months in prison, imprisonment in a camp for suspected Nazi perpetrators in Balingen, and forced residency in Beuron with a work permit for the monastery library—Kittel was only able to return to Tübingen in February 1948. He renounced his Tübingen professorship, but demanded an appropriate pension and wished to be able to continue the publication of the TDNT. On July 11, 1948, the theologian died at the age of 59, following a serious illness. Kittel did not die of inner brokenness or spiritual contrition.

The denazification arbitration chamber proceedings initiated against him did not reach a conclusion during his lifetime. Based on the state of affairs then and in comparison with other “cases,” he would have been acquitted. In his justification, “My Defense” (1946), there are only minor traces of a subjective self-awareness of guilt. He admitted complicity in the general catastrophe of the Germans. Individually, however, as a devout Christian, he felt at peace with himself. He wrote in 1946 that he had not touched a hair on a single Jew. Rather, as a courageous Christian confessor he had contradicted the Nazi worldview and its “vulgar antisemitism” and had worked in the party in this critical sense. With this resistance, he had risked a lot and had repeatedly been threatened with concentration camps.

Not Touched a Hair

Much about the “Kittel case” was kept silent in the post-war period. The Württemberg regional bishop Theophil Wurm, who was also the first chair of the postwar Protestant Church in Germany (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, or EKD), defended the theologian against accusations in a 1947 “expert opinion” and ruled that it was part of Professor Kittel’s ecclesiastical theological teaching assignment to show the “divine causes of the rejection of the people of Israel.”

Even in the 1970s, the Tübingen church historian Klaus Scholder had difficulty dealing with the suppressed topic. In his substantial 900-page work on The Churches and the Third Reich (1977) he mentions Kittel only marginally once in the notes. It was Scholder’s assistant at the time, Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, and the American historian Robert P. Ericksen, who simultaneously addressed the taboo topic, starting in the late 1970s. Siegele-Wenschkewitz apparently ventured too far too early with her courageous reappraisal, thereby losing the prospect of a university career as a church historian within the German theological faculties.

Further Reading: Gailus, Manfred, and Clemens Vollnhals, eds. Christlicher Antisemitismus im 20. Jahrhundert. Der Tübinger Theologe und „Judenforscher“ Gerhard Kittel. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020.

Review of Horst Junginger, The Scientification of the “Jewish Question” in Nazi Germany

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

Review of Horst Junginger, The Scientification of the “Jewish Question” in Nazi Germany (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2017), 456pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-34107-4.

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, University College

Horst Junginger’s ambitious and weighty history of an exceptionally ugly aspect of Christian scholarship during the Third Reich begins with a dedication to a Jewish woman from Karlsruhe named Sophie Ettlinger. Ettlinger “accidentally” made her way into Junginger’s meticulous work of scholarship “because she possessed a typewriter with Hebrew letters that was of service to National Socialist ‘Jew research.’” The heartrending and galling narrative about Sophie’s fate (and that of her typewriter), to which we will return shortly, illuminates not only Judenforschung during the Third Reich, but also Nazi theft of Jewish property and, ultimately, the murder of six million European Jews.

A few key conceptions and realities are at the forefront of Junginger’s study, which is a translation of a revised version of the author’s Habilitation thesis. First, the author seeks to demonstrate that Nazi-era “Jew research,” which purported to pose scholarly answers to the “Jewish Question” but in fact aimed at supporting anti-Jewish policies – was carried out at German universities in a manner that mutually reinforced religious and racial antisemitism. Thus, the book focuses on the religious aspect of modern antisemitism – even while recognizing with great care that “religious stereotypes coalesce with a racial explanation of the world” (ix). Second, the University of Tübingen’s centuries-long role as “an intellectual stronghold against Judaism” (x) culminating in its essential function as a locus of Nazi Judenforschung, is emphasized. Finally, theoretical and practical antisemitism converged during the Holocaust, as typified here by Junginger’s examination of the biographies of roughly a dozen war criminals who, the author demonstrates, were responsible for the deaths of several hundred thousand European Jews during the Shoah.

The book is presented in nine chapters. Chapters one and two set out the intellectual framework for the rest of the work, demonstrating how problematic were Nazi efforts to define Jews by means of their race or religion. The fact that baptismal records were a key means of identifying whether one was an “Aryan” or not speaks both to the crucial role played by the churches in this certification (and thus, by extension, the persecution, expropriation of belongings and property, ghettoization, and murder that followed for “non-Aryans”) and to the confusion brought about by the Nazi classification system. Junginger notes astutely, “National Socialist laws and their accompanying political commentaries could concentrate on blood and genealogical succession as much as they liked; apart from religion the state had absolutely no other means to ascertain the race of its citizens” (7).

Chapter three traces the history of the University of Tübingen’s long and tortuous history as a place of exclusion for and condemnation of Jews and Judaism. A key consideration here is how such ideas survived into the post-Enlightenment and post-emancipation eras. Junginger finds the answer, in part, in the work of the social historian Jacob Katz, who argued that, even in a far less religious epoch, Christianity was still a defining aspect of the European outlook. The pre-modern image of “the Jews” metamorphized “into a seemingly rational one” (68). Yet, even in the modern era, lingering and “antiquated” Christian prejudices still contributed to a multifaceted post-emancipation antisemitic milieu.

In chapter four, Junginger demonstrates that the University of Tübingen’s institutional bias against Jews and Judaism did not reverse during the era of the Weimar Republic, which he calls “the zenith of Jewish emancipation.” Quite to the contrary, and despite the fact that the Weimar constitution guaranteed full civil rights and access to civil service employment for all, regardless of religious affiliation, the university consciously undermined such a policy so thoroughly that, when the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service came into effect in April 1933, the university had the lowest quota of dismissals of any German university. While other reasons for this include the national malaise in the wake of the First World War, Junginger places greater emphasis on Tübingen’s centuries-long “all-encompassing nationalist Protestant consensus,” which included antisemitism (111).

Chapter five deals largely with the case of Gerhard Kittel, who became Chair of New Testament Studies at Tübingen in 1926. Thanks to the work of scholars like Max Weinreich, Robert P. Ericksen, Alan Steinweis, and Anders Gerdmar, Kittel is now a well-known and notorious case of Protestant scholarship in service of the Nazi regime, including its anti-Jewish policy. Still, Junginger’s deep dive into both primary and secondary sources offers the reader some new or lesser known aspects of Kittel. One is the revealing and harrowing account of a Jewish scholar named Charles Horowitz (1890–1969). In March 1928, Gerhard Kittel applied to the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (Emergency Association of German Science) for funding of a planned collection of rabbinic texts. In his application, Kittel stressed how vital the participation of young Jewish scholars would be. The project was approved and funded handsomely (122).

As one of the Jewish scholars hired for the project, Horowitz began working in the winter semester of 1930–1931. While working at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (College for the Study of Judaism) in Berlin, Horowitz collaborated during the early 1930s on the Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament), which was edited by Kittel. He apparently received no remuneration for this work. Horowitz also translated the Talmud treatise Jeruschalmi and proofread the Talmud references in Adolf Schlatter’s commentaries during this period. For his work overseeing a small working group for rabbinic texts in the summer of 1930, work which continued until March 1933, he received the paltry monthly stipend of 25 Reichsmark (124).

In April 1933, just two months after Hitler came to power, Kittel notified the rector’s office that Horowitz’s salary would be discontinued immediately, adding in June that Horowitz’s work as a tutorial assistant was to be taken over by Karl Georg Kuhn (1906–76) after Horowitz’s “retirement.” Just a few days before Horowitz was summarily dismissed, Kuhn had held the official boycott speech for the Nazi Party on Tübingen’s market square. Even before the National Socialists came to power, Horowitz had been the target of antisemitic hostility in Tübingen. He often found menacing letters and antisemitic notes on his desk and all of his documents were stolen from his study (125).

Horowitz’s misery would only increase, of course, with the onset of Nazi rule. Not long after his dismissal from work at Tübingen, he and his family fled to Amsterdam and then, in 1937, to Dijon, France. After the German invasion and occupation of France, in 1941, the Horowitz family fled across the demarcation line to Valence. Despite taking every precaution, including moving from place to place, in August 1942 Charles’s wife Lea was arrested and deported after a denunciation. While Charles and his children barely survived the war and the Shoah, Lea was murdered in Auschwitz (125-126).

Chapters six through eight cover the efforts of Kittel and like-minded others to transform existing confessional studies about Judaism into purportedly scholarly antisemitic studies; the extent to which such efforts were effective; the conversion of such theoretical studies into concrete action directed against Jews (that is, ghettoization, theft, violence, and murder); and the “ultimate consequences” of the antisemitism theorized at Tübingen but promulgated and executed throughout Europe during the Holocaust – that is, the aforementioned hundreds of thousands of murders carried out and/or ordered by war criminals influenced by their studies at Tübingen.

Among other things, we learn in these three chapters how Kittel was called upon in 1942 to give an expert opinion in the show trial of Herschel Grynszpan, the desperate, stateless Polish Jewish teenager who fatally shot German Legation secretary Ernst vom Rath in November 1938, an event that was used as the pretext for the Reich pogrom that began on November 9 (261ff.) and that Kittel provided both written materials and ancient Jewish caricatures for the notorious antisemitic propaganda exhibition called “Der ewige Jude,” which ran initially in the German Museum in Munich from November 1937 to January 1938 (230-231).

Though these three chapters offer a dire array of examples of words and deeds offered up by the purveyors of antisemitic Judenforschung during the war and the Holocaust, perhaps no example ties the threads of the study together quite like that of the aforementioned Sophie Ettlinger. In keeping with the increasingly common Nazi practice of theft of Jewish goods and property (made legal ex post facto) Sophie’s brand-new, very valuable portable typewriter – which contained Hebrew letters – was stolen and offered by the Reich Ministry of Education for sale to the University of Tübingen in September 1941. Though the rector at Tübingen replied favorably a few weeks later, noting that both the “research unit on the history of Judaism” and its Protestant faculty of theology would find the typewriter very useful, he received disappointing news, as it had been sold instead to the Frankfurt-based Institute for Research on the Jewish Question, whose head was Wilhelm Grau. Junginger notes the irony that an official Nazi organ for antisemitic research would thus take possession of the stolen (and re-sold) typewriter rather than “Judenforscher” Karl Georg Kuhn or another member of the faculty of Protestant theology at Tübingen.

Together with several family members, Sophie Ettlinger had been deported in October 1940 to the Gurs internment camp. Between August 5 and September 1, 1942, four deportation trains left Gurs for the extermination camps in the East, with a stop at the transit camp at Drancy along the way. Sophie was present with the more than 2,000 Jews from this group that went to Auschwitz, where Sophie was murdered (258-259).

The concluding chapter recapitulates the main emphases of the work but also reminds readers that most of the war criminals discussed in chapter eight—all of whom had significant ties to the University of Tübingen and/or its Jewish research unit and had blood on their hands by way of direct participation in the murder of European Jews—either received light jail sentences or had their sentences later reduced, enabling them to live the rest of their days in freedom and comfort.

Junginger’s work illuminates how the University of Tübingen, especially those members of its Protestant faculty of theology involved in research on the “Jewish Question,” made key contributions not merely to a broadly antisemitic atmosphere in Württemberg but to the murder of hundreds of thousands of European Jews during the Holocaust. While historians and scholars of religion will find it particularly useful, patient lay readers, too, will benefit from its sophisticated but clear argument about the nexus between antisemitic words and deeds in Nazi Germany.