Tag Archives: Paul Hanebrink

Review of Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

Review of Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018). 284 Pp. ISBN: 9780674047686.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

The Jobbik Party of Hungary. Greece’s Golden Dawn. The Neo-Confederate movement in the United States and countless other nationalist extremist movements. What unites all of them on a certain level is their adoption of the rhetoric chiefly associated in many people’s minds with Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich: that of a worldwide Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy out to destroy traditional Christian morality and age-old civilizations. Paul Hanebrink’s examination into the origins and power of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth offers readers the opportunity to think – not about how true the Judeo-Bolshevik myth is, but rather, “to understand why it has been and remains so powerful” (5).

Hanebrink’s work has been influenced by the approach taken by Israeli historian Shulamit Volkov whose work on nineteenth-century Germany explained the rise of antisemitic language as part of a response to the many unsettling experiences caused by the late unification of Germany. No matter how quickly economic modernization, rapid urbanization, and cultural changes were dislocating people in Germany, Volkov argued that the use of antisemitic rhetoric and tropes about Jews were part of a “cultural code.” By addressing the “Jewish Question” an individual could then respond with solutions to the so-called problem. This often allowed many people to believe that the problems they were experiencing in their daily lives could be explained by one, all-powerful disruptor: the Jew. Hanebrink explores the use of the “Judeo-Bolshevik myth” over the course of different time periods and across various countries in Europe and the United States, allowing the reader to track how this destructive myth about Jews varied over the course of the twentieth century and to ponder why the myth continues to persist so powerfully into the twenty-first.

Following the unsettling and devastating impact of the First World War and the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, much of Europe seemed to be in a state of revolutionary flux. Much like the work of Robert Gerwarth,[1] Hanebrink opens his work with the reality that, for so many Europeans, the First World War did not really end in November 1918. War and revolution continued on in many places, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, so that the experience of many people was not one of peace and stability but simply a continuation of the violence of 1914-1918. With so many revolutions breaking out in such a time of instability and dislocation, the search was on for the root cause of such upheavals. The answer that presented itself to so many people was a simple one: Jews were the face of revolution and revolutions seemed to be breaking out everywhere. From Munich, Germany, to Hungary, Romania, Poland, Russia, left-wing attempts to take over governments and countries led to an atmosphere of the total upheaval of societal norms. The one element that so many could agree upon was the role that Jews played in leftist activity. Hanebrink does not deny the involvement of some Jews in each of these movements, but he works hard to refute the notion that Jews created Bolshevism, supported the radical movement, and therefore all Jews were to be held responsible for the crimes of Bolshevism (14). The idea of the “Judeo-Bolshevik myth” was linked to the centuries-old language of hatred directed towards and about Jews: the figure of the Jew was linked to being the creator of disorder, disruption, and fanaticism, and there were just enough men and women who could be identified as being Jewish in each revolutionary movement that the myth seemed to embody a core kernel of truth.

How did this myth impact actual Jewish lives? Hanebrink exams the pogroms that repeatedly broke out in various parts of Central and Eastern Europe. In Ukraine, for example, Symon Petliura argued that by fighting against the “Judeo-Bolsheviks,” Ukrainians would be able to unify into a National Republic. Others in Ukraine attacked Jews, not to form a new Republic, but to restore an older state. In either case, Jews suffered directly because of the belief that they were behind the forces of disorder and chaos in Ukraine. Judeo-Bolshevism as an international threat played a prominent role in the political calculations of various faction leaders not only in Ukraine but also in Poland, Hungary, and Romania in the interwar years. Adding to this fear was the imagined idea that all Jews were by nature conspiratorial and therefore untrustworthy as potential allies. Works by Timothy Snyder and Omer Bartov[2] underscore Hanebrink’s analysis: some Jews in the borderland regions were caught in a crossfire of competing armies. The one element that each army could agree on was that the Jews were a true obstacle to achieving their objectives. As a result, more and more Jews lost their property if not their very lives. In such a tumultuous atmosphere, Jews were perceived my many as posing both an internal as well as an external threat to a country’s gentile population. The fears that Jews could potentially contribute to revolution, threatening the national security of a newly-formed nation fueled and rationalized the violence perpetrated against local Jewish populations.

While violence and pogroms continued in Eastern European territories, the Judeo-Bolshevik myth took on its perhaps most destructive power under the influence of Hitler and the Nazi regime. Hanebrink rightly points out that it is perhaps no coincidence that the early Nazi party had its beginnings in Munich – a city that had been rocked by left-wing revolution in 1919. Hitler took the pre-existing imagery of the Judeo-Bolshevik and used it to animate his followers. He told them they were fighting to defend traditional German Christian society which Jewish-Bolsheviks threatened to overturn. In Hitler’s mind, fighting the power of a Jewish-Bolsheviks was a matter of life or death for Germans. In this way, the Judeo-Bolshevik myth took on it perhaps most lethal form yet. If Germans were to live, then Jewish-Bolshevik supporters had to die.[3] Lending support to the “reality” of a Judeo-Bolshevik plot to destroy all of Christian Europe was the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Here Hitler saw an opportunity to elevate the existential threat that Jews posed to Germans – now he could point to Catholic Spain and argue that all of Europe would succumb to Judeo-Bolshevism unless there was a mighty crusade (led by him) to destroy it.[4] Once again, the mere presence of some Jews in the Spanish Civil War lent an air of truth to the idea of a vast “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspiracy. From the 1930s onward, the fight against Jewish Bolshevism would be tied to Nazi Germany, reaching its most destructive peak with the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

It was in that event that Nazi propagandists could unleash the full force of their anti-Jewish-Bolshevik imagery. Layered upon Judeo-Bolshevik images was the portrait of Russia as an Asiatic, barbaric, foreign place that had been perverted by Jewish domination for decades. Jews were set in the role of saboteurs, conspirators, partisans, and the supreme proponents of Communism. Therefore, they were seen as the ultimate security threat. This helped the Nazis and many of their Eastern European allies participate in mass violence against Jewish populations, ultimately labeled as the Holocaust. Hanebrink also tracks the evolution that occurs – from the period of Nazi victories inside of the Soviet Union to the periods of Nazi defeat – and he provides examples of how Nazi propaganda would leave a long-lasting mark, particularly as the Soviet Red Army advanced further westward. The successful blending of images of Red Army soldiers as representative of Jewish vengeance, along with the notion that the Red Army was composed of “Asiatic barbarians” come to overturn all of European Christian civilization would have a long-lasting impact on areas that found themselves living in a post-WWII Communist-dominated territory.

In places such as Poland, Romania, and Hungary, the success of the Red Army meant one, ultimate thing: “Soviet occupation had brought Jews to power” (168). Jews who had survived the Holocaust emerged from hiding and many who had believed that Jews had been eradicated in the war now feared Jews would seek revenge for their suffering. This was coupled with the belief that Communist systems were led by Jews. There was even a tendency among post-war countries such as in the case of Poland, where leaders argued that Jews had supported Communism and they, therefore, had no one but themselves to blame for any hatred directed against them by the public. This line of argumentation was particularly useful when, in 1946, a charge of blood libel was made against Jews which resulted in the murder of at least 42 Jewish people. In yet another cruel twist of irony, local Communists also exploited anti-Jewish sentiments, particularly in Hungary where the economy was floundering and accusations of war profiteering were utilized to stir up crowds against “capitalist exploiters” whose images looked suspiciously like stereotypes of Jews. In these types of cases, Jews were associated with capitalism, exploitation, speculation, and the like. In the post-war environment, Communist leaders sought to shake free of the association of Jewishness with Communism.

For the post-WWII Western nations, the question that emerged was how to continue to fight against the growing spread of Communism without associating the fight with Nazism? Hanebrink explores the shifting of terminology in the West, going from fighting against “Judeo-Bolshevism” to embracing “Judeo-Christian civilization.” Now, instead of Hitler leading the crusade against Communism, the United States would be the lead fighter for Western Civilization. Intellectuals could still maintain that the Soviets and Communism, in general, represented “Asiatic barbarity” but they de-coupled the language of “Judeo-Bolshevism” from this fight. In the aftermath of the devastation of the war, many Christians in Europe and in the U.S. argued that Christianity could lead Europe out of the darkness it had fallen into under Nazi domination. Now the fight could be reframed as a battle against “atheistic Communism” with Christians and Jews working together, sharing a common biblical tradition that provided the seedbed for moral renewal. The concept of Judeo-Christianity was one that allowed Jews to align themselves in the battle of the Cold War against the forces of atheism. In this new way of thinking, Jews could become Cold Warriors. The idea of shared moral values between Christians and Jews connected with the idea of creating a more liberal, more tolerant society. This also impacted the way in which the memory of the Holocaust was addressed in public discourse.

In some instances, voices emerged in post-Communist societies that argued that the crimes committed under Communist regimes were ignored, while undo attention was given to specifically Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. In countries such as Poland, heated debates rose to the surface, asking why so much attention was given to Jewish victimhood at the hands of the Nazis while the victimization of gentile Poles at the hands of the Communist leaders was downplayed or ignored altogether? This line of argumentation brought back the specter that has haunted Europe for much of the twentieth and now part of the twenty-first centuries: that of the Judeo-Bolshevik. Right-wing and populist leaders demand an acknowledgement that Jews supported Communism, that Communism created categories of its own victims, and in this way, Hanebrink argues, “The Judeo-Bolshevik myth was reborn in post-Communist Europe as a tool for challenging the premises on which transnational memory of the Holocaust rested- and with those premises, the liberal civic ideals of multicultural toleration, human rights, and European integration that Holocaust memory culture had come to symbolize so powerfully” (273).

Hanebrink’s book is a valuable contribution to the intellectual history of the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism. The book could benefit from the addition of several items including maps of the areas he is discussing, some pictures of propaganda imagery, and, most importantly, the book needs a comprehensive bibliography. The work would be useful in classes of graduate students who have studied some of the history of antisemitism, intellectual history, and histories of the twentieth century.

[1] Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished. Why the First World War Failed to End (NY, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017).

[2] See Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (NY, NY: Basic Books, 2010) and Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (NY, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2018).

[3] See especially the work of Michael Wildt, Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion. Violence Against Jews in Provinicial Germany, 1919-1939 (NY, NY: Berghahn Books, 2012) and also Thomas Kühne, Belonging and Genocide Hitler’s Community, 1918-1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). These works explore the dynamic of “us vs. them” in Nazi ideology.

[4] See, for example, Beth A. Griech-Polelle, “The Impact of the Spanish Civil War upon Roman Catholic Clergy in Nazi Germany,” in Kevin P. Spicer, ed., Antisemitism, Chrisitian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 121-135 and Beth A. Griech-Polelle, “Crusade. The Impact of the Spanish Civil War and the Invasion of the Soviet Union on the Roman Catholic Church under the Nazi Regime,” in Glaube- Freiheit-Diktatur in Europa und den USA. Festschrift für Gerhard Besier zum 60. Geburtstag, eds. Katarzyna Stoklosa and Andrea Strübund (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 715-726.

Article Note: Challenges to “Christian Civilization” across Europe

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Article Note: Challenges to “Christian Civilization” across Europe

Paul Hanebrink, “European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf?” Journal of Contemporary History 53, no. 3 (2017), 622-43.

Thomas Mittmann, “The Lasting Impact of the ‘Sociological Moment’ on the Churches’ Discourse of ‘Secularization’ in West Germany,” Journal of Religion in Europe 9 (2016), 157-776.

By Victoria J. Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum*

In the late 1930s the European landscape was roiled by the events in Nazi Germany, the Spanish Civil War, the unfolding terror in the Soviet Union, and the continued repercussions of the political and territorial shift that had followed the end of the First World War. European and North American church leaders were alarmed by the implications of these developments for the institutional church and for clergy, members of religious orders, theological faculties, and laypeople. The sheer scope of what was happening seemed to portend something more ominous: a transnational “Kulturkampf,” a seismic shift that threatened the foundations of what church leaders viewed as “Christian civilization.” Although in the early twentieth century Catholic and Protestant church leaders viewed the rise of Communism as the foremost “secular” threat, by the 1930s the threat seemed more complex and diffuse.

In his 2006 book In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890-1944, Hanebrink skillfully explored dynamics in Hungary. This article is an equally expert treatment of (primarily) Protestant responses to multiple crises that included the imprisonment and murders of Catholic clergy and members of religious orders in Spain, the growing pressures on the churches in Nazi Germany, and the debates within the international Protestant ecumenical movement as it sought to address the complexities of the German Church Struggle. Hanebrink offers three very different case studies from 1937 of battles against (and perceptions of) secularism and totalitarianism: in Nazi Germany, in an alliance between Catholics and Protestants in Hungary, and at the July 1937 Oxford ecumenical conference in England.

He begins with helpful background. The nineteenth-century “culture wars” had been framed largely in the context of church-state issues. During the 1920s the Russian revolution and its anti-church measures, as well as the emergence of left-wing political parties critical of the churches, led Protestants and Catholics to focus on Bolshevism and “secularism” as the new enemy. In the process the antisemitism already embedded in western culture was drawn into these new critiques: for their role in the processes of emancipation and assimilation Jews were accused of promoting a wider “secularism”, and they were also linked to Bolshevism.

By the 1930s such attitudes led many German Protestants to support National Socialism because of its anti-Bolshevism, and they were an impetus for Christians elsewhere in Europe to align themselves with the fascist movement. In contrast to this, Protestants involved in European ecumenism viewed fascism and National Socialism as new forms of “secularism” that contradicted and undermined the “Christian” values of individual freedom, conscience and human rights. These understandings, in turn, would shape the early post-1945 framing of these issues in the Cold War, in which the threat of “godless Communism” became the primary example of the dangers of “secularism.”

Hanebrink’s transnational approach is very useful for such analysis. As he notes, most studies of Protestantism during this period of European history draw on individual national case studies but don’t look comparatively across Europe. Hanebrink’s first case study examines the 1937 attempt in Hungary between Protestants and Catholics to form an anti-Communist alliance, building on a shared language and self-understanding of Christian culture, belief, and nationality. There was even an attempt by a Jewish author to encourage a broader religious alliance against totalitarianism and “godlessness.” This went nowhere; throughout Europe, the evils of Bolshevism were usually linked to a perceived “Jewish materialism and secularism.” The Hungarian case, however, offers a revealing look at a coalition that altered Christian understandings there of the “religious-secular conflict.”

The intersection of anti-Communism and antisemitism was pervasive in the German Evangelical Church as well. An additional complication was the German Kirchenkampf, the internal battles within German Protestantism that began in 1933 over the attempted nazification of that church and the theological extremism of the Deutsche Christen. The Confessing Church emerged in opposition to these attempts, particularly over the efforts to introduce a church “Aryan law” that would affect the inclusion, baptism, and ordination of “non-Aryan Christians” in the church. As Hanebrink notes, “the widespread conflation of anti-Bolshevism and antisemitism” added an additional level of complexity to these internal church debates. Many in the Confessing Church shared the anti-Bolshevism and the antisemitism of their compatriots and leaders, and over time these sentiments undermined the initially strong support for Christians of Jewish descent. This was also a factor in tempering the Confessing Church’s public criticism of the Nazi state. Nonetheless, while anti-Communism (and, I would argue, German nationalism) was a unifying factor throughout the church, the theological divisions and the church-state issues that emerged in the Kirchenkampf remained significant and are worth further analysis in any study of discourse about “secularism” in this instance.

Much of this became evident in the events surrounding Hanebrink’s third case study: the July 1937 conference in Oxford, England, of the ecumenical (Protestant) Universal Christian Council for Life and Work, which focused largely on the events in Nazi Germany. The Oxford meeting convened only a few months after the public reading from German Catholic pulpits of the March 1937 papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge and the Gestapo’s widespread confiscation of that encyclical in response. Delegates at Oxford were well aware of these developments, although there were, of course, no Catholic delegates present. (While there were unofficial communications during that era between Protestant ecumenists and some Catholic leaders, only after the Second Vatican Council was there official Catholic representation at Protestant ecumenical meetings).

For the German Evangelical Church, it was an equally volatile moment in the ongoing internal battles between the official church leadership and the Confessing Church. Shortly before the Oxford conference, Pastor Martin Niemoeller had been arrested. Niemoeller (described by US ecumenist Henry Leiper in 1933 as the new “Martin Luther”) had become the international symbol of the church opposition to Hitler. Moreover, in advance of Oxford, the Confessing Church had insisted that it be invited as the sole representative of the German Church. The ecumenical position since the beginning of the Kirchenkampf had been to maintain ties to all factions in the German Evangelical Church, and this was the moment when the Confessing Church—already itself deeply divided and alarmed by the escalation of state pressure—angrily abandoned its efforts to represent the German churches ecumenically (the pre-Oxford argument about this led Dietrich Bonhoeffer to resign as youth secretary of the ecumenical World Alliance). Ironically, shortly before the Oxford meeting, the German government blocked representatives of the official GEC church from attending the meeting, and so only individual German delegates were present.

Ecumenical leaders at the Oxford conference addressed the persecution of Jews in Germany very differently than did their colleagues who came from in a non-ecumenical context. The persecution of the Jews was understood (and condemned) as a terrible symptom of secularism, and ecumenical solidarity with the Jews as victims was combined with an outspoken critique of totalitarianism. To some degree this perspective had been shaped by the viewpoints of North American delegates and their activism on issues of race and prejudice in the United States, but I would add that even during the 1920s the ecumenical movement interpreted Communism, fascism, and the nationalism emerging in Germany as manifestations of a dangerous kind of “secularism” and was using the language of human rights that became more explicitly framed at Oxford. In 1937, the ecumenical language about nationalism, totalitarianism, and the treatment of the persecution of the Jews was entirely consistent with that of previous ecumenical gatherings beginning with the fall 1933 meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria, and it was notably different from how these issues were addressed in other European contexts.

Hanebrink’s important article illustrates why the diversity within European Protestantism—historically, nationally, culturally, and institutionally—makes it far more difficult than in the Catholic case to draw a coherent picture of the Protestant reactions to the turbulent historical events of the twentieth century, both before and after 1945. In framing the very different understandings of and responses to the threat of secularism, totalitarianism, and Communism, he shows that “there was more than one Protestant culture war.”

In an article focused on the post-1945 dynamics in West Germany, Thomas Mittmann picks up where Hanebrink leaves off, and many of his observations are helpful continuities of the discussion begun in Hanebrink’s article. Tracing developments in both Catholic and Protestant churches, Mittmann delineates three phases of “secularization discourse” in postwar Germany. The first, from 1945 to the late 1950s, emerged in the immediate aftermath of Nazism and its collapse. Seeking to regain their standing in the aftermath of Nazism, Christians in Germany longed for a religious revival; as the Cold War intensified this discourse became naturally aligned with anti-Communism. The second phase, beginning in the 1960s, brought a “theologization” of “secularization”: a theological discourse that increasingly embraced secularization as part of a new political awareness about the churches’ role in the modern world (along with a more explicit rejection of the churches’ failures under National Socialism). The third phase occurred in what Mittmann terms the “sociological moment” of the 1970s-1980s. Theological language was downplayed as the churches adapted to an increasingly secularized society, and the very significance of the “religious” vs. the “secular” was redefined. Although Mittmann doesn’t discuss the changes on the German church landscape after 1989, one could extend this third phase, I think, into the post-unification era and the dramatic shift in religious demographics and church membership.

The German churches’ process of navigating these discourses was theological as well as political, and Mittmann does a fine job of describing the role of Catholic and Protestant theologians like Dorothee Soelle and Karl Rahner in framing the discourse of their respective eras (even, in the case of someone like Soelle, bridging several eras). Particularly in the early postwar period, “secularization” was a “transformational term…that bundled church-political concerns and aspirations.” It also drew the lines of internal church debates between those who viewed secularization negatively in terms of church decline and those who saw it as a necessary opening for the church in the modern world.

By the 1960s, secularization was viewed more positively. Particularly in the Protestant churches, there was already a body of theological work by figures such as Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer who had framed such processes as positive and necessary renewals of the church—in Bonhoeffer’s case, in his embrace of a “this-worldly Christianity.” In this second phase, Catholic and Protestant theologians called upon the church to renew itself and address the world in affirmation. In the wake of the Second Vatican Council Catholic theologians like Johann Baptist Metz encouraged a similar movement, describing “worldliness” as part of the “inner-historical power” of Christ.

This embrace of a new position in the modern world occurred in conjunction with a new self-identification of church as social and political actor. German Catholic and Protestant churches and their agencies became more openly involved in political causes like the environmental and peace movements. There were also liturgical and church policy reforms. All this fed into the “sociological moment” in which church leaders and laypeople alike arrived at a very different understanding of what the church represented, what it meant to be Christian, and what it meant to have faith in the modern world.

Mittmann offers a fascinating examination of the rise during the 1970s of Islam in Germany and the challenges this development posed, particularly for the Protestant church. Suddenly a trend that the churches had viewed positively was viewed by the Muslim minority as an exclusionary method of establishing boundaries against the immigrant population. Having acclimated religion and its institutions to a modern society, German churches were now confronted by the phenomenon of a “religiosity” that did not want to integrate. Christian “secularity” was understood as supportive of the structures of modern liberal democracy; Muslims were expected to conform and revise the public expression of their religious life accordingly. Since the 1980s, Mittmann observes, the pendulum has begun to swing the other way (a development evident in the United States as well). There is now talk of a “post-secular” society and there are new theological exchanges between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Germany.

It is interesting to read both these articles from our vantage point in 2019. With the resurgence of conservative evangelical Christianity on the larger stage of world Christianity today—affecting not just churches in North American and Europe, but in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—“secularization” is once again viewed negatively by large sectors of the Christian world, with profound implication not just for understandings of Christian doctrine but with respect to church engagement in political issues. There are similar fault lines in Judaism and Islam. These articles by Hanebrink and Mittmann are important reminders that in any era terms like “secularization,” “religion” and even “Christianity” are fluid and subjective, driven by different cultural and political presuppositions and used for different ends.

* The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Conference Report: Religion and Ethno-Nationalism in the Era of the Two World Wars

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Conference Report: Religion and Ethno-Nationalism in the Era of the Two World Wars, University of Toronto, May 21-23, 2017

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

This symposium assembled an extraordinary group of twenty scholars from twelve different countries to discuss the roles of religious individuals, institutions, and networks in the conflicts and upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. Co-sponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and the University of Toronto’s Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Chair in Holocaust Studies, the three-day event was organized by Victoria Barnett (USHMM), Doris Bergen (University of Toronto), Kevin Spicer (Stonehill College), and Rebecca Carter-Chand (University of Toronto and Clark University). The wide range of cases and issues discussed made the symposium highly stimulating (although that same quality makes it difficult to summarize). Most fundamentally the symposium showed the value of taking a global perspective, not only to compare but to connect developments in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas; and it demonstrated the power of in-person interactions. Having time to talk, in lengthy sessions, over meals, and outdoors, proved very fruitful and will, we hope, lead to a publication and future initiatives.

The symposium built on a 2015 summer research workshop on “Religion, Fascism, Antisemitism, and Ethno-Nationalism in Europe, 1918-1945,” held in Washington, DC and initiated by Barnett and Spicer. Now the goal was to expand the conversation by bringing in more people and looking beyond Europe. A call for papers yielded three times more abstracts than we could accept—an indication of the topic’s significance—and a team of experts in History, Religion, Islamic Studies, and Jewish Studies helped choose among them. Four facilitators—Devi Mays (University of Michigan), Paul Hanebrink (Rutgers University), Milena Methodieva (University of Toronto), and Christhard Hoffmann (University of Bergen)—worked with us to organize the fifteen participants into panels and identify themes. All papers were pre-circulated.

After an opening party on Sunday, we had a full day of sessions on Monday, May 22. The first panel was organized around the theme of “Transnational Religion and Diaspora Communities.” Francesco Pongiluppi (University of Rome), Burçin Çakir (Glasgow Caledonian University), John Eicher (German Historical Institute, Washington DC), and Stefan Vogt (Goethe University) presented their research on, respectively, Fascist Italians’ cultural activities in interwar Turkey; debates about the Armenian genocide in Turkey one hundred years later; Mennonites in South America and their relationships to Nazism; and the tensions and connections between Jewish religion and German nationalist discourse in Martin Buber’s thought. Devi Mays identified several issues to think across these disparate topics. She noted the centrality of different locations in articulating nationalism, including transnational sites. Homeland, she observed, has to be articulated, too. Of the many questions that arose in this discussion, two stand out because they recurred throughout the symposium: What is the role of religion in narratives of the nation under attack? How do visions of religious ethics as a unifying force subvert or reinforce the exclusive claims of nation and land?

The second panel explored “Religious Leadership and the Role of Clergy.” Paul Hanebrink structured the session around four questions: 1) How are enemies and threats defined? 2) How do we understand theology? Religious language can be mobilized but it also has a weight of its own. 3) How do churches’ internal debates interact with outside forces? 4) What, if anything, is distinctive about European Christianity? Francesca Silano (University of Toronto), Jonathan Huener (University of Vermont), Eliot Nidam Orvieto (Yad Vashem), and Brandon Bloch (Harvard University) shared highlights of their research on, respectively, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Tikhon and his condemnation of pogroms in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution; Vatican responses to Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church in the Warthegau; The Religious of Our Lady of Sion, a Catholic order in France that reported assaults on Jews; and Protestant theologies of law and human rights in occupied Germany. In addition to big thematic issues, the discussion revealed some intriguing details, including Anna Shternshis’s observation that Soviet anti-religious propaganda depicted Tikhon as a Jew.

The third panel, facilitated by Milena Methodieva, was titled “Mobilization of Religion for National and Political Projects.” It featured the work of Roy Marom (University of Haifa), Peter Staudenmaier (Marquette University), Kateryna Budz (Kyiv, Ukraine), and Irina Ognyanova (Institute of Balkan Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences). Their research took us from Palestine in the 1930s to the Rome-Berlin Axis, and explored Ukrainian Greek Catholics and the Holocaust, and the Roman Catholic Church and Ustasha in Croatia. Methodieva raised issues about the role of religion in projects of national mobilization. She also noted how much can be learned from examining the so-called fringe or considering inconsistencies and tensions, for example, between an individual’s ideology and conduct.

These themes anticipated Tuesday’s session on “Religion and Violence.” Ranjana Mukhopadhyaya (University of Delhi), Ionut Biliuta (Gheorghe Sincai Institute for Social Sciences and the Humanities, Romanian Academy), and Jason Tingler (Clark University) all addressed the period of the Second World War, but with a focus on Buddhism and ethno-nationalism of Japan, the Romanian Orthodox Exarchate from southern Ukraine, and genocidal violence in Chelm. Christhard Hoffmann offered six tips for making comparisons: 1) In each case we are dealing not with religion per se but religion in a social context; 2) Look at the history of ethno-religious conflict in a region; 3) Pay attention to expectations for the future; 4) Consider different forms of violence; 5) What were the roles of religious people and leaders? 6) How did ethno-religious groups react when they became targets of violence?

The value of taking a global perspective was especially evident from the intense interest in Mukhopadhyaya’s paper, the symposium’s only examination of religion in a non-western context. Yet her work had many points of contact with the other papers. The importance of prophecies was one and proselytization, also central to Biliuta’s analysis, was another. Certainly Mukhopadhyaya’s insight that any religion can become implicated in violence resonated across all the sessions.

The roundtable of facilitators provided another opportunity to make connections. Kevin Spicer led off by noting that a central question in the 2015 workshop—Christian antisemitism or Christian anti-Judaism?—had not featured in any of the presentations here. Mays raised the issue of absence: what does it mean when religion is not discussed? that it is not there or is so pervasive it goes unarticulated? She highlighted two areas that got short shrift in our deliberations: gender and lay people. Hanebrink drew attention to the question as to exactly how religious concepts are harnessed and what determines whether that project succeeds or not. He wondered about the divide between private and public religious discourses and commented that the symposium as a whole did not have much to say about Jews. For her part, Methodieva emphasized the multiple forms of each religion examined and the role of individuals, including particular personalities, in driving developments. Hoffmann returned to the thorny question of the boundaries of religion: what is religion and what is non religion? He also pointed to the importance of narratives of victimization and decline in situations of violence.

The group discussion that followed raised more big questions. Spicer asked about comparative approaches: When are comparisons helpful and when are they counterproductive and even irresponsible? Marom pointed out that we had failed to question the assumptions built into the symposium title. Hanebrink observed that the term “ethno-nationalism” is a product of the 1990s, and Mukhopadhyaya explained that ethno-nationalism can complicate a bigger nationalist project, as in India where it works against civic nationalism. Bloch urged us to think about religious language as shaping how people understand the world. Silano remarked on the importance of material support: where do the funds come from and who controls the finances? Vogt warned against essentializing religion, and Budz emphasized how religious identity substitutes for ethnic identity when there is no national state. Susannah Heschel pointed to the importance of the imperialist context and referred to John Kucich’s book, Imperial Masochism (2009), to draw attention to imperialists’ insistence on their own abjection: “Look how we suffer.” Tingler encouraged expanding the scope not only geographically but chronologically, for instance, to explore religious roots of nationalism in the Middle Ages. Carter-Chand highlighted the significance of conversion and the diversity of what being “Christian” meant, even within Central and Eastern Europe, and Biliuta added the dimension of competition between religions and religious groups.

The final component was a public program featuring Susannah Heschel and Victoria Barnett and moderated by Doris Bergen. Titled “Religion, Ethno-Nationalism, and Violence: Probing the Intersections,” it was an opportunity to hear from two people who have shaped the field. Barnett and Heschel responded to three questions: 1) How do you understand the relationship between religion, ethno-nationalism, and violence? 2) How do you respond to the Holocaust and the violence of our own times without despairing? 3) How has your thinking changed in the decades since you began your work?

Their reflections were personal, profound, and often funny. Barnett described her childhood in West Virginia and her formative experience with liberation theology at Union Theological Seminary and the Puebla Conference in the late 1970s. She also invoked Jonathan Fox’s study of the “salience of religious issues in ethnic conflicts” to underscore that religion is not always or solely a factor, but it becomes powerful when “things fall apart.” Heschel challenged us to be more concrete and precise, and she set an example by defining “religion”: a communal system of propositional attitudes related to the superhuman. She poked fun at what she called the “ghostbusters” approach to comparative genocide studies—“Find the ten factors and you win!”—and asked what happens to religion in a democracy. Does it lose its enthusiastic quality? Both she and Barnett observed that pluralism is not enough. Do we come together as liberals of different faiths or within each faith? Both speakers, and the two of them together, made a powerful impression. David Clark, a PhD student at Wycliffe College who is writing his dissertation on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, called the event his “bibliography on stage.”

The full program of the symposium may be found at https://www.ushmm.org/research/scholarly-presentations/symposia/religion-and-ethno-nationalism-in-the-era-of-the-world-wars.