er of modern anti-semitism
places the documents collected in this volume in a broad historical context.
These documents offer ample evidence of the Church's opposition to an
historical phenomenon rooted long before the Nazis came to power, hence
also prior to the rise of modern anti-semitism. The protest of the Church
was fundamentally directed against those pagan and mythological elements
that had crept into Christianity itself in the course of its historical
development among the heathen.
To many of the fathers of modern anti-semitism, which is the racial and
political Anti-semitism that arose towards the end of the 19th century and
reached its highest stage during the Third Reich, the rejection of Judaism
was tantamount to the rejection of religion in general.
This view goes back to Feuerbach's anthropological criticism of religion,
to the young Hegelians (Max Stirner, Bruno Bauer) and to the early Romantics
who longed to return to the primitive forms of a religion called
"vorchristliches Germanenthum". [11] Modern anti-semitism was influenced by
these streams of thought through Nietzsche's concept of the 'Antichrist',
although Nietzsche himself kept aloof from the more vulgar manifestations
of political anti-semitism of his day. In him the anthropological view
reaches its culmination - God, who is nothing more than the deified form
of man [12] is finally overthrown by Dionysian man who found courage to
assert his instinctive life and abjure the gross and enslaving notions of
Christianity that men
<VIII>
are equal and can be redeemed by faith, the gospel of the downtrodden and
everything that creeps on earth. [13] These views, inimical to religion and
to Christianity, were already being expounded with great vigour towards the
end of the 19th century. Christian doctrine was accused of perverting man's
instinctive life, vitiating his natural enthusiasm, inflaming his ego,
invading his private life over which it declares its dominance only to
enslave human nature, to weaken and alienate man, by imposing upon him
"un-natural" restraint such as the anguish of his conscience.
Wilhelm Marr, one of the early fathers of modem racial and political
Anti-semitism and the man who during the late 70's coined the term
'anti-semitism'[14] included in the rejection of Judaism his critique of
Christianity as early as the year 1862. In a polemical work called
"Der