Covenant and Controversy 9/21/15 Covenant and Controversy 9/21/15

Anti-Semitism

There are many difficult problems grouped around the name "Jew" powerfully affecting the world and the Church, and as, in Europe especially, the issues involved become intensified from year to year, the nations of Christendom, in the midst of whom the mass of the Diaspora has been located since the destruction of the second Temple, are earnestly beginning to find solutions, and it is more and more obvious that " the Jewish question" is fast becoming an international one...

by David Baron
(Originally published in 1901)

To the Bible student, with the key of the future in his hand, it is very interesting to watch some of the more recent phases in the development of this "question," and to observe how the great God is, in His providence, now rapidly preparing the way for its final and only possible solution. Anti-Semitism, though no doubt a symptom of the diseased moral, political, and economic systems of Christendom, for which Jew and Gentile must bear equal blame, is nevertheless of great significance, and an unmistakable sign of the times when viewed from a Scriptural standpoint.

What is anti-Semitism?

Before me lies the 17th edition of the "Anti-Semiten-Katechismus," a small book of four hundred closely-printed pages compiled by Theodor Fritsch, and published in Leipzig. It is one of the very vilest products of the nineteenth century, and carries its condemnation within itself.

The first part is in the form of a catechism, containing twenty-one questions and answers, and the first question is, " Was Versteht man unter Antisemitismus?" (What is to be understood by anti-Semitism?) And then the answer, "Anti" means against, and "Semitism" describes the character of the Semitic race. Anti-Semitism, therefore, signifies waging war with Semitism. As in Europe the Semitic race is almost exclusively represented by the Jews, we understand the term Semites as referring in its narrower sense to the Jews. An anti-Semite, therefore, in our case means an opponent of the Jews ("Judengegner“).

Into the long indictment which this oracle of anti-Semitism contains I will not enter. The fact is that the professional "Judengegner" on the Continent, has been morally blinded by his hatred and prejudice to the extent of being no longer able to distinguish between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, and often allows himself to be carried by his passions to the greatest lengths of injustice and villainy. In the eyes of the anti-Semite it is not only a question whether Jews, like other men, are sinners, or are greater sinners than others, but the Jew himself, from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head, his very existence is an unpardonable crime. His very virtues are brought up as accusations against him, and the whole literature of the world, from the writings of Cicero down to the ravings of the unspeakable Edouard Drummond of Paris, are ransacked, and often misquoted, in order to prove that every Jew who has ever had the impudence to live, has been nothing else than an unmitigated rascal, to whom all the woes which have ever come upon the uncircumcised are to be traced.

For samples of anti-Semitic accuracy in quoting ancient or modern writers commend me to the collection of passages from Talmudic works and from the Bible which takes up a good part of this handbook. The promises of God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and passages from the prophets, are quoted as proofs of Jewish pride and arrogance, and when the prophets utter curses and scathing denunciations on account of sin, it is still brought up in proof against the Jews that they are, and ever have been, the very worst nation under heaven. It reminds one of the story told of the Roman Emperor, who, walking one day with his retinue, happened to meet a poor Jew on the roadside, who most humbly bowed and saluted. The Emperor stopped and cried out, " What, you, a Jew, have the impudence to salute the Roman Emperor! Off with his head !" A little further on he met another Jew, who, observing from a distance what had been done to his unfortunate brother, simply stopped on the roadside, and in fear and trembling allowed the tyrant to pass by without saluting, whereupon the Emperor turned round and cried: "What, you, a Jew, have the impudence not to salute the Roman Emperor! Off with his head!"

An instance how an anti-Semite reads Jewish history is supplied by the brief summary of the life of Joseph, who in words of Scripture is made out to be first an ungrateful profligate, who immorally assaulted the chaste and virtuous wife of his master Potiphar, and later on robbed and despoiled the famished Egyptians for his own ends, and for the enrichment of his tribe.

How is it done ? Very easily : all you have to do is to string together some half-sentences broken off from their context, and quote a lie as if it were a truth, and the thing is done. But, as an instance how the anti-Semitic Diabolus can quote Scripture for his own ends, I will translate the section on Joseph verbally just as it stands.

“Joseph in Egypten.”

The Hebrew slave which thou hast brought unto us came in unto me to mock me ; and it came to pass as I lifted up my voice and cried that he left his garment with me and fled."
.. Let him appoint officers over the land, and take up the fifth part in the seven plenteous years (without payment)."
... And Joseph gathered corn as the sand of the sea very much until he left off numbering, for it was without number."
... And Joseph gathered up all the money that was found in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan for the corn which they brought."
... Joseph said, Give your cattle, and I will give you for your cattle if you have no more money.”
... We will not hide from my lord how that our money is spent; my lord also hath our herds of cattle ; there is not ought left in the sight of my lord but our bodies and our lands."
... And he made it a law that they should give from everything a fifth. And so Israel dwelt in the land of Egypt in the country of Goshen, and they ruled over it and grew and multiplied greatly.?

It is a sad fact that perhaps ninety-nine out of every hundred " Christian " readers of this vile production in Germany and Austria are so ignorant of Bible history that they are taken in by these parodies of Jewish characters as if they were actual history. I may mention that my first acquaintance with this "Antisemiten-Katechismus'' was in the drawing-room of a Christian Hospitz in Berlin, where it was evidently kept for the enlightenment of benighted Christian travellers. But is there no ground for the accusations of anti-Semites? I am not one to hide up the sins of my people. There were no greater patriots than the prophets, yet they speak of Israel as "a sinful nation; a people laden with iniquity," and many centuries of wanderings and oppressions have not tended to ennoble them. No, Israel in a state of apostasy from their God are not a blessing among the nations as they yet shall be (Zech. 8.), but this I say, that false accusations by anti-Semites through the ages, of crimes which they knew in their conscience they were not guilty of, has been Satan's chief means of hardening Israel's heart into a Pharisaic self-consciousness, and of blinding their eyes to their real state of need before a holy God.

The true underlying causes and effects of modern anti-Semitism have been well summarized by Dr. Herzl in that remarkable pamphlet, " Der Juden Staat," which has given birth to the Zionist movement. " Modern anti-Semitism," he says, " is not to be confounded with the religious persecution of the Jews of former times. It does occasionally take a somewhat religious bias, but the main current of the aggressive movement has now changed. In the principal countries where anti-Semitism prevails it does so as a result of the emancipation of the Jews.

"When civilized nations awoke to the inhumanity of exclusive legislation, and enfranchised us, our enfranchisement came too late. It was no longer possible legally to remove our disabilities in our old homes. For we had, curiously enough, developed while in the Ghetto into a bourgeois people, and we stepped out of it only to enter into fierce competition with the middle classes. Hence our emancipation set us suddenly within this middle-class circle, where we have a double pressure to sustain, from within and from without. The Christian bourgeoisie would not be unwilling to cast us as a sacrifice to Socialism, though that would not greatly improve matters. At the same time, the equal rights of Jews before the law cannot be withdrawn where they have once been conceded. Not only because their withdrawal would be opposed to the spirit of our age, but also because it would immediately drive all Jews, rich and poor alike, into the ranks of the revolutionary party.

"Nothing effectual can really be done to our injury. In old days our jewels were seized. How is our movable property to be got hold of now? It is comprised in printed papers which are scattered over the world, locked up maybe in the coffers of Christians. It is of course possible to get at shares and debentures in railways, banks and industrial undertakings of all descriptions, by taxation, and where the progressive income-tax is in force, all our realised property can eventually be laid hold of. But all these efforts cannot be directed against Jews alone, and where they have nevertheless been made, severe economic crises, with far-reaching effects, have been their immediate consequence. The very impossibility of getting at the Jews nourishes and embitters hatred of them. Anti-Semitism increases day by day and hour by hour among the nations; indeed, it is bound to increase, because the causes of its growth continue to exist, and cannot be removed. Its remote cause is our loss of the power of assimilation during the Middle Ages ; its immediate cause is our excessive production of mediocre intellects, who cannot find an outlet downwards or upwards—that is to say, no wholesome outlet in either direction. When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of the revolutionary party; when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse.

Effects of anti-Semitism

"The oppression we endure does not improve us, for we are not a whit better than ordinary people. It is true that we do not love our enemies ; but he alone who can conquer himself dare reproach us with that fault. Oppression naturally creates hostility against oppressors, and our hostility aggravates the pressure.

"It is impossible to escape from this eternal round. 'No!' some soft-hearted visionaries will say; 'no, it is possible! Possible by means of the ultimate perfection of humanity.' Is it worth while pointing out the sentimental folly of this view ? He who would found his hope for improved conditions on the ultimate perfection of humanity would indeed be painting a Utopia!

"I referred previously to our 'assimilation.' I do not for a moment wish to imply that I desire such an end. Our national character is too historically famous, and, spite of every degradation, too fine, to make its annihilation desirable. We might, perhaps, be able to merge ourselves entirely into surrounding races, if these were to leave us in peace for a space of two generations. But they will not leave us in peace.

"For a little period they manage to tolerate us, and then their hostility breaks out again and again. The world is provoked by our prosperity, because it has for many centuries been accustomed to consider us as the most contemptible among the poverty-stricken.

"It forgets, in its ignorance and narrowness of heart, that prosperity weakens our Judaism and extinguishes our peculiarities. It is only pressure that forces us back to the parent stem ; it is only hatred encompassing us that makes us strangers once more.

"Thus, whether we like it or not, we are now, and shall henceforth remain, an historic group with unmistakable characteristics common to us all."

To turn again to the oracle of anti-Semitism to which I have already referred, in answer to the question, " Wie soil die Judenfrage nun gelost werden ? " (How shall the Jewish Question be solved?) we have the following paragraph: " Either the Jews must procure some territory for themselves—best if it were out of Europe (means they have plenty) and be allowed a definite period, say ten years, to depart from our midst, or, if they remain, the following enactment should be made: 'The Jews are only allowed to occupy themselves with agriculture or productive manual labour, in which they are to have only Jews as their assistants. From every other sphere and occupation they must be excluded, and for a non-Jew to be in any way in the employment of a Jew should be highly punishable to both parties.'

" The laws emancipating the Jews, and which granted them civil rights, should be repealed, and they should only be allowed to exist as aliens under special law" (" Judenrecht").

I hold in my hand three curios of modern anti-Semitism. One is an exact imitation of a German railway ticket. On the front we read these words : " Nach Jerusalem (to Jerusalem). There, but not return, 4th class, 20 mark." Across one end the route and date are as usual indicated, which are " Germany—Palestine," and across the other end, which usually has the initials of the railway company, the word " Isaac " is spelt out. Turning it over, on the reverse side we find the following inscription. First, in large letters, there is the Hebrew word "Kosher" ("clean"), a word with which things lawful for Jews to eat are usually sealed, and then this admonition, " Fahre hin mit 100,000 Deiner Bruder and taufe in Jordan Dich doch—Kehre niemals wieder" ("Go with 100,000 of thy brethren and immerse thyself in the Jordan, but never return “).

The second curio is an anti-Semitic bronze medal bearing the arms of the city of Berlin, with the date, beneath which are the words, " Hep ! Hep ! " On the obverse side are the names of the three best known and most violent German Jew-haters, for whom it calls " Hoch ! " (" Hurrah!") " Vivant sequentes." The third is a ticket to a public concert in Vienna, the price of which is a florin, but beneath there is this saving clause, " Fur Juden ist diese karte ungiltig," which is equivalent to " Jews are excluded."

The first of these curios expresses the aim and object of anti-Semitism, which is to drive them out of Christendom : " Go to Jerusalem, and never return ;" and the other two show us the weapons of anti-Semitism, by which they seek to accomplish their object, namely, by insult and exclusion, and if that will not answer, then " Hep! Hep ! " This apparently harmless word is the symbol of blood and death to the Jews. It is formed as already explained, 1 of the initial letters of the Latin phrase, " Hierosolyma est Perdita ! " and was the watch-cry of the Crusaders in their attacks and wholesale massacres of the Jewish communities in their bloody march to the East.

The Dreyfus case and the cries of " A bas les Juifs !" " Mort aux Juifs ! " which have so recently rung through the streets of the city which calls itself " the mother of civilisation," are but symptoms of the implacable hatred of the Jew which underlies anti-Semitism. Nor are Paris and Berlin alone in their attempt to revive the cry of "Hep! Hep!"

During several recent visits to Austria I had occasion to observe the consternation manifested in large Jewish circles at the developments of the anti-Jewish campaign in that tottering Empire. In Vienna a great municipal war which has helped to demoralise all the political parties, has ended, in spite of interpositions of the 1 See page 114. Emperor, in the repeated election of a burgomaster and a vast majority of councillors who are avowedly pledged to make the life of the 125,000 in that city, and the nearly two million Jews in the Empire generally, as wretched as possible. Mr. Arnold White, in his "Modern Jew," speaks of the leader of the anti-Semites in Austria " as a man of great personal charm." This is a matter of taste, but his spirit in relation to the Jews may be judged from some of his public utterances, which breathe of fire and sword.

It is not so long ago that a notorious Roman Catholic vicar near Vienna ended a series of weekly harangues against the Jews, delivered in his parish church, with the words, " Verbrennt die Juden zur Ehre Gottes. Amen." (" Burn the Jews to the glory of God. Amen.") " No one can deny the gravity of the Jews' situation," says Dr. Theodore Herzl, in that statesmanlike pamphlet from which I have already quoted. " Wherever they live in perceptible numbers, they are more or less persecuted. Their equality before the law, granted by statute, has become practically a dead letter. They are debarred from filling even moderately high positions, either in the army or in any public or private capacity. And attempts are made to crowd them out of business also. ' No dealing with Jews!'

"Attacks in Parliaments, in assemblies, in the press, in the pulpit, in the streets, on journeys—for example, their exclusion from certain hotels — even in places of recreation, become daily more numerous ; the forms of persecution varying according to the countries in which they occur. In Russia, impositions are levied on Jewish villages; in Roumania, a few human beings are done to death; in Germany, they get a good beating when the occasion serves ; in Austria, anti-Semites exercise terrorism over all public life; in Paris, they are shut out of the so-called best social circles and excluded from clubs. Shades of anti-Jewish feeling are innumerable. But this is not to be an attempt to make out a doleful category of Jewish hardships ; it is futile to linger over details, however painful they may be.

"I do not intend to awaken sympathetic emotions on our behalf. That would be a foolish, futile, and undignified proceeding. I shall content myself with putting the following questions to the Jews: Is it true that in countries where we live in perceptible numbers the position of Jewish lawyers, doctors, men of science, teachers, and officials of all descriptions, becomes daily more intolerable ? True that the Jewish middle classes are seriously threatened ? True that the mob are incited against our wealthy representatives ? True that our poor endure greater sufferings than any other proletariat ?

"I think that this external pressure makes itself felt everywhere. In our upper classes it causes disagreeables, in our middle classes continual and grave anxieties, in our lower classes absolute despair.

"Everything tends, in fact, to one and the same conclusion, which is clearly enunciated in that classic Berlin phrase : 'Juden 'raus!' ('Out with the Jews !’).

"But what is the meaning of anti-Semitism in relation to Israel's future ? A full answer to this question is given us in the Word of God. In Ps. 105., which sings the story of Israel's future redemption as prefigured by their past history, we have these words : "Israel also came into Egypt, and Jacob sojourned in the land of Ham, and He increased His people greatly, and made them stronger than their enemies. He turned their heart to hate His people, to deal subtly with His servants, He sent Moses His servant, and Aaron whom He had chosen." Then there follows a list of the plagues which He poured out upon Egypt, culminating in the slaying of all the firstborn in their land, " the chief of all their strength," so that " Egypt was glad when they departed, for the fear of them fell upon them. . . . For He remembered His holy promise, and Abraham His servant And He brought forth His people with joy and His chosen with gladness."

It is remarkable how history repeats itself, and in relation to Israel the words of the preacher may especially be applied : "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be ... and there is nothing new under the sun."

If we substitute the word "nations" for Egypt we have an epitome of the origin, development, and issues not only of the ancient but also of the modern phase of the Jewish Question in the three or four verses of the psalm which I have quoted.

1. The origin of the Jewish Question in Egypt is summed up in the words : " He increased His people greatly, and made them stronger than their enemies." This is brought out still more clearly in the original account in Exodus, where we read : " And the children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceedingly mighty, and the land was filled with them." It was on that account that the new Pharaoh who knew not Joseph became alarmed and took counsel with his people, saying, " Come on; let us deal wisely with them," the results of which were measures of repression, and when these did not answer, the promulgation of an edict for their extermination.

The modern phase of the Jewish Question originated and becomes from year to year intensified from the same cause.

We have already seen how since the commencement of the nineteenth century, the Jews are multiplying at a rate which is perfectly marvellous. Look, for instance, at the following comparative table in reference to Austria, where the Jewish problem is assuming a more and more acute phase :–

Jews in Austria at various times (exclusive of Hungary").

Maria Theresa's Reign ......... 200,000.

1830 ..... ............. 355,000.

1850 .................. 476,000.

1869 .................. 822,000.

1880 .................. 1,000,000.

1890 …………….1,143,305

According to the same authority there were in Hungary in the reign of Joseph II. 25,000 Jews; at the end of the last century there were 50,000; in 1830, 100,000; in 1847, 270,000; in 1870, 500,000; in 1883, 700,000; whilst at the present time the number has reached 1,000,000.

And not only is it in point of numbers that God is again causing His people "to increase greatly," but by their superior wits and energy and by their habits of frugality and thriftiness He makes them " stronger than their enemies," so that in those regions where the bulk of the nation is to be found, wherever the Jew has a fair chance he naturally places his Gentile neighbor in a less favorable position in the struggle for existence. The superior ability of the Jew is openly acknowledged by anti-Semites, and often appealed to as a ground for the restrictive and repressive laws which are in vogue against them in some countries.

The following is taken from a chapter which summariszs "the case for Russian anti-Semitism" in a work from which I have already quoted (" The Modern Jew," by Arnold White).

"But there is still another element which the rulers of Russia are constrained to take into their consideration. The intellect of the Jew is masterful. His assiduity, his deadly resolve -to'get on, his self-denial and ambition surmount all natural obstacles. If all careers in the Russian Empire were thrown open to the Russian Jew not a decade would go by before the whole Russian administration from Port Arthur to Eydtkuhnen, and from Archangel to Yalta, must pass into Hebraic hands. This is a sober statement of facts."

The same is true of other Continental countries. The following is a passage from an apology for anti-Semitism in Austria, which, though somewhat exaggerated, is largely true :— " The Jews are all powerfully represented in every walk in life that leads to influence and fortune. In the professions of law, medicine, and literature their numbers are out of all proportion to their quota of the population. Finance and commerce are practically in their hands. The great business houses, the banks, the railways that do not belong to the State, are all controlled by them. The Produce Exchange, and of course the Bourse at Vienna, Prague, or Budapest, are deserted on Jewish holidays. The press, with the exception of the Czech organs, is almost exclusively in the hands of Jews."

The proportion of Jews in the Austrian Universities is far in excess of what might be expected from their actual number in the country. For instance, in the Vienna University in 1887-88, out of 6,530 students there were 2,500 Jews— i.e., 40 per cent. In Vienna itself one person in every ten is a Jew, but the proportion of the Jewish population in the whole Empire is only 5 per cent. It is a notorious fact that an increasingly large proportion of the great specialists and best known Professors in Vienna are Jews or of Jewish origin. At the end of 1887, out of 660 qualified attorneys in Vienna 350 were Jews. Indeed, the faculty of law may almost be said to be a monppoly of the Jews in Austria, and also in Germany, where they form not only a large percentage of the attorneys, but also of the judges of the highest courts, and have, as in England and France, supplied from their ranks ministers of justice and judges of appeal. In Berlin 120 of the Professors and Privatdocenten are Jews, and in the whole of Germany there are about 400 Jewish Professors.

2. The next step in the old Jewish Question in Egypt was that " He turned their heart" (that is, of the Egyptians) " to hate His people, to deal subtilly with His servants." This is how the great God causes the wrath of man to praise Him, and when His purpose is accomplished "restrains the remainder." Pharaoh and his councillors said, "Come on, let us deal wisely with them," and attempted to solve the Jewish Question in their own way, namely, by persecution and extermination ; but God turned the wisdom of the Egyptians into foolishness. " The more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew." Instead of succeeding in drowning them in the Nile, Pharaoh and his host were in the end drowned in the Red Sea. But what is the meaning of His "turning their heart to hate His people"? It had a double significance.

(a) In relation to Israel it was the means which God employed to stir up their nest and to make them willing to leave the land in which, until the persecutions broke out, they had been content to live for centuries. " For He remembered His holy promise, and Abraham His servant," and the time had come according to His own Divine forecast to Abraham (Gen. xv. 13, 14) that they should come out of Egypt, and takes possession of the lands of the Amorites, whose iniquity was now full.

(b) In relation to Egypt it was "an evident token of perdition " and precursor of the plagues which came upon it. The judicial hardening of the heart of Pharaoh and the Egyptians was in itself part of the punishment from a righteous God upon a cruel nation sinking lower and lower to the most contemptible depths of idolatry. God has often chastened His people " with the rod of men, and with the stripes of the children of men," but He has no pleasure in the scourge which He employs, and as a rule uses for the chastisement of His people men or nations whom He designs to give up to destruction for their wickedness.

Now, in these respects, too, the ancient Jewish Question in Egypt finds its parallel in the modern phases of the problem which are accentuated by anti-Semitism. The millions of the poor and less cultured orthodox Talmudic Jews in Russia, Galicia, and Rou-mania have long ago been convinced that these lands cannot much longer remain their resting-places, and that it is about time for them to "arise and depart" toward that land for which they have never ceased to cherish a yearning desire ; hence the many colonising schemes and the more than thirty Jewish colonies which already exist in Palestine, consisting almost entirely of Russian and Roumanian Jews. The remarkable thing is that, as the result of the newest phases of the anti-Jewish movement on the Continent, the more cultured, wealthy, and rationalistic Jews are at last digesting the truths that it is not by the so-called "reform" movement which aims at assimilation with the nations that the Jewish Question will be solved ; for, after all their efforts in this direction for more than half a century and their desperate eagerness to strip themselves of all that is true and false in orthodox Judaism, as a kind of peace-offering to the mysterious, deep-seated antipathy of the Gentiles, they find that it is just against themselves, more even than against the less cultured of their brethren in Russia and Eastern Europe, that the bitterest animosity is manifested, and that Christendom, though it is itself for the most part apostate from truth and from the faith of Christ, is even less reconciled to the rationalism and neology of the modern cultivated " Israelite," than it is to the Talmudism of the more consistent orthodox "Jew" who still wears his kaftan and peyoth.

What is this but a repetition of the warning words which God in His providence has so often spoken to Israel: " And that which cometh into your mind shall not be at all ; in that ye say, We will be as the nations, as the families of the countries."

And in relation to the nations it is again an omen of approaching judgment which will culminate in the overthrow and destruction of the armies of the great confederacy, as shown in another part of this volume. "Jehovah frustrateth the counsel of the nations: He maketh the devices of the peoples of none effect. The counsel of Jehovah standeth for ever, the thoughts of His heart to all generations."

Covenant and Controversy 9/21/15 Covenant and Controversy 9/21/15

Dachau // A Silent Witness

“I believe the Holocaust has remained an unresolved mystery precisely because we have not raised the deepest and truest questions.…”

by Art Katz

As men, our integrity and eternal destiny are going to be measured and determined by the nature of the questions we ask. Despite countless volumes of study and speculation, despite the assaults of human wisdom and moral exertion, I believe the Holocaust has remained an unresolved mystery precisely because we have not raised the deepest and truest questions.

Perhaps this is so because in our hearts we already sense that were we ever to commit ourselves to finding the deepest roots of our Jewish calamities, our lives would be forever altered. Perhaps we have perceived in our hearts that the truth of the Holocaust and of Jewish existence is going to cost much, and therefore we prefer to examine and speculate about the Holocaust rather than confront its haunting and unsettling enormity, and ask, “why has this happened to us?” Nevertheless, the Holocaust, so vast in its dimensions, so all-encompassing in its implications, demands a correspondingly total and complete response from us. To ask less than an all-embracing “why?” and to throw less than one’s whole being into searching that question out, regardless of the cost, are not to make a meaningful response at all.

In Dachau, Germany, the concentration camp used in the Nazi era can still be found. The gruesome reality has become a museum, and seems to be a witness to a sincere commitment to truth, regardless of how painful and incriminating it may be. Or does it? What if it is a picture of our Jewish relationship to the Holocaust, costly and provocative, but seeming to stop short of that final and total confrontation and meaning which alone constitute truth?

The screams and shrieks that once permeated the air of Dachau have been muted, entombed behind glass windows. A barrack has been built to exact specifications, a perfect replica of the original, but it is antiseptic and clean, utterly devoid of the stench of death, untouched by the indelible stain of human torment and degradation. The museum, with its manicured grounds and memorial plaque, has submerged the reality of the Holocaust, blunting its true magnitude and impact far more effectively than could bulldozers and asphalt.

At Dachau today, the Holocaust has been reduced to manageable proportions, to dimensions which can still be contained within the limits of our understanding and emotions. The museum and its apparent candor is a relatively small price for the Germans to pay for the privilege of considering the Holocaust a past event, a momentary aberration of history, which, for all of its horror, is being explained in a sense, but only within the limits of our humanistic assumptions, thereby allowing our human optimism to remain intact. The shame and remorse evoked at Dachau are relatively easy alternatives to the unbounded shock and consternation which the Holocaust, untainted by human cosmetics, must inevitably produce.

As Jews, we may actually have been unsuspecting accomplices with our German brothers. Content to let remorse suffice, we are as unwilling as they to allow our perennial, human optimism and deep self-assurance to be brought into question. Even our own Holocaust memorials have served to insulate us from the full impact and deepest implications of our tragedy. The indignation and grief that Dachau evokes in the Jewish heart are preferable to, and far easier to live with, than the shock and total dislocation of mind and spirit which the Holocaust should, of itself, induce in us. We have acquiesced to explanations born of our own wisdom, weaving of them a cloak beneath which the impassioned “why us?” burning in our hearts has been smothered and suppressed. That question continues to burn, unquenched by our wisdom, just as the flames of the Holocaust continue to burn, though suppressed and hidden by the thin layer of civilization and culture stretched over the surface of our modern world. We have appeared willing to reckon with the Holocaust, to ponder it, but the truth is, we have not yet truly faced it.

One writer, reflecting upon the establishment of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw observed that “the calamitous march of events shook many pious Jews from their traditional moorings.” With few exceptions, we have drifted back to the traditional moorings of Judaism; we have drifted back to our humanistic optimism, to faith in human progress and to those religious traditions and practices that have come to characterize Jewish life. Today, as in the past, there are multitudes of false prophets among us, crying “peace, peace!” They are no longer found standing in the streets of Jerusalem, but in universities, in government offices and behind pulpits in synagogues. Their popularity with us today is as great as that of their predecessors. Yet, the truth is, there is no peace. We are only superficially healed. Most of us remain tied to our traditional moorings, content to believe in the optimistic words of our chosen “prophets.”

Let there be those who will risk being torn loose from those moorings by the impact of the questions raised by the Holocaust in just the same way as their fathers in Warsaw and Dachau were torn loose and set adrift by the actual events. Let there be those who will have the courage to dig deeper than the statistics of those horrors, deeper than the ashes and charred bones, deeper than the veneer of culture and civilization, for whom the comforts and securities of this present life are as transparent and cruel a deception as were the showerheads and bath-house fixtures of the death camp gas chambers. Let there be those who will come to acknowledge the still-burning fires of the Holocaust, mirrored in their own hearts as the burning question of “why?”

If we are still tied to our traditional moorings, then we have not yet recognized the reality of the Holocaust, for it is the very essence of the Holocaust to defy and undo our insistent optimism, to shatter all our illusions, to strip naked, to remove every prop and support, and leave us lost men “drifting through a fog-enshrouded world searching for light.” To experience the Holocaust as ultimate calamity is to be delivered from every illusion of security, from our country clubs and suburban homes, from our professions and bank accounts, and from our pious repetition of religious clichés; and then to be cast out into a storm of bewilderment and anguish from which alone the true cry of the heart can issue forth: “Why? What have we done to deserve it?”

Few have a heart for such questions. It is far easier to enter into intellectual speculations than to confront the Holocaust as a direct challenge to all our conceptions of what life means in general and for us Jews in particular. How is it that we have so long avoided those questions? How have we been able to go on in our customary ways while the Holocaust has only been superficially explained? Why have we not been gripped, compelled to risk all, to commit all of our passion and energy with an unrelenting urgency to find the answer to the deeper questions raised by the Holocaust?

The museum at Dachau is visually accessible for analysis; it is there to be questioned, but for many it remains submissive to their preconceived ideas. The real Dachau is not so submissive; rather, it is calculated to assault and refute every valued category we have held about the Holocaust. The man confronting the true Dachau must be prepared to have his moral systems shattered, his accommodations with his own peculiar circumstances utterly wrecked, and his uneasy peace with life irremediably disturbed. For such a man, the answer to “why?” must become a consuming passion.

As moderns, are we prepared to confront that reality today? This is no rhetorical question; the Holocaust is no mere historical event, but rather the most recent and devastating expression of the continuing state of Jewish existence. Like a malignant tumor, the Holocaust is but the dramatic and visible revelation of a cancer that is spread throughout the entire body. The whole logic of our history is calculated to disturb us, to jar us out of every secure peace with the world. Jewish history has been little more than a series of jarrings and proddings designed to force us to question our assumptions about our Jewishness and ourselves. In this respect, the Jew is the quintessential man. Life’s unprecedented calamities have cornered us, thrusting agonizing questions in our way.

Are we willing to ask why we have so long been a people in exile, scattered over the earth? Are we willing to ask why we have remained a foreign substance in the body of every nation in which we find ourselves? Or why it is that we have been preserved over the centuries, yet never delivered from our chronic alienation, predicament and vulnerability? From biblical times we have been haunted by our separateness, seeking to be like the nations around us, yet forever scorned and kept apart. Our being chosen of God as a light to all nations is evidenced by the inescapability of its implications.

Our suffering has been too great to comprehend, and our preservation too uncanny to explain in terms of chance, or in terms of our own perseverance. We are a people trapped in an eternal predicament, never far from perplexity, chosen and yet seemingly forsaken by God. The question of the Holocaust is but an expression of a greater question, the enduring mystery and enigma of all of Jewish existence. To question the Holocaust is to question everything about ourselves and our purpose for being.

The Holocaust is essentially the daily reality of Jewish existence writ large to compel our acknowledgment; its torments, its insecurities and its fears are no more than the eruptions of the torments, insecurities and fears that underlie our life as a people. On the one hand, the Holocaust is the conspicuous evidence of our exile, even our inevitable predicament; on the other, the countless insults and humiliations of daily life are there to remind us that we are yet vulnerable and alone.

The Holocaust has had repeated rehearsals preceding it in Jewish history. From even before the conquest of Judea by the armies of Babylon in 597 BC, out history has been punctuated by a repeating refrain of destruction and suffering. As a people in exile, we have endured the murderous riots of Alexandria in 38 AD, the leveling of Jerusalem and the dismemberment of the nation by Rome in 70 AD, the humiliation of the yellow badge begun in 1215, expulsion from England in 1290, the Spanish Inquisition and the exile from Spain in 1492. The herding ignites and the countless pogroms all preceded and foreshadowed the great nightmare that swept across a “civilized” Europe in our own lifetime.

It is as if the Holocaust has always loomed inevitable in the life of the children of Israel, a great black dread and portent permeating our past, dimming and contradicting all hope for the future. We are a diverse people, yet one thing alone unites us, transcending every boundary of time, geography and culture, and this one thing is stamped upon our consciousness as the indelible mark of Jewish identity, namely, the sense of inexplicable and inescapable alienation and pursuit, a mark which no amount of reason, effort or assimilation can ever erase. This mark is our common bond, our common and inescapable heritage. The Holocaust is the permanent and pervasive condition of our lives.

   The conflagrations, of which the Holocaust is the greatest, have been intermittent, but the fire from which they have sprung has been incessant. While our physical bodies are no longer being thrown into ovens, we are being subjected without ceasing to the warping and corrosions, the slow demoralizing and dehumanizing inner burnings of that same unquenchable flame. So many centuries of so tortuous an existence have left a permanent and visible mark on our lives. The psychological casualties far outnumber the physical. We have been stunted and compressed; our ulcers and heart conditions, our dependence upon tranquilizers and psychiatrists, our addiction to the amusements of the world and our ceaseless string and activity are all agonizing testimony of our unrelieved distress. We are a driven people, either pursuing an explanation and a solution to our condition with an unrequited passion, or else engaged in a frenzied effort to escape or deny it. But if our pursuit after success and wealth and acceptance has failed to deaden the awareness of our condition, neither has our pursuit after knowledge gained foe us any deliverance. We have attained whatever superficial relief that advantageous circumstances have allow us, but we have not arrives at any permanent cure or relief.

   The pattern of Jewish existence has not been broken. For secularized and religious Jew alike, the land of Israel has long been the last hope and ultimate dream of deliverance. Yet, recent history has proven that Israel, far from reversing the pattern of Jewish life, has revealed it all the more plainly and painfully.

In a country that has frequently been accused (even by its friends) of having a paranoid “Massada complex,” the sense of discontent is all pervaisive. Almost like a biblical plague, the Arab attack on Yom Kippur in 1973 swept away the sweet, fat, confident years that followed the 1967 war. (Time Magazine 12/2/74)

Professor Ammon Rubinstein, then Dean of the Tel Aviv Law School, make this comment shortly after the Yom Kippur War of 1973:

I am pessimistic like everyone today. It feels like we’re back where we began – a small weak country facing a much greater power with the odds against us. In many ways we’re worse off now that in 1948. We’re back to square one as Israelis and also as Jews. The pro-Jewish sentiment that followed World War II has disappeared and many people today feel that 30 years is time enough for atonement. Arafat’s appearance at the U.N. awakened in me memories of films of Hitler’s speeches. The feeling is one of being totally alone and not realizing why or what we have done to deserve it. It is a return to the Jewish predicament.

   A return to the Jewish predicament is to be surrounded and compressed by a great power without, while feeling vulnerable, alienated and perplexed within. The circumstances of Israel have not changed since those melancholy words were spoken. In the intervening years, the grip of the Jewish predicament has only tightened. The identity of the enemy changes; the political and economic circumstances alter, but the essential pattern of Jewish existence remains the same. So inevitable in its reappearance, so immune to space and time, the pattern of our life compels us to look beyond the range of our normal vision. It evoke a cosmic question. The current predicament of the state of Israel, like the current state of our lives as Jews, testifies to the fact that we have not yet fathomed the meaning of the Holocaust, and we stand, therefore, in jeopardy of having it repeated.

   As a people, Jews have sown the abundance of the creative energy and genius into the cultural soil of every nation in which they have found themselves, only to reap, all too frequently, persecution and rejection. We have been the builders of cultures and civilizations, the architects of ideologies and philosophies, only to later find ourselves confined in the enslaving ghettos built from the very products of our own labor. A German civilization, invigorated by nearly 2000 years of Jewish life, brought European Jewry to near extinction. Regardless of what we sow, we reap only exile and death. Whatever the answer may cost us, we are compelled to ask “why?”. Whatever the answer may cost us, the cost of failing to ask is bound to be far greater.

   The Holocaust is not so much a historical event as a present accusation, penetrating irresistible towards the very center of our lives. The power of this assault, the sting which pierces the heart and fastens the whole unbearable weight of our suffering is the realization that all this was allowed by the God of Israel.

   “Characteristic is the rebellion against God, against heaven, which is noticeable among many Jews who no longer wish to declare God’s judgement right.” That status made about the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto, but it is applicable to all, regardless of time and place, who awaken to discover themselves walled in and compressed, confined within the narrow limits of the Jewish predicament. Perennially confident of the favor of God, we, like the Jews of Warsaw, are confronted by God’s silence and abandonment in the hour of our extremity. The Holocaust is present to us today, inducing in our hearts the same crisis as was induced in Warsaw. The Holocaust continues, a fire of mockery and scorn, consuming our pious platitudes and evaporating every false and convenient idea of God. The whole of our history is but the accumulated weight of contradiction and frustration, the accrued substance of shrieks and cries, wails and laments, directed toward a God who seemingly did not answer us in our every crisis.

   How many of us stand in jeopardy of becoming hypocrites, continuing to profess a religious faith, persisting in religious traditions, while harboring in our hearts as unspoken accusation against the God who allows six million Jews to perish in the Nazi era? We pay a religious service to God without our lips, while doubts and charges fester and ferment into bitterness and rage. In our hearts we judge and condemn Him, secretly agreeing with those in the Warsaw ghetto who no longer desire to declare God’s judgement right. And are we any less the hypocrites who have spurned faith and railed against God without ever earnestly questioning either Him or ourselves?

To truly confront the Holocaust, then, is to truly confront God and ourselves. Indeed, few men are disposed to ask such ultimate and supremely costly questions. Do we have the courage to stand in identification with the Jews of Dachau and Warsaw, to have our whole world demolished, our souls thrust into anguish and perplexity by the awesome silence of God?

For many, the Holocaust has been the ultimate ground for rejecting God. But the truth is just the opposite. The Holocaust is the fire that burns and consumes everything that we have placed between God and ourselves. Our Jewish way of life, our Yiddishkeit, our philanthropies and our Zionism have permitted us to avoid facing the reality of our condition, namely, our utter and total alienation from the God of Israel.

Ponder the great shout of praise, so filled with the assurance of the presence of God, that brought the mighty walls of Jericho tumbling down; and contrast it with the result upon the fortress of Jewish life and culture by our silent shudder in the seeming absence of God from Dachau, Auschwitz and Warsaw.

The silence of God, superficially considered, will provoke accusations and judgements against Him, but the silence of God reckoned with in the depths of the heart, and allowed to sound and reverberated throughout our secret and guarded chambers, will shatter and wreck, will humble and strip bare, will call out into the light all secret apprehensions and fears, and will compel us to cry out “why?” and “where was God?” How many of us have a heart for such questions?

Until such questions are asked, our very piety and Jewishness will constitute a willful self-deceit. And no less is true of the seemingly bold humanism and secular idealism that have become so characteristic of our life. Thought we talk about an abstract, impersonal “force” behind the universe, our humanistic values, far from being the last resting place of a mind fatigues and disappointed after earnestly searching for the Author of biblical record, are rather the first resort and hiding place of the heart which will not rush all for the sake of finding Him.

Humility and honesty require of us the admission that while scorning belief in a living God, and while regarding His silence as final proof of His impotence and irrelevance, we have never earnestly sought Him nor truly desired to meet such a One. Our indignation and rejection are in essence just as much as means of insulating ourselves from the deeper issues raised by the Holocaust as has been our continuing religious piety. The place of true confrontation is not attractive to many, and requires the laying aside of our hopes that mankind will over time improve itself, which was so powerfully refuted in the ashes of the Holocaust, a refutation as irrevocable and complete as the contradiction of traditional religious piety write in those same ashes.

The silence of God demands the forsaking of cynicism as much as the abandonment of our supposed piety. it requires the shedding of the prosecutors robes as much as the laying aside of the defendoer’s cloak. Ultimately, it will require the laying aside of the difficult issues of our suffering if we are ever to respond to the question that God’s silence has raised. Our pain and lament must be set aside lest they too become a shield and barrier between ourselves and the God with whom we have to do. let neither our atheism, not our piety, be factors in our failing to perceive that in His silence God has spoken.

In His silence, God has contradicted our conceptions both of Him and of ourselves. In His silence, He has wrecked our traditional moorings and invited us to come seeking after Him, naked and in truth. The terrible inadequacy of our ideas of His has been uncovered and displayed by the grit of our historical experiences. This unyielding, impenetrable silence is the true meaning of the Holocaust. It lies at the heart of our lives, both as a people and individually; it is the substance of the Jewish predicament. God’s silence makes disquieting claims on all our categories and theories; it assaults our confidence and assurance; it contradicts our faith in ourselves. We can deny it; we can sink from its challenge in despair, but we can never truly escape it. Who has the courage sufficient to answer such a challenge? Who will stand in utter nakedness? Who will allow himself to be divested of all tradition, stripped of all intellectual and moral preconceptions and presumptions? Who, in the deepest and truest sense, is Jewish enough to encounter such a God?

In the hour of crisis, and delivers unjustly to the fiery furnace, three Jewish men, Shadrach, Mechash and Abednego, discovered God amidst the flames. God stood with them in the furnace, and delivered them without a burn, without even the smell of smoke. Where was the God of Daniel’s companions when six million of Israel’s people were being cast into the flames of the Holocaust? If His presence in the one furnace speaks to us, what, we are bound to ask, does His absence from the other say?

   By the hand of God, Job was a man delivered over to inexplicable suffering, stripped of everything, all his security and reason confounded. He was a man brought down to the dust, reduced to his “naked existence” without explanation, invited to “curse God and die,” (Job 2:9) to transmute his anguish and perplexity into bitterness and despair. But Job refused, and asked instead, “Let me know why You contend with me. Is it right for You indeed to oppress, to reject the labor of Your hands, and to look favorable on the schemes of the wicked?” (Job 10:3)

   Like Job, have we asked why God might be contending with us? Are we not rather without explanation for our plight, with both our enlightened humanism and our traditional religious understanding of God and of ourselves failing to provide an adequate answer? How do we understand a sovereign and contending God?

   “But I would speak to the Almighty, and desire to argue with God.” (Job 13:3) This is not the impious and blasphemous cry of a self-righteous man but the only true response of a heart, in anguished search for truth, being thrust nakedly beyond all limits of pride and extremities of pain, into the presence of God.

Covenant and Controversy 9/21/15 Covenant and Controversy 9/21/15

So-Called “Christian anti-Semitism”

Some Jewish leaders today are recognizing that the best friends the Jewish people have are the conservative evangelical Christians. Admittedly, some see Israel in prophetic terms, but this is not the primary reason for sympathy toward the Jewish people. It is rather because they take their Bibles seriously, read about the history of Israel, realize that Jesus is Jewish, and also have a biblically rooted sense of justice. All that being said, there has been a sad history, within European “Christendom” of mistreatment of the Jewish people.

by Rev. Fred Klett

The average seminary graduate knows much less than the average Jewish person about the unfortunate history of Christian-Jewish relations. Few church members know about the persecution the Jewish people have suffered at the hands of professing Christians. The bloody history of “Christian” persecution of the Jewish people and forced conversion to Christianity continues for centuries, but few Christians today know anything o this lamentable history. Beyond question, such treatment of Jewish people is completely contrary to anything Jesus taught! Some would say “No true Christian did such things!” However, that is too simplistic an approach. In fact, even true believers can and do sin. King David was a “true Jew” and a prime example of a man after the heart of God, yet David sinned terribly, committing, covetousness, adultery and murder. True believers have failed into sin, in spite of it being in contradiction with their faith.

During the first three centuries of the church Judaism and Christianity competed for the pagan mind. There was an active polemical debate between Christians and Jews, but it was on a theological level. Tertullian’s apologetic work, Adversus Judaeos, was an intellectual refutation of Jewish arguments against Christianity, but written with no anger or hatred. Flannery calls the works of this period “moderate” in their “general attitude toward Judaism” and that their “condemnations are usually tempered with a note of sadness and hope for reunion.”[1] Flannery says the fourth century brought a turn for the worse.

Augustine started the idea of the Jewish people as a “witness people,” that is, whatever happens to them demonstrated God’s blessing or judgement. Though he would have not approved, this idea served in later centuries as a rationale for persecution of the Jews. Augustine also said Judas is the picture of the Jewish people. The Jews are destined to be slaves, yet we should love them and lead them to Christ. He advocated preaching to the Jews with a spirit of love.

Jerome, translator of the Bible into Latin, wrote that the Jews are the image of Judas and haters of all men.

John Chrysostome wrote that the Jews are “most miserable of all men” (Homily 4:1), Jew are to live “under the yoke of servitude without end” (Homily 6:2) and that God hates the Jews and has always hated the Jews. He also said, “He who can never love Christ enough will never have fighting against those [Jews] who hate Him” (Homily 7:1). Jews are “lustful, rapacious, greedy, perfidious bandits… inveterate murderers, destroyers, men possessed by the devil” whom “debauchery and drunkenness have given them the manners of the pig and the lusty goat.”[2]

Gregorry of Nissa (331-96) said the Jews are “slayers of the Lord, murderes of the prophets, enemies of God, haters of God, adversaries of grace, enemies of their father’s faith, advocates of the devil, brood of vipers, slanderers, scoffers, men of darkened minds, leaven of the Pharisees, congregation of demons, sinners, wicked men, stoners, and haters of goodness.”[3]

The seventh council of Toledo (694) ordered all Jewish children above the age of seven to be taken from their parents by force and raised as Christians.

The Crusades began a new wave of persecution in the name of Christ. Jews were murdered by the thousands in the name of Christ.

According to Flannery, from January to July of 1096 1/4-1/3 of the Jewish population of Germany and northern France were massacred.[4] Charges of ritual murder and “desecration of the host” were used to justify the slaughter of Jewish people in hundreds of incidents.

In 1298 100,000 Jews were killed because of this charge. The yellow identifying badge we associate with the Nazi era began in thirteenth century France.

Forced attendance at sermons became more frequent in the 13th century and was even taken up by some Protestant reformers.

In 14th century Spain 50,000 Jewss were killed by a mob inspired by Martinez, Archdeacon of Seville. During the Spanish Inquisition, Isabella expelled Jews from Spain along with the Church. In Portugal during the inquisition all Jewish children were ordered baptized and taken from there parents. Many Christians were so appalled by this that they came to the aid of the Jews. (Flannery 90-141, passim)

The Pogroms sanctioned by the Russian Orthodox Church persecuted and uprooted whole Jewish villages.

Lest Protestants think themselves beyond reproach, consider the words of Martin Luther: “What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews?… First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or a cinder of them… Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed… Instead they might be lodged under a roof or in a barn like the Gypsies… Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught be taken from them. Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb…Fifth, I advise that safe conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews… Sixth, I advise that lending money at a high rate of interest be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them and put aside for safekeeping. The reason for such a measure is that… they have no other means or earning a livlihood than usury, and by it they have stolen and robbed from us all they possess… I wish and I ask that our rulers who have Jewish subjects exercise a sharp mercy towards these wretched people, as suggested above, to see whether this might not help (though it is doubtful_. They must act like a good physician who, when gangrene has set in, proceeds without mercy to cut, saw, burn flesh, veins, bone and marrow. Such a procedure must also be followed in this instance. Burn down their synagogues, forbid all that I enumerated earlier, force them to work, and deal harshly with them, as Moses did in the wilderness, slaying three thousand les the people perish!”[5] Luther was responding to a medieval Jewish fiction called On the Generations of Jesus, a horribly blasphemous work, but I do not think we can excuse him. Luther, like King David, fell into sin. The statements of Luther were used by Nazis to justify the Holocaust during the Nuremberg trials.[6] Thankfully, Lutheran denominations have emphatically and officially renounces Luther’s statement!

Though Calvin was generally very positive in his views of the Jewish people (see quotations here), even Calvin, says J. Verkuyl in Contemporary Missiology (alluding to a study by a Dutch pastor) “could at times revert to a medieval penchant for abusive name-calling. His descriptions of Jews was shameful” (p. 126). Historically, however, countries and churches influences by Calvin have had a positive history in terms of Jewish-Christian relations.

Clearly, anti-Semitism on the part of professing Christians has contributed to the difficulty we have in sharing the good news of salvation with the Jewish people. Almost every week Jewish news outlets have at least one article mentioning anti-Semitic remarks or actions associated with those perceived as Christians by the Jewish community.

White supremacist groups often characterize themselves as “Christian.” most Jewish people can relate an incident when they were slapped, insulted or ridiculed because the “killed Christ.” My brothers Jewish boss had his driveway spray painted on Easter with the words: “You Jews Killed Christ.” I have even heard some pastors and seminarians in ignorance use racial stereotypes in describing the Jews, describing Jews as fish and shrewd, and using expressions such as “Jewing down the price.” Remember Bailey Smith’s insensitive remark to the effect that God does not hear the prayers of a Jew?

“Christian Anti-Semitism” is an absolute oxymoron. A Christian is someone who worships and serves the King of the Jews! Christian means “follower of Messiah”–the Jewish Messiah! To the extent that we fail to radically purge anti-Semitism–and all forms of racism–from the church we fail to follow our Savior. We all long to see progress of the gospel in the world, but such progress will be delayed and hindered if we fail to radically expunge this sort of thing from our midst.

2. ibid. p. 50-51

3. ibid. p. 50

4. ibid. p. 92

5. Martin Luther, On the Jews and their Lies, Luther's Works volume 47 (p. 268-272)

6. David A. Rausch, A Legacy of Hatred, Moody Press, Chicago (p. 28-29)

This article was taken with permission from Chaim.org and Rev. Fred Klett