The Complete Difference Between Antisemitism Among the Nazis and Antisemitism Among the Christians

So, what' you're showing me is that you didn't read that link at the start of yesterday's post.  Guess I'll have to do a post about the substance of it in a future post.  For now, I'll deal with the rest of your comment.

I should have learned my lesson a long time ago, people who have THE TRUTH of the matter, that the Nazi murders of six-million Jews was the fault of Christianity, that those are the only murders in their large range of mass murder that are significant and the only ones that are allowed to be considered in discerning what made them kill six million Jews.  So, of course, such people in possession of such a truth don't need to read footnotes, look at links and to do any actual reading of the growing and ever deeper body of scholarship which looks, in depth at the only real source of information about why the Nazis killed six-million Jews and, especially, the men who made the decision to do that.  As with the material I've been looking at in regard to eugenics, the only real way to have any reliable knowledge about that is to look at all of what they said about why they did it, the reasons they gave to do it, what they used to persuade other people to do it or go along with it.  And doing that research into the thinking of the Nazis is extremely unpleasant and no fun and the opposite of entertaining, which is probably another reason you don't know it exists.

Most of that scholarship hadn't been done even a quarter of a century after the Nazis had fallen, much of it has been done in the past twenty years and it continues to be done.  One of the most valuable aspects of history as opposed to journalism or even the direct experience of current events is that it can provide a view of a time and of events which isn't even available to those directly involved in the event.  It's quite possible for someone studying history to know more about the Nazi mass murders than those who were directly involved in planning and carrying it out.  Most of the documentation of that period was not published or distributed, a lot of it was held by a tight knot of those planning the murders, kept from the general public.  I think it's entirely possible for honest, indepth scholarship to provide a fuller picture of that than even the Nazis could have if they'd paused from their crimes long enough to take a scholarly view of their own actions.

The documentary record is what any reliable ideas as to the motives of those who planned and carried out the mass murders must be made of .   That, unfortunately, isn't what the mandatory common received wisdom of thisamong the most crucially of understood atrocities is is based in, the common recieved wisdom is found mostly in novels, TV shows, movies and much of it in ideologically interested snark and propaganda which began to build a line of thinking in the late 40s and early 50s and which couldn't possibly be less interested in the truth.  That has become the master narrative of this period, the one which Steven Weinberg gives as the reason for his vicious hatred of Christianity and religion, the origin of his famous atheist slogan about religion being what makes good people do bad things.

For someone to say that is certainly ahistorical and it is oh, so convenient because that means they've nailed their target, religion, which means that their preferred framing of reality, science, is totally innocent of any involvement with the Nazi genocide.  Then you can safely label the science of the scientists involved "pseudo-science" and be done with that, never mind that the science of such scientists is also called "science" and, as has been noted here, has been used in post-war science, some of it using the very images and actual body parts of Jews and others whose murders were custom ordered,  Dr. Mengele handling many such orders from people in university departments of science.  And, as well, these men being "pseudo-scientists"  doesn't seem to have been noticed by many of their scientific colleagues even when it came to their scientific "racial hygiene" in the pre-war period.   None of them were thrown out of science.  As I mentioned some of the foremost architects of the Nazis' racial classification and assignment of value and of valulessness went right on working in departments of science at major universities.  At least one, Konrad Lorenz, was granted a Nobel prize, though not for his work published during the war on the evil consequences of so-called race mixing in support of Nazi ideology and practice.

In my post yesterday about the fact that what is widely accepted in scientific circles as science Evolutionary Psychology, was able to contain such a scientist as Kevin MacDonald and his bald-faced neo-Nazi style antisemitism for many years, giving him faculty appointments, professional honors, the prestigious role of editor of more than one professional journal apparently isn't nearly as troubling to poeple as it should have been.   As I noted, his science is based on Darwin's most important idea, Natural Selection, as was all of the racial theory of the Nazis.   Given its history in relation to the human population, and given its origin in the economic theories of Malthus and the British class system, it is inseparable from applications to human beings, I'd say that it's clear that in some cases what it takes for good people to do bad things, it takes Natural Selection.

I will repeat my decision to stop using quotes around the word science or to put such science as informed the Nazis into sanitary detention as "pseudo-science".   Scientists of that period cast the lot of such science by their refusal to reject those ideas at the time or to expel such scientists from high positions in university departments of science or highly financed laboratories.  As she just about always does,   Marilynne Robinson put it best,

Dawkins deals with all this in one sentence. Hitler did his evil “in the name of. . . an insane and unscientific eugenics theory.” But eugenics is science as surely as totemism is religion. That either is in error is beside the point. Science quite appropriately acknowledges that error should be assumed, and at best it proceeds by a continuous process of criticism meant to isolate and identify error. So bad science is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion. That both of them can do damage on a huge scale is clear. The prestige of both is a great part of the problem, and in the modern period the credibility of anything called science is enormous. As the history of eugenics proves, science at the highest levels is no reliable corrective to the influence of cultural prejudice but is in fact profoundly vulnerable to it.

I would agree with the caveat, that Christianity which does evil is certainly Christianity in opposition to the teachings of the man who defines what Christian practice consists of, Jesus. If all Germans had followed the teachings of Jesus there would have been no Holocaust, there would have been none of the mass murders committed by the Nazis.   And, in this matter, they would have also had to reject who Jesus was, his entire person and identity defined by him being a Jew who cited Jewish prophets and who even died, marked by the Roman State as a Jew just as the Nazis marked his fellow Jews who they murdered.   You can't say that an atheist who was a Nazi was violating any aspect of atheism to do what they did because there is nothing in atheism that would hold what they were doing was an evil act that would come back to them.

The Nazis saw Jews, not on the basis of their religion but as defined by their biological heritage. Christian Jews were as marked for extermination as atheist Jews or observant Jews.  That's certainly not how any mainstream of Christians saw Jews.   As noted, it's certainly not how the Catholic church in the 19th or 20th century - the only time period relevant to this discussion - or earlier centuries saw Jews*.  As noted, such Holocaust victims as the nun St. Edith Stein were seen by the Catholic hierarchy as being full members of the Catholic community.  There were priests and bishops whose biological heritage would have marked them for death as Jews by the Nazis on the basis of their biological heritage.  And I only deal with the difference between the Nazi way of viewing people and the official Catholic view of people because that's what I know the most about.

Today's mandatory, common received wisdom of the Nazi death machine prevents a real understanding of what happened.  The passage by Daniel Gasman I posted the other day notes that a fuller understanding of the reality doesn't serve the scientism of people like Robert Richards and, I will add, such atheists as Steve Weinberg

But this claim demonstrates a disturbing lack of knowledge about German history and the history of modern anti-Semitism, because it leaves out the emerging school of “scientific” secular anti-Semitism that Haeckel belonged to and was one of the founding fathers and a guiding light. He does not understand that so-called “scientific” anti-Semitism was much more lethal and prophetic of National Socialist ideology than purely religious traditional antagonism against the Jews.

The attempt to blame the Holocaust on the long history of antisemitism among Christians diminishes the scope of the Nazis' aspirations.  In the more than a thousand years in which Christian antisemitism was a factor in history, there had been no systematic attempt to purge Europe or the world of Jews, there had, also, been repeated attempts by Popes and other religious figures to keep the secular rulers who promulgated blood libel rumors (such as those of Innocent IV, Gregory X, Paul III, ) and condemnation of evictions of Jews from doing those things.

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There is no better example of that difference than one of the modern scandals of Papal wronging, the kidnapping of Edgardo Levi Mortara, who was borm to Jewish parents who lived in the Papal States and raised by his parents as a Jew until it became known that he'd been secretly baptized as a baby by a servant when it was feared he might die.  Pius IX (a pretty screwed up guy) had the boy taken from his parents.  The Pope adopted him, raised him as a Catholic and, unshockingly for a kid raised in the Vatican, he was ordained as an Augustinian priest.  The kidnapping of the boy was certainly an evil thing to do, it was a crime, one of a number of antisemitic acts taken by Pius IX, perhaps the last pope against whom a charge of serious antisemitism could be laid.  He also promulgated a number of downright medieval style antisemitic laws for the Papal States, before they were removed from his rule.

I won't go into the history of Egardo Montara, this article by John Allen from the National Catholic Reporter does a good job of going over, not only the sins of Pius IX and some of the subsequent history of Montara.  But I will note the crucial difference.   Christian antisemitism is not based in the biology of the person, in their supposedly unchangeable heritage, it is based on their ideas.  In the article which quotes Elena Montara, the great great niece of Edgaro Mortara, she defines that difference

“They removed him from the family and kept him segregated in a totally Catholic environment precisely because they knew his education would determine what he became,”

That is exactly what the difference between the old antisemitism of Christians and the Darwinian antisemitism of the Nazis rests in, the difference between seeing people as physical, biological units whose definition is predetermined and fixed by their biological heritage and seeing people as living beings defined by their thinking and capable of being everything more than their physical, biological heritage.  There is every possibility that even with Edgardo Montara's abduction and indoctrination, he could have chosen to return to his families religious faith.  He was free to change who he was, what his life would mean, on the basis of his choice,. That possibility is denied by the biological determinism of the Nazis and of eugenics derived from Natural Selection.  Nature, biology,  is what makes the crucial determination of the value of the individual under that framing of reality.

In his career as a priest, Montara specialized in giving ineffective sermons to try to convert Jews to Catholicism, in which he was a notable failure.  And it was not welcome by many Catholics who knew it would offend Jews and be scandalous.  When he came to the United States, the Archbishop of New York,  John Corrigan, refused to finance his missionary efforts.

And in that act, intolerable as it is to us, today, is another crucial difference between how the Nazis saw Jews on the basis of their biological heritage and how even Catholic antisemites saw Jews.  Nazis totally rejected the idea that Jews could be Germans, The men at the very top of the Catholic hierarcy, even antisemites among them, wanted Jews to be Catholics.

Egardo Montara died in Belgium in 1940.  I haven't found just how he died.  If he had lived even four more years it is quite possible that as a Catholic priest he could have been sent as a Jew to the death camps on the basis of his Jewish heritage, as so many other Jews, observant, secularized, atheist or converted to Christianity were.

There is no doubt that what was done by Pius IX in that case as in his antisemitic acts was wrong and it was evil - lots of Catholics were opposed to his canonization on the basis of those and other acts.  I'm totally at a loss to understand how Pope John XXIII, whose heroic actions in saving Jews from the Nazis and whose confession and reconciliation with Jews is still considered a landmark, today, could have held Pius IX in high esteem, which is what the article says.  But calling what Pius IX did by the same name that is used for what the Nazis did blinds people to the crucial difference between them.  It obscures the reason that one person performed limited acts hostile or indifferent to the feelings of Jews and another successfully murdered six-million Jews on the basis of who they were on the basis of their unchangeable biological heritage.  If you don't think there is a difference in that, you really haven't thought about this as deeply as you need to.

Update:  Rereading this after having more coffee and being woken up by facing hostile teenagers - real ones with an excuse, not the superannuated type who send me hate mail - I realize that I got the roman numeral wrong.  If I haven't corrected all of them, it was Pius the Nineth who kidnapped the kid, not Pius the Eleventh who issued the encyclical attacking the Nazis and their racism to be read at all German churches in 1937.