Hate Mail - Oh, Let Me Guess Where That Demand To Name A Holocaust Survivor Who Linked Darwin To The Holocaust Came From.

In the book Elie Wiesel: Conversations By Elie Wiesel, Robert Franciosi, he said:

When we study what happened a generation ago, we cannot but think that it was prepared by the rationalists.  If Darwin, the scientist, for example, had not reduced man to the state of an animal,  maybe people would have thought twice before killing human beings. 

That's what I come up with from memory in about 45 seconds.  If I had the time to research the issue I would find others, I'm sure.  Anyone who read what the Nazi racial theorists based their ideas of biological supremacy on would find the same short links between the British Darwinists and the German Darwinists and the proto-Nazi eugenicists (they were the same people in a number of instances) and the Nazi eugenicists whose biological dogmas were the explicit basis of the various programs of mass murder the Nazis committed.  In the case of Ernst Haeckel and several others, the links go both ways from and to ol' St. Chuck Darwin, himself.

He goes on to say,

Even Darwin wasn't the first.  If the Church hadn't seen the Jew as subhuman, maybe the Germans would have thought twice too.  The Holocaust could not have happened had there not been this combination of factors.


Of course the official Church, demonstrably, didn't see Jews as subhuman, as mentioned, again, this morning there were eminent Catholics, some of them bishops and cardinals who were Jewish converts.  In the post I linked to I mention the very man who is so often cited by those accusing the Catholic church of antisemitism, Edgardo Mortara, who was infamously taken from his parents, made a ward of Pope Pius IX, ordained as a priest and who lived as an ordained Catholic priest until just after the start of the Second World War.  If he had lived long enough it's possible the Nazis would have murdered him, a Catholic priest,  because he was Jewish.  As they, in fact, murdered St. Edith Stein who was a nun.

Pius IX, who is generally cited as an antisemite is also interesting in that he was a friend and something of a patron of the Lehman brothers, French twins who converted to Catholicism in the 1850s. became priests and theologians and were active in the First Vatican Council.   They circulated a Postulatum encouraging Jewish conversion which was signed by just about all of the Cardinals at the Council.   Clearly the leaders of the Catholic church didn't see Jews as subhuman, even as they were guilty of a form of antisemitism.   Again, as mentioned, they WANTED JEWS TO BECOME CATHOLICS.   That's entirely different from the Nazis who would have never entertained the idea that Jews could become Germans or "Aryans".  That, alone, shows that Wiesel's claim that "the Church" saw Jews as subhuman during the period in question is clearly false. though it is certainly possible to make the case that they practiced a different form of antisemitism.  And there is more.

Another indictment of Catholic antisemitism is the demand made by the Spanish monarchs that all Jews and Muslims either convert to Catholicism or leave Spain shows that even those world class antisemites didn't see Jews as subhuman, though there were those in the Spanish hierarchy who, for reasons of power, discriminated against converted Jews in the priesthood and hierarchy.  I would be surprised if you could find a period in the entire history of the Church when Jews were discouraged from converting on the basis of them being seen as subhuman.  As mentioned by those in the morning post, that is a biological concept that is at odds with how Catholics traditionally view people, as a matter of church doctrine, at least.

There are hundreds probably thousands of cases of Christians putting their lives and the lives of their family at risk by protecting Jews from the Nazis, as mentioned here before, many of the people honored by Yad Vashem did that, those people certainly didn't see Jews as subhuman.  Some, like the future Pope John XXIII issued ersatz baptismal documents for Jews to help them escape.  That's only scratching the surface in disproof of that last statement.  The history of the Catholic and other Christian churches is certainly not great in the treatment of Jews but even back into the medieval period there were Popes who issued encyclicals defending Jews against the blood libel, expulsion and numerous other instances of antisemitic actions, often by local officials who whipped up hatred so they could confiscate the property of Jews.  While that history is certainly bad, in the period in question, from the 1850s through the end of WWII, "the Church" certainly did not teach that Jews were subhuman.