Over the past several decades historians have turned a critical eye to the complicity of the German churches in fostering poisonous societal attitudes towards Jews on the eve of the Holocaust.Footnote ¹ Emerging from this research has been the disputed relationship between Christian anti-Judaism and the intense race-based anti-Semitism of the Nazi era. Separating the content and motivation of these two forms of disparagement has allowed Christians to remove themselves from the genocidal equation linked to radical, racist attacks on Jews.Footnote ² Susannah Heschel’s The Aryan Jesus tackles this issue by examining the historical backdrop and explicit content of racially motivated attacks on Jews by German Protestants in the years preceding and during the Holocaust. Targeting the Eisenach Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life together with the Institute’s leader, Walter Grundmann, her findings may well render obsolete any theoretical dichotomy between religious anti-Judaism and racial anti-Semitism.Footnote ³

Setting aside the “tired argument that racism is about biology,”Footnote ⁴ Heschel found in the religious-racist discourse of that period a connection between accusations of a degenerate, immoral spirit, and the socially active, physical “embodiment” of that spirit. Her examination of a number of prominent theories touching on race and culture revealed a circular reasoning that “made each the determinant of the other: culture indicated race, and race produced culture.”Footnote ⁵ Physical bodies were not dangerous by themselves, but to anti-Semites the Jewish body carried degenerate Jewish morality.Footnote ⁶ For the Institute and Grundmann, this racist perspective provided a platform for an “incarnational theology”Footnote ⁷ in which spiritual characteristics determined the essential nature of the physical. Such a formation of racial identity led Heschel to deduce that “what marks the distinction between Aryan and Jew, in the writings of Institute members, is not physical appearance but spiritual and moral qualities.”Footnote ⁸ Her conclusion is significant, for it brings to light the disturbing reality that litanies of spiritual condemnation expressed by the prevalent theological anti-Judaism—even if lacking crass racial overtones or motivation—share strikingly similar conclusions with virulent racial denigration regarding the nature and danger of the Jews.

Heschel’s evaluation of Grundmann touches on his admiration for his Tübingen mentor Adolf Schlatter. In an autobiographical reflection written many years later, Grundmann stated that:

Such effusive gratitude is understandable, since during Grundmann’s time at Tübingen, Schlatter’s influence at the university peaked, and he was viewed as the preeminent spiritual authority for students and clergy alike.Footnote ¹⁰ Evidence suggests, however, that the young theologian and Schlatter did not have a close personal relationship.Footnote ¹¹ There is no extant correspondence between the two, and though Grundmann spoke of private conversations at Schlatter’s home, the frequency and depth of any discussions cannot be ascertained. As an assistant to Gerhard Kittel, whose own unsurpassed adoration for Schlatter is well documented, Grundmann could not have helped but breathe the air of respect enveloping the Tübingen giant.Footnote ¹² From all appearances, Grundmann’s relationship to Schlatter was one of an admiring student who absorbed every word written and spoken by the teacher, finding genuine inspiration that indelibly marked his personal and professional life. He shared aspects of Schlatter’s pietistic orientation to faith, and spoke of the grace and joy in Schlatter’s sermons. He could certainly identify with Schlatter’s strong nationalism, which was critical of the social liberalism of the Weimar Republic, the Enlightenment, atheism, and moral degeneration. Grundmann’s fascination with Adolf Stoecker’s link between the Christian gospel and social responsibility would have compelled him to wade through the same anti-Semitic waters as Schlatter had years earlier in his career, with both coming to share in their own manner Stoecker’s gospel that Judaism constituted a moral and social problem for the German Volk.Footnote ¹³

It was, however, in the confessional context of praising the joyous content of Schlatter’s thought that Grundmann uttered his most controversial comment, claiming that “Schlatter built the path for us from theology to National Socialism.”Footnote ¹⁴ Grundmann’s contention is problematic. Despite conceding Schlatter’s right-leaning patriotism and antipathy to Judaism, his apologists distance him from any form of racist discourse.Footnote ¹⁵ Their objection cannot be ignored. Schlatter in no way shared Grundmann’s embrace of Nazi power politics, and his anti-Jewish polemic avoided racial ideology. Nevertheless, the fact that the nationalistic and racially charged Grundmann could find inspiration and guidance in Schlatter’s work prompts the question: Can Adolf Schlatter, the respected theologian, whose work flourished within conservative Protestantism before and after the Holocaust, remain unscathed by Heschel’s findings?

Throughout his teaching career, the Swiss-born Schlatter reflected the piety and conservative biblicism of his early family life.Footnote ¹⁶ Having established his prominence at Tübingen, he held well-attended emeritus lectures for eight years after his retirement in 1922 and continued active publication and correspondence, both personal and professional, with fellow theologians until his death in 1938.Footnote ¹⁷ Popular with pastors and the common people in the pew, he taught at least two generations of German pastors, including a number of academic elites who profoundly influenced twentieth-century Christian theology.Footnote ¹⁸ As “the most important figure in the Faculty of Protestant Theology at Tübingen” during the first third of the twentieth century,Footnote ¹⁹ Schlatter’s views carried both spiritual and academic authority, making his voice significant in shaping the opinions of many conservative Christians.

Notwithstanding Schlatter’s fame, only recently have critical studies suggested his complicity in the darker aspects of anti-Jewish theology.Footnote ²⁰ Adoration by conservative Christians in both Germany and America has resulted in overwhelmingly sympathetic portraits of Schlatter with a popular biography, monographs, and introductory essays to selected translations ignoring controversial aspects of his career.Footnote ²¹ The foremost proponent of such selective veneration is Schlatter’s biographer Werner Neuer. His massive study of Schlatter’s life and thought was “written mainly with Schlatter’s still enormous conservative evangelical readership in view.”Footnote ²² Neuer’s confessionalism steered him clear of several questionable aspects of his subject’s life, and led him to either ignore or minimize the decidedly anti-Jewish character of Schlatter’s legacy. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Neuer studied at Tübingen, and later wrote the biography while working in affiliation with the University. His relative silence on anti-Semitism followed that of the Tübingen church historian Klaus Scholder, whose meticulously detailed study of the Protestant church’s early struggles under the Third Reich contained but one innocuous reference to Gerhard Kittel and no mention of Schlatter’s antipathy to the Jews.Footnote ²³ In like fashion, Tübingen New Testament professor Peter Stuhlmacher, who may be credited with initiating the Schlatter “renaissance” in the closing decades of the twentieth century, has refused to acknowledge the harmful anti-Jewish character of Schlatter’s work.Footnote ²⁴ Such partiality makes understandable the offense taken by Schlatter’s devotees to any suggested connection to the Nazi Walter Grundmann.

The reaction of Schlatter follower Robert Morgan to Heschel’s criticism of Schlatter should not be surprising: “Christians who have been nourished by his edifying writings and admire the transparent goodness of his character will be perplexed by some recent casual defamations of him.”Footnote ²⁵ Morgan’s response touches the key issue with Schlatter interpretation today and reveals the historiographical shift in Holocaust research that casts shadows on his legacy. Morgan speaks for those who see in Schlatter a theological voice for their vision of authentic Christian faith, with his literalistic biblicism and triumphalist view of Christianity connecting harmoniously to the world of conservative believers, especially the American evangelical community.Footnote ²⁶ Robert Yarbrough, an American translator of Schlatter’s work, is emphatic on the significance of bringing Schlatter to the English-speaking world: “Schlatter’s importance for contemporary Biblical interpreters and especially evangelicals comes clearly to the fore… . Schlatter’s historical observation and theological synthesis yielded a Jesus and gospel message of classic Christian proportions.”Footnote ²⁷ Resurrecting Schlatter, however, is problematic both historically and theologically, since advocates extract him from the societal contingencies of his day and contextualize his thought within confessionally correct principles. A comment from Schlatter’s translator, Andreas J. Köstenberger, is telling: “Let Schlatter’s voice be heard again in a theological landscape that has seen some change, but one that is not so different that we can afford to neglect the prophetic words spoken by one of the greatest theologians of this century.”Footnote ²⁸ Such a tepid view of the theological landscape ignores a tectonic shift in postwar Holocaust theology, specifically: the church’s moral failure toward the Jews, bound as it was to Christianity’s long history of anti-Judaism. Yet it is precisely at this point where Schlatter’s advocates, and particularly Robert Morgan, erect a wall of defense against any hint that the theological anti-Judaism so ubiquitous in Schlatter’s thought could in any way be construed as anti-Semitic.

Morgan is intent on “sharpening the distinction between antisemitism and theological anti-Judaism” so as to avoid “injustice to German theology.”Footnote ²⁹ Ignoring Doris Bergen’s counsel that “such distinctions tend to lose their relevance in the context of National Socialism,”Footnote ³⁰ he seeks to employ such differences in defending Schlatter from what he sees as “an antipathy to theology” that “can blemish writing on church history.”Footnote ³¹ Morgan, however, in delineating his lexicon of hatred for the Jews, becomes ensnared in his own differentiations. While distinguishing “passive cultural antisemitism” from “theological antisemitism,” he speaks of the latter containing “monstrous religious beliefs such as the guilt and curse of Israel for the death of Christ [which] lead directly to antisemitism.”Footnote ³² Morgan should know that no German theologian of the twentieth century was more intent on placing corporate guilt on the Jews for their murder of the Christ than Adolf Schlatter.Footnote ³³ Perhaps that awareness compelled Morgan to finally admit that Schlatter’s “theological anti-Judaism could fuel antisemitism.”Footnote ³⁴ Heschel’s research has raised the stakes by arguing that the fueling of anti-Semitism by anti-Judaism makes the latter intrinsic to the virulent combustion of the former. Thus, The Aryan Jesus, and the scholarship critical of Schlatter contained therein, bears no antipathy to theology, but rather an antipathy to a theology which has proven to be a blemish on church history.

Schlatter was a staunch nationalist whose theology of God and Volk foreshadowed the more highly developed “orders of creation” found in his student, Paul Althaus. In his systematic dogmatics, under the heading “Man as the Work of God,” Schlatter stated that the person does not live “as an isolated individual,” but only as a member of a community from which one originated, for “God reveals himself to us not as the creator of the individual, but as the Creator and Lord of his kingdom, which he creates through community and for community.”Footnote ³⁵ In this spirit Schlatter’s commitment to the Volk was unequivocal:

Schlatter’s religious and political tendencies were evident during his tenure in Berlin, where he maintained a close relationship with the controversial anti-Semite, Adolf Stoecker, whose friendship he considered the greatest benefit of his time in that city.Footnote ³⁷ Following Stoecker, Schlatter promulgated the supersession of an atrophied Judaism by Christianity. Stoecker’s attacks on the greedy and deceitful Jew as the true misfortune of Christian Germany echoed in Schlatter’s later claim that the Jewish banker and rabbi formed the “pillars of Jewry.”Footnote ³⁸ Though repudiating racial hatred, Schlatter mirrored Stoecker in theologically grounding the Jew as the symbol of materialism and selfish egoism, thus considering them a danger to the spiritual character of Christian Germany.

Schlatter’s völkisch loyalties could at times uncharacteristically border on racist tendencies. In the autumn of 1914, Schlatter attached his signature to the infamous proclamation “To the Cultural World,” in which he and ninety-two other German academics voiced their support for the German war effort and defended military actions in Belgium. In countering the charge of breaking international law, the statement argued that “One has little right to deport oneself as a defender of European civilization if one would unite with the Russians and Serbs in offering the world the disgraceful spectacle of instigating the Mongols and Negroes against the white race.” Footnote ³⁹ Neuer claims Schlatter’s signature should not be given too much weight, since he did not know the wording of the document. Although utilizing Wilfred Härle as a source, Neuer fails to relate that Härle stated that after the war all signatories were asked whether they still stood by the claims of their appeal. Sixteen responded and stressed their continued unconditional adherence to the document, including Adolf Schlatter.Footnote ⁴⁰ On a more theoretical level, Schlatter could state: “Respect for race which honors the racially given barriers which it imposes, and the attention to the necessities set in place by nature that condition our völkischen Lebens, ought for every Christian to be self-evident.”Footnote ⁴¹ Despite the attempt by Schlatter’s defenders to minimize any racist implications of such thinking, the role of nature’s racial barriers certainly manifested itself in aspects of Schlatter’s work in the final years of his life.Footnote ⁴²

A close association with Grundmann’s Doktorvater, Gerhard Kittel,Footnote ⁴³ further marked Schlatter’s political and anti-Jewish proclivities. Kittel’s admiration for his predecessor is best illustrated in the dedication of his controversial Theological Dictionary to Schlatter.Footnote ⁴⁴ Their deeply personal relationship nurtured a mutual respect that often led them to seek each other’s counsel on a professional level. Schlatter’s daughter testified:

Kittel’s entrance into the Nazi Party caused no alienation; on the contrary, Kittel assisted with Schlatter’s own theological work, including the notorious Shall the Jew Be Victorious Over Us? Footnote ⁴⁶ Schlatter’s anti-Jewish rhetoric bore common themes and language with the writings of Kittel, most notably the latter’s infamous Die Judenfrage, in which the Jewish problem was seen as a “decadence problem.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Of no little significance is that while actively involved in Walter Frank’s anti-Semitic Reichsinstitut, producing work that “corresponded to the worst of Nazi propaganda,” Kittel was invited to be the memorial speaker at Schlatter’s funeralFootnote ⁴⁸—a fact omitted from Neuer’s detailed description of the event.Footnote ⁴⁹

Ambivalence shadowed Schlatter’s confessional politics under the Third Reich.Footnote ⁵⁰ A case in point was Schlatter’s alienation from Dietrich Bonhoeffer; a rift related to the former’s acceptance of the Aryan paragraph. This controversial paragraph based on new Nazi racial legislation, threatened Jewish Christian clergy with expulsion from their pulpits.Footnote ⁵¹ Schlatter justified this controversial stand on the Jewish question by asserting that “in this hour it is more important to maintain community with our German comrades than with the Jewish Christians.” Footnote ⁵² Here Schlatter sacrificed confessional unity to nature’s barrier of racial distinctions, and limited, at least in this critical moment, genuine Christian community to adherence to the Volk and its laws. Intertwining God’s redemptive purpose with the life of the German Volk led Schlatter to distance himself from the Confessing Church. He refused to sign the Barmen Declaration, since to embrace God’s revelation apart from the Volk would force him to “close his Bible and separate his faith from his very being.”Footnote ⁵³

While distrusting Nazi motives in the ecclesiastical sphere and in society in general,Footnote ⁵⁴ Schlatter marched lockstep with the then pervasive spirit in academia by signing a Tübingen University proclamation asserting, “We are full of thanks to God that He, as the Lord of history, has given our Volk Adolf Hitler as our leader and savior out of our difficult problem.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Attaching religious significance to Hitler’s regime was fully consistent with Schlatter’s desire for a unified “total state” that fought against selfish reservations, and a “total church” that embraced the divine order of a unified Christian Volk.Footnote ⁵⁶ It was in this context that as late as Christmas 1935, Schlatter could thank the “present state leadership” for making its citizens sensitive to the indivisibility of church, Volk, and university community and protecting them from individualism.Footnote ⁵⁷

Schlatter’s attempt to balance his völkisch loyalties with what he deemed confessional integrity prompted questions concerning his relationship to the German Christians.Footnote ⁵⁸ While Schlatter’s overall theological premises certainly separated him from the more radical aspects of the German Christian movement, there were times in which he was not consistent in his criticism; and in one particular circumstance Grundmann was directly involved. Following the November 1933 Berlin Sports Palace debacle in which Reinhold Krause’s address to a German Christian audience crudely attacked the Old Testament, the Apostle Paul, and the cross as inappropriate Jewish symbols for the National Socialists, a mass exodus of members and a dismantling of leadership left the movement in disarray.Footnote ⁵⁹ Leadership fell to the German Christian Saxon and Thuringian wing to which Grundmann belonged, and the young theologian grabbed the ideological moment. He penned his earliest influential pamphlet in the form of The Twenty-Eight Theses of the Saxon National Church,Footnote ⁶⁰ for the purpose of creating a fully Lutheran and fully National Socialist German church by uniting a racially völkisch message to the gospel.Footnote ⁶¹ Despite their racist bent, Schlatter maintained that Grundmann’s statements could be a foundation for the church, and though he thought some points problematic, he believed one should not “withhold Christian fellowship from a church that confesses this.”Footnote ⁶²

Such ambiguity explains why Schlatter’s political sympathies were often a point of contention with various clergy, with one pastor very loyal to Schlatter complaining of being constantly confronted with the opinion that “Schlatter was the father of the German Christians.”Footnote ⁶³ A leading German Christian weekly, Kommende Kirche, referenced Schlatter more than any other contemporary German theologian.Footnote ⁶⁴ Finally, a Tübingen teaching assistant remembered reading in school files, “Professor Schlatter is a convinced National Socialist.” He burned the documents in the school’s furnace.Footnote ⁶⁵ While these various testimonies prove nothing other than perceptions by some of Schlatter’s alignment with National Socialism, they establish that Grundmann’s view of Schlatter was not unique.

Grundmann’s affinity for Schlatter’s theology found its most explicit expression in a 1937 article in Kommende Kirche Footnote ⁶⁶ in which he spoke of the vibrant and joyous theology found in Schlatter’s emphasis on the unity of nature and history. Grundmann had discovered a theology refusing to divide faith and fatherland. For Schlatter, “[God’s] work is our Volk, [God’s] work is our church. There is only one love that cannot be divided.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Here Grundmann found his path to National Socialism. Such völkisch nationalism, however, bound these two theologians together on a deeper level. Grundmann and Schlatter rooted the health of the Volk in adherence to Christianity, and both firmly believed a threat to the faith was a threat to the nation. This concern for Christian Germany fed their animosity toward Judaism, convincing them of its negative effect on German society.

From first to last, Adolf Schlatter’s interpretation of Judaism structured his theology. In his early Faith in the New Testament, he clearly stated that the Jewish dynamic of identifying faith with obedience to legal demands militates against the gift of God, placing the actions of the individual at the controlling center of salvation. Such individualist achievement becomes the basis for Schlatter’s accusation of selfish egoism, or “selfish desire.” As a religion of selfish egoism and works-righteousness, Jewish piety created a worldly spirit at odds with God’s redemptive purpose.Footnote ⁶⁸ Such legalism produced a “religious type” that, while not limited to Judaism, found its paramount manifestation in the Jew in both the theological and secular sphere.Footnote ⁶⁹ In this regard it is imperative to grasp the underlying unity of Schlatter’s perspective toward the religious “Talmudjude” and the modern “secular” Jew. The Talmud’s individualistic and legalist compulsion not only failed to protect from sin, but produced it, revealing its inability to protect the Jewish community from the influence of European society’s materialism with its own undertow of individualistic selfish desires. Hence, for Schlatter, Talmudic piety was linked to Germany’s modern secular Jewish problem.Footnote ⁷⁰

The fruits of Schlatter’s polemic against Jewish piety could be found in several popular pamphlets he authored which touched upon the social implications of Judaism in the years before and during the Third Reich. These brief works conveyed to a nonacademic audience Schlatter’s polemics against the self-centered pride of the legalistic Jew, coupled with a pronouncement on the spiritual death of Judaism.Footnote ⁷¹ Disparaging Jewish influence on society, he could speak of the “cowardly weakling, exploiter of the worker …, and the dolled-up woman” as manifestations of “walking according to the flesh,” concluding that “what the young German calls ‘Jewish’ is all walking according to the flesh.”Footnote ⁷² With a touch of venom he could speak of the “soul-murdering poison” of the Jews within the German culture.Footnote ⁷³ His descriptive language constructs an image of the Jew that can be accurately described as a quasi-metaphysical entity at odds with the German Volk, and in conflict with the God who brought that Volk into being. The Jew, for Schlatter, effectively became the “ontological enemy of God.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Such theological grounding of secular society’s troubles enhances the signifi-cance of Werner Neuer’s emphasis on how Schlatter “kept his own times before his eyes,” and how his work “addressed at least indirectly the ecclesiastical and political situation that surrounded him.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Joseph Tyson’s careful study of Schlatter’s handling of Luke-Acts confirms Neuer’s assertion, showing that Schlatter’s “understanding of Judaism in Germany in the twentieth century seems remarkably similar to his understanding of Judaism at the time of Jesus.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Even as staunch a supporter as Robert Morgan has acknowledged that Schlatter’s theology contributed to the negative stereotyping of Jews, with his attacks on the secularism and individualism of assimilated Jews being absorbed into his critique of the Pharisees.Footnote ⁷⁷ Such an anachronistic interpretation makes it imperative to read Schlatter with an eye to the contemporary societal state of affairs in which he would have been heard. Put simply, Schlatter’s assessment of Judaism as “ethical-metaphysical influences which have caused depravity,”Footnote ⁷⁸ should give pause to anyone who attempts to view his work as an atemporal, theologically correct principle, since much of it was composed during a period when festering anti-Semitism foreshadowed closed swimming pools, theaters, restaurants, and “Juda Verrecke” scrawled throughout the city of Tübingen.Footnote ⁷⁹

Schlatter unleashed his most aggressive attack on the Jews in the 1935 tract Will the Jew Be Victorious Over Us? Footnote ⁸⁰ Though defenders such as Stuhlmacher and Neuer argue that the title is misleading and Schlatter was confronting Nazi racism, what in fact took place was that only weeks after the implementation of the Nuremberg Laws, he cast his lot with a widespread Christian polemic finding currency at the time. Uriel Tal and Stephen Haynes have detailed the proliferation by anti-Nazi theologians of a “Nazi as Jew” concept.Footnote ⁸¹ For Haynes, “If a dominant characteristic of interwar religious discourse was its penchant for stigmatizing the Nazi enemy with a ‘Jewish’ stain, this indicates that anti-Nazi authors knew instinctively that jewifying National Socialism would strengthen their case with the average German.”Footnote ⁸²Will the Jew Be Victorious Over Us? is significant in that a close reading finds Schlatter’s theology as a whole permeating the entire document.Footnote ⁸³ Its message firmly situates Schlatter in the anti-Jewish spirit of the period, and clearly shows the complicity of his theological convictions in the proliferation of anti-Semitic bigotry, despite his aversion to the Nazis. Finally, specific to the investigation at hand, the pamphlet reflects in microcosm not only Schlatter’s distance from Grundmann’s racism, but also their ultimate convergence on the nature of the Jew.

Schlatter contended that both the Jews and Nazis were seeking to “sweep the Christian message … from public view,”Footnote ⁸⁴ further adding that the Jewish priests’ and teachers’ national selfishness (nationalen Eigensucht) was no different from that of “those who knew nothing higher than the racial soul” for both thought in a fashion that was completely Jewish (vollständig jüdisch).Footnote ⁸⁵ In short, the Nazis’ Aryan pride mirrored the Jews’ claim to special election. With regard to the Nordic obsession with Jesus’s racial heritage, Schlatter broke with Grundmann and would have nothing to do with “sniffing out Aryans in ancient Galilee.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Jesus was Jewish and bound himself to his people. Yet, in conformity with the “Nazi as Jew” logic, Schlatter posited the Jews themselves as the origin of this “drop of poison.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The rabbis’ contention that Jesus was a product of the Roman Panthera’s rape of Mary, thus precluding his Jewishness, was a lie bred of hate toward Christianity. For Schlatter, the Jews were hateful liars, not due to their race, but rather as a result of their religion.Footnote ⁸⁸ Schlatter’s polemic against the Jews’ religious rejection of Jesus and the Nordics’ racial rejection of a Jewish Jesus converged on Jewish moral deformity, essentially making the Nordics’ problem not hatred of the Jew, but their “Jewishness” in rejecting Jesus.Footnote ⁸⁹ The tract’s anti-Jewish hatred, minimized by Schlatter advocates today,Footnote ⁹⁰ was not lost on the outspoken opponent of Nazism and anti-Semitism and future Righteous Gentile, Irene Harand. She castigated Schlatter, “who worked with lies,” and condemned the work as embodying the antithesis of justice and righteousness.Footnote ⁹¹ While Grundmann would not have embraced Schlatter’s attitude toward the racial soul, he certainly shared his fundamental religious, social, and political hostility toward Jews and Judaism.

Despite Grundmann’s broad agreement with Schlatter on Jewish matters, his underlying disagreement with Schlatter was on the matter of Jesus’s racial heritage remains ostensibly problematic. Their differences were rooted in the divergent paths taken by European theologians during the eighteenth century regarding the question of Jesus’s racial relationship to the increasingly alienated Jewish community. One school sought to solve this issue by separating Jesus racially from Judaism, while another set Jesus’s teachings in radical opposition to fellow Jews.Footnote ⁹² Grundmann chose the former path while Schlatter held firm to the latter. Yet, Heschel’s shifting of racial discourse from physicality and biology to spiritual qualities, allows us to delve deeper into the interconnectedness of these deviating theologies, and may help explain why Grundmann sensed no alienation from his mentor on this issue. Examination of their books on Jesus, published just three years apart, reveals a structural similarity in their presentaions of Jesus’s conflict with Judaism, leading them to similar conclusions. As Heschel points out, Grundmann rooted his racial hostility to the Jews in their negative spiritual and moral attributes; thus his 1940 Jesus the Galilean and Judaism Footnote ⁹³ contained an intense religious attack against the legalism manifest in the Pharisees. It was precisely the embodiment of religious failure which carried racial implications for Grundmann. Schlatter’s 1937 Do We Know Jesus?, reflected the same aggressive attack on the Pharisees’ religion, but his presupposition of Jesus’s essential Jewishness precluded any overt conclusions regarding race. Thus, despite divergence on the racial implications of Jesus’s struggle, Grundmann’s and Schlatter’s assault on Jewish piety followed a like-minded religious path to a common end: the moral condemnation and social ostracism of the Jews. In this regard, Schlatter’s legacy reveals that affirmation of Jesus’s Jewishness does not necessarily preclude Christian anti-Semitism.

One need not read far into Grundmann’s Jesus the Galilean Judaism to find how Schlatter’s exegetical work greatly influenced his young admirer. Grundmann refers to Schlatter more than any other New Testament scholar.Footnote ⁹⁴ Grundmann’s theological premises and polemical tone contain common threads of thought with Schlatter that would not be lost on contemporary readers. In his introduction, Grundmann maintains that the German Volk’s awakening emerged from its struggle with the Jews who, by living “according to the Law,” bred apathy to true German character and threatened to corrupt the nation. Defense against Judaism in all spheres of life, especially in the questions of religious life, was the highest priority; thus, Jesus’s mission provided the truest spiritual model for contemporary Aryans in their struggle against Jewish power politics and moral degeneracy.Footnote ⁹⁵

Grundmann understood the Law as the presupposition by which the Jews stressed their election and national identity before God, providing not only their salvation, but also their uniqueness and separation from all other humanity. Such a rigid embrace of the Law became the immediate cause for alienation from Jesus’s message.Footnote ⁹⁶ Here he followed Schlatter’s now discredited perception of the nature of the Law and its role in varying Jewish expressions of their relationship to God. This skewed view accused the Jews of practicing a degenerate and loveless legalism, devoid of true morality, which excluded them from the world to come and made them worthy of death.Footnote ⁹⁷ Their hostility to Jesus’s religion of love prompted the struggle between Jesus and the Pharisees, who, in Grundmann’s hands, came to symbolize the entirety of the Jewish faith and nation.Footnote ⁹⁸

Grundmann’s Jesus was not just a non-Jew, but the anti-Jew.Footnote ⁹⁹ Jesus was the Jews’ greatest enemy,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ and his call for peace and justice collided with Judaism’s hate and pursuit of power. Emerging from non-Jewish Galilee and offering a religiosity in opposition to the legalistic Jerusalem Jews, Jesus’s “Abba” experience revealed a divine-human encounter likened to the loving intimacy between father and child.Footnote ¹⁰¹ This message fueled the violent instincts of the decadent and legalistic Jews, resulting in Jesus’s terrible death.Footnote ¹⁰²

Schlatter’s last major work, Do We Know Jesus?, contained a final and concentrated expression of his lifelong attack on Judaism. He and others were passionate about the book’s importance for the German church community, with Schlatter telling a friend that he wrote the book “for the sake of the Volk,” and Schlatter’s son calling it his “legacy.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Schlatter stressed the relevance of Jesus for Germany’s current social circumstances, since to know him would serve to counter the paganism threatening German society, along with the “antichrists among us…[who] seek to suppress any memory of Jesus.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ But who were the antichrists? Who were those embodying the spiritual and moral threat to the Volk? Do We Know Jesus? offered no overt attack on National Socialism, but rather a series of 366 daily commentaries on episodes of Jesus’s ministry, especially those relating to his bitter conflict with the Jews. In understated fashion, Schlatter loyalist Hans Stroh lamented how the book’s portrayal of the “Jude” revealed a lack of “solidarity between the Christians of 1937 and the hard-pressed German Jews.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Indeed, a close reading reveals an all-consuming diatribe against the religion and morality of the Jews, with nearly every possible negative stereotype exploding from the pages.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Echoing Shall the Jew Be Victorious Over Us?, Schlatter saw the Jewish type as embodying the worldview Christians were to reject, since their antipathy to Christ and selfish nationalism was one with Nazi mentality. The correlation of past and present was clear: “It was completely impossible for Peter and John to return to the rabbinate and the Talmud, so it is impossible for us to return with our ancestors to the warrior gods and to celebrate the festivals of their nature gods.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷Shall the Jew Be Victorious Over Us? provides us with the hermeneutic to grasp Schlatter’s ability, at least in his mind, to address the current religious, social, and political situation through the lens of Jesus’s conflicts with Judaism.

For Schlatter, to know Jesus is to know that he was an “atypical Jew,” in that he offered salvation to all. If he had arrogantly sought to impose his will on others and rule them, despising all who did not belong to his community, and if he had fashioned a God available only to him, then Jesus would be the very type of Jew he brought to judgment.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The Jews confronting Jesus bore negative spiritual characteristics which distinguished them qualitatively from non-Jews. Schlatter certainly suggests his ontological isolation of the Jew when he writes:

As Schlatter continues, however, Jewish isolation becomes obvious. Jesus’s rejection in Capernaum reveals that the Jewish heart was unrepentant, “even less repentant than a Gentile heart,”Footnote ¹¹⁰ and the Jews’ violent nature led to “unrestrained anger” issuing from “the wrath of man, and not the wrath of just any man but that of a Jew.”Footnote ¹¹¹ During Jesus’s trial, the Jewish leaders’ hardheartedness would eventually lead them to sin against Jesus “in an even greater sense than Pilate.”Footnote ¹¹² Although Schlatter avoids racial terms, a distinctive type of hardheartedness, violence, and sin mark the Jew. Schlatter’s “Jew” clearly bore qualities embodying an “otherness” segregating the Jew from non-Jews. Exposed here is the linkage of religious polemic to a social alienation at one with the current racist rhetoric, rendering meaningless any distinction between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism.

Schlatter’s emphasis on the selfishness of Judaism repeatedly surfaces throughout Do We Know Jesus?, creating a spiritual type at odds with the gospel. The Law bred the Jews’ selfish character and for Schlatter the Law “was unable to create the unified community that was protected from decay.”Footnote ¹¹³ The Law sparked the individual’s selfish will, which in turn created a slavish legalism that precluded not only belief in the Christ but also the capacity to love.Footnote ¹¹⁴ When obedience to commands confers salvation, the individual becomes the center of divine-human encounter. Emphasis on self and faithful achievement fosters not only a disregard for others, but a pride and arrogance in the belief that God is on one’s side.Footnote ¹¹⁵ It is precisely this polemic which forms Schlatter’s bridge from religious denigration to social and political criticism of the egocentric Jewish threat to a unified Christian Volk. The Pharisees propagated this attitude,Footnote ¹¹⁶ corrupting themselves and the entire people, and Jesus’s condemnation was emphatic: “Your nature is like what a snake passes on to its brood … you are not merely corrupt yourself; you corrupt the people. You must be avoided as one avoids a snake.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ By denouncing Jewish egoism as detrimental to love, Schlatter maintained to the end his conviction, articulated half a century earlier, of the decadence of Jewish piety and its capacity to infiltrate and decimate faithful human community.

Schlatter specified his attack on alleged Jewish legalism by sharply contrasting economic materialism and social responsibility. A stumbling block to the Jews’ acceptance of Jesus was their “selfish desire” for possessions and treasures, for, “How was it possible to truly subject the Jews to God when they did not give up their pursuit of wealth?”Footnote ¹¹⁸ The person captured by this false hope was driven by sensual desires, and the race for accumulation of essential and luxury items led to neglect of the poor.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The Jew cared only about “preserving his property, and another’s well-being was a matter of indifference” to him.Footnote ¹²⁰ In contrast to those engaging in self-serving businesses that seek only advantage, tangible profit, and wealth, Jesus sent his disciples to the poor and in an act “completely counter to Jewish conventional wisdom and practice,” he commanded that they take no compensation.”Footnote ¹²¹ Yet, continuing this economic theme, Schlatter injected into his vocabulary a term not found in the New Testament—parasites, but certainly well known by his German readership. Jesus’s community avoids engaging in business, but “lives from the available food in the general population at large. It does so in such a way that is not open to the dishonorable charge of being idle parasites.”Footnote ¹²² From a historical perspective one can only judge as untimely Schlatter’s labeling as parasites those not effectively contributing to the völkischen Gemeinschaft especially in the context of business. Since the end of the nineteenth century, “parasitism” was a common description of the economic role of the Jews. Co-opting the biological imagery of symbiosis, where an organism drains life from the host, conservative völkisch thought cast the Jews as parasites on German society. Though detached from the economic and social realities of the vast majority of European Jews, who were in fact poor and somewhat isolated, this metaphor became widespread throughout Germany before and during the Nazi regime.Footnote ¹²³ Whether or not in this particular case Schlatter was guilty of nothing more than a poor choice of words, what is certain is that his theological polemic could echo the anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish wealth, greed, and sexual perversion prevalent in the Reich. His pronouncements on “The Plight of the Jew”Footnote ¹²⁴ carried a rhetorical flourish that could have been lifted from the Nuremberg Nazi, Julius Streicher’s notoriously anti-Semitic newspaper, Der Stürmer:

Casting the Jew as an aggressive sexual threat moves beyond any meaningful confessional message. Such blatantly anti-Semitic writings are characteristic of Schlatter. His language sets him squarely within the poisonous spirit of the day.

Not only was Schlatter’s Jewish community marked by greed, but also Jesus’s passion revealed that there was no restriction on the Jews’ hatred,Footnote ¹²⁶ with his crucifixion the final act of acrimony.Footnote ¹²⁷ The Jews “murdered” Jesus because he taught the truth of God, a truth they rejected, and for that rejection they were cut off from God.Footnote ¹²⁸ Consistent with his lifelong emphasis on deicide and Jewish corporate guilt, Schlatter assured his readers that Jesus “will not die as a result of a clash with the totally corrupt royal house. His struggle is not merely with Jewish riffraff such as the Herodians; his confrontation is with all of Judaism.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Though murdered by the collective will of hate-filled Jews, the good news remained: “The Gift of the Murdered One Is Eternal Life.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Found here was no passing comment woven into the narrative, but rather the highlighted title for the August 9th devotional reading.

Schlatter’s coup de grâce against Judaism, and arguably the most damning expression of his anti-Semitism, was presenting the contemporary German with a Manichaen either/or: “Who should be honored: the Jew or God?”Footnote ¹³¹ Jewish guilt and rejection “becomes total in that they toss Jesus aside. Judaism is what it wants to be: Jewish greatness, Jewish power, Jewish Kingdom.”Footnote ¹³² This assertion is strikingly similar to a comment in Shall the Jew be Victorious Over Us?: “What they [the Jews] demanded of God, and thus also of Jesus, was the realization of their wants, their greatness, their victory, and the fulfillment of their national selfishness.” Schlatter continued, however: “How are such wishes different from those who know nothing higher than their racial soul?”Footnote ¹³³ The earlier pamphlet’s blatant conjoining of Jew and Nazi was more tacitly affirmed by, but no less essential, to Schlatter’s message in Do We Know Jesus?: the Nazi racial paganism in league with the antichrist found embodiment in the Jew. Grasping this connection helps clarify Schlatter’s purpose in placing before his readers, no longer merely the murdered Jesus, the victimized “atypical Jew,” but an existential choice between two competing powers: the Jew or God. Schlatter’s Jew no longer simply provided a foil for his theological polemic, but emerged as the embodied negation of God’s rule, in essence, the “ontological enemy of God.”Footnote ¹³⁴ In the shadow of the Third Reich, Schlatter’s either/or implicates him in radically alienating the Jews from the true character of German society and effectively erases any moral distinction between his theology and Nazi politics.