The title of this volume may be a surprise: ‘Theresienstadt's Protestant Congregation’. The collection comprises six articles by the distinguished German Protestant church historian Johannes Wallmann, who turned ninety in May 2020. The first and at 112 pages by far the most substantial of these, published here for the first time, focuses, as the volume's title indicates, on the Protestant congregation established in Theresienstadt, the city to which many Jews, particularly artists and intellectuals, were deported by the National Socialist regime. Theresienstadt had both a Protestant and a Catholic congregation, both of which were extensively researched by Eberhard Röhm and Jörg Thierfelder in volume iv of their study of Jewish Christians during the Third Reich, Juden – Christen – Deutsche, 1933–1945 (Stuttgart 1990–2007). However, as Wallmann observes, the existence of scholarly studies of a historical phenomenon does not mean that that phenomenon is widely known, and the widespread lack of awareness of the existence of Christian congregations in Jewish ghettos is an example of precisely that kind of forgetting. Wallmann describes the founding of Theresienstadt's Protestant congregation by Arthur Goldschmidt, who later wrote its history. Goldschmidt had been baptised as a sixteen-year-old; after serving in the First World War, he became a lawyer in Hamburg. Receiving notice in 1942 that he was to be deported to Theresienstadt, Goldschmidt trained as a lay preacher and equipped himself with twenty Bibles and liturgical vessels; however, these were impounded on arrival, leaving him with only a copy of the Gospels. In Theresienstadt, Goldschmidt was given permission to hold services and allocated an attic room in which to do so; this was also used by the Catholic congregation which was founded soon afterwards. Services included a reading from the Bible, a reflection by Goldschmidt, a hymn and intercessions. No baptisms took place, but the Lord's Supper was celebrated regularly using a chalice and patten provided by a church in Prague; bread was available but wine not allowed in Theresienstadt, so sweet tea was used instead. The regular Sunday congregation numbered between 100 and 150. Goldschmidt was assisted by another lawyer, Otto Stargardt, deported with his wife from Berlin, where they had been members of Martin Niemöller's congregation and Stargardt had been a member of a circle providing theological training to non-Aryan Christians to enable them to minister to Jewish Protestants in ghettos and concentration camps. In 1943 Georg Hamburger arrived in Theresienstadt. Hamburger had also been part of Niemöller's congregation, had undertaken the theological training for non-Aryan Jews, and been ordained. He offered himself as a second pastor to the congregation but after a period of conflict it was decided that he should instead provide a weekly bible study. This article offers a fascinating glimpse into a little-known aspect of the history of the oppression of Jews under the Third Reich, and into the networks which sought to provide pastoral support for deported Jewish Christians, and particularly into the role of Georg Hamburger. There is a personal element to this account for Wallmann, whose theological development was shaped by his experience of attending a Berlin church as a child and sitting amongst Christians of Jewish extraction who were wearing the yellow star.

The remaining articles in the volume address its subtitle: ‘Reflections on the engagement of the German Protestant Church with its history’. They consider anti-semitism and attitudes towards Jews in German Protestant history and theology, seeking particularly to critique what Wallmann views as simplistic assumptions about the Luther's influence on modern German anti-semitism. This is the key question explored in Wallmann's article, ‘The reception of Luther's writings on the Jews from the Reformation to the end of the nineteenth century’, first published in Lutheran Quarterly in 1987, but still cited, and here published in German for the first time. In it Wallmann argues that until the latter part of the nineteenth century, Luther's 1523 treatise That Jesus Christ was born a Jew was much better known than his later and much more polemical On the Jews and their lies (1543). This theme is picked up in the next article (previously published in 2012), in which Wallmann considers Pietism and Judaism, particularly attitudes towards Jews – Spener and Arnold recommended tolerance or at least neutrality – and the founding of the mission to Jews in Halle by Johann Loder and Johann Heinrich Callenberg (and not, Wallmann argues, by Francke). A short discussion of the claim that Luther established a ‘Judensonntag’, first published in 2016, follows. This refers to the Tenth Sunday after Trinity, now known in the German Protestant calendar as ‘Israel Sunday’, for which the medieval lectionary set as the Gospel Luke xix.41–8, Jesus' prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem and the account of the cleansing of the temple. In 1525, in the aftermath of the peasants’ war, Luther preached an influential sermon on this text in which he interpreted the destruction of Jerusalem as a parable for Germany's own fate. However, Wallmann finds that Luther generally preached this Sunday as a day of repentance, and that this was a stronger Protestant tradition than the focus on Jerusalem or the Jews. He suggests that the term Judensonntag may have emerged in the nineteenth century, in the context of the mission to the Jews, or perhaps even only after the Second World War; it cannot be traced back to Luther. In an article first published in 2017, Wallmann explores the influences which led to the establishment of the ‘Entjudungsinstitut’ (‘Institute for research into and removal of Jewish influences in German church life’), disputing the idea that its philosophy can be traced back to Luther's influence. Instead Wallmann traces the institute's anti-semitic approach to the ideas of the British-born philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927). In a final essay, also previously published in 2017, Wallmann draws on the work of the Israeli historian Uriel Tal to explore German Protestant responses to Zionism during the Weimar Republic, showing how Zionist Jews, who tended to be less assimilated, could find themselves concurring with anti-semitic political interests.

This is a challenging set of essays showing deep engagement with current literature. The first article provides a fascinating reminder of the complexity and multiplicity of the German Jewish population affected by the Nazi definition of Jewishness and the regime's oppression of Jews. The remaining articles are a useful contribution to the on-going debate on the roots of anti-semitism, but they seem in places to protest too much. That there is no continuity of influence from the Reformation to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century readings of Luther's anti-Jewish polemic does not in the end lessen the impact of those writings when they were drawn into the service of Nazi ideology.