In this vigorous study Tom Lawson scrutinises the response of British Anglicans to the National Socialist persecution of the Jews from the high vantage points claimed by the discipline of Holocaust Studies. Accordingly, he is concerned to interpret their words and actions by the categories that have become customary to the workings of that discipline, viewing them as ‘bystanders’, and assessing their contribution to a subsequent culture of ‘memory’. Such language and such perspectives did not occur to the participants themselves, and here the approach brings both opportunities and dangers. The foundation of the enterprise is stated, perhaps rather quietly, in an early footnote. Observing historians who have appeared to ‘praise’ those British Christians who expressed solidarity with the persecuted Jews of Hitler's Germany, Lawson himself remarks that ‘There have also been some more critical views of the Church of England's relationship with the Jewish tragedy – and this book can be seen in the same tradition’ (p. 21).

At the outset, Lawson observes the archbishop of York, Cyril Forster Garbett, struggling in 1951 to frame a definition of western civilisation. Yet it is exactly the perception that this understanding possessed solidity, and from 1933 itself, which is the foundation of the argument of the book. Here the Christian critique of Nazi dictatorship as, above all, something anti-Christian becomes the paradigm into which all other arguments are incorporated, not on their own terms but on the terms of a coherent and consistent determination to preserve a Christian civilisation. Accordingly, Lawson observes that British Christians busily committed more time and energy to the plight of fellow Christians than of Jews, and made the experiences of one Protestant pastor, Martin Niemöller, the prism through which they understood the whole drama. The protests which broke out in the churches after Kristallnacht in November 1938 altered none of these arguments. Thereafter, even the foundation of the Council of Christians and Jews in 1942 only served to show the creation of an alliance, not on a shared acknowledgement that Nazi antisemitism was fundamental and unique, but on the illusion that Christians and Jews shared comparable dangers together. A distinction between ‘Nazis’ and the ‘other’ Germany was predicated on a dubious argument that Christians could hardly be Nazis because Nazism was, after all, an onslaught against Christianity. This again declared a questionable sense of perspectives, loyalties and priorities, and became a self-serving argument for ecumenists eager to rebuild Christian bridges after the war was over. After 1945 the bishop of Chichester, George Bell, became the representative voice of the Church in campaigning against war crimes tribunals, in so doing fetching up in some distinctly questionable company and undermining the emergence of a just sense of historical memory that would give to the Jewish tragedy its proper place.

Lawson's approach has the great virtue of presenting a strong, even insistent, conceptual power. Analysis is in certain ways intensified. But the liability is also explicit. The material is seldom quite free to breathe for itself, but is instead marshalled too forcefully and pressed into the service of the defining arguments. Narrative approaches might appear humdrum, but they do at least have the strength of allowing us to trace sensitively the evolution of arguments. Here the intensity of the focus on one strand surely does obscure chronological development, and sometimes gives the picture a greater coherence than it might actually have possessed. Beside this, arguments with which the author takes issue are sometimes set up too crudely with a view to demolition (particularly, perhaps, over Kristallnacht and the movement towards war in 1938–9). Would an exploration of the language of Jewish-Christian understandings in Britain before 1933 have added an important dimension to all of this, and even affected the direction of the argument? Fragile though its foundations were, the very fact of the foundation of the Council of Christians and Jews should not be viewed too lightly. As Lawson himself demonstrates, the politicians had their eyes on other matters altogether. Although it is understandable that little should be said here about the refugee work to which Bishop Bell committed so much of his time and effort, the absence alters the balance of the perspective. When it comes to the war crimes tribunals, Lawson presents his own case for a virtual prosecution of the bishop of Chichester. He is more concerned to press, repeatedly, that Bell regarded the allegations against the persecuted as ‘unimportant’ (for example, p. 155), than to show how his sources were guiding him. Here it is surely hazardous to suggest that Bell represented the opinion of ‘the Church of England’.

The range of sources used is impressive. What is lacking – as in most previous studies – is a weighing of German material. But contrary to Lawson's own modest apprehension (in the acknowledgements), this is a very striking book indeed; a provocative, even polemical, contribution to a significant realm of scholarship. It claims its author as an impressive prospect.