ROBERT S. WISTRICH
221
to the conversion of the Jews. This development opened up a dangerous
situation whose demonic possibilities became fully apparent only with the
rise of Nazism. For although Christianity had provided the seedbed on
which Nazi racialist doctrines concerning the Jews could flourish, the
Church still provided the Jews with an exit. If a Jew converted he was
saved. There was no need for the extermination of the Jews because they
had their place, even if it was a subordinate and degraded one, in the
Christian world-order.
The Nazis took over all the negative anti-Jewish stereotypes in
Christianity but they removed the escape clause. There was no longer any
way in which even fully assimilated or baptized Jews could flee from the
sentence of death which had been passed by the inexorable laws of race.
In that sense, the "Final Solution," the purification of a world that was
deemed corrupt and evil because of the very existence of the Jews, went
beyond even the most radical Christian solution to the "Jewish Ques–
tion." Hitler and Nazism grew out of a Christian European culture, but
that does not mean that Auschwitz was pre-programmed in the logic of
Christianity. Indeed, one could argue that the decline of religious belief
by removing all moral restraints actually intensified the anti-Semitism
which had been incubated for centuries under its protective shield. If
anything, this released an even more virulent Germanic strain of the same
virus which ultimately turned on Christianity itself as one of the prime
symptoms of the so-called "Judaization" of Western civilization.
Anti-semitism did not disappear with the Holocaust any more than it
has been eradicated by secular universalist ideologies like Soviet Com–
munism or indeed Zionism, which proposed to "normalize" the Jewish
status by creating an independent nation-state in Israel. The image of the
Jew as an outsider, a nonconformist, an anomaly and an irritant has
survived the rise and fall of the secular ideologies of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Anti-Semitism, too, has adapted itself to the post–
war situation of Jewry, transformed by the creation of Israel, by the
Cold War and by the response of the Arab and Islamic world to the
challenge of a non-Muslim, non-Arabie-speaking Jewish state in its midst.
These new factors have, if anything, heightened the usefulness of anti–
Semitism as a weapon that can be exploited for the most protean
purposes. Fundamentally irrational myths like
The Protocols oj the Elders
if
Zion
have found a new lease on life in the post-war era and are still
widely believed in the Arab world seventy years after their definitive ex–
posure as a forgery. As Hitler put it in
Mein KampJ
in 1924: "The
Frank–
furter Zeitung
repeats again and again that the
Protocols
are forgeries. This
alone is evidence of th,eir authenticity." Much the same might be said
today by certain Arab nationalists, Islamic fundamentalists, Russian anti-
