Singling out Christianity: The Passion Play of Hyam Maccoby
In which a Jewish scholar offers the explanation that dare not speak its name
It’s the beginning of holiday season in London; the crowds bustling through the bracing December chill are exhibiting the conventional Dickensian cheer, bearing festive rolls of wrapping paper and ribbon home. But deep in the basement of the Sternberg Library of the Leo Baeck Institute for Jewish Studies, the combative scholar Hyam Maccoby was exhibiting a very different kind of holiday spirit.
“People go on about this jolly festival of Christmas,” he was saying to me. “But I think Christmas is a sinister festival.”
Sinister?
“Because what is it? The sacrifice has been born. Let us rejoice. The Christian doesn’t think about Easter now, but somewhere in the back of his mind, Christmas is leading him to Easter. In the back of everybody’s mind is, Why are we celebrating this birth with such joy? We are garlanding the sacrifice. Because he’s due for a horrific death.” A horrific death the Jews will pay for, have paid for. To Maccoby, the dark truth beneath the cheer, the skull beneath the skin of the holiday spirit, is the responsibility Christianity, even Christmas, bears for the horrific death of the Jews.
“Christians say the Holocaust is part of the evil of humanity,” Maccoby remarked to me later in our conversation. “It isn’t the evil of humanity. It’s the evil of Christendom.”
And Hitler? “He embodied a certain aspect of Christian civilization which in other people is diffused,” he told me later on in our conversation, when he spoke of Hitler as “the boil” in which the poisons of “Christian society” came to a head.
This is extremely strong stuff, another example of how attempts to explain Hitler drive the most mild-mannered and scholarly types, like Maccoby, to rhetorical and philosophical extremes. Sitting behind his desk in the book-lined office set in the corner of the library stacks, Maccoby has the demeanor of a retired clerk, but his words carry the fiery conviction of the warrior priests, the Maccabees, whose name he bears.
Maccoby’s is not the emotional partisanship of a religious fanatic. An Oxford-educated literature scholar turned historian of religion, his serious convictions arise from a lifetime of study and scrupulous research. He is, he believes, merely expressing painfully uncomfortable truths that other Jews refrain from expressing for fear of offending the primarily Christian society in which they live. But for Maccoby, the Hitler explanation that dare not speak its name must be expressed, the Christian roots of genocide must be exposed. When Maccoby says, “Christmas is a sinister festival,” he’s not saying, “Bah, humbug”; he’s saying, in effect, “Bah, Holocaust.”
To some extent, the dispute between George Steiner and Hyam Maccoby conjures up the great disputations of medieval Europe. Those disputations were, in fact, terrible Inquisitional torments inflicted on Jews in the guise of theological debates. The disputations could be seen as the intellectual crucifixion of Jewish faith. A prominent figure of Jewish learning or rabbinic scholarship would be compelled—often dragged—to the cathedral to take part in a “debate” with a leading Christian theologian over the crude proposition: Which religion has the truth: Judaism or Christianity?
Needless to say, the fight was fixed, the judging rigged, the Jews subjected to catcalls and verbal and physical abuse while trying to maintain with dignity beliefs they had no wish to subject to debate—often against converted, renegade Jews who claimed to know insidious and shameful fallacies and secret distortions in Jewish doctrine. Maccoby himself has written a play based on one of the most famous of these, The Disputation, a play one Jewish critic described as “a Jewish Passion play.”
While the conflict between Steiner and Maccoby has some elements of the grand medieval disputations, it’s more a battle of equals, both brilliant and impassioned partisans. But ultimately the crux of the debate comes down to the stark choice of Judaism versus Christianity. Which is more to “blame” for Hitler? Steiner finally blames Judaism’s “blackmail of transcendence” for making the Jews an object of murderous hatred. Maccoby blames what he believes is the blood hate at the heart of the Christian Gospels for sanctioning, preparing the ground for, what in his view amounts to the Christian ritual murder of the Jewish people.
For Maccoby, a trim, distinguished-looking man who was close to seventy when I saw him, this has become a deeply ingrained article of faith but one he insists is the product of reason, years of painful immersion in the history of the Christian-Jewish relationship. The executive director of the Sternberg Library in the Leo Baeck Institute (a distinguished London center for the study of German Jewish culture), Maccoby is the author of half a dozen scholarly books, but he’s most well known in America through his combative polemics in Commentary, which challenge Jews to cut through the warm fog of ecumenical hopes and cast a cold eye on the responsibility of Christian culture and Christian belief for the Holocaust.
For someone with Maccoby’s views on the responsibility of Christianity, George Steiner’s elaborate speculations about the responsibilities of Judaism are not merely misguided, they are patently offensive. He goes so far as to accuse Steiner of “glorifying Hitler” by giving him that final unrefuted speech of blame-the-Jews self-justification in The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H. Maccoby’s tone in speaking of Steiner ranges from the acidulous (he does “not consider him a charlatan,” although he implies others do) to the contemptuous: He accuses Steiner of “playing with fire” in giving Hitler’s incendiary speech such rhetorical power. He makes it sound as if Steiner were an irresponsible child playing with matches.
But there is a sense in which Maccoby himself can be seen as “playing with fire,” burning bridges—the fragile bridges of ecumenicism that link Christians and Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust—by insisting Christianity is irremediably infected with a murderously evil hatred in its very essence.
When I raised the question, Maccoby’s response was, “Forget ecumenicism, one can’t be ecumenical with a faith whose essence is sanctioned hatred of Jews.”
Maccoby knows that what he’s doing is breaking a taboo, that pronouncing aloud the explanation that dare not speak its name can be as troubling to Jews as it is to Christians. He’d first advanced the notion that Christianity (not just some Christians) must bear responsibility for the Holocaust—that it was not an aberration of Christian principles but a culmination of some malevolent essence—in a piece in Commentary that created an uproar on the Jewish magazine’s letters page.
“Your position was attacked almost as if it were a breach of decorum—of an unspoken rule that Jews have to be nice about not saying such things,” I suggested.
“Oh very much so,” he said. “You could see the extent to which what I said horrified many people, Jews as well as Christians. But I felt that people were concerning themselves so much with Jewish-Christian relations they were sweeping things under the carpet which needed to be talked about. All these people will say, ‘Yes, yes, there have been Christians that have been anti-Semites, and it’s unfortunate that it’s spread among the people as a kind of misconception of Christianity, but it was never really the true meaning of Christianity, it was never shared by the leaders of Christianity.’ And my argument was just the contrary: that people remained for centuries unaffected by anti-Semitism. It took the indoctrination by the leaders over the entire course of eighteen centuries to make the people anti-Semitic enough to accept Hitler.”
Maccoby is not anti-Christian per se: He speaks well of certain variants that don’t emphasize “the human sacrifice” of the Crucifixion, as he calls it, and the concomitant need to scourge the Jews as the “sacred executioners” of God. But he does believe that the impulse to hate and to murder Jews, the impulse that Hitler tapped into, is not an aberration but an essence of mainstream Christianity.
It is a straight line, “a direct connection,” Maccoby believes, “between Judas and Hitler.” Between the hate-filled portrait of a treacherous betrayer of the Lord, who became the archetypal Jew in Christian consciousness for eighteen centuries, and the culmination of that indoctrination in Jew-hatred: the readiness of Christian nations, Christian people to become complicit in the murder of the Judas people when incited and empowered to by Hitler.
Perhaps considering his preoccupation with Judas, it should not come as a surprise that betrayal is a recurrent theme of Maccoby’s discourse: One senses that part of his anger at George Steiner derives from his feeling that Steiner (like one of those medieval disputationist Jews who argued the Christian side) has betrayed his own people—become a Judas to the Jews—in the service of his intellectual vanity. And Maccoby’s account of the evolution of his own personal antagonism to Christianity began with what he describes as a personal betrayal: his betrayal by T. S. Eliot.
“I come to the whole subject as a British Jew rather than, let’s say, someone personally involved in the Holocaust,” Maccoby told me. “My family are all part of that Russian Jewry which moved to Western Europe and America as a result of the [turn-of-the-century] pogroms. It’s very possible that some of my family were lost in the Holocaust, but I don’t know because we lost touch with our Russian relatives.”
He was, however, personally involved in the war against Hitler. “I served in the British army, but that’s the extent of my involvement.” He was too young to see combat before the war ended. He speaks of the “underestimation syndrome” in Britain in the prewar era of his childhood, “which wanted to regard Hitler as a normal kind of politician who might have been extreme in one way or another, but as time went on, rational considerations would take over. I mean, people even are talking on those lines today. There’s [John] Charmley now,” the author of a recent biography of Winston Churchill that argues that he was too fanatically obsessed with Hitler and that the British might have been better off making a “peace of equals” with Hitler in 1940 or 1941.
“I think that’s all wrong. I mean, people just didn’t understand how extreme Hitler was and how mad he was.” He speaks of his own first intimations of that in his first year at Oxford in 1942. “When I was a student at Balliol [College], people were beginning to hand round pictures, evidence of what was going on in Hitler’s death camps. And there were one or two big meetings held at various parks in London and in Oxford to make people aware of what was going on. But people weren’t aware, the general public was not aware.”
His own awareness had not yet begun to affect his cultural preoccupation. He’d embraced the Western canon at the roots, the fount of Balliol. “I studied classics at Oxford—that is, Latin and Greek. And then I went on to study philosophy, and, in the end, English literature became my main study.”
As much as he embraced Western literature and Western culture, he could not help but begin to feel a growing disturbance at one aspect of it. “I think the first time I encountered that was in the writings of G. K. Chesterton, which I got very interested in when I was a teenager. I loved his writing, but then there was the streak of anti-Semitism running through it. And also Hilaire Belloc. His writing was even worse.” Something about the difference between Belloc’s and Chesterton’s anti-Semitism made Chesterton seem somehow more sinister to Maccoby.
“With Chesterton, it didn’t seem to come too naturally to him. He seemed to pick it up from his religious belief rather than from the kind of inbred anti-Semitism that Belloc’s was. I became interested in the relationship between Christian doctrine and anti-Semitism. I’d always been interested because I was brought up in a very rabbinical family. My father’s father was, and my uncle was, a serious student of the Talmud. So I was brought up in the study of Judaism at its most scholarly. And I read quite deeply in the history of Christianity in my early years. And I came back to it after I started getting deeply into the study of English literature, because the author whom I was particularly interested in—whom I wrote many articles and did research on—was T. S. Eliot.
“And here we’re back to the same syndrome of Christianity: an author whom I admired as a writer and who, at the same time, seemed to have anti-Semitism not just as something peripheral to his writing, but one that seemed to go right to the depth of his personality and the heart of his beliefs as a Christian.”
To his dismay, Maccoby came to feel that it was the kind of writer who felt his Christianity most deeply, writers such as Chesterton and Eliot, who were more likely to feel impelled to disparage Jews and Judaism. And, Maccoby came to believe, in doing so they weren’t necessarily misunderstanding Christianity; they might have been understanding the anti-Semitic impulse within it all too well.
It’s an impulse Maccoby believes emanates from, above all else, the Judas story in the Gospels, the identification of Judas as the archetypal Jew and the incitement to hatred in his portrayal. While Judas isn’t singled out for his Jewishness in the New Testament (all the disciples were at least nominally Jewish), the identification was made official by papal pronouncement as early as the fifth century when Pope Gelasius I denounced Judas as “a devil and the devil’s workman [who] gives his name to the whole race” of Jews.
Unofficially, elements of the Judas story in the Gospels have lent themselves—or helped create—the most pernicious stereotypes of the Jew: his treachery was mercenary (he sold Jesus to the authorities for thirty pieces of silver), he was a greedy embezzler (in the Gospel of John, he’s filching from the disciples’ funds for the poor), and, above all, he is a dishonest, deceitful traitor, a smiling villain who kisses Jesus on the mouth while stabbing him in the back. Indeed, one can hear incendiary anti-Semitic echoes of the Judas story in the stab-in-the-back accusation Hitler manipulated to convince the German public that the heroic German army had not lost the First World War but had been betrayed, stabbed in the back, by treacherous Jews and Jewish-paid politicians on the home front. Judasness is central to the vision of Jewishness in Hitler’s rhetoric.
In his focus on the Judas story, Maccoby differs from much of the previous discussion of the sources of Christian anti-Semitism, which has tended to focus more on the early “anti-Judaizing” shift in Christianity’s self-definition—from a faith that saw itself fulfilling the promises of Judaism to a faith that “superseded” its Jewish origins. The focus of this school of thought is less on Judas than on the powerful anti-Judaizing supersessionist ideology of Paul, the Jewish persecutor of Christians who became the Christian purger of Jewishness from Christianity. Some see Paul’s doctrinal predisposition as sanctioning popular rage against Jews for denying and crucifying Jesus.
Maccoby emphatically disagrees. While there are anti-Jewish elements in Paul’s doctrine and in the rhetoric of the Pauline Epistles, “my main point is that it’s not so much a question of doctrine. It’s a question of the imaginative image that is produced by the Judas story itself. There’s no credo in Christianity saying you have to be anti-Semites. The figure of Judas plays no part in the Christian creed, but in the Christian story it plays a very important part because he personifies the figure of the Jews.”
I was somewhat skeptical of Maccoby’s position initially. Having recently reread the Pauline Epistles, I’d been shocked at the kind of insidious, incendiary incitements Paul uses against the Jews in certain of them. But I made a point, after speaking with Maccoby, to look again at the Judas passages in the New Testament. In part, their anti-Semitic potential derives from the fact that Judas is not the abstract people that Paul rails against but a vividly embodied flesh-and-blood Jew—one Christians had not only heard of and read about but had actually seen, the sneaking, despicable betrayer familiar to centuries and centuries of Christian audiences: the Jew in the Passion play.
What struck me also in reading the Gospel accounts of Judas is the exterminationist imperative embedded at the very heart of the story in the words, the curse, of Jesus himself. Knowing, at the Last Supper, that Judas has already betrayed him, Jesus issues this curse: “Woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would have been better for that man if he had never been born” (emphasis added). A curse that struck me more forcefully for having recently heard George Steiner speculate that it might have been better if the Jewish people had disappeared or never existed, had never been born. It is virtually a wish for retroactive extermination, which in Maccoby’s thesis paved the way for Hitler’s proactive extermination.
Perhaps the emotional power of the Judas story has something to do with its pervasive rhetoric of blood. The thirty pieces of silver Judas has taken from the temple authorities to betray Jesus becomes “blood money”; when a cravenly remorseful Judas slinks back to the temple to try to return it to his paymasters, even they reject it because it’s tainted with blood. Those cursed silver coins are used by the temple authorities to buy a field that later becomes known as the Field of Blood. A place that becomes (in another variant of the story) the place where Judas meets his bloody end. It’s a field he bought with his blood money and, while surveying his purchase, he suffers a violent fall—a plunge that resulted in his intestines bursting out of his body, bathing the ground in blood, turning it into a “field of blood” in fact as well as name.
The pervasiveness of blood in the Judas story finds its reflection, Maccoby believes, in the pervasiveness of blood in the most incendiary and murderous of anti-Semitic legends: the so-called blood libel—the persistent legend that Jews practice the ritual murder of Christian children (a kind of recapitulation of the Crucifixion) in order to obtain blood for use in Passover rituals.
To Maccoby, the repetition of the Judas story—centuries and centuries of Christian children being indoctrinated with that primal tale of mercenary Jewish blood-money betrayal—had, by the time of the Holocaust, cumulatively built up a profound and deeply embedded thirst for Jewish blood, a vengeful thirst once satisfied by periodic pogroms but easily manipulated by Hitler into complicity with extermination.
I asked Maccoby if there was, in the story of the “field of blood,” of the blood of the Jew soaking the landscape, an anticipation of or sanction for the fields of blood that Hitler’s camps became.
“It is the story, yes, people are much more affected by a story than they are by theology or creeds. And children who are taught a story in which from the earliest years the Jew is the hateful figure—Judas Iscariot and the Jews generally are hateful figures—will hate Jews from then onwards, without even knowing why they hate the Jews. And if they lose their Christian belief, that hate will still remain with them. They’ll find some other reason for hating Jews. Like Hitler himself, for example.”
“You feel the Judas story was directly responsible for Hitler’s anti-Semitism?” I asked Maccoby.
He emphasizes that in two of the Gospel accounts of Judas’s betrayal, he is “entered by Satan” (Luke) or “taken possession by the Devil” (John) before he betrays Jesus, forever inscribing an image of the Jews as the people of the Devil on the hearts of children who hear the story in a state of primal receptivity.
“Hitler was brought up to hate the Jews, particularly to hate the Jews as the people of the Devil,” he insists. “He lost his Christian faith, but he retained the hatred of the Jews as the people of the Devil.” Maccoby is here deliberately undercutting the argument of those who attempt to exempt or exculpate Christianity as a source of Hitler’s Jew-hatred by citing various anti-Christian remarks Hitler made over the years.
An instance of this can be found in a newspaper column by Pat Buchanan. In attempting to repudiate Jesse Jackson’s inflammatory remark that a “Christian coalition” in Nazi Germany provided “a suitable scientific theologic rationale” for Hitler, Buchanan declared: “Hitler loathed Christianity. In Louis Snyder’s Hitler’s Third Reich: A Documentary History, Hitler is quoted as saying ‘Antiquity was better than modern times because it didn’t know Christianity and syphilis.’”
Of course, Hitler was all over the map with his pontifications on Christianity, often attacking it as Judaism under another name, but just as often uttering pieties about the importance of the church to national morality.
Maccoby’s point is that however many anti-Christian quotes from Hitler you find, they came from the adult Hitler; the true relevance of the anti-Jewish animus of Christianity to Hitler’s psyche was its effect on Hitler’s impressionable imagination as a child. That the emotional indoctrination of the Judas story was a powerful, poisonous legacy that ran deeper than any later disagreements Hitler might have over the political and social role of the Christian church in Germany. In the ongoing controversy over the origin of Hitler’s anti-Semitism and the cause of its virulence, then, Maccoby seems to be envisioning a far earlier starting point than most.
“Are you saying it began at the Benedictine monastery, then?” I asked him, referring to Hitler’s early schooling in the Benedictine friars’ school at Lambach.
“Yeah, well, you may say lots of people who [received similar education] didn’t turn into Hitlers. But it was certainly that, combined, of course, with a particularly obsessive personality, which made this the center of his thinking. I’m quite sure that his personal upbringing had a great deal to do with it—if he hadn’t had a Christian upbringing he would have been probably a sick personality anyhow, but his sickness would’ve fastened onto some other kind of hatred. But having had that Christian upbringing, his sick personality centered on the traditional enemy. And particularly in the circumstances of the defeat of Germany, there is the need for a scapegoat—the tendency of people to turn to the traditional scapegoat in times of great distress.”
I asked Maccoby what his reaction was to Hitler’s own account in Mein Kampf of a later transformative moment in his perception of Jews: that moment in the Vienna street some ten years later than Lambach when he “first” glimpsed a Jew in alien-seeming black caftan and black earlocks.
“Well, he’s kidding himself, I think,” Maccoby says. Or kidding us: “Hitler has an interest in portraying anti-Semitism as something he developed rather than grew up with. I think he saw this figure, but why was he filled with such hatred for this figure? I mean, if it had been Amish, for example, and also dressed in rather unfamiliar black garb, he wouldn’t have felt a sense of hatred at all.”
I mentioned to Maccoby a doctoral thesis I’d seen (by Helmut Schmeller) that argued that, growing up in Linz, Hitler was most likely reading the extremely anti-Semitic newspaper the Linzer Fliegende Blätter, which would suggest an anti-Semitic awareness of oft-caricatured black-caftaned Jews long before the alleged revelatory encounter with that apocryphal wandering Jew in the streets of Vienna.
“So he’s lying about that. Or at the very least this was something that probably went back so early in his life he can’t remember when it started.”
“And what about all the millions of Christians indoctrinated in the same way who didn’t become Hitler?” I asked.
“He was very unique in a way—in the sense that he embodied a certain aspect of Christian civilization which, in other people, is diffused and has many other things to counterbalance it. But he struck a chord with that aspect in others. He was himself a human being who contained that chord. He embodied it single-mindedly. He was the focal point of a kind of evil which grew to a head, like a boil, in him.” It was that common chord that united the German people with Hitler in their partnership in genocide, he believes.
“The criticism of your point of view,” I said to Maccoby, “has been that Hitler’s was a racial, not a Christian anti-Semitism. Am I right in thinking that what you’re saying is that racial anti-Semitism as the Nazis and Hitler formulated it was something that had been around for maybe a century? But there were eighteen centuries of Christian—”
“Right, absolutely. The point is, you see, that you build up a fund of hatred against a certain group of people. The fact that that fund is backed by certain dogmas doesn’t mean that when those dogmas left, the hatreds left. The hatred’s still there. And it has to be backed up by newer theories. I mean, if the Jews are no longer hated because they are the people of Satan who killed Jesus, then some other theory works—in the case of the Nazis it was a racial theory; with Karl Marx, the Jews played the role of the archetypal capitalist. This is what I call post-Christian anti-Semitism”—a continuation of Christian anti-Semitism in a different guise, as opposed to Daniel Goldhagen’s concept of “eliminationist anti-Semitism,” for instance, which Goldhagen defines against Christian anti-Semitism.
For Maccoby, it all comes back to the Gospels, to the emotional power of the blood curse. “The Gospels really worked up this picture of the Jews as murderous deicides.”
In fact, I came to think that in Maccoby’s insistent emphasis on the emotional power of the blood curse and the blood rhetoric of the Gospels, he was doing something very powerful and emotional. He was reversing the poles of the notorious blood libel, so long and so murderously leveled at Jews, to say: We are not guilty of the bloodthirsty ritual murder of Christian children we’ve been accused of. But you Christians are guilty of, accomplices to, paved the way for, the ritual murder of the Jews. Our blood is on your hands.
In his book on the Judas question, The Sacred Executioner: Human Sacrifice and the Legacy of Guilt, Maccoby offered an anthropological analysis of the way the Crucifixion is transformed into the ritual murder of the Jews. “Jews are killed because of Christian guilt,” he wrote. “Guilt for their [the Christians’] need for a human sacrifice to make their salvation possible” (the sacrifice of Jesus to atone for their sins).
“The fact that the powers of evil [the Jews] bring about the [necessary, redemptive] death of the sacrifice doesn’t excuse [the Jews] in any way,” he told me. “They’re still hated. In fact, the more you hate them, the more you are saved yourself, because you therefore can wash your hands like Pilate and you’re no longer implicated in the death [of Jesus], which was done for your sake [for your sins]. You benefit by the death of Jesus because you’re saved, but you have no part in the death. Guilt for it is displaced to the Jews who can then be killed with impunity.”
Jews are, in Maccoby’s interpretation, dragged into the Gospel story to perform a function (killing the necessary sacrifice) and then are themselves slaughtered to absolve the guilt of those who really benefited from the killing of Christ, the Christians. The blood is really on Christian hands, Maccoby believes—they’re the ones guilty of the ritual murder.
Frankly, I’m not sure Maccoby’s psychoanthropological analysis is necessary or adds anything to his Judas-based case against Christianity. But he’s attached to it, as he’s attached to that case. Maccoby isn’t unaware of how transgressive, indeed offensive, this analysis will sound to devout Christians. He’s thought about the consequences of what comes close to indicting Christianity for Hitler’s murder of the Jews, but he believes it has to be said, Christians have to be confronted with what he sees as the hatred at the heart of the Gospels. He also knows that his insistence on this is disturbing, even offensive, to many Jews.
He talks about a 1989 clash at a symposium at New York’s City University Graduate Center with the American Jewish ecumenicist Rabbi Marc Tannenbaum. “He was very much against my whole line of approach. He was involved in Jewish-Christian relations in a very big way. And he was involved particularly with talks with the pope to try to get the Vatican to recognize Israel. And he felt that this line that I was adopting was counterproductive. But I reject that line of thought,” he continued. “It’s what I call pusillanimous. Here we [Jews] are, for the first time for many centuries, we’re able to speak out. Before we couldn’t speak out because we’re going to get killed if we speak out. Now supposedly we mustn’t speak out because it’s bad taste to speak out. One way or another, there’s some gag on us. I said if we don’t speak out now, when are we going to speak out? We can’t speak out in time of persecution because we’ll be persecuted. But in times when we’re not being persecuted, we mustn’t speak out because that would show lack of gratitude to people for not persecuting us? So when do we speak out? Never?”
“On the other hand,” I suggest, “your view is fairly bleak in the sense that it doesn’t hold out any ecumenical hope of some reconciliation between Jews and Christianity, because you’re saying at the very heart of Christianity is the sanctioned hatred and murder of Jews.”
“Well, as I always say to people who say ‘You’re calling for the end of Christianity in the sense that it depends on the ritual murder of Jews,’ I say, ‘No, I don’t think so, I’m supporting a certain strand in Christianity against official Christianity. I’m saying that throughout the centuries there have been Christians who have actually protested against Christianity. People like Pelagius who protested against Augustine. People who believed in the humanity of Jesus, not in the divinity of Jesus. Who didn’t want to think of the death of Jesus as being a sacrifice, a theological sacrifice, but simply the martyrdom of a great man in the cause of freedom. He was fighting against Rome, not against the Jews. People who think of Jesus as a model teacher. And Jesus would be in the same position then, in Christianity, that Moses is in Judaism, as Mohammed is in Islam, a human teacher. There’s nothing antireligious in this.”
“It’s not a position, then, that Christianity, if it were self-aware, has to abolish itself? It’s more that there is a kind of Christianity that does not have implicit in it hatred of the Jews?”
“Right. In other words, that instead of concentrating on Jesus’ death they would concentrate on Jesus’ life.”
It is, however, a Christianity that would be recognized as such by only a small percentage of those calling themselves Christians, mainly Unitarians and the like.
In response, Maccoby points out that there are some post-Holocaust Christian theologians such as Rosemary Ruether who tend to agree with him—who feel so troubled by the implication of Christian anti-Semitism in paving the way for the Holocaust that they have begun to call for mainstream Christianity to reevaluate or revise its core beliefs to exorcise anti-Jewish animus.
I wondered if he was also referring to the strand of post-Holocaust German Christian theologians who have attempted to incorporate the Holocaust into the Gospel story of the Crucifixion by positing that the Jews of Europe were in some way on the cross, that they were the victims of the Crucifixion, the true body of Christ in some mystical, atemporal way.
He rejects it as pernicious. “I object very strongly to that kind of Christianization of the Holocaust by which the Jews become a kind of Christ figure suffering for the Christians’ sins.” He sees a tricky theological rationalization going on here which still reifies or recuperates the notion of a sacrificial crucifixion by a sacred executioner—here Hitler assumes the role of Jewish crucifier, driving the nails into the body of the Jewish people. It ends up, in effect, renewing the crucifixion story with fresh blood, so to speak, and “blaming the Jews in a more sophisticated way,” Maccoby says.
Blaming the Jews in a more sophisticated way: This is exactly what Maccoby believes George Steiner is doing. Of all the attacks on Steiner following the publication of his Hitler novel, Maccoby’s (which appeared in Encounter) was the most thoroughgoing, cut closest to the bone, and was the one Steiner’s allies have gone to the greatest lengths to refute. In part, because Maccoby knows Steiner’s work all too well; knew the sources of Hitler’s speech in Steiner’s earlier work; could cite the way Hitler in Steiner’s novel “becomes a full blown Steinerian . . . expressing views taken word for word from Steiner’s other writings.” Maccoby’s verdict is also the most severe, going so far as to characterize Steiner’s novel as a “misleading piece of anti-Jewish propaganda of a regrettably contemporary kind which may prove of aid and comfort to anti-Semites for years to come.” He accuses Steiner of not merely giving Hitler as a person “a cosmic dignity” but serving to “dignify Hitler by elevating him into a metaphysical principle.”
Part of Maccoby’s animus seems to stem from the fact he is reacting not only to the publication of the novel but to the 1981 stage production of the novel at London’s Mermaid Theatre, the production staged by Christopher Hampton, the one with a Hitler who “scared the hell” out of Steiner himself. But Maccoby’s attack was on more than the speech of Steiner’s Hitler character, it was on Steiner’s whole oeuvre, on Steiner’s character, for what he called a “colossal miscalculation” produced by intellectual “vanity.”
I wondered, after an attack like that, if the two had ever met and confronted each other.
“Well, I do come across him sometimes,” he said. “I don’t see a lot of George Steiner, but I do from time to time. We don’t really see eye to eye very much,” he says with seeming mildness before taking a rather sly swipe at him: “I’ve never come to criticize him in the way some people have and call him a charlatan and so on. I admire some of his work. But I do think when he gets into Jewish topics, he falls into a trap.”
Falls into several traps, according to Maccoby. But before moving on to them, let us take note of the acidulous “I’ve never . . . call[ed] him a charlatan” remark, which has the effect of propagating the idea that the charlatan notion is widespread while distancing himself from such an uncharitable view in the guise of generosity toward his foe. Although I suspect it’s a view Maccoby really does share.
The primal “trap” Steiner falls into, both personally and in his Hitler novel, Maccoby tells me, involves not so much his image of Hitler but his image of Jews. “He falls into a trap, which is to think of the archetype of the Jew being the Wandering Jew.”
And, in fact, just a few days before, Steiner had spoken to me in a very heartfelt way of his identification with the Wandering Jew, with Jews who wandered, outcasts and dissidents such as Freud and Leon Trotsky—Trotsky in particular, the inventor of a system, cast out by the monster state he helped create (another kind of Frankenstein story), forced to become the haunted, controversial provocateur in exile.
But there is a profound problem, Maccoby believes, in Steiner’s—in any Jew’s—identification with the Wandering Jew. “The Wandering Jew is not a Jewish image but a Christian image.” He’s referring to the origin of the Wandering Jew legend in Christian apocrypha as the story of an encounter between Jesus and a Jew on the streets of first-century Jerusalem. Jesus, dragging his cross, bleeding from his crown of thorns, about to be crucified, asks the Jew for something for his thirst. The Jew rejects him and as a punishment is condemned to wander the world, forever after an outcast, condemned to a living eternity of remorse. Later, in legends and novels, the Wandering Jew becomes a more ambiguous, even heroic figure. But at its core it is, Maccoby insists, “A Christian image of an ideal kind of Jew”—a Jew who acknowledges his guilt over rejecting Christ and implicitly acknowledges the justness of the persecutions inflicted on him by Christians.
“It’s saying that Christians would like Jews to accept the role of the people who brought about the death of Jesus,” the role of murderer in effect. “And to do so in a spirit of repentance,” acceptance even, of the punishments inflicted upon them. Up to and including the Final Solution?
Maccoby didn’t go on to make the connection between the Wandering Jew’s acceptance of his implication in his fate and Steiner’s apparent argument for the Jews’ implication in their genocide in his Hitler novel.
I’d argue that Steiner’s image of the Wandering Jew owed much more to the modern intellectual’s preference to be seen as the alienated outsider and to existentialist philosophy’s elevation of guilt into something not to be ashamed of but rather something to aspire to—as a higher, more acute and authentic form of consciousness in a fallen world. But Maccoby might be onto something in the sense that Steiner may have fewer qualms about imputing guilt to the Jews for the Holocaust because this guilt gives the Jews a tragic ironic chosenness Steiner seems to relish as much as he rejects the conventional, triumphalist concept of the Chosen People.
Steiner’s ideas about the triumphalist character of the Chosen People concept constitute another trap Maccoby believes Steiner’s fallen into. I told Maccoby about my conversation with Steiner in which Steiner had steadfastly, repeatedly insisted that the questions he raised in his fictive Hitler’s speech are questions he thought were valid, questions he wanted answers to. The question, for instance, about whether Hitler’s racist doctrines were “a hungry imitation” of the alleged racism of the Chosen People idea in Judaism.
“Actually, the doctrine of the chosen race is fundamentally different from a racialist doctrine,” Maccoby says. “The Jews don’t say we are the chosen race because we are inherently better than other people, because of some racist characteristics. On the contrary, what is said is that the Jewish people were chosen not for any qualities that they had but because of the mission: that it was given that the Jews actually come up short all the time. The whole story is about the defects of this people. The whole story is about the backslidings, and it’s not a glorification of the Jews at all. It’s a history of how they failed on the whole to live up to the mission entrusted to them. It was the story of a failure. And you can’t imagine Hitler talking about the failings of the Nordic race; on the contrary, the only failures are not their fault but the fault of traitors who are plotting against them. Whereas Jews came to be evil in the sight of the Lord: Most people turned away from God and had to be upbraided by the prophets. So it’s entirely different from a racist concept. It’s the story of a totally degraded people, a slave people who were chosen to develop a concept of freedom. The idea of election is at opposite poles from being a superior race.”
Opposite poles from being a superior race, perhaps, but still chosen in the sense of “chosen to develop a concept of freedom.” This might often have been a freedom to fail, a freedom to choose wrong, but a freedom, a power to choose that was especially important to God, even if as an object of his wrath. Maccoby might be strictly right in rejecting the notion that chosenness represents “superiority” in the sense of intellect, beauty, or nobility—the kinds of claims made for the Nordic race by Hitler—but it does reflect a perhaps even more special moral significance or responsibility.
There are two better arguments against Steiner’s position than the one Maccoby advances. First, all religions have ways of conferring upon some of their initiates some sense of superiority over the rest of mankind: the Elect and saved in some versions of Christianity, the Enlightened of Buddhism, the Brahmans of Hinduism, the man who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca in Islam. To single out this aspect of Jewish belief as somehow implicating Jews in their own murder is uncalled for.
Another argument against Steiner (or Steiner’s Hitler) is that there is little evidence that Hitler did adapt his doctrine of Aryan superiority from the Chosen People concept of the Jews. In fact, there’s more evidence that he adapted it from an abundance of tracts and treatises available to him on the mystical superiority of the Aryan race, ones that ranged from the semipornographic Ostara magazine in Vienna to the multivolume “scholarly” works of Wagner’s “scientific” race guru Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
Maccoby is more persuasive, I believe, in his attack on the assertion Steiner puts in the mouth of his Hitler that the source of the success of Hitler’s anti-Jewish crusade was the threefold “blackmail of transcendence”—the invention of conscience by Moses, the impossible injunction to perfect love by Jesus, the impossible injunction to perfect justice by Marx.
“I disagree with this whole idea of his [Steiner’s] that Judaism differs from other religions in that it sets a high moral standard which is so impossible that people have to resent it. This is a theory about anti-Semitism, that anti-Semitism consists of the resentment of Christians being forced to live up to the Judaic standard of morality. I don’t think that’s the case. I think, on the contrary, what is resented in Judaism is people saying morality is possible. That it’s not all that hard, and, therefore, all the excuses people make for avoiding morality don’t work. Because what the Bible says is it’s not in the heavens, it’s not beyond the seas, it is there before you. Morality is easy; the only thing that makes it difficult are all the excuses people make. One of those excuses is to say that morality is so difficult that the only virtue is total humility—that we cannot possibly be good people, so therefore we need a savior to come from heaven in order to suffer death on our behalf. So what’s resented is not the difficulty of Jewish morality but more a notion that morality is a possibility.”
It was strange, the week I spent going from Steiner to Maccoby: both brilliant, impassioned intellects; both utterly at odds; both playing with fire. While Maccoby clearly regards Steiner as having done something dangerous in giving birth to an intellectual rationale for Hitler that blames his victims, Maccoby might, in fact, be doing something equally dangerous: telling the overwhelmingly dominant Christian majority within which diaspora Jews live that its faith bears within it—inextricably entangled at its very heart—the murderous evil seeds of genocide. And that to truly exorcise the guilt of their faith, they must radically transform it or abandon it.
They’re both playing with fire with their Hitler explanations, but they both also, in very different ways, could be seen as absolving Hitler of responsibility for the Holocaust. They’re both shifting the focus from Hitler himself to abstract ideological and anthropological forces of which Hitler is at most a pawn, a boil, a mouthpiece. In Steiner’s view, Hitler merely serves and exploits the widespread animus against Jews for the torments of conscience they invented. In Maccoby’s view, it was not Hitler so much as Judas—not the real Judas but the hateful Christian representation of Judas as archetypal Jew—who is responsible for the slaughter of the Jewish people. The image of Judas made Hitler’s crimes possible, fertilized the field of blood Hitler harvested. Hitler was merely the catalyst for the inevitable crystallization of Christian hatred.
And the other thing that Steiner and Maccoby might seem to do is to remove, if not completely exculpate, Germany from explaining Hitler. While Steiner mused about some potential for violence in the German language, he was emphatic about it being just “Germany’s bad luck” that Hitler came along “with his peculiar genius,” because, Steiner believed, France would have been more naturally receptive, more anti-Semitic at the core than Germany and the German culture of Goethe and Heidegger, which Steiner still cherishes, despite his distrust.
Maccoby’s exemption of Germany or at least of German culture is even more heartfelt. At the close of our conversation, as Maccoby was gathering his papers to hurry off to a lecture he was to deliver, I raised a question I’d hesitated to ask because I sensed it might be troubling, if not offensive. A question about Leo Baeck, the tragic luminary of the German Jewish community, the Berlin rabbi Maccoby’s institute is named after. It was a question raised by Richard Rubenstein, the American rabbi and one of the most outspokenly heretical of post-Holocaust Jewish theologians. Rubenstein had argued that Jews must hold God to account (if not to blame) for the Holocaust, that to worship him without questioning his silence and passivity in the face of the death camps is virtually an insult to the Jewish victims.
Rubenstein has also raised questions about the silence and passivity of some leaders of the German Jewish community in the thirties who, trusting in God, urged Jews to go about business as usual despite the fate being prepared for them. Rubenstein singled out Rabbi Leo Baeck, the revered leader of the sophisticated, cosmopolitan, assimilated Berlin Jewish community, for Baeck’s final act before he was dragged off to Theresienstadt concentration camp in the final evacuation of German Jews in 1942.
What stunned Rubenstein was an apparently trivial gesture Baeck made in the moments before he went off with the SS: He paid his electric bill. Think about it, Rubenstein says: He’s joining the rest of the Jews in death camps run by the Nazi regime, but he pays his electric bill to that regime before he leaves.
“For Rubenstein,” I said to Maccoby, “this emblematizes Jewish passivity in the face of the Holocaust. What’s your response to that?”
I was surprised at the eloquence—and the direction—of his reply.
“What he [Rubenstein] wants Baeck to do is to be a kind of token rebel against the whole system,” Maccoby told me. “The point [of Baeck’s act] is that Jews are always expecting decency from people around them. That’s our trouble, really. This is really why so many Jews failed to leave Germany. They really couldn’t believe that this Germany, which they loved, felt obligations toward—professionals, for instance, felt gratitude toward Germany [for giving them more opportunity for advancement and fulfillment than any other European country]. And they wanted nothing more than to express this gratitude by being good citizens.”
At that point, an assistant came in and whispered something in Maccoby’s ear, probably about his being late for his lecture.
“Yes, yes, we’ve just finished,” he said. But he had something more he wanted to add, something about Baeck and his electric bill. “I’d say that Leo Baeck never lost that feeling of love for Germany, that sense of obligation toward Germany, as a place to which he had obligations. And he expressed that by acting as an obedient citizen as far as he possibly could, even at the time when Germany was taken over by someone who he felt to be against the whole spirit of Germany.”
Was Hitler contrary to the spirit of Germany—if so, why did he strike such a receptive chord in Germans?—or was he an expression of that spirit? Maccoby’s Leo Baeck Institute is devoted to the principle that there is a spirit of Germany Jews can still love. “Even today,” he says, “you’ve got German refugees who have a whole German Jewish culture still going outside Germany. The Leo Baeck Yearbook [of scholarly articles on German Jewish culture] is an expression of the love of Jews for Germany. And that’s a very real thing.”
And then he returns to the culture he regards as far more responsible for the Holocaust than Germany. “Germany’s one thing. The Christian side of Germany is another thing. I don’t blame Germany for the Holocaust; I blame Christendom for the Holocaust.” (Cynthia Ozick, an admirer of Maccoby’s work, stressed to me her belief that Maccoby is not exculpating Germans—the German perpetrators—by blaming “Christendom” because the Holocaust was executed largely by German Christians.)
Still, it was interesting, two Jews, Steiner and Maccoby, going to great lengths to absolve Germany (if not Germans) from guilt. Two intellectuals who go to great lengths to shift responsibility from Hitler to Great Abstractions such as “the blackmail of transcendence” and “Christendom.” Why are so many so reluctant to find the obvious suspects guilty or at least responsible? In fact, the argument over the centrality of Hitler’s responsibility and over the proportion of that responsibility shared by the German people as a whole is one of the most contentious and unresolved disputes in the whole field of Hitler explanation. One that, not long after my encounters with Steiner and Maccoby, turned into a bitter and divisive battle of scholars over the work of Daniel Goldhagen.