The Holocaust and Jewish Theology

Overview

Recall questions on the theological problem it poses, the responses of Rubenstein, Fackenheim and Wiesel, and the covenant after Auschwitz.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What was the Holocaust?

   Model answer

   The deliberate, state-organised murder of Europe's Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, in which about six million Jewish people were killed between 1941 and 1945, following years of persecution before that. It was carried out by shooting units, by ghettoisation and starvation, and by extermination camps built for the purpose. It was not a wartime disaster that happened to Jews; it was a policy aimed at ending Jewish existence.

2. 2

   What is meant by the Final Solution?

   Model answer

   The Nazi term for the plan to annihilate the Jews of Europe. The intention hardened from persecution and forced emigration into systematic killing during 1941, and the Wannsee conference in January 1942 coordinated the machinery of deportation across the occupied territories. The bureaucratic language is itself part of the historical record of how the killing was organised and concealed.

3. 3

   What is the longer context of antisemitism behind it?

   Model answer

   Centuries of Christian European hostility, including the charge of deicide, the blood libel, forced conversions, expulsions from England, France and Spain, ghettoes and pogroms. In the nineteenth century this was recast in racial terms, so that hatred no longer depended on Jewish belief and could not be escaped by conversion. Nazi ideology drew on that racial version, and it found ready ground across much of Europe.

4. 4

   What were the Nazi persecutions of the 1930s?

   Model answer

   From 1933 Jews were driven out of the professions and public employment. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped them of citizenship and criminalised marriage with non-Jews. In November 1938 a state-directed pogrom across Germany and Austria burned synagogues, destroyed Jewish businesses and homes, killed many and sent tens of thousands of Jewish men to concentration camps. Emigration became desperate, and most countries kept their doors closed.

5. 5

   Why does the Holocaust present so severe a problem for Jewish belief?

   Model answer

   Because the covenant claims a God who is just, who acts in history and who has bound himself to this people. The murder of a third of the Jewish people, including more than a million children, cannot be squared easily with any of those claims. The classical answers, that suffering is punishment, or discipline, or a test, look either false or obscene at this scale, and the question is not why the innocent suffer in general but why God did not act here.

6. 6

   What is the range of Jewish theological responses?

   Model answer

   There is no agreed answer and no attempt at one. Some abandoned belief. Some concluded that the God of history is dead. Some found in the event a command to keep Jewish life alive. Some defended God's hiddenness as the price of human freedom. Some appealed to the servant who suffers on behalf of others. A few advanced the traditional language of punishment, which most Jews rejected with anger. Others hold that theology should fall silent and the survivors be listened to instead.

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