The Grey Book: A collection of protests against anti-semitism and the persecution of Jews issued by non-Roman Catholic churches and church leaders during Hitlers ruleSnoek, Johan M.
Religion
The Grey Book: A collection of protests against anti-semitism and the persecution of Jews issued by non-Roman Catholic churches and church leaders during Hitlers rule
Snoek, Johan M.
Antisemitism; Christianity and other religions -- Judaism; Judaism -- Relations -- Christianity; Protestant churches -- Europe
First I wish to state that what has shocked and appalled Christian
conscience, what has provoked protests from one end of the Christian world
to the other?
Protests which will certainly be reiterated and increased - is precisely
the fact that this new gospel of racialism already has been applied to the
Jews, and seems to have reached its culmination point in the Nuremberg
Decrees. One cannot know whether even worse may not happen later on.
I have met many Jews who had been driven out of Germany since the Hitler
revolution, and when I went to Germany as recently as this year, on two
occasions while travelling through a large part of Germany, I could not
but feel intensely moved on seeing, at the entrance of villages and towns,
large signboards forbidding access to the Jews; and on many trees along
the roads, posters full of insults against them.
Christian as I am, and knowing what Christianity owes to Judaism, I know
that the Church of Jesus Christ is the daughter of what it calls the ancient
Church of Israel. The Protestant in me knows what the Gospel owes to those
prophets who, beginning eight centuries before Jesus Christ, have presaged
the universalism which the religion of Christ would later proclaim
throughout the world.
Did not Isaiah welcome the day when all nations would flow unto the mountain
of the Lord? And others after him, such as Jeremiah, did they not show their
people, the only people ever elected, the road by means of which they were
to bring to others the revelation which had been bestowed upon them, so that
all nations might come to know the true God?
The Gospel is the heritage and fulfilment of that great hope of the prophets.
It is impossible for a Christian, when he sees the infamous crusades
conducted against Judaism, not to be among those who declare that they are
unable to forget what they owe to the Jewish people. We are among those who
remember all this with deep gratitude. We believe that this gratitude, in
view of the suffering of this people who are being crucified once again,
ought to be shown in acts of sympathy and solidarity.
Racialism inside the Christian Churches
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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