What made the murder of six million Jews in the heart of Europe defining was not the scale of the crime — other genocides compare — but the way in which it was tied not only to the venality of Nazism, but also to the most sacred traditions of Christendom. Hitler’s lethal anti-Semitism murdered the Jews, but he could not have done it without the antecedent anti-Judaism that formed a core dogma of the Christian Church.
After World War II, the Christian Church, speaking generally, began to confront the facts of its ancient complicity in the demonizing of Jews, and — especially through two generations of Jewish-Christian dialogue — the worst old manifestations of anti-Semitism were renounced. Christian structures of Jew hatred — the Christ-killer slander, bigoted stereotypes, theological triumphalism — were dismantled. But a broad assumption took hold among Jews and Christians both that the new civility was enough. That anti-Semitism, at least in nations bracketing the North Atlantic, was mostly left behind spawned a vast complacency. The contemporary Church’s self-congratulation for having confronted its complicity in evil layers over a profoundly unfinished moral reckoning.
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