Was Jesus a Jew? The idea shouldn't be controversial. Yet there have been plenty of attempts to challenge his connection to Judaism. Dissociating Jesus from his Jewishness has a dark history that continues to poison discourse today.
In the early 20th century, the anti-Semitic and racist German-British philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain argued that while Judaism provided the religious background for Jesus, he "had not a drop of genuinely Jewish blood in his veins." The Nazis picked up on this thread. As Hitler consolidated power, German theologians insisted that Jesus was not a Jew but an Aryan, descended from Galilean gentiles.
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