Jews, Christians and Auschwitz

My colleague, John Roth, has carried to unprecedented lengths the doctrine that the arch-criminal is the victim himself. In “When a Faith Exalts Itself Over Others, Hatred Is Born” (Op-Ed Page, Aug. 25), he writes:

Possibly no idea has changed human history more than the belief that one’s community has a special, favored relationship to God (or gods). Christians . . . inherited the conviction from their Jewish forebears, who understood themselves to be God’s “chosen” people.

For Roth, the root of all evil is the biblical covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the foundation equally of Judaism and Christianity. In its Christian version, says Roth, this produced the:

. . . Propensity . . . to brand Jews as “infidels” . . . because they “fail” to accept . . . a “new” covenant, established through Jesus. . . .

Roth concludes that what happened at Auschwitz ( viz , the Holocaust):

. . . Is bound up with beliefs about God held first by Jews and then by Christians . . . The lesson that still needs learning (is that) . . . When a socially dominant faith exalts itself over the others in its midst, the inference among believers is that . . . they are free to eliminate the others. . . .

Roth’s thesis is vitiated, to say the least, by the fact that the Nazis were no more Christians than they were Jews. The Nazi theories upon which the extermination or enslavement of all “inferior” races was justified were all derived from 19th Century neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology. Just as Marxism saw all higher forms of life emerging out of lower forms by means of the class struggle, the Nazis saw this accomplished by a race struggle. Common to Nazism and Marxism was the rejection of the Bible, and its account of the world as being of devine creation.

I leave it to Christians to vindicate their religion against Roth’s slanders. As a Jew, I was taught that only righteousness exalts a people. God’s covenant with Abraham was never intended to justify the unrighteousness that Roth falsely attributes to it.

HARRY V. JAFFA

Salvatori Research Professor

of Political Philosophy Emeritus

Claremont McKenna College and

Claremont Graduate School