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The initial response of the IMCCAJ to the Nazi anti-Jewish campaign was precisely what one would have anticipated from study of its earlier positions. A report to the Committee of the International Missionary Council, meeting at Northfield, Massachusetts, in September-October 1935, precisely when the notorious Nuremberg laws were being promulgated and implemented, noted that:
The outbreak of Nazi anti-Semitism in Germany, accompanied by a rising tide of anti-Jewish feeling in many other countries, has aroused widespread public interest in the Jew. This awakened interest has provided open doors for educational penetration of the Church constituency as well as of the general public. Never have there been so many requests for addresses on the subject of the Jew from churches as well as secular groups as at present. Such opportunities are serving as foundation work for changing the century-old un-Christian approach to the Jews to a definitely Christian approach.
But, while the primary concern to offer the gospel to the Jews remained constant, more and more attention began to be paid to the physical peril of Jews and, especially, Hebrew Christians in Europe. When the British and European sections of the IMCCAJ met the next April at Kasteel Hemmen, the Netherlands, Professor Philip Kohnstamm of Ermelo, Holland, "gave a brief account of the relief work that is being done for non-Aryan refugees from Germany. He spoke of the need for future planning and the care and education of children whose parents were suffering from persecution. Various relief and emigration schemes had been planned, both through the High Commission of the League of Nations and by private agencies, which need to be carried farther."
In his report as Director to that same meeting, Conrad Hoffmann, Jr. indicated that a detailed study of antisemitism was to be conducted and he called for increased cooperative efforts by the mission agencies to deal with the "urgent problems confronting the Jewish missionary enterprise...including the existence of anti-Semitism in the Church." Clearly, antisemitism would have to be approached head-on. It was to be the central item on the agenda of the international conference in Vienna, the planning for which was begun at Kasteel Hemmen.
Nevertheless, the principal task of the IMCCAJ would not be neglected, as is indicated by a resolution adopted by the Ad Interim Committee of the International Missionary Council at Jordans, England, June 1936:
This Committee having heard the report of the International Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews, and being reminded again of the difficulties which afflict both the Jews themselves and all Christian work among Jews in many parts of the world, reiterates its conviction that the Christian Gospel is the salvation of God for all men without distinction of blood or nation, and that the world mission of the Christian Church must always include as an integral and vital part the carrying of the Gospel to the Jewish people.
Vienna, 1937
"Before the IMCCAJ could really begin its full activity," wrote H. L. Ellison, a British Hebrew Christian, "Hitler's rise to power, in 1933, increasingly turned the attention of the Director [Conrad Hoffmann, Jr.] to the problems of the European Jew and Hebrew-Christian. In many ways the conference in Vienna in 1937 was potentially of greater importance than those of 1927, but in spite of its careful preparation it was so dominated by evils to come that it had little effect on the development of the work."
The Vienna conference, the first major meeting to be convened since the Atlantic City gathering, was of critical significance for precisely the reason about which Ellison complained. The evils of the Nazi regime were in full swing3 and Conrad Hoffmann had, indeed, been concentrating his efforts on attempts to ameliorate their effects on Jews, particularly Jewish converts to Christianity. A summary report by the IMC pointed out that:
The director visited Germany and Austria each year up to and including 1939 in an effort to be of help through counsel and direct relief, largely in the form of securing immigration permits for those non-Aryans who were especially hard pressed. With the help of the Swedish Missionary Society operating in Vienna and that of other bodies in Germany, it was possible to help a very considerable number of non-Aryans to escape from Germany. Special mention should be made of the great aid given by the committee in Dublin, which is a branch of the London Jews Society and which provided hospitality for many refugees unable to secure permanent immigration permits for anywhere else in the world.
Antisemitism had become an urgent and existential human problem as well as a barrier to conversion. It was soon literally to become a matter of life and death.
By 1937 there was no doubt that the Nazi government was waging a war against the Jews, the embryo of which had been growing at least as long ago as 1920 when the platform of the Nazi party declared that "We demand freedom for all religious sects in the state in so far as they do not endanger the state or work against the customs and morals of the German race. The party as such represents the point of view of a positive Christianity without binding itself to any particular confession. It fights the spirit of Jewish materialism inside and outside of our ranks and is convinced that a lasting convalescence of our people can take place only from the inner conviction that 'common welfare comes before individual welfare.'" That Nazi party was now in power and had already incited a massive boycott of Jewish shops and businesses in March-April 1933 and passed the Nuremberg laws (September 1935), which, inter alia, decreed that only a citizen of "German or kindred blood" had the right to serve the "German people and the Reich" as civil servants (for only such a person was entitled to exercise full political rights) and prohibited marriage and extra-marital sexual contact between Jews and "Germans."
An account written by Stephen H. Roberts, an Australian historian who spent a sabbatical (November 1935-March 1937) in Germany studying Nazism, painted a stark picture of the Jewish situation at the very time of the Vienna conference:
At present, the German Jew has no civil rights. He is not a citizen; he cannot vote or attend any political meeting; he has no liberty of speech and cannot defend himself in print; he cannot become a civil servant or a judge; he cannot be a writer or a publisher or a journalist; he cannot speak over the radio; he cannot become a screen actor or an actor before Aryan audiences; he cannot teach in any educational institution; he cannot enter the service of the railway, the Reichsbank, and many other banks; he cannot exhibit paintings or give concerts; he cannot work in any public hospital; he cannot enter the Labour Front or any of the professional organizations, although membership of many callings is restricted to members of these groups; he cannot even sell books or antiques. If he is starving he can receive no aid from the Winterhilfe organization, and if he dies in battle his name will be on no war memorial (for has he not seen the erasing of the names of his forebears from such memorials by order of Goebbels and Frick?). In addition to these, there are many other restrictions applying in certain localities. The upshot of them all is that the Jew is deprived of all opportunity for advancement and is lucky if he contrives to scrape a bare living unmolested by Black Guards or Gestapo. It is a campaign of annihilation--a pogrom of the crudest form, supported by every State instrument.
In this social climate the IMCCAJ convened the international conference in Vienna, hosted by the Swedish Society for Israel, prior to its regular business meeting. "They came, men and women, from three continents, and from sixteen countries. The Near East and Asia were represented by men from Palestine and Syria. All the countries of Europe, where the Jewish problem is of importance, sent their representatives. A shadow was cast on the meeting by the announcement that most of the delegates from Germany were unable to attend."
That shadow was from the cloud that hung menacingly over all of Europe. Reports were given revealing that in "Poland there are 3,500,000 Jews...at least a million of them are probably living below the poverty line. In town after town there are scores of families occupying a single room, earthen floor, no beds, no water supply, no heat, no cheer, often no food. This million, at least, would immigrate, but who would take them? Where could they go? The world, wrestling with its own population and economic problems, is hardly likely to give an open ear to the appeal of the unwanted Jew."
Further, "Christian workers told of refugees from Germany who had escaped from that country, and wandered from one land to another, with temporary permits, or perhaps with no papers at all.....Often they found their only friends among the few missions to Jew (sic), among the friends of the Eternal Friend. A few only of these cases could be dealt with, and that one by one: larger action awaited clearer vision and more willing dedication of life and money by the Christians of the world."
As we have seen, the missions to Jews were not financially equipped to handle any large number of refugees, even though the will was there to do so. Nevertheless, "thanks to the personal contacts then made between different countries at this conference, it was possible during the next three years to rescue thousands of people from concentration camps and annihilation. The Swedish Mission to the Jews [Schwedische Gesellschaft für Israel] in Vienna became the headquarters for this relief action and could report, when its doors closed in 1941, that over 3000 Christians of Jewish origin through its care had been able to leave Germany and Austria in order to build up a future in other parts of the world."
Though the refugee problem was critical for the participants at the Vienna conference, the fundamental raison d'être for their gathering was not neglected: "The Committee's objectives are perfectly clear and at no time have they been concealed. Roughly they include the whole responsibility of the Christian Churches towards the Jew and the Committee is openly committed to the conviction that only through Jesus Christ can the Jew obtain fullness of life."
In order to understand what the "whole responsibility" actually was, the IMCCAJ had commissioned a number of studies about antisemitism and the world situation generally. One of these, by Prof. Philip Kohnstamm of Amsterdam University, was entitled "The Church of Jesus Christ in the Age of Secularism." Secularism had emerged as a major concern of the missionary movement and of the churches in general. Indeed, secularism was thought to be the most dangerous threat to the Church. The 1928 Jerusalem conference of the IMC had focused on secularism and the concern had persisted into what was now the Nazi era, which was secularism carried to an extreme.
Kohnstamm began with what had become standard procedure for attempts to comprehend antisemitism--an analysis of just who "the Jew" might be. The "cause of antagonism between the Jew and non-Jew would only be eliminated," he wrote, "if, on the purely instinctive level, the Jew did not differ from other people in the colour of his skin....The full-blooded Jew, and to some extent also his mixed offspring, are in many respects different from the European or American of non-Jewish descent. He has a different temperament, a different rhythm, a different sense of humour and a different taste....This stamps itself even on his physical build, his speech and manner of expression."
Taken out of context, these words would suggest that the author was parroting the racial theory of the Nazis. But not so. Despite the curious comment about skin color, Kohnstamm's point of reference was social and environmental, not hereditary: Among the great majority of Jews, and especially eastern Jews, the effects of centuries of oppression and lack of freedom are manifest: the Jews today show many peculiarities, which are not characteristic of the people we encounter in the Bible. The ghetto-Jew and his offspring in the first generations often display traits, which we must attribute not to an unalterable hereditary disposition, but to his environment. No individual can escape such influence of his environment, still less a community which has been for many centuries exposed to the pressure and effects of an inferiority complex."
Then, after some discussion of the ways in which groups of people come into conflict, Kohnstamm made the telling observation that "group hostility is borne in quite a different spirit when it is experienced as religious opposition, and in consequence felt to be in some connection with the will of God." Orthodox Jews, he observed, therefore bear their lot as "outcasts from the society and state so much more lightly in comparison. Here in the age of secularisation, for the first time in history we are experiencing persecutions of Jews which are directed against a secularised Jewry."
But even the most secularized Jew identified with and was influenced by the Old Testament and
Instincts and impulses, culture and ideals, are mighty motives in man. But they unfold their full power only when they are not self-directed, but put into the service of a faith. Their full power for good or evil, according as this faith is the knowledge of almighty God, the creator of heaven and earth, or idolatry, i.e., in the last resort, always the deifying of one's own ego or of the still greater "we" (society).And so, however favourable other conditions may be, hostility between people can only be finally abolished, when they come together in response to a faith, when they know that they are profoundly akin, notwithstanding differences in other respects which they neither hide nor ignore.
A variety of "German religions" stemming from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Enlightenment had coalesced into the German Faith Movement (Die Deutsche Glaubensbewegung), building on the works of people such as Paul de Lagarde (1827-91) who denied the messiahship and even the Jewishness of Jesus, scorned the resurrection, and claimed that the Old Testament prophets were irrelevant. In place of "Jewish" Christianity, Lagarde placed "ancient" German religion and its gods: "They say thou art dead, O Father Odin, and yet thou hearest me when I call upon thee."1 This movement was ready-made for National Socialism and, though the Nazi party continued to insist that it supported "positive Christianity," ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg (Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts) and J. von Leers (Nordische Welt) diligently worked at developing a German religion totally free from anything that could be considered Christian, not to mention Jewish. Kohnstamm quoted Rosenberg:
The so-called Old Testament must once for all be abolished as a book of religion. With it would vanish the frustrated attempt of the last 1500 years to make us Jews in spirit, an attempt we owe, among other things, the present material dominion of the Jews over us....In place of the Old Testament stories of rogues and cattle-dealers, the Nordic sagas and fairy tales will be introduced."
"It is clear," Kohnstamm commented, "that wherever such views are abroad, not only will understanding for the original Jewish character be lacking, but even the influence of the Old Testament in secularized Jewry will be utterly misunderstood." But it is not only the Jewish character that would be misunderstood, it is Christianity as well, as Kohnstamm's quote from J. W. Hauer, one of the early apologists for the German faith, made clear: "The struggle of the German faith with Christianity is seen in its historical significance only when it is set in the context of the two worlds of faith to which the German faith and Christianity respectively belong. Christianity has come to us from the Semitic realms of the Near East. The German faith has its original home in the Indogermanic world."
The antisemitism of the German Faith Movement, though clearly antisemitism, was of a different character from that of the centuries of Christian anti-Judaism and considerably more sinister. "At this stage, "Kohnstamm wrote, "we begin to understand present-day Antisemitism --in contrast to the mediaeval hostility to the Jews--in its deepest nature and its full significance. It is no longer in any way a struggle between Jewish and Christian faith. Today the Jew who believes in the Bible and the Christian can live at peace with each other comparatively easily. It is much rather the bitter life and death struggle which the religion of violence, the national-naturalistic movement which marches under neo-pagan symbols, carried on and must carry on against everything which took visible form in Israel first among all the nations."
Christians and Jews, therefore, could "come together in response to a faith" they have in common and thus know themselves to be "profoundly akin," in opposition to the secular neo-paganism of the German Faith Movement and the Nazi party. In this way antisemitism could be overcome.
The informal minutes of the Vienna conference indicate that Kohnstamm's analysis of antisemitism was taken seriously and, moreover, that some significant conclusions were drawn:
The evidence gathered by the Committee showed that nothing in the spiritual realm was more necessary in the Church today than a great act of solemn contrition for its past attitude to the Jews. But contrition without amendment of life was not enough, and it was this amendment, rather than its own resolutions and amendments that the Committee sought to translate into action. In no field was this more necessary than in that of Antisemitism in its special expression as a new-fangled religion of blood and race....It was clearly recognised that this challenge of highly infectious Antisemitism could not be met by the Church alone. It created international consequences of the most critical order; it meant that the forces of international opinion, including the League of Nations must be mobilised; and the Church could not rest until Governments, science, culture, and humanitarianism had taken the matter seriously. It was indeed true that it was a question for the man in the street, for the man on the spot, but it also needed an enlarged definition of the spot.
The "great solemn act of contrition" on the part of the Church was not to come until years later, after the war, but it is of no small moment that the missionaries to Jews were able to see clearly what was required. Four years earlier, in May 1934, the Confessing Church had met at Barmen and produced the ringing statement that set this body of Protestant churchmen solidly in opposition to the Hitler regime. But the six points of the Barmen Declaration were silent about the plight of the Jews and evidenced no awareness that the Nazi antisemitic program was a body-blow to Christianity. After the fact, Franklin Littell was to write: "For Christians, Antisemitism is not just a peculiarly nasty form of race prejudice; Antisemitism is blasphemy--a much more serious matter!" At the time, however, Conrad Hoffmann, Secretary to the IMCCAJ, wrote that "Even those who have protested against the Aryan paragraph--and let us recognize the courage of all who have so protested--have significantly protested more against the violation of church principles involved than against the anti-Semitic implications of the paragraph. There have been few protests from Christian Church circles against anti-Semitism per se."