In the distress of European refugees and other victims of anti-semitism we face a problem so immense that we cannot with our present wisdom and resources do more than touch the fringes of the need.

We cast the problem back on the Christian Churches by calling them to prayer that God Himself will act in mighty Power. At the same time we are not absolved from the duty of doing what each can do, and we call upon the bodies which we represent to take such action as may seem to be within their powers, but would urge proper clearance of all such relief so as to avoid unnecessary overlapping.

The Vienna conference had been carefully timed to precede immediately the 12-26 July 1937 world conference on "Church, Community, and State" convened at Oxford by the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work, which, like the IMC, had grown from the 1910 Edinburgh missionary conference. It was through the Oxford conference that the Vienna conferees hoped to influence the international community toward awareness of and action against the "highly infectious antisemitism" that "could not be met by the Church alone." Toward that end, they adopted a statement reflecting their urgent consensus:

We desire to record our conviction that in contemporary anti-Semitism we face an extraordinary menace against which all Christians must be warned. All forms of hatred and persecution must be deplored by Christians, and their victims must be succored; but there exists today a type of racial anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic propaganda inspired by hatred of everything springing from Jewish sources; and this creates more crucial issues for Christianity than ordinary outbursts of race feeling. Christian churches must be warned that they cannot be silent in the presence of this propaganda, still less connive at or participate in the extension of its errors and falsehoods, without betraying Christ, undermining the basis of the church, and incurring the most severe judgment of God.

The Christian church must let no doubt about its attitude prevail in the eyes of the world. Realizing that enmity to the Jews has now become a cloak for the forces of anti-Christ and conceals hatred for Christ and his gospel, the Christian church must reject anti-Semitism with complete conviction. To realize its true nature and to vindicate its right to the title of the "Body of Christ" the church must preach the gospel and open its fellowship to men of all races, including the Jews. Our mission to the Jews cannot consistently be carried on without at the same time combating anti-Semitism among Christians, and giving more tangible evidence than has yet been given of our sympathy with Jews and Hebrew-Christians in their present distress.

Anti-Semitism can and should be combated systematically:

1. By suitable literature, capable of influencing specially wide classes, also by sustained treatment in Christian Reviews and newspapers.

2. By occasional conversations, discussion, and lectures, on the destiny and hopes of the people of Israel.

3. By sincere and friendly discussion between Jews and Christians.

4. By the realization among Christians of the treasures committed to them (Christianizing of Christians).

In their covering letter, those in Vienna pointedly asked the Oxford conference to address the menace antisemitism was becoming, not only to the Jews but also to the Church:

The International Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews desires to lay before the Oxford Conference on Church, Community, and State the problem of Anti-Semitism.

The fact of Anti-Semitism is proved, by the ample material in the possession of the Committee to be of growing importance and menace in the world. It constitutes one of the principal denials of modern life of the Christian doctrine of man. It is an attack upon the unity of the una Sancta, it is even a denial of the person of Christ Himself.

It has largely been instrumental in aggravating existing economic and social strains until they have become intolerable. The human misery created, maintained and at the same time concealed by the influence of Anti-Semitism is difficult to estimate. Graver, however, than the volume of human misery is the poisoning of the spirit, the drying up of sympathy and the warping of judgment caused by the influence of Anti-Semitism, especially among the young. Deepest of all is the denial which Anti-Semitism offers to the Unity of the Church, and to the meaning of the Person of Christ Himself.

The Committee would further ask the Conference to consider the terrible fact that this problem is not, like many the Conference will consider, that of an influence external to the Christian Church with which it must make its account, but also of an evil within the church. Anti-Semitism antedates Christianity and it is not suggested that it is a purely Christian phenomenon, but it is aided by false Christian teaching and it results in the appalling situation present in several countries where Christian churches are reluctant, or frankly refuse, to receive a Jewish convert. It is plain that where racial and physical conditions of church membership over-ride the conversion of heart and will, the Christian religion has ceased to exist except in a vain form. But this devitalising influence is present within the Church, not only in one country but in many, and far more widely than is suspected.

The Committee therefore invites the Oxford Conference to do two things: in the first place, realizing that the Conference can make its voice heard widely among the Churches of all lands it begs the Conference to speak out clearly on the dangers of Anti-Semitism to the Church itself and to recognize openly the total impossibility of a Church tainted with this form of racial absolutism bearing any valid witness to the word of God in the world.

Secondly, it asks that in any provision that is made after the Conference for international Christian study of the great problems that confront the Church in the modern world, attention shall be given to this problem of Anti-Semitism. The International Committee which has already collected a certain amount of information on the subject would gladly cooperate in such a study.

Conrad Hoffmann, Jr. was to report that the "Oxford Conference did take very positive and definite action which appears in the report of the World Conference on Church, Community, and State. This represents probably the first pronouncement on the subject by the Protestant church universal, and gives promise of increasing concrete action by the churches in regard to racial discrimination and particularly to anti-Semitism." Unfortunately, Hoffmann's enthusiasm scarcely reflects what the Oxford conference actually did. The word "antisemitism" does not appear in its message to the churches, though it avers that "Against racial pride or race-antagonism the Church must set its face implacably as rebellion against God." Indeed, the sole reference to antisemitism per se was buried in the section report on "The Universal Church and the World of Nations" under the heading "Removal of Racial Barriers":

The Church dishonours its claim to oecumenical reality if it allows, even under the pressure of situations of great and genuine difficulty, the presence of racial barriers within it. We call attention here both to the acceptance of the colour bar in certain Churches and to the more widely diffused and less acknowledged evil of anti-Semitism, whereby not only have terrible sufferings been imposed upon the Jews by States historically Christian, but membership within the Church denied or made difficult to those of the race to which our Lord belonged after the flesh.

In face of the political and social crises facing the world, which were thoroughly discussed at Oxford, the insistence by a peripheral group of missionaries to Jews that antisemitism was an "evil within the Church" was easily subsumed by the conference under a general denunciation of racism.

Be that as it may, the foresight and theological acumen enunciated at Vienna should be recognized for what it was--the direct result of a passionate concern, both for Jews and the Christian gospel. "Antisemitism of today is a grave danger, a warning against which must be issued to all Christianity," the Vienna conference members asserted. "True to its essence and its mission Christendom must take a stand against every kind of prosecution (sic) and hatred and aid those who suffer therefrom. Especially the race-antisemitism is dangerous, doubting the spiritual goods of Jewish origin. Such hatred embraces hatred against Jesus Christ and the Gospel. The mission among Jews has no right of being, unless it is able to help Jews and Hebrew-Christians through love in their present plight."

The newly elected chairman of the IMCCAJ, C. H. Gill, Secretary of Church Missions to the Jews, supplied the specifically missionary rationale for aiding refugees in his report on the Vienna conference: "[I]t became clear that unless the Christian Church is prepared to show its love by self-sacrificing giving, the preaching of Christianity amongst the Jews must be seriously hindered for a generation to come, for the conditions of starvation and suffering must make a mockery of a preaching which does not live up to its messages of love."

Persecution, 1938-1945

The Vienna conference was held none too soon. Less than one year later, on 15 March 1938, Hitler rode triumphantly into Vienna, celebrating his Anschluss of the neighboring ethnic German nation. "By the 20th Der Stürmer was on show on the street corners, within a short time the German racial laws were in force and an estimated 47,000 of the city's 176,000 Jewish population was reduced to poverty. In four months the number of Jewish suicides in Vienna alone was computed as about 7000." Eight months after that, the state-inspired pogrom that ever since has been known as Kristallnacht marked the overt beginning in Germany itself of what we have come to know as the Shoah (destruction)--the systematic murder of European Jews by technological means at the hand of the German state. In its survey for 1940, the International Review of Missions poignantly reported that a "considerable amount of missionary work in the European countries now under occupation by the German armies has had to be suspended and there is little news of those missionaries who are still in these countries.' Not until 1947--ten long bitter years later--was the IMCCAJ able to convene another international conference.

The war, and particularly the plight of European Jews, necessitated drastic alterations in the activities of the IMCCAJ. "Hitler and the war completely disrupted the European section," the Committee reported to the IMC in 1945. "Fortunately we were in constant touch with the Swedish member....The British section has functioned throughout. The American section remained inactive in the hope that the responsibility for the American end of the work would be taken over by the Home Missions Council....This, however did not occur...."

Relief of refugees took precedence over evangelistic efforts so long as the mission stations in Vienna, Warsaw, and Germany itself were allowed to function. "Throughout the war years Sweden, by virtue of the contacts it had in southeastern Europe, was able to carry on a great Christian relief ministry in Rumania and beyond." The Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum, the major missionary training institution supported by the Committee, had, in 1936, been forced to flee from Leipzig to Vienna, where a young Polish-German missionary, Hans Kosmala, was director. In 1938 the Nazi government confiscated all property and funds that had remained in Leipzig and the Reich police (sic) transported its library to Berlin. That same year the work of the Delitzschianum was closed in Vienna and re-established in London as the Christian Institute for Jewish Studies, with Kosmala at its head.

Most telling for the work of the IMCCAJ, its director, Conrad Hoffmann, Jr., was appointed assistant secretary of the Board of National Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the USA. This appointment, which took effect, after the Vienna conference, on 1 September 1937, meant that Hoffmann was able to spend only three months annually working for the Committee during 1938 and 1939 and then, with the beginning of the war, to devote only about six weeks each year, because, in addition to his other responsibilities, he had been called back into service by the War Prisoners' Aid of the World's Committee of the YMCA.

The annual surveys by the editors of the International Review of Missions continued throughout the war to report on the increasingly desperate plight of Jews who came within the province of the "Third Reich." But they also reported on missionary activity, and its difficulty, in face of the persecution of Jews in Europe and elsewhere:

"Evangelism among Jews has continued in Central Europe, in some places under difficult conditions. In Bohemia-Moravia there have been almost wholesale applications for baptism, many from men of advanced education."

"A considerable amount of missionary work in the European countries now under occupation by the German armies has had to be suspended and there is little news of those missionaries who are still in these countries."

"In Budapest the Church of Scotland mission continues its work under the protection of the Hungarian Reformed Church."

"In spite of the near approach of hostilities during the summer months, mission work continued in Palestine and the Near East generally."

"The Church Missions to Jews were able to carry on the work of their elementary school in Tunis during the German occupation while other schools were closed. Their missionary, Mr. Dunbar, emerged from hiding to conduct a Christmas service in his home while the German police were on the look-out for him."

"While the situation remains fluid, there are likely to be many new avenues for the Christian approach to the Jews in the post-war period. The Continental Churches have been brought into close contact with the Synagogue during the war. There has been a lively theological interest in the problem of Israel, and much has been written on the Jewish question from the Christian point of view."

"Reconstruction plans in the work of missions to the Jews call in the first place for a general survey, realistically and tragically statistical as its character must in many countries be, to define the scope and re-locate the areas of greatest need."

Though the mission as such in most European localities was sharply curtailed by the war and Nazi persecution, if not rendered completely impossible, thought and discussion about "Jewish mission" continued unabated throughout the period. And even though its director, based in the United States, was largely consumed with the more urgent task of refugee relief, the IMCCAJ continued to function with the Rev. Robert Smith, formerly a missionary in Prague for the Church of Scotland, as associate director and editor of the Committee's News Sheet. From London, Hans Kosmala actively produced books and articles on mission to Jews. And even Conrad Hoffmann found time, in 1941, to pen a study pamphlet, The Jews Today: A Call to Christian Action, in which, among other things, he detailed the way in which American society was riddled with antisemitism, though not the lethal sort that was then killing Jews by the thousands (the millions were to come later) in central Europe.

The end of the war and the closing of the Nazi death camps did not eliminate the need to combat antisemitism. The IMCCAJ continued to struggle with how it would understand and deal with this human and social disease when it met for the first time following the war, at the same time it renewed its commitment to "Jewish evangelism." But the situation following the war was so radically different that the missionaries were compelled to re-examine both their program and their rationale for it. And this they began to do at the first enlarged meeting the Committee was able to convene after the cessation of hostilities.