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In
Mordecai Would Not Bow Down, Timothy P. Jackson argues that the central reasons for the Holocaust were ideological: Nazism's belief in survival of the fittest directly conflicted with Judaic moral monotheism, and this conflict drove the compulsion to annihilate the Jewish people. Identifying these ideological causes provides important context for the continual resurgence of anti-Semitic violence.
List of contents
- Introduction: Judaic Holiness and a Holistic Approach to Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust .
- Chapter 1: Legitimating a Topic as Old as Esther
- Chapter 2: The Perennial Either/Or
- Chapter 3: Nazism and the Western Conscience
- Chapter 4: The Evils of Supersessionism
- Chapter 5: Jesus and the Jews: Two Suffering Servants Incarnate
- Chapter 6: Naming Good and Evil: Hitler's Insidious Genius
- Chapter 7: A Closer Look at Schadenfreude and the Prophetic
- Conclusion: Guilt, Innocence, and Anne Frank
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Timothy P. Jackson is Professor of Christian Ethics at The Candler School of Theology at Emory University. He is the author of Political Agape: Christian Love and Liberal Democracy and The Priority of Love: Christian Charity and Social Justice, among other works.
Summary
“Never again!” In the years following the Holocaust, the phrase came to signify a general determination never again to permit systemic anti-Semitism and genocidal violence. Yet anti-Semitism endures, and its underlying causes persist. The resilience of anti-Semitism casts the Holocaust not as inexplicable or singular, but as an event shaped by identifiable--and universal--human prejudices.
Despite the intense attention focused on the Holocaust, we consistently misrepresent it. By describing it as a purely irrational phenomenon, we risk minimizing the threat that anti-Semitism continues to pose. Instead, we must identify and acknowledge its causes, which are not only political, economic, and pseudoscientific but ideological as well. Taking its title from the Book of Esther, Mordecai Would Not Bow Down investigates these ideological causes. Timothy P. Jackson argues that the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were persecuted for their belief in one God who is the sole Creator of a moral order centered in selflessness and love. Judaic teachings about the importance of caring for the weak and vulnerable overtly contradicted the Nazis' “natural” lust for power and enjoyment of cruelty, which further fueled their anti-Semitism.
By analyzing the ideological clash between Nazism and Judaism, Jackson reveals the ways in which Christianity was complicit in the Holocaust-specifically, the role of Christian supersessionism: the belief that the New Covenant supplants or erases the Old Covenant, making Christians and not Jews God's elect. Supersessionism has historically enabled Christian anti-Semitic violence. Yet Judaism and Christianity are ultimately complementary in their shared origins and analogous aims: the Law that saves the Jews and the Gospel that saves the Gentiles are of a piece. God's choosing the Jewish people to embody collectively a message of fellowship and moral responsibility is parallel to God's calling on Jesus to save humanity individually. Moreover, both divine vocations often engender demonic resentment. Recognizing that Auschwitz and Calvary are but two sites of the same murderous despair is an important step toward eliminating the pervasive menace of anti-Semitism.
Additional text
Many books have been written about anti-Semitism. This one is different. Without for a moment averting his eyes from the particular horrors of the long history of Christian anti-Semitism, or of its culmination in the Holocaust, Jackson invites us to go deeper. Jackson finds in anti-Semitism fundamentally an effort to escape our humanity before God, a form of idolatry that lashes out in hatred of God and of the frail and vulnerable, whom God loves. He summons each of us recognize our own inner Nazi, intent on denigrating others in order to elevate ourselves, resistant to a moral monotheism that demands universal love and suffering service to the world. A proper engagement with these matters, he insists, must be radically self-involving, not detached or merely analytic. Mordecai Would Not Bow Down is a profound, lyrical, forceful book that will not let you go.
