The International Committee on the Christian approach to the Jews and its role in ecumenical Protestant understanding of antisemitism and the Jewish problem during the Hitler years

Abstract

This thesis describes a framework of ecumenical Protestant aspirations for world expansion of Jewish evangelization in the years before, during, and after Nazi extermination of European Jewry. It uses extensive archival documentation to reconstruct and analyze the developmental path of the International Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews from inception in 1927 to its major collaboration on the World Council of Churches founding statement on Jews, antisemitism, and Jewish conversion in 1948. It examines the centrally informing role of the Jewish problem on a landscape of ideas, perceptions, and beliefs which ground organizational theories about relations between the Jewish problem, escalating antisemitism, and what was deemed to be a Christian imperative to evangelize Jews. The research unfolds around textual analysis of two categories of key texts in five chronologically structured chapters: ideas about Jews, the Jewish question, antisemitism, and Jewish missions, in the first, and protests against Nazi persecution of Jews, in the second. The study tracks and analyzes developing trends and patterns in organizational thought as well as cross-connections and cross-influence between key ecumenical leaders in order to explain why this principal rallying body for ecumenical emphasis on conversion of Jews was, by the eve of Hitler's rise, also the self-proclaimed 'responsible' body for making known to Protestant audiences the causes of discrimination, prejudice and race-hatred. The thesis examines the presences and absences of official ecumenical voices on behalf of Jews from 1933 to the end of the war, as well as the background internal dynamics of arriving at official organizational responses to the escalating persecution of Jews. It examines in detail the collaborative effort which led from a 1927 International Missionary Conference in Budapest and Warsaw to the 1948 World Council of Churches statement that called attention, in the embers of the Holocaust, to the continuing existence of a people who did not acknowledge Christ.

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