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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

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
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
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.
University of Southampton
Sanzenbacher, Carolyn
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Sanzenbacher, Carolyn
b291a688-3e11-434a-8100-6c45b6d641d5
Kushner, Antony
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Sanzenbacher, Carolyn (2016) 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. University of Southampton, Faculty of Humanities, Doctoral Thesis, 273pp.

Record type: Thesis (Doctoral)

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.

Text
PhD Thesis Sanzenbacher October 2016 - Other
Restricted to Repository staff only until 31 December 2025.
Available under License University of Southampton Thesis Licence.

More information

Published date: October 2016
Additional Information: The thesis is currently (November 2020) being revised for publication as a book.
Organisations: University of Southampton, History

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 402372
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/402372
PURE UUID: 89c6044e-8c9c-4024-8ca1-cc8bb1182c12

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 01 Dec 2016 15:54
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:14

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Contributors

Author: Carolyn Sanzenbacher
Thesis advisor: Antony Kushner

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