6 million is a lot of people.

On Yom HaShoah, I am once again pondering the effects of the Holocaust on twentieth and twenty-first century scholarly imagination.  I already posted about the "crisis in theology" that resulted among Christian scholars, but today I have a different thought.

We forget how many Jews there used to be.

6 million is a lot of people.  It's a number that gets thrown around, but I think it really is kind of incomprehensible to think of how many people that really is.  And then there are, to my surprise, almost 200,000 survivors living in Israel alone today, not to mention how many there have been over the last few decades.  These are even more people that were removed from the European population.

I once preached a sermon, I forget which one it was now, and a visitor (who therefore didn't know I was Jewish) came up to me afterwards and said to me, "I always resisted calling us 'Judeo-Christian' because I didn't think there was anything really Jewish about who we are and I didn't want to be associated with Jews.  But you've kind of changed my mind."  I was... a little flabbergasted, to be honest, and responded with a smile and something polite about the accuracy of history and how many Jews there were in the Roman Empire.  He laughed and said, "Yeah, all point-three percent of them!" and went on his way.

But he was wrong.  Jews weren't 0.3 percent of the Roman Empire.  By some estimates, 10% of the population of Rome in the first century BCE were Jews (I think.  I know I've read that somewhere but I can't find a source at the moment...).  Jews were a significant portion of the population in Alexandria, and all over the eastern Mediterranean.

We, today, are so used to the decimated Jewish population in Europe that we really don't have a sense for how big and apparently influential the Jewish population was in the ancient world.  I say influential, because there had to be a reason Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Herodotus, and Suetonius, at a minimum, mentioned and wrote about Jews.  Claudius' expulsion of the Jews from Rome was a momentous enough event that Suetonius included it in his biography a hundred years later.  The Jewish population was not always the small minority it is now, but was a much more significant minority which had political standing and enough weight that special legislation was written for it.

This has led to some interesting scholarly reactions.  The one I'm thinking of right now is recorded in Cynthia Baker's chapter "'From Every Nation under Heaven' Jewish Ethnicities in the Greco-Roman World" in Prejudice and Christian Beginnings (eds. Laura Nasrallah and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza) where she points out that all the people "from every nation" in Acts 2 were probably all Jews.  Christian scholars have such a hard time wrapping their minds around the phenomenon of a) lots and lots of Jews from all over the ancient world, inside and outside the Roman Empire and b) Jews who speak other languages.

This is, in an odd way, both the triumph and tragedy of the success of Zionism and its projects of both the modern state of Israel and Modern Hebrew.  It has become so ingrained in the contemporary imagination that Jews are focused on Israel and have some knowledge of Hebrew.  The Holocaust and the subsequent establishment of the state of Israel so drastically changed the face of Europe's Jewish population that people today have problems conceiving of any other way of things being arranged. 

What crisis in theology?

It is common to say that the Holocaust caused a crisis in theology.  What kind of god would allow the systematic and mechanized murder of millions of human beings?  But it also caused a deep crisis for many Christians who had to stare at the rhetoric of the church's history and its use by the abhorrent Deutsche Christen of the Nazis as well as the general acquiescence to anti-Semitism by European and white American Christians.  Not only God, but the church itself had to undergo redefinition.

Earlier this week, I was reading a very insightful article on Donald Trump.  The author argues cogently

Barack Obama is many things, but conservative rhetoric aside, he’s no radical.

We can’t say the same for Obama as a political symbol, however. In a nation shaped and defined by a rigid racial hierarchy, his election was very much a radical event, in which a man from one of the nation’s lowest castes ascended to the summit of its political landscape.  ...

For millions of white Americans who weren’t attuned to growing diversity and cosmopolitanism, however, Obama was a shock, a figure who appeared out of nowhere to dominate the country’s political life. And with talk of an “emerging Democratic majority,” he presaged a time when their votes—which had elected George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan—would no longer matter. More than simply “change,” Obama’s election felt like an inversion. (emphasis original)

This "shock" is the loss of white power and loss of the white perspective as normative.  And I think this is the same shock that Christian theology is undergoing in the century after the Holocaust.  It is not so much that Christianity was wrong as it was centuries of white male theology culminated in something so horrific.  That the "historical-critical method" could be brought to bear on the wholesale slaughter of human beings.

However, for anyone who was paying attention, this should not be surprising.  Many of the scholars who pioneered the historical-critical method were openly anti-Semitic, because the Christian church had been for centuries.  From the constant expulsions and denial of citizenship to the slaughter of Jews during Passion Week to the forced conversions of the Inquisition to the pogroms of eastern Europe, the church had been arguing, in many of its myriad Roman Catholic and Protestant forms, that Jews were members of a decadent, dead religion, abandoned by their God, and deserving of death.  The famous documentary hypothesis of Welhausen rests implicitly on these assumptions (e.g. P must be late, because the Law was a corruption of God's original religion).

And so, with a weekend's reflection, I am going to say that there should be no crisis of theology or faith for Christians because of the Holocaust, but only a crisis of unexamined, un-self-conscious assumption of white supremacy.  White Europeans are not special, and have no more intellectual capacity and insight than anyone else, and the Holocaust proves they can sometimes get it catastrophically, barbarously wrong.