The Pen Confronts the Sword by Avihu Zakai

Author:Avihu Zakai
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2018-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

Aryan Philology and the Elimination of the Old Testament

We expect our national Churches to shake themselves free of all that is un-German, in particular the Old Testament and its Jewish morality and rewards.

—“Resolution of the German Christians,” rally at Berlin Sportpalast, November 13, 1933

Did Christianity arise out of Judaism being thus its continuation and completion, or does it stand in opposition to Judaism? To this question we respond: Christian faith is the unbridgeable religious contradiction to Judaism.

—“The Godesberg Declaration,” Evangelical Lutheran Church, April 4, 1939

Elimination of Jewish influence on German life is the urgent and fundamental question of the present German religious situation … the de-Judaization of Christianity would continue the work of the Lutheran Reformation.

—Walter Grundmann, 1939

Philology studies the grammar, rhetoric, history, and critical traditions associated with a given language to establish the authenticity, original form, intent, and meaning of literary texts and written records. During the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, it became enmeshed in ideological and historical transformations related to the rise of Aryanism, racism, anti-Semitism, and Nazism in Europe: it became “war by other means.”133

During the nineteenth century, European philologists and historians searched for an alternative to the traditional Judeo-Christian origins of Western civilization. Their quest actually began at the end of the eighteenth century, when the Anglo-Welsh philologist William Jones (1746–1794) “discovered the similarities between the European languages” and the “Sanskrit and Persian” languages, laying “the foundation for the hypothesis of an Indo-European language [Indo-Germanische] affinity and an Indo-European primal population.”134 Like the sixteenth-century Copernican Revolution, which replaced the geocentric conception of the universe with the heliocentric view, the discovery of Sanskrit literature displaced classical antiquity. “Henceforward the Greco-Roman world could only be regarded as a single province, a small sector of the universe of human culture.”135

The historical-linguistic construction of Indo-Europeans also had tremendous implications for the Judeo-Christian tradition. The bible’s authority was called into question by a “comparative linguistics that supported the new people.”136 The interest stemmed—and still stems—“from a will to create alternatives to those identities that have been provided by tradition,” or the Judeo-Christian tradition.137 European research on the “Indo-Europeans and their culture and religion [was] used … in the service of various ideological interests.”138 Aryan philology “became the primitive homeland of Western man in search of legitimation.” It sought to provide “answers to a series of questions that first became urgent in the nineteenth century, questions pertaining to the origins and vocation of a Western world in search of a national, political, and religious identity.”139 Particularly in Germany, it strove to develop a new ancestral lineage and to eliminate the Old Testament stories from history as well as the Christian canon. Philology was inextricable from, not only ideology and history, but anthropology. Germany witnessed the “transformation of nineteenth century scholarly studies of philology into racist and even genocidal rant in the twentieth century.”140 By the end of the nineteenth century, “culturist philology was unable to prevent the word ‘race’ from being usurped by naturalist forces, and human

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