Language:
English
Year of publication:
2003
Titel der Quelle:
Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte
Angaben zur Quelle:
16,1 (2003) 149-168
Keywords:
Antisemitism
;
Jews
;
Judaism Relations
;
Christianity
;
Christianity and other religions Judaism
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Abstract:
The rescue of Jews by the Danish resistance movement in October 1943 engendered the myth that the Danes were innately immune to antisemitism and that Danish antisemitism, if it existed, was a German import to a nation having no autochthonous anti-Jewish tradition. Many facts disprove this myth. Focuses on the attitudes of Danish Lutheran Church leaders toward the Jews and Judaism from the early 19th century to World War II. Although aggressive racial antisemitism found little support in milieus affiliated with the Lutheran Church, anti-Judaic and anti-Jewish stereotypes were widespread and constituted core elements of identity formation. Danish spiritual leaders opposed the integration of the Jews with the Danish nation other than through conversion. In their discourse, they made no clear distinction between Judaism as a religion and the Jews as people. In the 1930s many clerical writers justified the German solution of the "Jewish question". They began to change their views only after the "Kristallnacht" pogrom, and some only after the Nazi occupation and the first news concerning the Holocaust.
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