Andreas Pangritz, Die Schattenseite des Christentums: Theologie und Antisemitismus, Stuttgart (Kohlhammer) 2023, 218 pp., ISBN 978-3-17-040046-7, 29,00 €.

If one reflects on the history of anti-Semitism, you won’t be able to exclude its Christian origins as a religious hostility towards Jews. Andreas Pangritz, a Protestant emeritus on systematic theology and an important advocate for a vivid Jewish-Christian dialogue, has recently published a worth-reading book on the “Schattenseite des Christentums” (“shadow-side of Christianity”). This book offers an overview of the long continuity of Christian animosity against Jews. Pangritz reveals the strong connection between Christianity and anti-Semitism not only in the historical context but highlights the necessary critique of this connection until today. From a German perspective, Pangritz concentrates on the history of Christian theology identifying in this field a constant enmity against the Jews, especially in the period after the reformation.

Methodologically, Pangritz’s analysis combines a historical and theological examination with a reflection on theoretical approaches on anti-Semitism. Hatred towards Jews in Christian theology is usually named as anti-Judaism, as Pangritz states. But in his eyes this differentiation between (religious) anti-Judaism and (racial) anti-Semitism should be revised. For sure, Pangritz as well sees a transformation of the hostility towards Jews in the 19th century but describes it as a reinterpretation of Christian anti-Jewish semantic and themes into modern antisemitic stereotypes.

After this terminological clarification Pangritz turns to the task to reconstruct the history of Christian anti-Semitism, which is structured in the book chronologically: Pangritz starts with a view on the New Testament’s anti-Jewish motifs asking whether Christology has an inevitable anti-Jewish bias. An in-depth presentation of other passages and themes from the New Testament could have been added. More in detail the author depicts the Church Fathers and recognizes in the Adversus Iudaeos tradition a first center of the “doctrine of contempt” (“Lehre der Verachtung”, p. 37) against Jewry. This description of an anti-Jewish attitude among the Church Fathers (chapter 3), the medieval antisemitic accusations of ritual murder, host desecration or well poisoning (chapter 4), but also of Martin Luther’s anti-Semitic statements (chapter 5), have meanwhile been analyzed in detail, why Pangritz can bundle these research results.

The second and main topic introduces Christian hatred against Jews in the time up to the 20th century (chapters 6–11). Therefore, two chapters of this book will be descriped to which especially practical theology should pay attention. Even if Pangritz does not make references to practical theological fields as empirical research on religion or to homiletics, the transmission to these topics can be made easily.

“Friedrich Schleiermacher’s anti-Judaism” is the subject of chapter 7, where Pangritz refers again to other research (cf. Matthias Blum, “Ich wäre ein Judenfeind” Zum Antijudaismus in Friedrich Schleiermachers Theologie und Pädagogik, Berlin 2010; Micha Brumlik, Deutscher Geist und Judenhass. Das Verhältnis des philosophischen Idealismus zum Judentum, München 2002). In his description of Schleiermacher, he reveals some of his theological thoughts about Jewry from which anti-Jewish positions arise until today, as he declaims. His main example for this thesis is the debate on the validity of the Old Testament for the Christian Bible when some scholars sought support in Schleiermacher.

But Pangritz also reflects on Schleiermacher’s book Reden über die Religion which is studied nowadays in many practical theological classes thinking about religion. There Schleiermacher formulates an (mostly unnoted or ignored) anti-Jewish position when he associates Judaism with a dead religion: Christ brought “die Vernichtung” (”the extermination”) over the ideas of Judaism (p. 97). Only Christianity with its universal perspective can be considered (among the existing “positive religions”) as an intermediary to pure religion. In contrast, Judaism for Schleiermacher is characterized by particularity, decay and as religion of retribution. Thus, will lead us the reference to Schleiermacher in theoretical approaches on religion to an anti-Jewish attitude? Pangritz at least wants to warn theologians against a careless use of this common concepts.

In the further discussion, Pangritz picks up a discussion, whether Schleiermacher supported a religious-pluralistic society in his historical context. Even if Schleiermacher had close contact with Jewish friends in Berlin, Pangritz regards him as a non-proponent of equal civil rights for Jews.

The historical examination of Christian hostility towards Jews reaches its destination in the 20th century (chapter 10/11): Pangritz reveals the ambivalent relationship of various German theologians who were in resistance or distance from the Nazis, but whose theology of Israel was not free of hostility towards Jews (also the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Bath come into view). But it is above all Barth who is the starting point for Pangritz (strengthening the work of Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt) to evolve an alternative path to the traditional “doctrine of contempt” (p. 171): Barth’s theological insight about the election of the congregation “in a double shape as Israel and Church” (p. 174) is essential for a reformulation of the Jewish-Christian relationship until today: No Jew is rejected by God. Israel and Church are under the “arch of the one covenant” (KD II/2, 220, cf. Pangritz p. 174). Is this insight common ground for homiletical practice or don’t we find common anti-Jewish motifs in Christian sermons until today?

Pangritz does not stop with Barth and analyzes briefly German theologians of the second half of the 20th century who also sought to redefine the Jewish-Christian relationship. More recent theological drafts, which demand not to be shaped by the “doctrine of contempt”, are rather left out. Nevertheless, Pangritz’s concluding sentence is fully valid: “The duty to develop [...] a renewed and changed Christian theology that is not hostile against Jews is [...] only just beginning.” (p. 195)