The Grey Book | Page 6

Testament... and every believing Christian
knows well what a rejoicing there will be in the Kingdom of God when
the people of the Old Testament finally acknowledge their sin against
Christ and repent. This event will be hailed by all Christendom and by
the angelic hosts with paeans of praise, and it will be turned by the
Church in the End of Days into glory and renown when Israel will
bring to it its uncommon religious talents and intellectual gifts..." [20]
The inner tension between the theological view that sees the solution of
the Jewish question in the liquidation of Judaism and the racial view
that sees it in the liquidation of the Jews is clearly expressed in an
address delivered by Stoecker on 8.2.1882 about the danger to the
German Reich from Jews in public life, in which he states:
"We regard the Jewish question not as a religious nor indeed as a racial
question. Although it is at bottom both of these, it appears in its
external form as a social-ethical question, and is treated by us as such.
No people can tolerate the preponderance of an alien spirit without
degenerating and being destroyed? We would not solve the Jewish
question radically by force, but gradually in a spirit of peace and
amity... We must keep the wounds open until they are healed..." [21]

Although Stoecker himself was opposed to the use of force, modern
political anti-semitism, which was to no small degree influenced by
him, did not shrink from advocating violence in its hostility to Judaism,
to religion and finally to Christianity. A significant contribution in this
direction was made by the Darwinian racial doctrines of Eugen
Duehring and his antisemitic disciples. Whereas Marr had formulated
the anti-religious meaning of modern anti-semitism in ominous terms
of the Jewish domination of Europe and especially Germany, Dühring
adopted a so-called constructive approach by suggesting an alternative
to religion and religious culture, namely, race. In his antisemitic
writings after 1880 Judaism serves as the prototype of religion in
general, including Christianity. The primary aim of this
anti-Christian anti-semitism was for Duehring the struggle against Jews
and Judaism, and this also entailed the struggle against the
monotheistic religions and all forces that suppressed what he called
"the instinct of the free, natural life." In his anti-religious book "Wert
des Lebens" (1877), and especially in the third edition issued four years
later, he points out that Christianity as a monotheistic religion is
opposed to life and that all religious systems are nothing but
pathological maladies (ein Stueck weltgeschichtliche Krankheitslehre
des Geistes). Christianity is thus not interested "in ennobling man, but
rather in suppressing his natural instincts" as is evident, for example, in
the "paradox Christian doctrine" of the crucifixion of the flesh. [22]
Hence, it is absurd and hopeless to conduct the struggle against the
Jews with Christian theological concepts borrowed from Judaism, and
those Christians who attach importance to this only deceive themselves
for it is plain that:
"...their anti-semitism lacks the primary truth, namely, that Christianity
itself is Semitism, a truth... that must serve as the terminus a quo for all
genuine anti-Hebraism..." [23]
As long as the Christians fail to disavow their Jewish source and their
Jewishness they themselves will be tainted by its anti-natural influence.
But since Christianity is inextricably bound to its Jewish origins, and
even the New Testament is nothing but "a racially Jewish tradition"
(eine rassenjuedische Ueberlieferung), the only hope for struggling

humanity is to throw off once for all this humiliating yoke, meaning the
religious heritage of Jews and Christians alike. The liberation from the
Jewish-Christian heritage, on the one hand, and the strengthening of the
Nordic German race on the other cannot be achieved through the
process of education or civilization but only by means of racial purity
which will cleanse man of religious depravities and restore the vital
sources of his instinctive life. Christianity is inadequate for this
struggle since it is itself ineradicably debased by its complicity with
Judaism: "Those who would cling to Christian tradition are in
no position to combat Judaism effectively. ...An understanding
Christian cannot be a serious antisemite... The Nordic gods are rooted
in nature itself, and no millennial diversion can eradicate them... We
here see a vivid phantasy in operation that is incomparably loftier than
the Jewish slave-imagination..." [24]
This basic thesis that racial anti-semitism must also be directed against
Christianity continued to be elaborated from the end of the 19th century
onwards by Theodor Fritsch as well as in a number of journals: the
Antisemititche Correspondenz, which in 1888 became the official
organ of the D.A.P. under the name of Deutsche-Soziale Blaetter, the
Antisemiten-Katechismus which was later called Handbuch zur
judenfrage and, in the early years of the present century, the influential
journal Hammer. The