Die unterlegene Religion

Analyzes the understanding of Judaism in the writings of 13 German Protestant Old Testament scholars from 1850 to 1933, with a brief chapter on the Nazi period. They distinguished between prophetic religion ("Israel") which developed into Christianity, and legalistic "Judaism", which became ossified. In general, they avoided any connection of their field of study with post-biblical and contemporary Jewry. However, in 1912 Rudolf Kittel was asked by the court to submit an expert opinion on the book "Mein Beweismaterial gegen Jahwe" by the antisemite Theodor Fritsch, on trial for blasphemy and defamation of the Jewish religious community. Kittel refuted Fritsch's allegations, but at the same time he pointed to negative characteristics in both biblical and contemporary Judaism. In the Nazi period, with few exceptions, Old Testament scholars carried on their work in utter detachment from what was happening to the Jews, or, as in the case of Johannes Hempel (editor of the "Zeitschrift für alttestamentliche Wissenschaft"), they accommodated their views to Nazism. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)