Holocaust Study Group Says Roots of Anti-semitism Neglected by Educators

The Philadelphia-based National Institute on the Holocaust claims that “a good deal of the present ‘education’ against anti-Semitism is simply superficial and misdirected.” In its first Holocaust Studies News-letter, the institute says this is because it “deals only with modern anti-Semitism of the Nazi and KKK-type and fails to draw the knife against the theological and cultural anti-Semitism which provided a fertile seedbed for ideological/political attacks on the Jews.” The newsletter said that Christian anti-Semitism began as “theological anti-Semitism out of which developed first cultural and then political anti-Semitism.”

The newsletter said that the “widespread acceptance” of political anti-Semitism “was only possible because of the lies about the Jews taught for centuries by the church and because cultural anti-Semitism was endemic in Christiandom.” In a preface to the newsletter, Franklin H. Littell, the institute’s chairman, noted that “more and more writers are expressing the conviction that the two major events of recent Jewish and Christian history are the Holocaust and the restoration of Israel. “He said the institute was established “to widen the circle of those concerned to learn and teach the lessons of the Holocaust.”