Tracking the Jews: Ecumenical Protestants, Conversion, and the Holocaust

(Hardback)

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This book sheds light on an unprecedented Protestant conversion initiative for the global evangelisation of Jews. Founded in 1929, the International Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews (ICCAJ) aimed to bring Jewish people to their spiritual destiny, a task it saw as both benevolent and essential for a harmonious society. By the time of Hitlers rise to power it was active in thirty-two countries, educating Protestant churches on the right Christian attitude towards Jews and antisemitism.

Reconstructing the activities of the ICCAJ in the years before, during and immediately after the Holocaust, Tracking the Jews reveals how ideas disseminated through the organisations discourse Jewish problem, Jewish influence, Judaising threat, eternal Jew were used to rationalise, justify, explain or advance a number of deeply troubling policies. They were, for vastly different reasons, consciously used elements of argumentation in both Protestant conversionary discourse and Nazi antisemitic ideology.

Author Bio

Carolyn Sanzenbacher is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Southampton's Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations