Justice In Nazi Germany Essay

You watch as a little girl sporting a golden star on her jacket sleeve is kicked and spit upon in the street, and listen to the hearty laughs of men and women from the window above you as the horror commences. To them and to her abusers, she is unworthy of mercy—at least, according to the scriptures they are taught to believe. Such actions were once commonplace, as the words of Rabbi Elijah ben Abuya, “There [was] no Law, and there [was] no Justice” in regards to religion in Nazi Germany (qtd. in Idinopulos 123). Yet, it was not always this way. In order to withhold justice from the Jewish people living among the Christian majority of the German population, the Nazi Party must have first been able to reconstruct the German Christian establishment …show more content…
Peter M. Marendy, author of “Anti-Semitism, Christianity, and the Catholic Church: Origins, Consequences, and Reponses[sic]”, argued that a long-standing history of smoldering bias on behalf of early Christians made the assimilation of anti-Jewish sentiment into then-modern practices much easier, as seedy interpretations of early Gospel text were not new conceptions. For example, the common belief of Catholics at the time that the Jews lacked “righteous[ness]” lacked political context; it was an exclamation which the apostle Matthew used to set apart his local community from Pharisees amidst what Marendy calls “false teachings” (Marendy 291-292). The Gospel of John went a step further, laying down the foundation for many Anti-Semites’ beliefs that, as Marendy continues, “Jews wanted to persecute and kill Jesus (Jn [sic] 5:16-18)…they do not follow anything in the Torah (Jn [sic] 7:19-24)…[and] bear responsibility for his death” (p. 292). Despite this, the Jewish figures listed therein were members of a group that rivaled the apostle’s own community, and only shared the mindset of a single faction as opposed to the