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Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1988 3(4):395-412; doi:10.1093/hgs/3.4.395
© 1988 by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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Articles

‘Faith, Ethics and the Holocaust’

THE JUSTIFICATION OF RELIGION IN THE CRISIS OF THE HOLOCAUST

ELIEZER SCHWEID

Hebrew University of Jerusalem Israel

The crisis of theodicy in Christian and Jewish religious thought after the Holocaust resulted from the believers' realization that their religon had utterty failed ethically. Christian thinkers faced not only Christianity's failure to prevent or even to oppose the horrible crime, but also its contribution to shaping the antisemitic stereotype and enhancing the hatred towards the Jews. Orthodox and Liberal Jewish thinkers realized that their understanding of Jewish religion had blinded them to manifest dangers leading to the Holocaust, making this the cause of their failure to fulfill their religious responsibility as leaders. This paper demonstrates that the traditional solutions to problems of theodicy are unacceptable after the Holocaust, when the problem is really one of the justification of religon, not God. Only through substantial content and normative changes can religion again come to terms with human reality in the modem era.


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