Holocaust Did not begin with Hitler

Holocaust Memorial Day, April 8, 2013 / Yom Hashoah 5773

The following post is not one I am proud to post. Rather, it is an attempt to expose one of the most insidious, diabolical plans ever formed in the minds of people who believed they were doing Gods work. I believe these plans were birthed in the character of satan, and it is he who influenced a generation of hatred.
This is not about taking shots at any one religion, or any one system. Rather is it submitted for your consideration, It does not make for pleasant reading. But it is a historical fact that must be confronted with honesty, remorse and some form of vicarious repentance.
Knowledge of this history of antisemitism within the Catholic/Christian churches is indispensable for any full understanding of the Holocaust. The crimes that were committed by the Nazi regime did not begin in the 1940’s – but the seeds were sown long before Hitler was ever conceived.
I tried to include the sited references when possible. These religious men have influenced churches, wrote doctrine, taught in our seminary’s, and many college classes on religion. Building up the wall between the Jew and gentile is what the adversary does best.
The quotes can be verified through any search engine, library, or church/historic writings. Many of these names you will know, some you may not – this is not an exhaustive list by any means, but only a very small portion of some of the more well known names throughout history.

Adonai, my strength, my fortress,
my refuge in time of trouble,
the nations will come to you
from the ends of the earth, saying,
“Our ancestors inherited nothing but lies,
futile idols, completely useless.”
Can a person make himself gods?
(In fact they aren’t gods at all) Jeremiah 16:19-20

Ignatius Bishop of Antioch (98-117A.D.) – Epistle to the Magnesians
For if we are still practicing Judaism, we admit that we have not received God’s favor…it is wrong to talk about Jesus Christ and live like Jews. For Christianity did not believe in Judaism, but Judaism in Christianity.

“Epistle of Barnabas” (between 130A.D. and 138 A.D.)
Take heed to yourselves and be not like some piling up you sins and saying that the covenant is theirs as well as ours. It is ours, but they lost it completely just after Moses received it.

Justin Martyr – Dialogue with Trypho (Between 138A.D. and 161 A.D.)

**He was one of the earliest apologist of the church**
We too, would observe your circumcision of the flesh, your Sabbath days, and in a word, all you festivals, if we were not aware of the reason why they were imposed upon you, namely, because of your sins and the hardness of heart.The custom of circumcising the flesh, handed down from Abraham, was given to you as a distinguishing mark, to set you off from other nations and from us Christians. The purpose of this was that you and only you might suffer the afflictions that are now justly yours; that only your land be desolated, and you cities ruined by fire, that the fruits of you land be eaten by strangers before your very eyes; that not one of you be permitted to enter your city of Jerusalem. Your circumcision of the flesh is the only mark by which you can certainly be distinguished from other men…as I stated before it was by reason of your sins and the sins of your fathers that, among other precepts, God imposed upon you the observance of the sabbath as a mark.

Origen of Alexandria (185-254 A.D.) – A ecclesiastical writer and teacher who contributed to the early formation of Christian doctrines.
We may thus assert in utter confidence that the Jews will not return to their earlier situation, for they have committed the most abominable of crimes, in forming this conspiracy against the Savior of the human race…hence the city where Jesus suffered was necessarily destroyed, the Jewish nation was driven from its country, and another people was called by God to the blessed election.

Saint Jerome (ca. 342-420 CE)

Saint Jerome was responsible for translating the Bible from Greek and Hebrew into Latin. The resulting Vulgate Bible is still to this day the official biblical text of the Catholic Church. A Christian intellectual and vigorous defender of the orthodox views of the then nascent Catholic Church, Jerome wrote voluminously on subjects of theological importance. Throughout his life, Jerome wrote spirited polemics against Jews and their religious practices. Such as follows:

The Jews seek nothing but to have children, possess riches and be healthy. They seek all earthly things, but think nothing of heavenly things; for this reason they are mercenaries. Holding fast to their ancient anger and violence, still today under the name of Nazarenes, the Jews in their synagogues blaspheme the Christian flock: and while they slay us, they will their own destruction in the eternal fire.”
Source: Jerome, In Amos, I, 11 ff.; Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina, XXV, 1001.

“If it is expedient to hate any men and to loathe any race I have a strange dislike for those of the circumcision. For up to the present day, they persecute our Lord Jesus Christ in the synagogues of Satan.”…..”A fornicatress is a woman who has had intercourse with several men. An adulteress, one who, deserting her true spouse, joins herself to another. The Synagogue is both of these, and if she continues in fornication and adultery, God will strip off her clothes and remove the ornaments which He gave her.”
Source: Jerome, Ep. LXXXIV, 3; Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum

John Chrysostom (344-407 A.D.)

One of the “greatest” of church fathers; known as “The Golden Mouthed.” A missionary preacher famous for his sermons and addresses.***THIS MAN WROTE DOCTRINE FOR THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH**
Chrysostom is considered to be among the most beloved and admired in Catholic Church history. Besides his proclamation of Jews as ‘god-less, idolaters, pedicides, stoners of prophets (Matthew 23:37-38), and committers of 10,000 horrors. Chrysostom declared the following in his work Orations Against The Jews:

“The Jews are the most worthless of all men. They are lecherous, rapacious, greedy. They are perfidious murderers of Christ. They worship the Devil. Their religion is a sickness. The Jews are the odious assassins of Christ and for killing God there is no expiation possible, no indulgence or pardon. Christians may never cease vengeance, and the Jew must live in servitude forever. God always hated the Jews. It is essential that all Christians hate them’ (year 379). Furthermore: ‘The Jews sacrifice their children to Satan. They are worse than wild beasts. The Synagogue is a brothel, a den of scoundrels, the temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults, a criminal assembly of Jews, a place of meeting for the assassins of Christ, a house of ill fame, a dwelling of iniquity, a gulf and abyss of perdition. The Jews have fallen into a condition lower than the vilest animal. Debauchery and drunkenness have brought them to a level of the lusty goat and the pig. They know only one thing: to satisfy their stomachs, to get drunk, to kill, and beat each other up like stage villains and coachmen. The Synagogue is a curse, obstinate in her error, she refuses to see or hear, she has deliberately perverted her judgment; she has extinguished with herself the light of the Holy Spirit.’ He elaborated further on God’s punishment of the Jews: ‘But it was men, says the Jew, who brought these misfortunes upon us, not God. On the contrary, it was in fact God who brought them about. If you attribute them to men, reflect again that even supposing men had dared, they could not have had the power to accomplish them, unless it had been God’s will. Men would certainly not have made war unless God had permitted them. Is it not obvious that it was because God hated you [Jews] and rejected you once for all?”

On yet another occasion Chrysostom is quoted as saying; “I hate the Jews because they violate the Law. I hate the synagogue because it has the Law and the prophets. It is the duty of all Christians to hate the Jews.” Chrysostom’s homilies were used in seminaries and schools for centuries as model sermons, ensuring his message of hate would be passed down to succeeding generations of theologians.

St. Augustine of Hippo (c. 354-430 A.D.),One of the most important Christian philosophers of ancient world
How hateful to me are the enemies of your Scripture! How I wish that you would slay them (the Jews) with your two-edged sword, so that there should be none to oppose your word! Gladly would I have them die to themselves and live to you!
The City of God, Confessions, 12.14 Augustine managed to touch on several themes central to Christian anti-Judaism: decide, the failure of Jewish belief in Jesus, and the Diaspora caused by God for Jewish impiety. “The true image of the Hebrew is Judas Iscariot, who sells the Lord for silver. The Jews can never understand the scriptures, and forever bear the guilt of the death of Christ.”

The Crusades – The Middle Ages

In medieval society, the close link between Church and State meant that the seeds of Christian anti-Semitism, already sown, yielded terrible fruits.

The Crusades
The year 1096 ushered in a period of viciously cruel harassment unique in Jewish history in terms of duration:
Great, ill-organized hordes of nobles, knights, monks, and peasants — ‘God wills it’ on their lips as they set off to free the Holy Land from the Muslim infidel — suddenly turned on the Jews One chronicler, Guibert of Nogent (1053-1124), reported the crusaders of Rouen as saying: ‘We desire to combat the enemies of God in the East; but we have under our eyes the Jews, a race more inimical to God than all the others. We are doing this whole thing backwards.

Approximately a quarter to one-third of the entire Jewish population in Germany and northern France was murdered during the First Crusade.

In Jerusalem the Jews fled from the Crusaders, locking themselves in the main synagogue, where all 969 were burnt to death. Outside, the Crusaders, who believed they were avenging the death of Christ, sang, Christ, We Adore Thee, holding their Crusader crosses aloft. Earlier that day, as the Crusaders ran over the mutilated bodies of those slaughtered, one leader, Raymond of Aguilers, quoted Psalm 118:24: ‘This is the day which the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.’ The Crusaders intended to make Jerusalem a Christian city….

There is so much more I could have added pertaining to this time period. The crusades were some of the most deplorable acts ever committed against Jews. Many books have been written about this topic.

Martin Luther – 1543 The “Great” Reformer, founder of the Luthern Church
But your [God’s] judgment is right, Yes, so shall Jews, but no one else be punished, who held your word and miracles in contempt and ridiculed, insulted and damned it for such a long time without interruption, so that they will not fall, like other humans, heathens and all the others, into sin and death, not up in Hell, nor in the middle of Hell but in the pit of Hell, as one cannot fall deeper…
Even if they were punished in the most gruesome manner that the streets ran with their blood, that their dead would be counted, not in the hundred thousands, but in the millions, as happened under Vespasian in Jerusalem and for evil under Hadrian, still they must insist on being right even if after these 1,500 years they were in misery another 1,500 years, still God must be a liar and they must be correct. In sum, they are the devil’s children, damned to Hell…
The Jews too got what they deserved. They had been called and elected to be God’s mouth as Jeremiah says…Open your mouth wide and I will fill it; they however, kept tightly closed their muzzles, eyes, ears, nose, whole heart and all senses, so he polluted and squirted them so full that it oozes from them in all places and devil’s filth comes from them.
Yes, that tastes good to them, into their hearts, they smack their lips like swine. That is how they want it. Call more: ‘Crucify him, crucify him.’ Scream more: ‘His blood come upon us and our children.’ I mean it came and found you…
Perhaps, one of the merciful Saints among us Christians may think I am behaving too crude and disdainfully against the poor, miserable Jews in that I deal with them so sarcastically and insulting. But, good God, I am much too mild in insulting such devils…
On the Jews and Their Lies, 1543

Several months after publishing On the Jews and Their Lies, Luther wrote Vom Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi (Of the Unknowable Name and the Generations of Christ)’, in which he equated Jews with the Devil:
“Here in Wittenburg, in our parish church, there is a sow carved into the stone under which lie young pigs and Jews who are sucking; behind the sow stands a rabbi who is lifting up the right leg of the sow, raises behind the sow, bows down and looks with great effort into the Talmud under the sow, as if he wanted to read and see something most difficult and exceptional; no doubt they gained their Shem Hamphoras from that place.”

A first edition of On the Jews and their Lies (Luther) was presented to Nazi General to Julius Streicher, on his birthday in 1937 .The city of Nuremberg presented the newspaper described Luther’s writting (The Jews and their Lies)  as the most radically antisemitic tract ever published,It was publicly exhibited in a glass case at the Nuremberg rallies and quoted in a 54-page explanation of the Aryan Law by Dr. E.H. Schulz and Dr. R. Frercks.On December 17, 1941, seven Lutheran regional church confederations issued a statement agreeing with the policy of forcing Jews to wear the yellow badge, “since after his bitter experience Luther had [strongly] suggested preventive measures against the Jews and their expulsion from German territory.” Luther wrote of the Jews as if they were a race that could not truly convert to Christianity. Indeed, like so many Christian writers before him, Luther, by making the Jews the devil’s people, put them beyond conversion. Noted that in a sermon of September 25, 1539, “Luther tried to demonstrate through several examples that individual Jews could not convert permanently, and in several passages of The Jews and Their Lies, Luther appeared to reject the possibility that the Jews would or could convert.” Franklin Sherman, editor of volume 47 of the American Edition of Luther’s Works in which On the Jews and Their Lies appears, responds to the claim that “Luther’s antipathy towards the Jews was religious rather than racial in nature,” Luther’s writings against the Jews, he explains, are not “merely a set of cool, calm and collected theological judgments. His writings are full of rage, and indeed hatred, against an identifiable human group, not just against a religious point of view; it is against that group that his action proposals are directed.” Sherman argues that Luther “cannot be distanced completely from modern antisemites”. Regarding Luther’s treatise, On the Jews and Their Lies, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote: “There you already have the whole Nazi program”

John Calvin (July 1509 May 1564)

A Response To Questions and Objections of a Certain Jew
Their [the Jews] rotten and unbending stiffneckedness deserves that they be oppressed unendingly and without measure or end and that they die in their misery without the pity of anyone.
Excerpt from “Ad Quaelstiones et Objecta Juaei Cuiusdam Responsio,” by John Calvin; The Jew in Christian Theology, Gerhard Falk, McFarland and Company, Inc., Jefferson, NC and London, 1931.

Johann Eck November 1486 – February 1543

Johann Eck was a German Scholastic theologian and defender of Catholicism during the Protestant Reformation.- In his writing he convinced thousands of his members that Jews were responsible for killing Christian children and drinking their blood for their Purim Festivals, desecrating the eucharistic, and poisoning wells.

Adam Clarke (1760 or 1762 – 1832)

A British Methodist theologian and Biblical scholar. He is chiefly remembered for writing a commentary on the Bible which took him 40 years to complete and which was a primary Methodist theological resource for two centuries.
Contained in 6 volumes, consisting of nearly 1,000 pages each, it was considered the most comprehensive commentary on the Bible ever prepared by one man. His commentary, particularly that on Revelation, identified the Catholic Church with the antichrist and bordered on antisemitic, as illustrated by the following quote:
“The Jewish philosophy, such as is found the Cabala, Midrashim, and other works, deserves the character of vain deceit, in the fullest sense and meaning of the words. The inspired writers excepted, the Jews have ever been the most puerile, absurd, and ridiculous reasoners in the world. Even Rabbi Maimon or Maimonides, the most intelligent of them all, is often, in his master-piece, the Moreh Neochim, the teacher of the perplexed, most deplorably empty and vain.” A.C. 1831 VI p. 486

THE GUILTY JEWS
The term “perfidious Jews” (meaning guilty, faithless) is a term used in the Good Friday prayer by the Catholic church up to 1959, Catholic historian Warren H. Carroll asserts:
The word “perfidious” in the old Good Friday liturgy referred to the rejection of God’s Son the Messiah by the Jews who called for his crucifixion. He had given them proofs of who He was, but they closed their eyes and ears to them. Though it may be counter-productive to make this point in today’s age, this willful blindness to the truth is spectacularly evidenced… They must have known or at least guessed the truth, and yet refused to believe. In any case, the expression “perfidious” cannot logically apply to Jews apart from the circumstances of the crucifixion, except under a theory of collective guilt..
In the form used before 1955 it ran like this:
Let us pray also for the faithless Jews: that Almighty God may remove the veil from their hearts 2 Corinthians 3:13-16; so that they too may acknowledge Jesus Christ our Lord. (‘Amen’ is not responded, nor is said ‘Let us pray’, or ‘Let us kneel’, or ‘Arise’, but immediately is said:) Almighty and eternal God, who dost not exclude from thy mercy even Jewish faithlessness: hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of thy Truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness. Through the same our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amene

It should be noted that it In 1960 (or 1959 the date is hard to verify) Pope John XXIII had removed the term from the Good Friday prayer. During the 1960s, Pope John XXIII met with a delegation of Jews and said, “I am Joseph Your Brother” marking the beginning of a new relationship between Jews and Catholics. Inspired by the visit of Pope John Paul II to Israel in 2000, I am Joseph, Your Brother assesses and reflects on the changes that have occurred in the often difficult and turbulent relationship that has existed for centuries between Jews and Christians, Judaism and Catholicism, and more recently, between the State of Israel and the Vatican.

The point of this blog is to shed some light on this subject. We must know the damage that has been done to the Jewish people in the name of “Jesus” we have a mandate on our lives to provoke the Jews to Jealousy (Romans 11:11) does this history reflect that calling in any way? These facts are verifiable, I challenge you to do your own research, but understand this; don’t allow Google to form your theology. Allow the Holy Spirit, prayer, and study of the scriptures to be source of information. When searching anything on the internet, you will yield a harvest of information you use in your search queries. If you search for “evil Jews” or “evil Catholics” you will get sites based off of those words. I say this because I have seen more people search out the internet to do a study on a subject and walk away with a distorted list of “facts” and thereby form an incorrect biased based off of blogs or articles. Understand that the references I used are public record and when I came across them, I was not looking to discover what I found. Initially I wanted to know to who, when, and why was the Sabbath day changed. From there a landslide of information was discovered and to my horror, this was a part of that search.
In our observance of Holocaust, please be somber, be compassionate, be wise. Don’t be quick to offer your opinion of why you think these things happened. Just know this, the Holocaust did not begin Adolph Hitler.