General Information

The Holocaust and HaYesod

From 1938 to 1945, the Jewish people endured a seven-year great tribulation, the culmination of the horrors of exile. The long years of persecution reached a demonic crescendo. Blackness. Utter despair. Ruin in the face of naked evil. Six million dead. Yet the people of Israel lived.

As the world emerged from the travails of World War II, stories of the Holocaust began to circulate. Slowly, the realization sank in. Christians all over the world began to understand what had happened. Theologians and churchmen were abashed to realize that their own religious prejudices and bigotry had contributed to the greatest human travesty of all time.

Though he was a self-proclaimed pagan, Hitler justified the genocide by pointing to Christian writings and Christian history. He even quoted Luther. Ashamed and mortified, Christian thinkers and theologians began to publicly swear off anti-Semitism. As a part of that process, they re-examined old church theologies that had allowed for and even encouraged the historic brutalization of the Jewish people. Bible scholars began to reexamine the assumption that the church had replaced the Jewish people. They also reexamined the assumption that Jews are cursed by God and enemies of Christ. This process was the beginning of a renaissance in Christian thought and theology. A new breed of scholars emerged, willing to examine the origins of Christianity in light of Jewish sources. We are only now beginning to reap the harvest of post-Holocaust biblical research. HaYesod is a result of that new wave of research. Hitler would be dismayed to realize that his persecution of the Jewish people is the very thing that has begun the Jewish Roots renaissance of Christianity. Get involved and rediscover the Jewish roots of Christianity.