Hitler’s Bible

HT:  Tzvee

Pravda: Hitler rewrote the Bible and added two commandments

An institute, founded on Hitler’s command, rewrote Bible texts, eliminating all mentions of the special role of the Jewish people. According to Hitler’s version, Christ was an advocate of Aryan ideas. Sections from the Nazi Bible will be published by German publication Bild on Thursday.

In May 1939, on the Furher’s command, a theological institute was founded in Eisenach with the purpose of contributing to “dejewification”. Its employees edited biblical texts, removing non-Aryan passages. Dozens of works printed by the institute were published in over 100 thousand copies of the new Holy Scripture. It was assumed that this work would become a standard household book amongst Germans.

For a long time, almost nothing was known about Hitler’s Bible, since believers burnt almost every copy. However, a few copies were discovered in German churches at the end of the 1980s, but this was kept hidden from the general public at the time, writes Izvestia.

German biblical archivist Hansjorg Buss has summarized the dubious achievements of Hitler’s myrmidons for Bild newspaper.

“Germans with the Lord – the German book of faith”: the renewed version of the Holy Scripture contained 12 edited commandments instead of 10, as follows:

1. Honor your Fuhrer and master.
2. Keep the blood pure and your honor holy.
3. Honor God and believe in him wholeheartedly.
4. Seek out the peace of God.
5. Avoid all hypocrisy.
6. Holy is your health and life.
7. Holy is your well-being and honor.
8. Holy is your truth and fidelity.
9. Honor your father and mother -- your children are your aid and your example.
10. Maintain and multiply the heritage of your forefathers.
11. Be ready to help and forgive.
12. Joyously serve the people with work and sacrifice.

In the new edition of the psalms, words of Jewish origin, such as messiah and halleluiah, were altered and the city of Jerusalem was referred to as Eternal City of God. The crucifixion of Jesus Christ was presented as resulting from a battle he fought against the Jews.

In the 1940 edition, the following words can be found: “The Evangelical Jesus can only become the savior of our German people, because it does not incarnate the ideas of Judaism, but fights against them mercilessly.”

“The German people fought against the destruction of their life and essence by the Jews”, wrote the director of the institute Walter Grundmann. Hitler personally signed the decree on the appropriation of the awarding of the title of professor to him.

And finally, Jesus’ ancestors, according to the Nazis, came from the Caucuses, therefore there was no way that the savior could have been Jewish.

Nixon on abortion

From New York Times:

WASHINGTON — On Jan. 23, 1973, when the Supreme Court struck down laws criminalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade, President Richard M. Nixon made no public statement. But privately, newly released tapes reveal, he expressed ambivalence.

Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster “permissiveness,” and said that “it breaks the family.” But he also saw a need for abortion in some cases — like interracial pregnancies, he said.

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding, “Or a rape.”

Isaiah Berlin’s voice

While I would rather read Isaiah Berlin than listen to him, I must take note of the following MP3 lectures now hosted at Oxford:

Freedom and its Betrayal: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1952)

Berlin lectures on Rousseau’s The Social Contract and discusses Rousseau’s anti-intellectualism, idealism of Nature, the worryingly authoritarian implications of his philosophy. Originally broadcast by the BBC's Third Program in 1952

Alexander Herzen: His Opinions and Character (1955)

Lecture on Alexander Herzen, philosopher and founder of Russia’s first free press. He discusses Herzen’s passionate belief in individual liberty and his distaste for the new violent radicalism in Russia in his time.

A Fire at Sea (1957)

Isaiah Berlin introduces and reads his translation of Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev’s short story; 'A Fire at Sea' in which Turgenev recounts an embarrassing episode from his youth. Originally broadcast by the BBC’s Third Program in 1957.

From Communism to Zionism: Moses Hess (1957)

1957 Lucien Wolf Memorial Lecture.  Lecture on the Jewish philosopher Moses Hess, one of the founders of Zionism and a committed Socialist. Berlin also discusses Hess’s evolution as a philosopher, from International Socialism to Zionism.

Alan Ryan’s very personal impression of Isaiah Berlin

This talk by Alan Ryan was given at Wolfson College on May 28 2009 as part of the Lives and Works series of lectures.

Some other interesting links:

Quotations Berlin made of others

A good starting anthology of Berlin

Crooked Timber of Humanity by Berlin

Russian Thinkers by Berlin

Tom Stoppard’s Tony Award winning trilogy based on Berlin’s book

Ordaining women

The Christian tradition of a male priesthood would seem to be well established.  In the cases of the Catholic and Eastern churches, this is now orthodox practice.  Among the Western Protestant churches, a wide variety of stances toward women clergy have been adopted.  (Sadly, one need not search hard to find ill-informed preachers eager to blog wildly complex theories of Scriptural translation that, cleared of the fog of incoherence, present despotic fantasies of the husband as autocrat with rod close at hand.)

With some controversy, Gary Macy, a professor of theology with a named at Santa Clara University (a Jesuit university where Frederick Copleston once taught), has apparently been for some time been presenting what he claims is historical evidence of a well-established tradition of ordaining women in the Medieval Church.  He begins his recent book, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination (published by Oxford University Press) with the following provocative introduction:

In 1997, I gave an address at the Catholic Theological Society of America that suggested that women in the Middle Ages had presided over ceremonies during which they distributed the bread and wine consecrated during the communion ritual.  It wasn’t a very radical suggestion but seemed to touch a nerve with some people.  My talk, along with the addresses of my colleagues John Baldovin and Mary Collins, earned the disapproval of Cardinal Avery Dulles in an issue of the Catholic journal, Commonweal.  There was a bit of a kerfuffle that seemed to be fading when a colleague of mine, Evelyn Kirkely, stopped me in the hallway and remarked, “I heard you proved that a woman had been in ordained in the Middle Ages.”  I was perplexed and a little annoyed.  No, I protested, I had proved no such thing, and further, women never had been ordained in the Middle Ages.

Kirkley, not being Catholic, had not followed closely the minor uproar over papers given at the CTSA.  She was suggesting, nevertheless, a possible conclusion that could be drawn from the examples I had given.  She was herself an ordained minister and an accomplished scholar.  She doesn’t voice opinions lightly.  On the short trip back to my office, I reconsidered my hasty response.  I had never checked the evidence.  Maybe women were ordained.  Maybe, as Kirkley intimated, women distributed communion because they were ordained to do so.

There is no point in rehearsing the fascinating hunt that followed.  As so often happens in scholarship, one small clue led to another and yet another.  Slowly, a pattern emerged.  There was no shortage of evidence about ordained women and of secondary studies analyzing this evidence.  But the sources were dismissed as anomalies, and the studies that argued that women had been ordained were attacked or marginalized.  Mostly, though, both were ignored.  Few historians questioned, as I had not, the assumption that women had not, and could not have been, ordained in the Middle Ages.  The memory of ordained women has been nearly erased, and where it survived, it was dismissed as illusion or, worse, delusion.  This was no accident of history.  This is a history that has been deliberately forgotten, intentionally marginalized, and, not infrequently, creatively explained away. 

Macy further explains his historical discoveries in a May 11th lecture he recently gave at Vanderbilt.  (Here is the referring page.)  This lecture is currently the most popular on Vanderbilt’s site.  (No wonder Macy’s book is back-ordered from Amazon; I have ordered it, but see that Amazon says 2 to 4 weeks are required for delivery.)

Now this topic is far, far away from my own expertise, and I must confess that Macy’s tone seems more than a bit politicized to me; still, I did think his lecture was interesting I am find myself looking forward to reading his book. If I have something intelligent to say after I have read his book, I may post it here.

Television 1: Firing Line

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