ABSTRACT
Few events of the twentieth century have been the object of as much persistent popular interest as the Holocaust. Most academically trained historians argue that events like the Holocaust can be adequately explained in terms of the conflicting material interests of the perpetrators and their victims. In spite of national socialism's unremittingly racist antisemitism, Europe's motives for seeking the elimination of the Jews were largely religious. As a result of the Enlightenment, the Jews came to participate in European life under conditions of more or less civic equality. This resulted in the rise of a class of Jewish writers, thinkers, intellectuals, and academics who for a time were able to influence European Christendom from within. Neither the Catholic Church nor the Protestant churches found that development acceptable. After the Bolshevik Revolution, perceived by both the churches and the European right as a Jewish assault on Christendom, the Jewish presence within European Christendom became intolerable to important political and religious elites.
