ABSTRACT
I will begin with a personal reminiscence, if I may. Born at the end of 1933 in a German Protestant pastor's house, I witnessed the end of the last World War, perfectly conscious of what happened, and experienced it as a liberation on the one hand, a political and moral catastrophe on the other. This experience has determined the further course of my life and thinking, presumably more than other factors. So I felt obliged to find an answer to how that catastrophe and especially that murderous anti-Semitism could be explained, which certainly is the deepest shame of the German national history. During my theological studies I recognized that the history of Christianity has to be included if one investigates the historical roots of anti-Semitism. For, even if anti-Semitism is older than Christianity and the racism of the Nazis, aimed at a systematic eradication of the Jews, is only explicable against the background of a de facto de-Christianization of public life in Germany; that the promotion of Christianity to the state religion of the Roman Empire under Theodosius I opens an especially sad chapter within the book of the history of the Jewish Passion, nobody can call in question, as I soon understood. Chrysostom's Λόγοι κατὰ 'Iουδαίων, or Orations against the Jews, known to me only from quotations — seemingly needing no commentary — I gave for a long time a wide berth. I simply felt ashamed of them.
