ABSTRACT
Amid the dawning realization of the horrors of the Nazi regime’s genocide against European Jewry after World War II, Christians began the slow process of coming to terms with the long tradition of Christian antisemitism. When the Nazi regime excluded the Jews from German public life, the participants and bystanders were identified as Christian, as were those who facilitated or directly murdered six million European Jews. Upon the liberation of the camps in 1945, the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches faced an inescapable question: how could Christians have stood by and even participated in the mass murder of the Jews, especially when the greatest commandments Jesus gave were to love God and love one another? After the Holocaust Christians began the process of confronting the Church’s anti-Judaic legacy and confessing guilt for sin. More specifically, the churches began building relationships with Jews on shared beliefs, traditions, and values; repudiating the charge of deicide (that the Jews killed Christ); reevaluating the nature of God’s covenant with the Jews; and transitioning from a missiological to a dialogical approach in relating to Jews. This process of confronting and engaging the past has contributed to a new phase in Jewish-Christian understanding, dialogue, and cooperation.
