ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Karl Barth's personal interactions with individual Jews confirm the criticisms, or alternatively offer a portrait of in which Jews figure more positively. Evidently, there has been and remains a great deal of controversy, not to say confusion, surrounding Barth's personal attitudes toward Jews and Judaism. His own comments on subject, made late in his life, have hardened the perception of his critics that he held deep- seated suspicion of and perhaps even animosity toward Jews. And yet, as have seen, the historical record suggests a somewhat different story. If, in the early 1920s, he kept the acquaintances at a respectable scholarly distance, the Nazi years particularly as the persecution of the Jews intensified to genocidal proportions saw him adopt a far more positive perspective, from which he was able to stand in both theological and humanitarian solidarity with the persecuted kinfolk of Jesus.
