Sonja Spear

Jesus the Jew: Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic Constructions of Jesus in an Age of Anti-semitism, 1890-1940 Sonja Spear

In the decades leading up to the Second World War, American Jews claimed the historical Jesus as a fellow Jew. By invoking Jesus the Jew, liberal rabbis such as Kaufmann Kohler and Stephen S. Wise used Jesus as a weapon against Christian anti-Judaism, even as they sought Christian allies against racist Anti-Semitism. This book explores the figure of Jesus the Jew in the goodwill (interfaith) movement of the 1920s, when liberal Jews, Protestants, and Catholics joined to repudiate the exclusive Protestant nationalism of the Ku Klux Klan. These goodwill exchanges attempted to create an inclusive national religious identity, laying the foundation for a new interpretation of America as a "Judeo-Christian" country during WWII. The book follows Jesus the Jew from the polemics of liberal rabbis to the rhetoric of liberal Protestants, who invoked the Jewish identity of the historical Jesus in their own struggle against fundamentalism. When Hitler rose to power in Germany, liberal Protestants and Catholics, appropriating this Jewish rhetoric, interpreted Nazism as an attack on Christ and his church.