Vermont-NEA / Holocaust Curriculum

Three Major Historic Stages of Christian Anti-Semitism, Culminating in the Holocaust of the Jews

1. You cannot live among us unless you convert to Christianity. These were the early persecutions of the Jews by the Christian Church, starting with the Roman Catholic Church, and beginning in the very early Middle Ages. These persecutions took the forms of:

The Inquisition, begun by the Office of the Propagation of the Faith of the Roman Catholic Church, by the order of which Jews were Christ-killers and heretics and must convert to Christianity or be executed. Most such so-called "conversions" were accomplished under extreme forms of torture. Those refusing were murdered in a number of ways, such as being pressed to death or burned at the stake. Many thousands of Moors who had settled in Spain from the African Continent were also murdered.

The Crusades, instituted by the Roman Catholic Church and took the form of the mass movement of "soldiers of Christ" whose task was twofold:
1. to retake Jerusalem from the infidels (the Arabs, who held it at the time), a "victory" for the church which left, as historians note, "the sands of the Middle East red with the blood of Arabs," and
2. to rid Europe of infidels, primarily Jews. They slaughtered Jews throughout Europe.

2. You cannot live among us. This took the form of:

The expulsion of the Jews from "Christian" lands, leading to their dispersion into Eastern European countries.
The ghettos, or walled cities, where Jews were required to live entirely apart from their Christian neighbors.
The indoctrination, of Christians by Church leaders, who now included major Protestant leaders such as Martin Luther, a violent anti-Semite who preceded the later racial anti-Semites with his doctrines that Jews were incurably evil and a danger to the moral order of the world, incapable of true conversion or of correction because of the very nature of their corrupt Jewishness. He preached that they should be exterminated, or at least separated from the rest of humankind, in order that they not be allowed to spread their pernicious evil.

3. You cannot live. Beginning in the 19th century, the notion that Jews were an evil race apart from the rest of humankind began to be coupled with ideas of extermination of the virus, the Jews. Under Hitler and the Nazis, the Germans took historic anti-Semitism the necessary further step which would guarantee the purity of the Aryan Race and the salvation of the Christian world, the complete extermination of the Jewish Race. Under this fully-endorsed government policy, two/ thirds of the Jews of Europe were massacred by the Germans and their allies.