Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis by John Gray

so, it is impossible to account for the Holocaust solely in terms of racist ideology. No other group was selected for complete extermination, and none was hunted down with such systematic intensity. Whether they were Yiddish poets or medical doctors, university professors or Hasidic teachers, scientists or artists, tradesmen and merchants, men, women or children, Jews were threatened and stigmatized, driven from civil life and their property stolen, beaten and murdered in state-inspired violence, consigned to concentration camps and finally singled out for a fate no other section of humanity has had to suffer.
    If a historical comparison can be made, it is with the attribution of demonic power to Jews in medieval Europe. As Norman Cohn has put it, ‘the drive to exterminate the Jews sprang from a quasi-demonological superstition.’ 55 A belief in the diabolical powers of Jews was a major feature in the millenarian mass movements of the late Middle Ages. Jews were shown in pictures as devils with the horns of a goat, while attempts were made by the Church to force Jews to wear horns on their hats. Satan was given what were considered to be Jewish features and described as ‘the father of the Jews’. Synagogues were believed to be places where Satan was worshipped in the form of a cat or a toad. Jews were seen as agents of the Devil, whose goal was the destruction of Christendom, even of the world. Documents such as the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
– a hugelyinfluential forgery that probably emanated from the foreign branch of the Tsarist secret service – reproduced these fantasies and turned them into a paranoid vision of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.
    The singularity of the Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jews comes not only from the scale of the crime but also from the extremity of its goal. Jews were seen as the embodiment of evil and their extermination as a means of saving the world. Nazi anti-Semitism was a fusion of a modern racist ideology with a Christian tradition of demonology. Eschatological myth and perverted science came together to produce a crime without precedent in history.
    Like the millenarian movements of medieval times, Nazism emerged against a background of social disruption. Mass unemployment, hyperinflation and the humiliating impact of the Great War produced a wrenching sense of insecurity and loss of identity among Germans. As Michael Burleigh has written, the 1914–18 conflict
    … created the emotional effervescence which Emil Durkheim regarded as integral to religious experience. The Great War and its disturbed aftermath led to an intensified revival of this pseudo-religious strain in politics, which exerted its maximum appeal in times of extreme crisis, just as medieval millenarians, or the belief that the thousand-year interval before the Day of Judgement was at hand, had thrived before in times of sudden change and social dislocation. 56
    The similarities between Nazism and medieval millenarianism were recognized by a number of observers at the time. Eva Klemperer, the wife of the philologist and diarist Victor Klemperer, compared Hitler with John of Leyden, and so did Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, the aristocratic author of an anti-Nazi book entitled
History of a Mass Lunacy
, published in 1937. 57 Around the same time the British foreign correspondent F. A. Voigt identified the central role of eschatology in Nazism:
    Every transcendental eschatology proclaims the end of this world. But
secular
eschatology is always caught in its own contradiction. It projects into the
past
a vision of what
never was
, it conceives what
is
in terms of what
is not
, and the
future
in terms of what can
never be.
The remoter pastbecomes a mystical or mythical Age of Innocence, a Golden or a Heroic Age, an Age of Primitive Communism or of resplendent manly Virtue. The Future is the Classless Society, Eternal Peace, or Salvation by Race – the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. 58
    In a study that is too little