Faith, Politics and Nazism Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions Series

The essays of the late Uriel Tal uncover the dynamics of the secularization of religion, and the sacralization of politics in the Nazi era, to render explicable the deep ideational structure of the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Through a process of inversion of meaning, concepts such as race, blood, soil, state, nation and Führer were brought into the realm of faith, mission, salvation, sacredness and myth, thereby acquiring absolute significance. Within this Nazi worldview, the Jew epitomised the arch enemy, both as a symbol and as the concrete embodiment of all that Nazism sought to negate: Western civilisation, monotheism, critical rationalism and humanism.


Contents:
1. Political Faith of Nazism Prior to the Holocaust 2. Structures of German Political Theology in the Nazi Era 3. Law and Theology: On the status of German Jewry at the outset of the Third Reich 4. Aspects of Consecration of Politics in the Nazi Era 5. On the study of the Holocaust and Genocide 6. Religious and Anti-religious Roots of Modern Anti-semitism 7. Violence and the Jew in Nazi Ideology 8. Jewish and Universal Social Ethics in the Life and Thought of Albert Einstein