(This takes approximately nine minutes to read.)

The importance and significance that J.C. has to a wide variety of people and cultures has lead to a wide variety of often wildly different summaries about him. Hence, people’s summaries of J.C. tend to tell us more about them than they do about him. That being said, the most explicit evidence that J.C. was Jewish comes from John chapter 4. A Samaritan identifies him as Jewish, and he does not deny it. In fact, he states this in verses 21–23:

You worship guessing in the dark; we Jews worship in the clear light of day. G-d’s way of salvation is made available through the Jews.

(And that was not all.)

From Luke 2:21 (MSG):

When the eighth day arrived, the day of circumcision, the child was named Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived.

There are almost no records whatsoever of ancient European goyim practising circumcision, and the few that we have mention it strictly as a medical procedure rather than a ritual. Otherwise, both the Greeks and the Romans abhorred it. Likewise, the evidence that any of the Germanic tribes practiced it is nearly nonexistent, and even this marginal evidence is probably a fabrication inspired by scripture. There are also no records of ancient Jews forcibly circumcising goyim in the post-Hasmonean period.

In contrast to today, few ordinary Christians were aware of the Nazarene’s Jewish roots. Since many churches were explicitly anti-Jewish, acknowledging those roots would lead to cognitive dissonance and all sorts of awkward questions that would be hard to reconcile with Christian anti-Judaism. Since Christian anti-Judaism has a tragically long history, the presumption of a gentile Jesus is actually surprisingly old.

In premodern times, it was common for European artists to bestow their god and most of his disciples with a European goy’s facial features, whereas their Jewish rivals (including Judas Iscariot) had stereotypical ‘Jewish’ features. For byspel, as early as the 9th century there is a work that depicts an icon of the hanged one taking damage from ‘two tormentors, identified as Jews by their “Jewish garments” (a barely visible knot of the cowl) and their facial features—a receding forehead, combined with an elongated jaw and nose to demonstrate their wickedness.’ Needless to say, the hanged one’s icon lacks those features, thereby implying that he was gentile.

Many Christian scholars were aware of the Nazarene’s Jewish heritage, but academic pushback came in the long 19th century, at the height of European colonialism. To the best of my knowledge, it was Johann Gottlieb Fichte who was the first thinker to explicitly propose that the Nazarene was gentile. Quoting Léon Poliakov’s The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe, pg. 101:

In many respects Fichte was an astonishing forerunner. It was he, once again, who was the first to question the ethnic origin of Jesus of Nazareth and to conclude that he was not perhaps of Jewish stock,* thus sweeping aside the greatest obstacle in the quest for an authentically German religion.

As a result, even the genealogies of the New Testament came to be doubted. Those of the Old Testament had already been discredited by the rationalist Lutheran theologians of the eighteenth century and nobody in Germany gave any further thought to Ashkenaz as a national ancestor.

Susannah Heschel’s excellent The Aryan Jesus: Christian theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany traces the concept of a specifically Aryan redeemer all the way to Ernest Renan, who proposed in 1863 that his god was born Jewish but miraculously matured into an Aryan. Although the Fascists might not have borrowed this concept directly from Renan, he, like Fichte before him, most certainly laid the groundwork for future theologasters, making the preposterous idea of an Aryan Galilean more acceptable.

One of these theologasters was Houston Stewart Chamberlain (not to be confused with Neville Chamberlain). Quoting, World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia, vol. 1, pg. 45:

Chamberlain and others like him tried to rebuild an acceptably “Aryan” or “Nordic” version of Christianity by severing Jesus entirely from Judaism. They built on the work of German Protestant critics of the Bible to preach that Jesus himself had not in fact been a Jew; to do this they exploited the idea of his Galilean origins: Galilee (in northern Palestine), it was claimed, having been inhabited by heathen, non-Jewish tribes, as opposed to Judah (in southern Palestine, around Jerusalem). There was said to be a pure, original version of the non-Jewish teachings of Christ, which had been traduced after his death by the Jew St. Paul.

Telling the Germanic Fascists about J.C.’s actual heritage was of no help, as one ‘political pastor’ learnt painfully:

With an oily voice that could have covered a ton of sardines, he shouted emotionally to the crowd:

“…and there is another reason why I cannot understand the National Socialist hatred of the Jews. We all know that the Savior was descended from the Jews and that Christ himself therefore was a Jew. If we are to be Christians, we must bow before the Jews, not fight them as the National Socialists do in such an unchristian way!”

The pastor probably expected howls of outrage from the speaker, but they did not come. And the farmers gave no sign of wanting to tear the speaker to bits. They were waiting eagerly for his response.

“Well, the pastor wants us to believe that Christ was a Jew. But we are good Christians who paid attention to what we were taught.

We learned that Christ was G-d’s son, not the son of some Hebrew. Besides that, the Catholic Church teaches that Holy Mary, the mother of Christ, died a virgin. That means she never had sexual relations with a man, certainly not with a flat-footed garlic Jew. And thirdly, according to Catholic doctrine, Christ was born by a miracle, not by the normal natural process. Finally, the church teaches that ‘Holy Spirit came upon’ the Virgin Mary. He must, therefore, be regarded as the father or source of Christ. Surely not even the pastor wants to tell us that the Holy Spirit is a Jew!”

His argument resulted in explosive laughter. Defeated on his own ground, the red-faced ultramontane Jew-lover had no choice but to disappear as fast as possible. Only later did he remember that he had left his hat and coat behind.

Surprisingly, even some fascist neopagans believed that J.C. was Aryan. Quoting David I. Kertzer’s The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, pg. 204:

Alfred Rosenberg […] argued that G-d created humans as separate races; the superior Aryan race was destined to rule over the others. Jesus was an Aryan, he explained, but his Jewish apostles had polluted his teachings. Catholicism was the bastardized product of this Jewish influence.

Bryan Mark Rigg’s Lives of Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: Untold Tales of Men of Jewish Descent Who Fought for the Third Reich, ch. 4:

Many [Fascists] denied the fact that Jesus was a Jew. For instance, commander of the SS Heinrich Himmler claimed that Jesus was not Jewish.⁸ He was joined by several theologians throughout Germany who claimed Jesus came from “non-Jewish blood.”⁹ Julius Streicher, head of the notorious newspaper Der Stürmer, called Christ the “greatest anti-Semite” ever.¹⁰

Regardless of the nonsense [that] the [Fascist] religious élite preached, the Jew Jesus, the central figure in Christianity, presented Hitler with a dilemma: either exempt him from his racial ideology or face millions of angry Christians who believed the Bible when it said [that] Jesus was Jewish. Hitler therefore dubbed Jesus an Aryan, and [so-called Positive] Christianity made images of Jesus look more Nordic and no longer described him as the advocate of love, but as the bearer of the sword for the rebirth of the Volk.¹¹

Hitler believed [that] Jesus did not practice Judaism, but was the greatest early fighter in the war against the Jews. Nor was he, according to Hitler, the apostle of peace. Hitler believed that Jesus preached against capitalism and [that] this was why the Jews, his archenemies, killed him. What Christ had started, Hitler said [that] he would finish.¹²

This bombastic call to continue the Nazarene’s purportedly violent mission has precedents at least as old as the eleventh century. As usual, the Fascists introduced nothing new.

The theology that J.C. was a goy had adherents outside of the Third Reich. For example, quoting Nicholas M. Nagy-Talavera’s The Green Shirts and the Others: A History of Fascism in Hungary and Romania, pg. 170:

[Ferenc] Szálasi, too, found the idea of Jesus being of Jewish descent intolerable. Hitler made an Aryan out of Christ during his table talks. Szálasi improved his days while in prison in 1938 by establishing “with the help of the Bible” the family tree of the Redeemer — arriving at the conclusion that, after all, He is not Jewish! Jesus, according to Szálasi, belonged to the “Godvanian race” (whatever that means), which is related to the Hungarians!

Ionut Florin Biliuta’s ‘Sowing the Seeds of Hate: The Antisemitism of the Orthodox Church in the Interwar Period’:

Alexandru C. Cuza […] recommended to Orthodox theologians that they adopt a new Christology in line with his antisemitic views. He ‘cleansed’ Jesus of His Jewishness and proclaimed the end of the ‘Judaic religion’; the main messianic attribute of Christ was that of being an assiduous fighter against the Jews. […] In order to refute the […] idea that Christianity was a Jewish religion and its founder had been a Jew, [Nichifor] Crainic envisaged Christ as a divine–human person in whom there was no hint of Jewish blood, thus radicalising the […] hypothesis of an Aryan Jesus[.]

Scott Beekman’s William Dudley Pelley: A Life in Right-Wing Extremism and the Occult, chapter 6:

In defense of his stance that the Jews had no special place in the past, Pelley argued that Jesus Christ was not a Jew. He posited that Christ was “not a Judaist, or any other kind of a Hebrew, but a Galilean” descended from immigrant Gauls. According to Pelley, Christ actually hated the Jews for violating G-d’s precepts and “drove the Jews out of the Temple with a whip of ropes.” Pelley noted that Christ “looked Gentile, thought Gentile, acted Gentile, came from a Gentile province, talked Gentile, died with Gentile courage for a principle, and withal was the world’s outstanding anti-Semite of all time.”³³

Occasionally, an anti-Jewish Christian, such as Michael von Faulhaber, would acknowledge that the Nazarene was Jewish but awkwardly gloss over it as ‘unimportant’. One example from Henry Munson’s ‘Christianity, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust’:

Bishop Hilfrich of Limburg admitted that Jesus had been a Jew in his pastoral letter for Lent 1939, but he insisted that “the Christian religion has not grown out of the nature of this people, that is, is not influenced by their racial characteristics.” He added the usual assertion that the Jews had killed Jesus and had been cursed by G-d ever since (Lewy 1999, p. 132). Once again, we see traditional Christian hostility toward the Jew effortlessly meshed with racial antisemitism.

It is hardly unusual for antisemites to allow a few exceptions to their bigotry.

I should mention that while the New Testament has some worrisome verses, I am reluctant to agree with Prof. William Nicholls’s pessimistic conclusion that ‘No uncritical reader of the New Testament could easily come away with any but the most negative opinion of Jews.’ Be that the case, it would be easy for someone to conclude likewise about the Hebrew Bible, which does not exactly portray all Jews as perfect little saints either, to put it succinctly. Simply put, the relationship that all Abrahamic scriptures have with Jews is complex and ruling-class goyim concentrated on the unappealing aspects of that relationship according to the political needs of the day.

Finally, I want to comment on the erroneous lessons that too many people take from the importance of religion in the Third Reich. Many Christian apologists have overstated the neopagan elements, the relations with Islam, or even claimed that the German Fascists were atheist secularists. In contrast, Christianity’s critics have stressed the Christian elements in the Third Reich to the point of implying that Christianity was responsible for the Shoah. Neither of these extremes is analytically sound.

In truth, the Fascist bourgeoisie nurtured culturally as well as politically specific variants of Christianity that it used to justify, but not effect, its actions. The ruling classes controlled these variants of Christianity, not the other way around, and they had little in common with the Christianity of either Dr. Martin Luther King or Óscar Romero. MLK and Óscar Romero read the parable of the Good Samaritan and would have rather been either the Samaritan or even the victim than the robbers. The Fascists, if they did not overlook the parable completely, surely would have rather been the robbers than any of the ‘weaklings’ in the tale.