The Early Church: Internal Jewish Migration or New Religion?

Abstract

This paper discusses the issue of “Christian” identity customarily defined by its distinctiveness. I wish to start with a biographical observation: The classics school that I entered in April 1939 in Frankfurt am Main was under the same roof as the Jewish high school. This struck me as very peculiar given the propaganda and political activity of the late thirties in Nazi Germany. The Jewish high school was named after Samson Rafael Hirsch, the famous Jewish scholar and rabbi of nineteenth-century Frankfurt. On our side of the building there was nobody who would answer my questions about the school, and before long the object of my boyish inquisitiveness ceased to exist. As part of the German war machine, a military censorship complex took over the Jewish part of the building and closed the Jewish high school. The Jewish students and their teachers disappeared. We, the students of the non-Jewish part of the building, wondered during study breaks where they and the many Jews in the neighborhood of our school had gone. As the yellow star on the clothes of Jewish fellow citizens appeared, it became very obvious to us youngsters that there were fewer and fewer Jewish people around. As the Nazis established a store “for Jews only” at the trolley stop near our school, the pain and hunger of the people with the Star of David showed more and more on their faces. Their number visibly dwindled.

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