One other detail which has stayed with me from this conference, from a paper by Rebecca Peterson on how the Lutheran theologian Philip Melanchthon wrote about the Jews. Melanchthon was (in this as in many things) much more moderate and softly-spoken than Luther himself. But apparently, when he wanted to say something positive about the children of Abraham, he tended to call them Hebrews or Israelites; when he wanted to criticise them, even if he was talking about the same time period, they became Jews. The implication is that there really were good and admirable Jews: but they'd all been dead for more than two thousand years.
None of which makes Melanchthon implicit in genocide. But it does make him implicit in something.
Doesn't the Bible pretty much do the same thing - use "Jews" negatively and "Israelites / Hebrews" positively?
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