Abstract
Robert Braun’s Protectors of Pluralism: Religious Minorities and the Rescue of Jews in the Low Countries during the Holocaust is an impeccably researched, theoretically sound examination of how Dutch Protestants and Catholics rescued their Jewish countrymen and women during the Holocaust. While there are many accounts of heroic rescue efforts by individuals throughout Europe—and many more stories, undoubtedly, that have not yet been told—Braun’s inquiry offers a new look on the dynamics of rescue as resistance. The book opens with a description of two similarly sized Dutch towns and a puzzle they present: in one, 42 percent of Jews survived the Holocaust, aided by Catholic rescue networks, while in the other, no such rescue networks existed and only 22 percent of the Jewish population was able to avoid roundups and deportation to the camps. Why did successful rescue efforts emerge in one community but not the other?
Braun shows that rescue activities cannot be explained by altruism alone, nor can they be explained by religious ideology—for if either were true, the variation that he seeks to explain would not exist. Instead, he offers a profoundly sociological explanation, one that focuses on the minority status not of the people needing rescue, but of the rescuers themselves. Specifically, he suggests that religious minorities were more likely to engage in successful rescue than religious majorities. He then proposes two mechanisms that can drive these outcomes: empathy and capacity. The former results from the tendency of religious minorities (in the Dutch case, Protestants living in predominantly Catholic areas, and Catholics living in predominantly Protestant areas) to have empathy for Jews as fellow minorities, while the latter is a product of the small, tight-knit, and trustworthy networks within a religious minority group.
This argument, and especially the idea that religious minorities have greater capacity for rescue because of their committed networks, is derived from insights from the fields of social movements and contentious politics. By applying this literature to his research question, Braun adds the crucial insight that rescue of Jews during the Holocaust was not simply a question of motivation, but also one of mobilization. Social movement scholars are well aware of the problem of collective action; but as Braun rightly points out, this problem is exacerbated when actors are attempting high-risk activism, which can incur high costs. In his terms, rescuers had to be able to solve the “clandestine collective action dilemma” (p. 34). This is no small point. Sheltering Jews was a crime in Nazi-occupied Europe, often with lethal consequences for both Jews and their protectors, so successful rescue networks had to be able to mobilize in secret. Doing so, as so many studies of anti-Nazi resistance throughout Europe during World War II show, was always rife with peril, but Braun hypothesizes that minority groups had greater capacity for successful underground work because of their “isolated hubs of commitment” (p. 16) that could defend networks against any member outing them to the authorities. In contrast, majority groups were more visible and better known, increasing the chances that their underground rescue work could be detected and denounced.
After presenting his theoretical argument at the start of the book, Braun devotes the rest of the book to testing it empirically. It is here that the book really shines. In fact, it is hard to imagine a more thorough examination of Braun’s thesis. A bulleted list of his impressive array of data sources (pp. 7–8) gives the reader a hint of the careful analysis that is to come. These sources include geo-coded data on victimization and survival of Jews, using both German and Dutch data sources; newspaper articles demonstrating religious communities’ opinions about Jews and other religious minorities; and postwar surveys and testimonies from Jews, Protestants, and Catholics. Braun draws on these data masterfully, presenting both quantitative and qualitative analyses that test, and retest, his thesis.
This brief review cannot adequately summarize all the ways that Braun both seeks confirming evidence and rules out alternate explanations for his argument, but I will offer a few of his main findings. First, he finds that the closer Jews lived to minority churches (Catholic churches in Protestant areas, and Protestant churches in Catholic areas), the more likely they were to evade deportation. Yet while these findings are consistent with the minority thesis, they do not assess the mechanisms of empathy and capacity. Braun then complements these analyses in several ways. Content analyses of newspapers find that minority elites were consistently more pro-Semitic than majority elites, and testimonies reveal that minority groups were better able to trust their community members with sensitive activities and information.
Still not satisfied, Braun goes even further to see if his argument holds beyond the Dutch case. Using the case of Belgium, a Catholic-majority country, he finds that minority Protestant communities were more likely to shelter Jews. Finally, he accounts for deviant cases—church communities of majority religions that sheltered Jews—by showing that they exhibited traits such as isolation that allowed them to develop committed networks. Indeed, his analysis is so careful that it is quite surprising to find more than a few typos, along with one missing figure (Figure 5.4) and at least one (that I caught, at any rate) mislabeled figure (Figure 8.3). These production errors should not detract from the quality of the research, however.
The book ends on a somber note, which is not surprising for a study of the Holocaust, but it struck me nonetheless. As I followed Braun’s thoroughly convincing presentation, I was grateful to all the rescuers for the generations of Jewish lives they saved. Perhaps because of that gratitude, upon reaching the book’s end I expected something more positive, perhaps a conclusion that would suggest new ways to build coalitions with minority groups, or a call to follow minority groups for guidance and inspiration. The latter would have been consistent with Braun’s brief and intriguing suggestion that, in the context of genocide, providing more resources to minority groups may be a way to save lives (p. 14). Instead, Braun ends by cautioning that his is “not as much a story of hope as of tragedy” (p. 238). His statement therefore reminds us of the incalculable tragedy of the Holocaust. While some Jews were rescued, millions more perished—including Braun’s ancestors, as well as my own. Upon reflection, that is the more proper conclusion.
I was sold on the book long before I reached its final pages, however. In fact, after having read only the first two chapters, this book shot to the top of my list for my graduate-level social movements seminar. Protectors of Pluralism offers a primer on how to present a theoretically sound, empirically thorough answer to a compelling research question. Kudos to Robert Braun for this impressive analysis.