In the 1930s and 1940s, members of the Society of Friends—Quakers—pursued a number of remarkable, controversial, and highly-publicized strategies meant to provide tangible assistance to people who were being oppressed by the Nazi regime. Quaker work on behalf of people whom the Nazis were persecuting—or whom the Nazis had persecuted—began in 1933 and continued until the 1950s. It was carried out by Friends living in Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands and the United States.
In 1947, a carefully-crafted and extraordinarily roseate account of some of those activities appeared in print. It was written by one of the most famous Quakers in the world: Rufus Jones. The next year, Friends were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.
From the 1940s up until the present day, Quakers, Jews, and others have continued to produce stories about what members of the Society of Friends did in the thirties, forties, and fifties. Some of the stories that have been told are simplistic. Playwrights such as Rosalie Regan have, for example, presented Quakers as fearless saints who treated Nazis with respect and thereby melted the Nazis’ hearts. Historians such as Stephen Norwood have portrayed Friends as throughgoing antisemites who gave a great deal of aid and comfort to the Nazis.
But a number of writers—including Guy Aiken, Bettina Brand, Debórah Dwork, Christopher Isherwood, Leonard Kenworthy, George Mosse, Hans Schmitt, Elizabeth Vining, and William Howard Wriggins—have presented more complex (and therefore more compelling) accounts of Quaker actions in the 1930s and 1940s. Quakers have been presented, for example, as people who survived concentration camps and as people who died in the camps. They have also been presented as deeply flawed saints and as people who actually did less to help Jews escape Europe than they did to help refugees adjust to life in the United States.
“Quakers, Jews, and Nazis” would give listeners a brief overview of the various narratives about Quakers’ responses to Holocaust and also provide a more extended analysis of a text that the author of this proposal finds particularly compelling: Christopher Isherwood’s The World in Evening. By the time he wrote The World in Evening, Isherwood had already won a reputation as one of more gifted novelists in the United States. Later, Isherwood would go on to become an icon of gay liberation. The World in Evening makes it clear that Isherwood believed that the Quaker subculture on Philadelphia’s mainline to be insufficiently queer. The novel also presents a sympathetic analysis of Quakers’ efforts to offer assistance to people in need and of Quaker approaches to worshiping God.
Aiken, Guy. “The American Friends Service Committee's Mission to the Gestapo.” Peace & Change: A Journal of Peace Research, no. 42 (2017): 209-231.
American Friends Service Committee Refugee Assistance Case Files. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Bowie, MD.
Brandt, Bettina. “From Vienna to the Midwest: Austrian Refugees and Quaker Rescue Efforts after 1938,” in Germany from the Outside: Rethinking German Cultural History in an Age of Displacement, ed. Laurie Ruth Johnson. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2022).
Dwork, Debórah. Saints and Liars: The Story of Americans Who Saved the Refugees from the Nazis. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2025.
Isherwood, Christopher. The World in the Evening. New York: Random House, 1954.
Jones, Rufus M. “Our Day in the German Gestapo.” The American Friend, July 10, 1947.
Rufus M. Jones Papers. Haverford College Quaker & Special Collection. Haverford, PA.
Kenworthy, Leonard S. An American Quaker Inside Nazi Germany: Another Dimension of the Holocaust. Kennett Square, PA: World Affairs Materials, 1982.
Mosse, George L. Confronting History: A Memoir. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013.
Norwood, Stephen H. “The Quakers’ Dark Side: Appeasement, Ambivalence, and Antisemitism, 1933-1939.” National Resilience, Politics and Society 4, no. 1-2 (2022): 11-49.
“Quakers.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Holocaust Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/quakers.
Regen, Rosalie. Peaceful Heroes. Philadelphia, PA: Friends General Conference, Religious Education Committee, 1962.
Schmitt, Hans A. Quakers and Nazis: Inner Light in Outer Darkness. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997.
Vining, Elizabeth Gray. Friend of Life: The Biography of Rufus M. Jones. Philadelphia, PA: JB Lippincott & Co., 1958.
Watt, David Harrington. “Eugenicists, Quakers, and Rufus Jones, 1893-1938,” In Quaker Religious Thought 135(September 2020): 14-26.
Weisberg, Joseph. “Three Jews at a Time: A History of Antisemitism and Exclusion at Haverford College, 1887-1945.” Undergraduate thesis, Haverford College, 2021.
Wriggins, W. Howard. Picking up the Pieces from Portugal to Palestine: Quaker Refugee Relief in World War II: A Memoir. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004.
This paper presents a survey of some of the narratives that have been told about Quaker efforts to offer assistance to refugees from Nazi Europe. It argues that many of those narratives are startlingly unsophisticated. The paper will focuses in large part on particular on a novel--Christopher Isherwood's The World In Evening--that presents a more nuanced--and therefore more compelling--portrait of Quakers who tried to assist people who were fleeing Nazi Europe.