In the decades leading up to World War II, American Jews claimed the historical Jesus as a fellow Jew. By invoking Jesus the Jew, liberal rabbis such as Kaufmann Kohler and Stephen S. Wise used Jesus as a weapon against Christian anti-Judaism, even as they sought Christian allies against racist antisemitism.

Jesus the Jew follows Jesus the Jew from the polemics of liberal rabbis to the rhetoric of liberal Protestants, who invoked the Jewish identity of the historical Jesus in their own struggle against fundamentalism. When Hitler rose to power in Germany, liberal Protestants and Catholics, appropriating this Jewish rhetoric, interpreted Nazism as an attack on Christ and his church.