The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism

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Summary: The Vatican set the stage
Review: At the begining of the 21st century we are witnessing a resurgence of anti-semitism. This is an appropriate time to read Mr. Kertzers' outstanding book in order to understand the terible historical burden the Catholic Church must carry for the rise of 20th century anti-semitism. This is a well researched account proving that the Church cannot wash it's hands of the blood of the victims of the Shoah. The book examines Church policy against the Jews from the end of the 18th to the begining of the 20th centuries. Kertzers' research clearly proves that there cannot be a clear and neat distinction between "classical" (i.e. religous) antisemitism and "modern" (i.e. racial) antisemitism. Racial antisemitism was not a divergence from Church antisemitim but developed from it. Chuch leaders (particularly the Jesuit press) were active in the various circles promoting modern antisemitism. The Church cannot distance itself from the annihilation of European Jewry. It's very doctrine set the stage. Present day Islamist fundamentalists promoting anti - semitism would particularly do well to read this book.

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Summary: Well-written, compelling argument
Review: Brilliant and meticulously documented; I urge you to read this book.

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Summary: Popes Against the Jews
Review: David Kertzer's "The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism" provides an eye opening view of the Catholic Church's anti-Semitism in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. Based on documents from the previously closed Vatican Library, it documents a long history of Vatican anti-Semitism. The Church admits this, which is why Pope John-Paul II was impelled to request the forgiveness of the Jews. The author's main goal, however, is to show that the Vatican bears a more direct responsibility for the Holocaust. It is not intended to be a balanced look at the Church's anti-Semitism. With the exception of ritual sacrifice, it does not look into the truth of statements made about Jews, or at Jewish interactions with Christians. It mainly looks at what the Vatican and Vatican controlled press wrote about Jews.

By focusing on the documents from the Archives and from the various newspaper libraries, such as Civilta cattolica, and L'Osservatore romano, one gets a stark view of the attitude of the Church toward the Jews, and of the suffering the Church caused them because of its anti-Semitism. It documents how the Church treated Jews as inferiors, isolated them into ghettos, supported their expatriation, limited their job opportunities, and demonized them. If one wants to undertand the Vatican's attitude toward Jews in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, this book is must reading.

In the end, however, the book falls short of its goal. There are chapters on France, Austria, Poland, and extensive discussions of the Church in Italy, but little on any Church activity or influence in Germany. Further, while David Kertzer shows a turn in the Church's attitude in the early twentieth century toward the secular anti-Semitism exploited by the Nazis, he acknowledges, but is dismissive of, consistent caveats by the Vatican that despite the problems (according to the Church) with the Jews, Christians cannot harm Jews or destroy their property. All three Popes between World Wars I and II stated this. Showing that the Papal States regulation of Jews provided a model for Nazi and fascist racial laws falls significantly short of showing responsibility (or complicity) for their extermination. Some responsibility for the German Holocaust may be able to be proved, but "The Popes Against the Jews" does not do it.

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Summary: A tremendous addition to a growing field
Review: David Kerzer makes a noteworthy addition to the growing field of study, namely the relationship between the Catholic Church and anti-Semitism in the 19th and 20th century. Kertzer, a historian who was granted considerable access to the Vatican, examines how the church failed to condemn the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and actually added to it.

Among other things he cites the leading roles a number of priests played in propagandizing for anti-Semitic groups, including spreading the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion far and wide. Moreover, he shows that the church actively supported a number of virulently anti Semitic political parties in the late 19th and early 20th century. The ideology of these parties was, in many ways, a breeding ground for the philosophy of national socialism.Kertzer cites several examples of church officials seeing Jews as evil and enemies of the faith.

No doubt many reviewers of this book will condemn it, I suspect most without ever reading it. That is unfortunate. This does nothing to help break with the past, nor does it contribute to honest scholarship. People should read this fine work by a talented historian before they tried to condemn it. If they find fault in his arguments they should cite them before they resort to polemics

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Summary: Vatican's archives..the truth revealed !
Review: In "The Popes Against The Jews", Kertzer meticulously documents how the Vatican and the European Catholic Church created a fertile ground for the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany.

In precise and penetrating studies of recently revealed, previously sealed, archives of the Catholic Church, Kertzer shows that the innate vilification, condemnation and de-humanisation of the Jews by the Catholic Church did nothing but endorse the racial anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime and that it is ludicrous to suggest that such a policy could have had any other consequence than to assist in the extermination of the Jewish people.

These anti-Jewish sentiments are shown to have existed at the highest levels within the Catholic Church. Kertzer also reveals how the ancient �Blood Libel', the evil, abhorrent, ancient myth of Jews using the blood of Christian children to make Matzos at Passover, was widespread within the Vatican. (A myth still propagated in areas of the Mid-East to this day.)

This study shows how the Vatican's recent official statement absolving itself of any involvement is preposterous in face of the vast amount of evidence available. Evidence that the Vatican, in sitting in judgement upon itself, chose to overlook.

What is especially disturbing is that the book describes a human institution consisting of Popes, Cardinals, Bishops, Inquisitors, Monks and Parish Priests, that in following the aforementioned principles actually believed & were convinced that they were doing God's work. Commendably, Kertzer also mentions the many figures who struggled in vain to change the Vatican's policy against the Jews.

The author shows that even if, as the Vatican claims, they never approved the extermination of the Jews or indeed opposed it, their teachings and actions helped make it possible.

This book needs to be read by Christian and Jew alike and faces issues that must be addressed head-on by the Vatican and the Christian Church as a whole if Catholic-Jewish relations are ever to be fully normalized. Might I respectfully suggest some further reading for those with an interest in this subject, in highlighting three other books,-

"A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair" by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, "The Anguish Of The Jews" by Edward H. Flannery & "Hitler's Cross: The Revealing Story of How the Cross of Christ Was Used As a Symbol of the Nazi Agenda" by Erwin Lutzer.

Well written & highly recommended.

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Summary: How the Roman Catholic Church Abetted the Holocaust
Review: In 1987, Pope John Paul II requested the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews to investigate what responsibility, if any, the Roman Catholic Church bore for the programmatic murder of millions of Jews during the Second World War. Eleven years later the Commission delivered its answer in a document entitled "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah." Perhaps not surprisingly, the Commission concluded that the Church bore no responsibility, resting its conclusion on the specious distinction between "anti-Semitism"--the doctrine that grew up in Europe in the nineteenth century and that motivated the Holocaust--and "anti-Judaism," the doctrine that the Church preached for hundreds of years. As David Kertzer summarized the intellectually painful semantic parsing of the Vatican Commission in his Introduction to "The Popes Against the Jews":

"According to the report, a crucial distinction must be made. What arose in the late nineteenth century, and sprouted like a poisonous weed in the twentieth, was 'anti-Semitism, based on theories contrary to the constant teaching of the Church.' This they contrasted with 'anti-Judaism,' long-standing attitudes of mistrust and hostility of which 'Christians also have been guilty,' but which, in the Vatican report, had nothing to do with the hatred of the Jews that led to the Holocaust."

In "The Popes Against the Jews," Kertzer meticulously documents how the Vatican, and the Catholic Church throughout Europe, created fertile ground for the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany. Kertzer's factually-based historical argument demonstrates that, contrary to the 1998 conclusion of the Vatican Commission, a more credible statement of the Church's role was made in 1939 by Roberto Farinacci, a member of Mussolini's Fascist Grand Council, while speaking on "The Church and the Jews":

"We fascist Catholics consider the Jewish problem from a strictly political point of view. . . . But it comforts our souls to know that if, as Catholics, we became anti-Semites, we owe it to the teachings that the Church has promulgated over the past twenty centuries."

"The Popes Against the Jews" is a grim indictment of the Church's antagonistic relationship with the Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kertzer shows how this relationship was particularly heinous in the Vatican states during the years prior to Italian unification, when the religious authority of the Church was combined with secular power. While seemingly little known today, as recently as the mid-nineteenth century the Church in Italy engaged in the kidnapping and forced baptism of Jewish children and the forced ghettoization of the Jews (including the requirement that Jews wear a yellow star). When Vatican political power began to wane in Italy, the Church directed its energies more strongly towards the propagation of the infamous myth of Jewish ritual murder-the "Blood Libel"-and the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," fueling the atavistic fires of anti-Semitism and pogroms among the Catholic faithful in Europe. In all of this, the Catholic press was deeply involved, including, as Kertzer documents, the Vatican-approved "L'Osservatore Romano" and "Civilta Cattolica" (published by the Jesuits).

While there is a polemical edge to Kertzer's history, it is an edge that to this reader, anyway, is unavoidable given the heinous nature of the events and attitudes he documents. Far from a smear campaign against the Church, "The Popes Against the Jews" is a well-written, carefully researched and methodically documented historical argument that enlightens rather than misleads.

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Summary: Opinionated therefore not factual
Review: In the historiography of anti-semitism, there are books a plenty on medieval catholic anti-semitism and there are a number of good books on the intellectual history of German "racial" anti-semitism (e.g. Whiteside's SOCIALISM OF FOOLS, Field's EVANGELIST OF RACE, not to mention myriad books on Richard Wagner), but to date there has no discussion of the catholic church during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kertzer has filled an important gap in our knowledge.

Kertzer takes his starting point with the Vatican document "We Remember" which distinguishes sharply between "racist" anti-semitism which led to the Holocaust and "theological" anti-semitism which was merely unfortunate and deplorable, but no bearing on the Church or her teachings. It furthermore, paints a picture of the Church bravely standing against fascism.

Needless to say Kertzer's research paints a different picture. Kertzer focuses on 3 instances of the vatican's dealing with temporal power: The treatment of jews in the papal states, The involvement with anti-semitic political parties in France, Austria, and Poland, and finally relations with the fascist regimes of Italy and Germany.

Apologists may seek to absolve the papacy as being powerless as to what Catholics may do in other countries, but this argument will not wash when one considers how it *did* run things in the papal states when it did have temporal power. Astonishingly, well past the "englightenment" into the nineteenth century, we see the Inquisition at work, infants kidnapped on the pretext that they had been baptized, compulsory sermons, walled in ghettos, severe restrictions on travel. More so than the France's Ancien Regime, the Vatican seemed to remember everything yet learn nothing from the French Revolution and Napoleon. With astonishing pig-headedness against all decency and common sense, it tries to continue to rule the papal states like it was still the thirteenth century. Not even Metternich, can reason with them!

With the collapse of the papal states and the consolidation of the Italian nation, the vatican does what it does best--strike out at enemies real and imagined--in this case, "jewish freemasonry" (the favorite boogie man of traditionalist catholics to this day). Vatican institutions and publications play a major part in reviving the "blood libel" beginning with the Damascus case of the 1840's, in promoting the idea of an international jewish conspiracy to take over the world, blaming jews for both capitalism and socialism, condeming jewish relgion and spreading lies about the Talmud not to mention the old standbys of deicide and "irrational" hatred of christians and christianity. True the Vatican may not have had a hand in originating "racial" anti-semitism, but it promoted everything else.

Figures such as Eduard Drumont and Karl Lueger are seen in a new light by the relationship (however difficult) that the church maintained with them both.

Finally, there is the dealings with Mussolini and Hitler. Yes, relations with frequently strained. Yes, there was "neopaganism" in fascist ideology. Yes, the Vatican did oppose certain actions of the fascists states. But the Vatican's opposition was narrow and legalistic, focusing only on various concordats and on the issue of baptised jews, while saying nothing about the jews as a whole.

Again we see the distinction that we find in "We Remember" between racial anti-semitism and theological antisemitism, only this time the latter is upheld as entirely legitimate. And while the Church cannot be said to have preached genocide, it is hard to escape that no one single entity did so much to promote hatred of Jews.

I found this book to be engrossing. On every page I found myself saying "oh my god!" I was left with the impression that the fault did not lay with Pius XII was not his alone, but one with an institution for which all attempts to reform will be too little, too late.

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Summary: Evenhanded and Damning
Review: One of the most moving episodes in recent memory was the pilgrimage of Pope John Paul II to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. There, he prayed for forgiveness of Christian crimes against Jews. Despite his rigid conservatism in other respects, the Pope's sincere respect for Judaism is unquestionable and his acknowledgement of Christian anti-semitism of great importance. Despite this important gesture, David Kertzer's book shows that the Catholic Church has not yet forthrightly confronted its past. Drawing heavily on research in recently opened Vatican archives, Kertzer demonstrates the startling and often vicious anti-semitism exhibited consistently by the Vatican. Throughout the 19th century and a good part of the 20th century, the Papacy and the Catholic Church were startlingly reactionary institutions, condemning almost anything - freedom of religion, freedom of speech, rationalistic thought - that smacked of the modernity. Jews, unfortunately, came to be perceived by the Vatican (and many others) as agents of modernity and considerable threats to Catholic Christianity. Combined with traditional, almost medieval elements of anti-semitism, the Vatican became an active proponent of virulent anti-semitism. In the late 19th century, Catholic publications, many of them with the unofficial endorsement of the highest officials in the Vatican, including the Pope, trumpeted anti-semitism. Many of these publications carried great influence and propagated despicable lies, including conspiracy theories about Jewish plans to control the world and the blood libel, the medieval idea that Christian blood was needed for crucial Jewish religious ceremonies. Kertzer shows also that the Vatican gave both covert and overt support to such virulently anti-semitic political movements as the Christian Socialists in Austria. In the 20th century, the Vatican's conservatism and fear of Marxist movements would lead to church into cozy relationships with the Fascist govenment of Italy (the first Italian government ever recognized by the Vatican), the Nazi state, and Francoist Spain. While Church doctrine did not stigmatize Jews as racially different in the sense that Nazi pseudoscience would do, Church publications often stressed the differences between Jews and Christians, stopping just short of the biological stigmatization of Jews. The Church's goal was conversion of Jews, not their extermination, but the Church's clear anti-semitism and influential voice was a major contributor to the widespread anti-semitism that would enable the Holocaust. It is important to note that Kertzer's charges are not inferences or allegations. Thanks to the honesty of Vatican officials, Kertzer and other scholars gained access to Vatican records sealed for decades. These include papal correspondence, confidential diplomatic papers, and secret memoranda. Kertzer's charges are documented very well and the most affecting parts of this book are quotations from primary sources. Kertzer also supports his thesis by a careful reading of the Catholic press and the quotations from these documents are simply shocking. This book is written for a general audience though it possesses more than sufficient scholarly rigor. Kertzer is a clear writer and uses quotations from primary sources liberally and effectively. This is book was written to make a point but this is no ordinary polemic; engaged but dispassionate.

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Summary: Powerful and persuasive
Review: Pope John Paul II recently unveiled the study, "We Remember: reflections on the Shoah," which in effect exonerated the Catholic Church from any culpability for the Holocaust or the hatred that caused it. Kertzer, in this thoughtful and evocative examination of the Church's relationship with Jews, persuasively demonstrates that no reasonable reading of the history could conclude that the Church was so blameless. Indeed, Kertzer's main evidence comes from the Church's own archives, carefully examining several hundred years of the Church's ongoing persecution of the Jews.

The work focuses on two distinct periods, the first when the Church ruled the Papal States, an area of Italy where the Pope exercised temporal as well as ecclesiastical control. This region was almost certainly the most backward and oppressive towards Jews outside of Czarist Russia. While the other European powers embraced modernity, the Church insisted on denying Jews basic civil rights and protections, forcing them to live in Ghettos, wear distinctive yellow stars, banned them from the professions and universities, and bared them from universities. The Nazi Reich adopted all of these rules when it came to power in the 20th century. Kertzer also examines how the Church hierarchy saw liberation and equality for Jews as one of modernity's great evils that should be thwarted all costs, even as it turned out, if it cost the Pope his temporal kingdom.

Kertzer then goes on to examine how after Italian unification denied the Pope his state, the church turned with a vengeance on Jewry, laying out in Catholic papers much of what would become the standard charges of modern anti-Semitism. Jews are portrayed as bent on the murder of Christians to use their blood in satanic rituals. These Catholic papers further claim Jews are in a conspiracy bent on world domination and that Jews, an oppressed minority in Europe for over 1000 years, are actually the rulers of the continent. Again, as with the rules limiting Jewish Freedoms, many of these famous canards became incorporated into modern Anti-Semitic propaganda in the 20th century.

Kertzer's work on the relationship between the rise of Catholic political parties in France and Austria and the rise of modern anti-Semitism is nothing short of seminal. These parties often led and represented in parliaments by priests relied on the worst sort of anti-Jewish vitriol. Portraying Jews as controllers of finance and the media bent on world domination, they fanned much of what became modern anti-Semitism. Kertzer even finds several examples of the parties leaders, clergy, and catholic newspapers exposing the racisialist form of anti-Semitism, that Jews even if converted to Christianity are by nature evil and not to be trusted. Beginning with these sorts of arguments could the Nazi?s eliminationist anti-Semitism be far behind?

The weakness of Kertzer's work is in his dealing with the concept of papal infallibility that took firm root in the 19th Century. Popes Against the Jews is, implicitly, a challenge to the Church's claim of institutional innocence in modern anti-Semitism, laying the blame instead on evil laymen. While a puzzling position to non-Catholics, the position is in fact internally consistent with Catholic theology. The rational goes as follows. Popes and the Church are by definition blameless and innocent, therefore any evil must have been the act of outside forces. The argument may not be satisfying to many, or even just, but Kertzer would have done well to explain it to his reader so they better understood the Church's position.

The tension between the Church and Europe?s Jews is based on 1000 years of the former?s consistent and often violent oppression of the latter. Obfuscation will not heal these deep rifts. Honest appraisals, such as this one, however give a strong basis from which one can begin to understand the history and seek ways to address these past wrongs.

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Summary: uninformed
Review: This book is very painful reading because it makes the case that the Catholic church promoted terrible antisemitic beliefs and practices, which helped lead to the Holocaust, at the highest levels. This is hard to read because it's difficult to think about the pain some in the Church have caused. It's very upsetting to think of what innocent people have had to endure.

My problem with it is that it focuses too narrowly on the popes and not enough on the real problem, which unfortunately in my opinion is Christianity itself. The belief of Christians is that Jews must be "saved", and as long as they hold that belief and have political power, there is the potential for atrocities like the ones described here. The forced baptisms, including removing children from their parents, are awful to read about.

It also seems to me when Constantine took Christianity over (almost 1,700 years ago now) and made it the official religion of Rome, Christianity became corrupted. When you take a religion that champions the oppressed ("neither slave nor free," etc.) and turn it into the most powerful hierarchy on Earth, you set up a terrible conflict between promoting the power structure and following the higher principles of your faith. Additionally, the wielders of religious power are likely to start stomping on people, especially people they dislike...

I agree with the author that meaningful relationships between Jews and non-Jews require honesty about the past, including its terrible aspects.