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

by David I. Kertzer (Author) "THE HISTORY of the Vatican's dealings with the Jews over the past two centuries could well have followed a different path..." (more)
Key Phrases: ritual murder campaign, dei battesimi, forced sermons, Holy Office, Papal States, Holy See (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
The Vatican's 1998 report "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah" purportedly exonerated the Church of complicity in the Holocaust. In The Popes Against the Jews, David I. Kertzer argues that the report is "not the product of a Church that wants to confront its history." Kertzer's book refutes the Church's thesis that the Holocaust grew out of "an anti-Judaism that was essentially more sociological and political than religious." In fact, Kertzer asserts, those dimensions of European anti-Semitism developed "in no small part due to the efforts of the Roman Catholic Church itself." The racial laws of fascist Italy and the Nuremberg Laws of 1930s Germany, for example, were directly modeled on the Church's own rules governing treatment of Jews: until the collapse of the Papal States in the late 19th century, Jews living in these territories were forced to wear yellow badges and live in ghettos. Kertzer's arguments make for compelling reading because they're presented in story form, based on the actions of the popes themselves. Access to long-sealed Church archives allowed Kertzer to reconstruct some of the most shocking, secret conversations that occurred in the Vatican in the decades leading up to World War II. --Michael Joseph Gross --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
A number of excellent studies have recently addressed the political and social role of the Catholic Church in Europe during the Holocaust. Along comes a book that explores the church's role in setting the stage for that Holocaust. If the title of The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism isn't enough of a hint, David Kertzer spells out his thesis in the introduction: Although "the Vatican never approved the extermination of the Jews... the teachings and actions of the Church, including those of the popes themselves, helped make it possible." Kertzer argues that centuries of the church's demonization of the Jews paved the way for genocide.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (September 24, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375706054
• ISBN-13: 978-0375706059
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #99,111 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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53 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Old Bigotries Never Die...., July 9, 2008

By	Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

...but unlike "old soldiers", they seldom fade away. Instead they are refurbished, recycled and reapplied. It's the similarities that I note, between the rise of pre-Shoah anti-Semitism and the new anti-Semitism of Mark Steyn and his ilk - remembering that Arabs are Semitic also - which has led me to re-read this book from 2001 with a new perspective. Before Steyn's "Eurabia", there was the Jewropa of anti-Semitic Catholics such as Father Giuseppe Oreglia, editor of Civiltá Catolica, and Eduard Drumont, author of La France Juive. Before Islamic terrorism, there was ritual murder of Christian children for the baking of matzos - one a real threat, one a horrific libel, but both manipulated un scrupulously for political gain. Before the power of petro-wealth, there was the pelf of banking to explain how the 0.2% of the population of Italy that was Jewish could be running the whole show. Before Steyn's "exposure" of Islam's grand ambition to dominate the world, there were the "Protocols of Zion" and other fabricated evidence of Jewish plans for dominion. I'll return to this comparison later, but first I want to address the theses and the methodology of David Kertzer's convincing indictment of the Popes and the Vatican bureaucracy for having a major role in the rise of violent anti-Jewish inhumanity from roughly 1800 to 1940.

Kertzer states his central thesis succinctly on page 205 of The Popes Against the Jews: "Efforts to deny Catholic Church involvement in the rise of modern anti-Semitism have made much of the presumed lack of a racial element in whatever hostility the Church had directed against the Jews in the past. As embraced by the 1998 Vatican Commission report on the Shoah, this argument consists of three parts: (1) One of the defining features of modern anti-Semitism is the view that the Jews constitute a separate, and inferior, race; (2) the Church has always condemned racial thinking, for it goes against the Church's universal mission; and so (3) the Church could not have been involved in the development of modern anti-Semitism." In other words, Kertzer regards the Vatican's We Remember statement as a thorough white-wash, and he marshals example after example from the recently available Vatican archives to prove his point. On the next page, he continues: "...even if we identify modern anti-Semitism with racism, it does not follow that racism id the only significant feature of modern anti-Semitism. In fact, there are other, equally important components of the ideology that produced the first modern anti-Semitic political movements in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Any list would have to include the following: There is a secret Jewish conspiracy; the Jews seek to conquer the world; the Jews are an evil sect who seek to do Christians harm; Jews are by nature immoral....Jews control the press; Jews control the banks...Jews are responsible for Communism; Judaism commands its adherents to murder...Jews seek to destroy the Christian religion; Jews are unpatriotic, ever ready to sell their country out to the enemy; for the larger society to be properly protected, Jews must be segregated and their rights limited." Kertzer documents precisely and amply that every one of these assertions was made by the highest levels of the Vatican hierarchy again and again under Popes Pius IX and Leo XIII. Returning to my comparison of then and now, consider how easily one can substitute "Islamicists" for Jews in any of the items of that list, with the result of sounding just like Steyn and his scare-monger crew.

Another sample, from page 178; Kertzer writes: "L'Univers, the oldest and most respected Catholic paper in France, and the one with the closest ties to the Vatican, published its own rave review of Jewish France. Drumont, the priest who authored the article enthused, had the courage to tell the truth. `We French Christians are all, in effect, vanquished, conquered, expropriated from our own country and our own faith, by a race of cosmopolites, of cunning intelligence, of greedy soul... The Jew is master of all.'" Once again, notice how familiar this kind of diatribe sounds with just the substitution of one word, Muslim for Jew.

In the same vein, just as Jews were consistently confounded with Liberals in the period of Kertzer's study, using the one label to smear the other interchangeably, so according to the anti-Semites of the Steyn stain, it's the liberals again who are blind to the threat of Islamofascism. Funny, isn't it, how the Jews could have been both the bloated capitalist exploiters of the Catholic masses and the radical anarchist unionist communist Liiibeeerallls!

It would be absurd to accuse the Catholic Hierarchy of being the sole source of modern anti-Semitic violence - just as absurd as to blame the Presidents and Congresses of the USA solely for the genocide against American Indians in the 19th Century. In both cases, the most culpable perpetrators of racial violence were next-door neighbors. But it would be equally absurd to exculpate Andrew Jackson of ethnic cleansing as to apologize for Pius XI's advocacy of the re-ghettoization laws of Italy during his papacy. Understand, please, that Kertzer is a historian, not a polemicist. He is not seeking an ultimate declaration of guilt. Rather, he is probing the documentary evidence that leading Catholics, including Popes and their Prime Ministers, consciously - one might even say conscientiously - disseminated anti-Jewish ideas and doctrines that contributed to the persecution, expropriation, and attempted extermination of the Jewish people of Europe. Frankly, Kertzer's case seems irrefutable.

Where there's smoke, there's fire. No doubt, but I have a corollary: where there's fire, there's usually smoke. If you take the centuries of anti-Jewish violence in Europe to be the fire, then the persistent vilification and slander of the Jews by the Christian clergy, Catholic and Protestant, must be the smoke... or the smoke screen behind which the guilty tried to hide.

A long, detailed, painful book to read! I suggest taking alook at other reviews, especially Jay Young's, before deciding whether you need to read it as much as I think you do.

83 of 113 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tremendous addition to a growing field, September 19, 2001

By	J. A Magill (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (Hardcover)

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

39 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars How the Roman Catholic Church Abetted the Holocaust, February 1, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (Hardcover)

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.