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

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...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.

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

Books on what Pius XII did or did not do for the Jews during World War II seem to be a dime a dozen these days. We have books by John Cornwell, Susan Zucotti, Ronald Rychlak, Margaret Marchione, and many others trying to prove either that Pius was silent in the face of genocide, or that he did more to help the Jews than anyone else at the time. According to Kertzer, this attention is misplaced, since it ignores how the Vatican propagated anti-semitism. Specifically, this happened from Paul IV's order to confine Jews in Papal States to ghettoes, down to Pius XI. Kertzer quotes from a relevant passage of "We Remember," a Vatican statement on the holocaust: "By the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, Jews generally had achieved an equal standing with other citizens in most States and a certain number of them held influential positions in society. But in that same historical context, notably in the 19th century, a false and exacerbated nationalism took hold. In a climate of eventful social change, Jews were often accused of exercising an influence disproportionate to their numbers. Thus there began to spread in varying degrees throughout most of Europe an anti-Judaism that was essentially more sociological and political than religious." He goes on to note that "this argument, sadly, is not the product of a Church that wants to confront its history. If Jews acquired equal rights in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was only over the angry, loud, and indeed indignant protests of the Vatican and the Church." (p. 6)

In 1551, Paul IV, arguably the most hated Pope in history, issued an edict requiring Jews residing in the Papal States to live in ghettoes. They were denied most rights, were restricted in what professions to choose, banned from attending universities, had to wear Jew badges, and on and on. During the Carnival season, several of them had to dress up and make a humiliating public offering in the streets of Rome, and they had to attend "Saturday sermons" in which priests attacked their religion, on a rotating basis (though Pius IX abolished these two practices). When Napoleon invaded the Papal States, he threw the gates of the ghettoes open, but when he was defeated, the Jews were forced back in. After the end of the Napoleonic wars, the church was at a turning point- it could adapt to the modern world or continue with medieval practices. One man who was pushing for the former was Cardinal Consalvi. He argued that to drive the Jews back into the ghettoes would be "to give ammunition to those who argued that the papacy was an anachronism, a hopeless relic of medieval society." Unfortunately, Pius VII did not listen to him. He saw the Jews as forever degraded for crucifying Christ, and he was backed in this view from all other Cardinals than Consalvi. The ghettoes continued to exist until the final dissolution of the Papal States in 1870 when Italian Nationalist forces captured Rome.

In 1880, Civilita Cattolica, the Vatican newspaper whose articles recieve approval by the Pope's Secretary of State, kicked off an anti-semitic campaign. "Here modern anti-Semitism rises directly out of older Church views; the Jews' emancipation is the catalyst that transforms the earlier forms into the new. `With religious liberty proclaimed, and citizenship conceded even to the Jews, the Jews took advantage of it...to become our masters. Indeed, today it is the stock market that has political control, and this is in the hands of the Jews. What governs is Masonry, and this too is directed by the Jews. What shapes and reshapes public opinion is the press, and this also is in large part inspired and subsidized by the Jews." (p. 145) In addition, the Vatican gave overt or covert support to anti-semitic movement in Germany, Austria, and France.

What does all this mean? Well, that whether Pius XII was "silent" or not is really beside the point. The Vatican's views on the Jews and its role in supporting modern anti-semitism helped create the climate that made the holocaust possible. This is an essential book for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of the Vatican and the holocaust than the "Pius Wars" books offer.

In 1998, the Vatican issued a report in which it denied responsibility for the Holocaust. The report argued that the Church's own anti-Semitism was religious rather than racial, and in any event that Catholic anti-Semitism had diminished over the centuries.

This book attacks that argument. Kertzner points out that Catholic media (including newspapers fairly close to the Vatican) aggressively slandered Jews, using the same arguments as racial anti-Semites.

Just as racial anti-Semites argued that Jews were trying to take over the world, so did Catholic media. Just as racist anti-Semites blamed Jews for both Communist violence and capitalist greed, so did Catholic media. Just as racist anti-Semites called Jews unpatriotic, so did Catholic media. Just as racist anti-Semites blamed Jews for anti-Jewish violence, so did Catholic media. Just as racist anti-Semites called for Jews to be stripped of civic and economic equality, so did Catholic media.

The more hostile reviews of this book point out that 20th-century popes did not themselves engage in these attacks, and thus argue that the Church should not be blamed for the words of some of its clerics. And Kertzner does not really focus that much on the words of the Popes themselves (which is why I think the title is slightly misleading). On the other hand, some newspapers close to the Vatican were quite venomous; L'Osservatore Romano (the Vatican daily paper) and Civilta Cattolica (whose director was approved by the Vatican) often published ugly attacks on Jews. For example, in 1893, a Civilta Cattolica article claimed that Jews murdered Christians for ritual purposes, stating that "the Jew sucked Christian blood ... out of principle, in obedience to their law." Jews could not win in the world of anti-Semitic Church media: if they stuck to Jewish law they were literally vampires, and if they entered the national economy they were economic vampires!

Were these hateful attacks responsible for the Holocaust? Not directly; many Nazis had little use for any form of religion. But Kertzner suggests that by spreading hatred of Jews for decades, Catholic anti-Semites made it easier for European Catholics to support and to colloborate with Hitler. Had there been less Catholic anti-Semitism, Hitler still might have risen to power- but more Catholics would have actively resisted Hitler. Would such additional resistance have been enough to stop (or substantially mitigate) the Holocaust? We'll never know.

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.

David Kertzer's book makes many valid points, and I agree that this is a part of history that should not be forgotten. But he also omits many relevant facts.

His errors include:

* Assuming that the current Pope must be behind everything done by Catholics living in Rome. For example, re-read his assertion that the Popes must have agreed with all the antisemitic statements in "Civilta Cattolica" -- it makes no sense. CC was a newspaper published by the Jesuit Order, not the Vatican, and certainly not the Pope himself. Do you think John Paul II personally approves of every article in Commonweal today?

* He describes how Pope Pius IX was at first very friendly to Jews and abolished the ghetto in Rome. Then came the revolutions of 1848, and the Pope was kicked out of Rome. The revolution eventually subsided and the Pope was allowed to come back to the Vatican. Upon his return, Pius IX was furious at the Jews of Rome and re-established the ghetto laws. Why? Kertzer doesn't say. Surely an obvious possibility is that many Roman Jews had been involved in the revolution. (This is in many _other_ history books, and I hardly think it's slanderous -- most people I know would become revolutionaries if kept in a ghetto.) This incident (and many similar ones) show that Kertzer simply wants to record anti-Jewish things done by the Popes and others at the Vatican, without explaining the reasons for these actions. (I am NOT saying that the deeds of any Jews justified the response! Even if every Jewish person in Rome was involved in the revolution, which they weren't, that wouldn't justify the ghetto. But if you don't mention these actions at all, the story doesn't make any sense.)

I certainly don't think Kertzer has malicious motives. And there is some good history in his book. But if you want to see a more balanced picture, I suggest you start with Hannah Arendt's classic "The Rise of Totalitarianism, Part One: Antisemitism".

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.

Many Catholics turn blind eye to the obvious problems in the Pope's and the Catholic Church's role in the Holocaust--starting with the Church's *failures* to act as an institution against immoral persecution and murder. This text is a balanced and reasonable exploration of the issues that any Catholic should welcome in an effort to come to terms with the past and to move constructively forward.

This is a superb work that details, in a scholarly fashion, the history of Papal anti-Semitism. To say that the Vatican did not cause the Holocaust is certainly true, but almost two millenia of disparagement and open hatred did a great deal to prepare the ground. I myself wrote to a Cardinal of the Church here in California to ask for the current Church position on ritual murder. The reply was, "We have nothing further to say." So times change but opinions continue. The work is both a careful history and a warning that seemingly "harmless" prejudice and religious bigotry can lead to unwanted and horrendous circumstances.

In 1990, the Catholic church attempted to absolve itself of guilt in the persecution and murder of Europe's Jews by publishing a defense based on documents from its archives. There was something odd about one of them.

It was a report on pogroms in Poland in the early '20s by an extraordinary Vatican investigator, Achille Ratti. While other documents were quoted in full, parts of Ratti's report was paraphrased. It appeared to be opposed to the pogroms, and this was important because Ratti soon become Pope Pius XI, whose term coincided with the emergence of Nazi anti-Jewish policies, and because Pius IX was presented as the pope who was sympathetic to the fate of the Jews and who had worked, though quietly, to protect them.

A few years later, when the archives were opened, the reason for the paraphrase was obvious: Ratti's opinions about Jews and what should be done about the "Jewish problem" were indistinguishable from those of any other vicious antisemite. And, particularly, as David Kertzer shows in "The Popes against the Jews," from any other pope of the past two centuries.

The argument, still heard, is that the traditional, medieval Catholic antisemitism was different in kind from the modern, exterminationist antisemitism, supposedly a new thought derived from nationalism, skepticism, liberalism and science.

While it is true that, when push came to shove, the church said it opposed murder, Catholic antisemitism was eliminationist: the Vatican wanted to revoke the civil and economic rights of Jews and to make Catholic Europe judenrein: Hitler's stated policy, too, up till 1941.

The German Nuremburg decrees in 1935 and the Italian racial laws in 1938 were copies of the Jewish regulations imposed by the popes in the Papal States until the Liberals extinguished the church's civil power in 1870.

These regulations were policed with a savagery that even a Nazi would have admired. Any decent reader's heart will crack reading the horrible fate of little Lazzaro Anticoli.

Some of the chapter titles give the flavor of what the English historian A.J.P. Taylor called "the most obscurantist regime in Europe": "Forced Baptism"; "Ritual Murder Makes a Comeback"; "Jewish Vampires"; "Ritual Murder and the Popes in the Twentieth-century."

While Kertzer believes that a big part of the motive for the sustained campaign of lies and vilification of the Jews by the Vatican was a practical political strategy - as the franchise was extended in more and more countries, embracing antisemitism was a proven vote-getter - it is also the case that every pope, and virtually every bishop and priest was completely convinced that matzoh had to contain the blood of an innocent Christian child.

Actions speak louder than words. Because Catholic doctrine is that anyone, even a pagan, can perform a valid and effective baptism by following the correct form of words and water, a strange story came out of Egypt.

Catholic papers reported that Jews there had been unable to kidnap a Christian, so in desperation they got a Muslim boy, baptized him and murdered him.

High-ranking commentators, with direct ties to the pope, opined that while reprehensible, this event did have its positive aspect: At least the Muslim boy died Catholic and was saved from damnation.

That this crazy tale was expected to be taken seriously is proof enough of Kertzer's theme.

Defenders of the church invariably point out the the Vatican had disputes with the Nazis.

In itself, this proves nothing. A church that would arrogate to itself all civil power will have disputes with
any government. The Catholic church was more comfortable with fascists than any other regimes. It was implacable in its refusal to deal with either liberal or socialist governments. But when fascists began to control states, the Vatican rushed to regularize relations with them.

Kertzer, however, has an even more subtle explanation, worth quoting in full:

"The Austrian bishop's statement was, in many ways,characteristic of the Roman Catholic Church's approach to the rise of fascism in Germany and Austria. Hitler and his minions represented a threat to the church, for they sought to replace popular loyalty to a Catholic worldview and Catholic liturgy with worship of the state, the party and the regime. But the antisemitism of the Nazis was a problem for the church in the 1930s not because of its negative portrayal of the Jews, much of which was shared by the church itself; the problem stemmed on the contrary, from the danger that the Nazis would exploit an appeal that had previously been identified with the church to attract Catholics to a non-Christian cause. In denouncing Nazism, church leaders were eager to show people that they did not have to join the Nazis to be against the Jews. The old church distinction between the good, Catholic antisemitism and the bad pagan antisemitism was once more trotted out."

Or, as a leading Catholic polemicist wrote, Catholics should not "oppress the Jews unjustly."

Just and Catholic oppression was admirable.

It should be noted also that not only is Kertzer's scholarship and use of recently opened archives outstanding, but his writing is, for an American historian, unusually graceful and clear.