The Popes Against the Jews [Hardcover]

...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.

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.

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