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Title: The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism by David I. Kertzer ISBN: 0-375-40623-9 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 18 September, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.97 (30 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Opinionated therefore not factual
Comment: This work represents all that is wrong with certain elements of the liberal establishment. Instead of acknowleding what's good in the Church, they insist on continuing their campaign of hatred against one of the remaining bastion of decency in this world...But again it is so fashionnable to be anti-catholic in certain groups nowadays...
Rating: 5
Summary: a missing link
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Powerful and persuasive
Comment: 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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Title: The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara by David I. Kertzer ISBN: 0679768173 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 30 June, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews -- A History by James Carroll ISBN: 0618219080 Publisher: Mariner Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII by John Cornwell ISBN: 0140296271 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 03 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany by Guenter Lewy ISBN: 0306809311 Publisher: DaCapo Press Pub. Date: February, 2000 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: A Moral Reckoning : The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty ofRepair by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen ISBN: 0375414347 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 29 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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