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Review Essay* War without End: The Popes and the Jews between Polemic and History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 November 2012
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The Popes against the Jews. This declarative statement certainly makes for a scintillating title, as David Kertzer no doubt appreciated when he chose it for his book on the papacy's role in the emergence of modern anti-Semitism. Published in 2001, Kertzer's The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism quickly emerged as one of the most critically acclaimed and contentious books of its genre and generation. It took direct aim at a thesis being proffered at the time by the Vatican positing a fundamental distinction between the traditional “religious” anti-Judaism of Christian provenance, and the modern, politicized racial anti-Semitism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which constituted the catalytic element of a noxious brew of ideas and resentments that led to the Final Solution. The anti-Judaism / anti-Semitism distinction, Kertzer argues, “will simply not survive historical scrutiny.”1 While acknowledging that the Catholic church could not be held responsible per se for the Holocaust, even less for having approved the exterminatory policies of the Hitler regime and its collaborators, Kertzer imputes to the modern popes—especially those of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a significant degree of responsibility for having contributed to the social and cultural milieu in which the Final Solution was conceived and attempted. Although the Vatican never sanctioned the campaign to eliminate European Jews, Kertzer writes, “the teachings and actions of the Church, including those of the popes themselves, helped make it possible.” In fact, Kertzer maintains that the Vatican was one of the major “architects” of a new and distinctly modern form of anti-Semitism that drew inspiration and moral authority from traditional religious apologetics to buttress a radical secular politics of anti-Jewish repression and exclusion. The Holocaust, he concludes, “came at the end of a long road…. [I]t was a road that the Catholic Church did a great deal to help build.”2
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References
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6 The pope evoked his 1979 statement in 1995, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. See “Message of His Holiness John Paul II on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the End of the Second World War in Europe,” (accessed 22 June 2012). Online: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/1995/may/documents/hf_jp-ii_mes_08051995_50th-end-war-europe_en.html.Google Scholar
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13 Russell Hittinger goes so far as to minimize the document, calling it a “pamphlet” and wondering why David Kertzer would see fit to “quarrel” with it in such substantive ways while largely ignoring a vast and exhaustive range of more authoritative papal writings. See his review essay of , Kertzer'sThe Popes against the Jews titled “Desperately Seeking Culprits: Who Unleashed Anti-Semitism?” Journal of the Historical Society 2 (2002) 215–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here at 215, 216, 221–22.
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73 In Were the Popes against the Jews?, Lawler levels similar charges against historian John Connelly from the University of California, Berkeley in a sharp disagreement over how to interpret the Vatican's response to the 1938 Italian Fascist racial laws regulating marriage. Lawler crosses the line, and not for the first time, when he questions Connelly's “state of mind” and suggests that his interlocutor is suffering from “some kind of synaptic disconnect,” hence what Lawler calls the “schizoid character” of Connelly's “ploy.” See , Lawler, Were the Popes against the Jews?, 258–60Google Scholar. The exchange between Connelly and Lawler played itself out in the pages of Commonweal (Lawler, Justus George, “Benedict, German Catholics, and the Holocaust” 135:12 [2008] 10–11Google Scholar). See also John Connelly, “In Sheep's Clothing,” review by Hubert Wolf, “Pope and Devil: The Vatican's Archives and the Third Reich,” in The New Republic, 8 February 2011 [http://www.tnr.com/print/book/review/pope-devil-hubert-wolf, accessed 28 May 2012] and , Connelly's “Reformer and Racialist,” in Commonweal 135:1 (2008) 10–13Google Scholar, at 10.
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