Were the Popes Against the Jews?

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Introduction.........................................................................viii1. From Agreement to Discord.........................................................12. The (Supernatural) Power of the Press.............................................223. Anti-Semitism vs. Anti-Judaism....................................................484. Satanic Synagogues and Jewish Dogs................................................675. Ritual Murder and the Duplicity of Leo XIII.......................................966. Ritual Murder and the Villainy of Pius X..........................................1217. Popes, Poles, and Pogroms.........................................................1478. Pius XI, Pius XII, and Anti-anti-Semitism.........................................1949. Righteous Petitions and Doctored Texts............................................238Annex: Anti-Semitism and Theological Arrogance.......................................28810. Ideals, Institutions, and Reform — Toward a Conclusion.....................298Acknowledgments......................................................................372Index................................................................................374

Chapter One

When the first reviews of David I. Kertzer's The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism appeared in the fall of 2001, the book's enthusiastic reception was not surprising. For more than half a century no historical event had so bewildered the general public, as well as scholars and journalists, as the unforgettable mass murder of six million European Jews. Regardless of the vast number of words devoted to exploring that unique catastrophe, anything new that shed even a small ray of light on it could only be universally welcomed. It merely heightened interest in Kertzer's book that it appeared in the immediate aftermath of a number of other widely read studies that had severely criticized the role of the papacy and the Catholic Church during the wartime period.

At the time of the book's publication, I was finishing Popes and Politics: Reform, Resentment, and the Holocaust, which appeared the following year. I had looked at Kertzer's book briefly, and it soon became clear that few historical assertions were less deniable than his opinion that Christian teaching was the soil in which the evil of racist anti-Semitism flourished. But it soon also became clear that a large element of the enthusiasm for the book among Catholics stemmed less from how it validated that opinion than from how it could be enlisted in such causes as reform of the American church and condemnation of the ecclesiastical structures created by various recent popes, particularly Pius XII and John Paul II. Since this reformist theme is a recurrent motif in the chapters that follow, how it was related to Kertzer's book merits a brief examination.

Among his early enthusiastic reviewers was Garry Wills in The New York Times (September 23, 2001), about whom I said in Popes and Politics:

Garry Wills writes of the author's "sickening task" covering "a stretch of two centuries" while not "giving way to the indignation most readers must feel," and resulting in a "staggeringly thorough job." To all of which anyone would probably say "amen," since the church's role in the horrors of anti-Semitism is a theme on which too much repetition or too many variations — of which Kertzer's book is clearly another — can never be enough.

Wills cited the eminent British historian of the modern church Owen Chadwick to the effect that Pius IX was the only pope who would have canonized the sixteenth-century inquisitor Pedro Arbués. The review ended withWills's conclusion that "there was only one pope who would have beatified Pius IX — John Paul II." Since Kertzer had mentioned the latter pope only a few times in the entire book, mainly regarding his progress in ecumenical matters and his advocacy of truth telling, his emergence at the end of the review was something of a surprise.

Similarly with Pius XII, whose presence could hardly be overlooked since he put in an appearance by way of a laudatory jacket blurb from the author of Hitler's Pope, John Cornwell. The importation of Pius XII into the ambit of the book was also an unexpected development, since Kertzer himself was dismissive of the role of that pope. "The debate over what Pius XII might have done during the Holocaust is a distraction." "With all the attention given to what he did or did not say about the Nazi-led campaign against the Jews — his influence was at best limited." According to Kertzer, Pius's wartime deeds or misdeeds diverted attention from "the more important question, what did the Catholic Church do to help bring on the Holocaust in the first place?" The response in Popes and Politics was: "'Much too much' is the obvious answer of history — an answer which has been reaffirmed again and again by the second Vatican Council and by two popes." As I mentioned in the introduction, it was only a few years later, after the appearance of the paperback edition of Popes and Politics (2004), that I finally got around to a closer examination of the book and its author.

I began with a brief search for information on Kertzer's own website and on that of his publisher. Both of these supplied the conventional biographical and bibliographical data along with interviews, quotations, links to other comments about the author, and reviews of the book itself. Two quotations — from personal interviews with the author — stood out. The first was the following: "If you're interested in what role the Church played in making the Holocaust possible, it's decades and decades of demonization of Jews." Some readers might have paused at such a sweeping statement being made about "the Church" in general, and some would probably cavil at the word "demonization," but the gist of the observation seemed as unexceptionable as the book's broader thesis mentioned above. However, what was surprising about Kertzer's quotation was its apparent generosity regarding that demonizing church. Most people familiar with the history of Christianity from its dark night of the soul in the Middle Ages and on into the twentieth century would have thought that the author's reference to decades and decades was a generous understatement; certainly this would have been true for those who wholeheartedly embraced the confession attributed to Pope John XXIII: "Across the centuries our brother Abel has lain in the blood which we drew, or shed tears we caused by forgetting Christ's love." But after examining the book itself, it became clear that the author's chronological frame was not intended to exonerate nearly a millennium and a half of Christian abuse of Jews, but rather to emphasize the responsibility of five recent popes for, in Kertzer's words, putting Europe's Jews on "the road to the Holocaust." Those popes were Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, Pius XI, and, to a lesser degree, Benedict XV.

Nevertheless, I wouldn't have decided to analyze The Popes Against the Jews had it not been for the doubts raised by the second and much longer quotation I have already mentioned — also from a personal interview with Kertzer and available on his publisher's website. The material there related to the contention that a modern pope on a public occasion had explicitly referred to Jews as dogs that were molesting Christians. Here is the passage from the interview, which is followed by a step-by-step description, tedious but necessary, of the process that raised my suspicions to the point where I decided to undertake a critical examination of a book to which I had originally been sympathetic.

What bothers me is the misrepresentation of history and an unwillingness to confront the past truthfully. Let me give a small example. A couple of days before the beatification of Pope Pius IX in September 2000, I did a live national Italian radio debate with a monsignor from the Vatican congregation for the promotion of saints. In that debate, in response to the claim that Pius IX was kindly disposed to the Jews, I cited his remarks at an audience in 1871 in which he referred to Rome's Jews as "dogs" who were running barking through the streets, molesting the good people of the city. The next day, at a Vatican press conference, in response to a journalist's question about my remarks, the Vatican official said that no responsible historian would put any credence in what I had said. When the journalist subsequently contacted me about the quote, I referred him to a volume titled "The Speeches of Pio IX" published by the Vatican in 1872, edited by a priest. In addition to giving him the page number where the quote about the dogs was to be found, I pointed out the page of the preface which reported that the Pope himself had read and approved the proofs of the book before publication. If there were any apology I am interested in from the Vatican at the moment, I guess it would be for what was said about me at that press conference. But I'm not holding my breath. Although readers had no way of knowing what was said about Kertzer at the press conference — because he doesn't tell them — they do get a sense of the complacent mood of the author at his triumph over the obnoxious monsignor. However, even that mood might merely have come from the narrator's gratification at disclosing what he clearly viewed as an important historical fact. But then that concession comes up against the wisecrack about "not holding my breath" — which also didn't quite jibe with the mood conveyed by the offhand "what bothers me." Another seed of suspicion was sowed by the comment about the narrator's truth-seeking goals and those of the unnamed others who implicitly were, if not in search of misrepresentations, then apparently seeking something less than "truth." Nor was that tone entirely dissipated by the narrator's apparent reticence ("a small example") about what he clearly regarded as a large issue.

But it was not just Kertzer's smugness that gave pause. I was left wondering why over a period of what appeared to be at least two, and more likely, three days (the broadcast; the press conference; the journalist's "subsequent contact") hadn't Kertzer, rather than engaging in what even by his own description certainly sound like convoluted exchanges, just shown the disputed passage to the inquiring reporter and/or the insulting Vatican official, and gotten it all over with? Why not just make the misguided monsignor confront the past by exhibiting, perhaps with only a modest flourish, before the dumbfounded prelate's very eyes the infamous statement itself? Instead, Kertzer referred to the volume, provided the title and publication date, mentioned its editorship by a priest, gave the page number of the fateful quotation, and pointed out the page in the preface that indicated the pope's approval of what was in the book — all of which seemed an oddly circuitous way of making a simple point.

It was that last clause about "pointing out the page of the preface" that heightened even these secondary suspicions about what was going on. I couldn't imagine how anyone could do all this without having in hand a copy of the book. It is difficult to believe that Kertzer was fortunately armed with a copy of the page from the preface — but not a copy of the page with the statement about those molestation-prone Jewish "dogs." It should have been the most straightforward thing in the world to just display at the time of this confrontation the incriminating page — and have done with the whole wrangle. Presenting the page with the complete text of the pope's slur would certainly have led to the author's victory in the eyes of everyone involved: the journalist, the monsignor, and the presumably sizeable audience of observers and bystanders, some of whom must have been thinking — as was I when first reading the description of the confrontation — surely somewhere, even in the Eternal City, there was a Xerox machine.

The accusation about a pope calling Jews "dogs" will be scrutinized in detail later, since from it flow a whole series of other bewildering matters that relate to the story that Kertzer has to tell. In the more immediate context, from it also flowed the decision to read carefully The Popes Against the Jews. It particularly bothered me that the author of this book, whose central point as far as I understood it was undeniable, would have appeared so devious about so relatively minor a matter. Apart from the cocksureness of his narration, this also raised doubts as to whether he had actually seen the text of the document he kept referring to, or whether he had lifted the information — as proved to be true — from some secondary source. In any case, the whole incident didn't seem quite compatible with his initial concern over misrepresentations of history by those who were "unwilling to confront the past truthfully."

What follows will be the only place in this book where I elaborate anything even remotely autobiographical. But since I have started writing in the first person, and because the preceding discussion takes off from a personal reaction, I will continue in this vein for the next few pages. After nearly half a century of passing judgment on manuscripts for the five publishing imprints of which I had been editor (not to speak of an even longer period of correcting a wide range of undergraduate and graduate student papers), I felt it would be possible to make a reasonably impartial and fair assessment of the book, even though my view of the author was now somewhat colored by the bombast of his encounter with the testy Roman monsignor. Anybody familiar with publishing realizes that a judgment on a manuscript — particularly a controversial one — can't be made on the basis of a given author's personal traits, much less on the compatibility of the author's views with those of an editorial reader.

Over a period of time most editors of general trade books — basically meaning here serious nonfiction — acquire their own techniques for maintaining a sense of objectivity by reining in strong personal biases and opinions. "Technique" is used by design, since what is involved is more an acquired skill in the practical craft of willing one's way to open-mindedness than any kind of ad hoc effort at adopting an alien intellectual position. I don't want to make this process sound too arcane or recherché, because basically it is mainly a matter of respectful and attentive reading — done as speedily as possible. Recent theorists of the art of interpretation, usually following a book that I published, Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method, have maintained that it is impossible to read about any familiar and controversial subject with complete openness. Nevertheless, experience has shown that it is possible to block out prejudices that relate to specific controversial themes — otherwise decisions to publish would all be made on the basis of personally favored positions. In The Much Too Promised Land (2008), Aaron DavidMiller, the Jewish American diplomat who has been involved in decades of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, and who won the admiration of both parties, says simply, "try to determine where your biases lie, and overcome them." If you have to do it, you will.

As to the above emphasis on speed, it has nothing to do with time-is-money concerns. Once a decision to read a complete manuscript is reached — usually a matter of simply weighing credentials, book proposal, outline, and so on, and a thumb-through of the first few chapters — the next goal is to get a sense of the book's argument and organization, and most important of all, a sense of its author's integrity. The purpose of this quick read is to acquire a "feel" for the work as a rhetorical whole, while concomitantly exposing to the reader anything that might appear slightly unexpected, anything that didn't harmonize with the larger picture, anything, that is, which would set off even a faint vibration in what might be thought of as the seismograph of the mind.

What this comes down to is the practice of a kind of engaged detachment not unlike that described by Linda Stone, an expert in "computer culture," as "continuous partial attention." In the present instance, this means that quickly grasping the overall drift and structure of the text is the primary object of attention, while remaining aware of what is taking place on the borders of one's consciousness is the more or less secondary object — since it is on those borders that lurk aspects of the text hinting at something amiss. These hints often take the form of errors in spelling and punctuation, or of less blatant mistakes having to do with grammar, logic, and chronology. In themselves these may be insignificant and readily corrected, but they are often a clue to something beneath the surface of the author's presentation that demands greater attention. The basic assumption behind this entire process is that any such minor disruptive element in the text of an experienced writer — and here I return to David I. Kertzer — is a kind of "tic" that betrays preoccupation with some rhetorical or logical stratagem that may reveal more about the author than his explicit statements.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Were the Popes Against the Jews?by Justus George Lawler Copyright © 2012 by Justus George Lawler. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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