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The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism Hardcover – September 18, 2001
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Pope John Paul II, as part of his effort to improve Catholic-Jewish relations, has himself called for a clear-eyed historical investigation into any possible link be-tween the Church and the Holocaust. An important sign of his commitment was the recent decision to allow the distinguished historian David I. Kertzer, a specialist in Italian history, to be one of the first scholars given access to long-sealed Vatican archives.
The result is a book filled with shocking revelations. It traces the Vatican’s role in the development of modern anti-Semitism from the nineteenth century up to the outbreak of the Second World War. Kertzer shows why all the recent attention given to Pope Pius XII’s failure to publicly protest the slaughter of Europe’s Jews in the war misses a far more important point. What made the Holocaust possible was groundwork laid over a period of decades. In this campaign of demonization of the Jews—identifying them as traitors to their countries, enemies of all that was good, relentlessly pursuing world domination—the Vatican itself played a key role, as is shown here for the first time.
Despite its focus, this is not an anti-Catholic book. It seeks a balanced judgment and an understanding of the historical forces that led the Church along the path it took.
Inevitably controversial, written with devastating clarity and dispassionate authority, The Popes Against
the Jews is a book of the greatest importance.
- Print length355 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherKnopf
- Publication dateSeptember 18, 2001
- Dimensions6.55 x 1.25 x 9.54 inches
- ISBN-100375406239
- ISBN-13978-0375406232
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Review
"David Kertzer's provocative new book challenges the widely accepted distinction between Catholic anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism. He moves beyond recent attacks on the Vatican's record during WWII, indicting not just Pius XII but the entire tradition out of which he emerged. Many will disagree with Kertzer's conclusions, but no one will be able to ignore this disturbing history of the Papacy and the Jews in the modern era." --Brian Porter, Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan and author of When Nationalism Began to Hate
"This is a fascinating study of an important and controversial subject. As well as being both polemical and highly readable it is scholarly and contains a great deal of unfamiliar information from the recently opened Vatican archives." --Denis Mack Smith
"Once again Kertzer has produced impressive evidence of the part played by the papacy in the growth of anti-Semitism in the twentieth century. Painful as his historical narrative may be for Catholics, it is a necessary prelude to a true reconciliation between the Catholic Church and Judaism." --John Cornwell, author of Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII
"This is a powerful and incisive analysis of the ways in which the Vatican and the Catholic Church helped to nurture and shape the emergence of modern anti-Semitic movements that made the Holocaust possible. With the help of solid documentation and clear exposition, Kertzer sweeps away the apologetic myths that have sought to disculpate the church from direct complicity in the tragic fate of European Jewry."
---Professor Robert S. Wistrich, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, author of Hitler and the Holocaust
From the Inside Flap
Pope John Paul II, as part of his effort to improve Catholic-Jewish relations, has himself called for a clear-eyed historical investigation into any possible link be-tween the Church and the Holocaust. An important sign of his commitment was the recent decision to allow the distinguished historian David I. Kertzer, a specialist in Italian history, to be one of the first scholars given access to long-sealed Vatican archives.
The result is a book filled with shocking revelations. It traces the Vatican s role in the development of modern anti-Semitism from the nineteenth century up to the outbreak of the Second World War. Kertzer shows why all the recent attention given to Pope Pius XII s failure to publicly protest the slaughter of Europe s Jews in the war mi
From the Back Cover
"David Kertzer's provocative new book challenges the widely accepted distinction between Catholic anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism. He moves beyond recent attacks on the Vatican's record during WWII, indicting not just Pius XII but the entire tradition out of which he emerged. Many will disagree with Kertzer's conclusions, but no one will be able to ignore this disturbing history of the Papacy and the Jews in the modern era." --Brian Porter, Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan and author of When Nationalism Began to Hate
"This is a fascinating study of an important and controversial subject. As well as being both polemical and highly readable it is scholarly and contains a great deal of unfamiliar information from the recently opened Vatican archives." --Denis Mack Smith
"Once again Kertzer has produced impressive evidence of the part played by the papacy in the growth of anti-Semitism in the twentieth century. Painful as his historical narrative may be for Catholics, it is a necessary prelude to a true reconciliation between the Catholic Church and Judaism." --John Cornwell, author of Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII
"This is a powerful and incisive analysis of the ways in which the Vatican and the Catholic Church helped to nurture and shape the emergence of modern anti-Semitic movements that made the Holocaust possible. With the help of solid documentation and clear exposition, Kertzer sweeps away the apologetic myths that have sought to disculpate the church from direct complicity in the tragic fate of European Jewry."
---Professor Robert S. Wistrich, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, author of Hitler and the Holocaust
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Edward Cardinal Cassidy, Australian head of the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, called in reporters to announce the long-awaited results of his investigation. It was March 16, 1998--eleven years after Pope John Paul II had asked the Commission to determine what responsibility, if any, the Church bore for the slaughter of millions of European Jews during World War II. For the Church, a more explosive subject could hardly be imagined. It had been thirty-five years since Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy had first raised the charge of papal complicity in the Holocaust, triggering Catholic outrage worldwide. Yet the suggestion that the Vatican bore any responsibility for what had happened to the Jews continued to grate on Catholic sensibilities. And so nervousness mixed with curiosity as the report was finally released to a public sharply divided between those worried that it might criticize the Church, and those who feared it would not.
Heightening the drama and underlining the significance of the event, the Pope himself wrote an introduction to the report. John Paul II hailed the Commission document--"We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah"--as an important part of Church preparations for the upcoming millennial celebrations. To properly observe the jubilee, the Pope wrote, the Church's sons and daughters must purify their hearts by examining the responsibility they bore for sins committed in the past. He voiced the hope that by providing an accurate account of past evils, the Commission report would help ensure that such horrors as the Holocaust would never be repeated. The report's preamble echoed this theme, not only stressing the Pope's commitment to repentance for past sins, but also linking the proper understanding of the past to the building of a brighter future.
At the heart of the problem, as the Vatican commissioners recognized, was the fact that the Holocaust had taken place "in countries of long-standing Christian civilization." Might there be some link, they asked, between the destruction of Europe's Jews and "the attitudes down the centuries of Christians toward the Jews"?
Those who feared that the report might criticize past popes or past Church actions were soon relieved to learn that the Commission's answer to this question was a resounding "no." True, the report admitted, Jews had for centuries been discriminated against and used as scapegoats, and, regrettably, certain misguided interpretations of Christian teachings had on occasion nurtured such behavior. But all this regarded an older history, one largely overcome by the beginning of the 1800s.
In the Commission's view, the nineteenth century was the key period for understanding the roots of the Holocaust and, in particular, the reasons why the Church bore no responsibility for it. It was in that turbulent century that new intellectual and political currents associated with extreme nationalism emerged. Amid the economic and social upheavals of the time, people started to accuse Jews of exercising a disproportionate influence. "There thus began to spread," the Commission members argued, "an anti-Judaism that was essentially more sociological and political than religious." This new form of antagonism to the Jews was further shaped by racial theories that first appeared in the latter part of the nineteenth century and reached their terrible apotheosis in the Nazis' glorification of a superior Aryan race. Far from supporting these racist ideologies, the Vatican commissioners asserted, the Church had always condemned them.
And so, 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.
When I read the news story of the Vatican press conference, and later read the text of the Commission report, I knew that there was something terribly wrong with the history that the Vatican was recounting. It is a history that many wished had happened, but it is not what actually happened. It is the latter story, sometimes dramatic, sometimes hard to believe, often sad, that I try to tell in the pages that follow.
Just how little this history is known was driven home to me by reader reactions to my recent book The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. The book tells of a six-year-old Jewish boy in Bologna, Italy, who, in 1858, was taken from his family on orders of the local inquisitor. Having been secretly baptized by a servant--or so it was claimed--the boy, the inquisitor argued, was now Catholic and could not remain in a Jewish household.
"You mean there was still an Inquisition in 1858?" readers asked. "I thought the Inquisition was back in the 1500s or 1600s." I also kept hearing--especially from non-Jewish readers--how amazing it was for them to learn that forcing Jews to wear yellow badges and keeping them locked in ghettoes were not inventions of the Nazis in the twentieth century, but a policy that the popes had championed for hundreds of years.
Although various histories of the fraught relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the Jews have been published, most focus on a more remote past. Others examine Church doctrine, engage in biblical exegesis, or analyze various other texts, and so do not capture the actual struggle between the Church and the Jews. Someone, I thought, needed to write a book about the Church and the Jews in modern times, one that would use original archival documents--many never before examined--to tell a story that has remained in important ways unknown.
This last point is worth emphasizing, because while recent scholar- ship--especially in Italy--has brought to light important new information about the Vatican and the Jews, much has remained buried in the archives. In this light, Cardinal Ratzinger's announcement in 1998 that, for the first time, the archives of the Holy Office of the Inquisition were being opened to scholars, offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Sources never before seen by scholars were now available, offering the tantalizing prospect of new insights into Church history. This book rests heavily on these newly available documents from the Inquisition archives, as well as from other Vatican archives that have become open to researchers in recent years. Together with evidence that has been reported in the specialized scholarly literature--mainly in Italy and France--over the past few years these new sources shed light on a history that until now has remained hidden.
Back in early 1998, news of the impending release of the Vatican report on the Holocaust had brought hope that the Church itself might help rectify the ignorance that surrounded the history of the Church's dealing with the Jews. Pope John Paul II had done much to foster an ecumenical spirit and warmer relations between the Catholic Church and the Jews, and he had called on the Commission to be fearless in confronting the truths of the past. The Commission did not take its task lightly, studying the question for over a decade before formulating its conclusions. Surely, thirty-six years after the Second Vatican Council opened, the time had come for the Church to face up to its own uncomfortable past.
The report's key passage on the rise of modern anti-Semitism explains:
By the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth 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 nineteenth 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.
The anti-Semitism embraced by the Nazi regime, the report goes on to say, was the product of this new social and political form of anti-Judaism, which was foreign to the Church, and which mixed in new racial ideas that were similarly at odds with Church doctrine.
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 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was only over the angry, loud, and indeed indignant protests of the Vatican and the Church. And if Jews in the nineteenth century began to be accused of exerting a disproportionate and dangerous influence, and if a form of anti-Judaism "that was essentially more sociological and political than religious" was taking shape, this was in no small part due to the efforts of the Roman Catholic Church itself.
As this book will show, the distinction made in the report between "anti-Judaism"--of which some unnamed and misinformed Christians were unfortunately guilty in the past--and "anti-Semitism," which led to the horrors of the Holocaust, will simply not survive historical scrutiny.
The notion that the Church fostered only negative "religious" views of the Jews, and not negative images of their harmful social, economic, cultural, and political effects--the latter identified with modern anti-Semitism--is clearly belied by the historical record. As modern anti-Semitic movements took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, the Church was a major player in them, constantly warning people of the rising "Jewish peril." What, after all, were the major tenets of this modern anti-Semitic movement if not such warnings as these...
Product details
- Publisher : Knopf; First Edition (September 18, 2001)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 355 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0375406239
- ISBN-13 : 978-0375406232
- Item Weight : 1.55 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.55 x 1.25 x 9.54 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,167,470 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #941 in Christian Popes
- #1,304 in History of Judaism
- #5,601 in History of Christianity (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
David Israel Kertzer (born February 20, 1948) is an American anthropologist, historian, and academic leader specializing in the political, demographic, and religious history of Italy. He is Paul Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology, and Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University. His book The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (2014) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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Customers find the book well-researched and scholarly. They appreciate the references, bibliographic sources, and admirable thesis. Readers describe it as an amazing, well-written examination of the Catholic church's own press. While some find the subject dark, they consider it worth exploring.
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Customers find the book's content well-researched and logical. They appreciate the thorough research, references, and admirable thesis. The book is described as full of facts from cover to cover and provides an insightful examination of the Catholic Church.
"...to form your own opinions, however once you read this meticulously researched, unflinching and reasoned study I dare you to not come to the same..." Read more
"...Well written and documented, Kertzer has a way of making history come alive. A good book to have for historical reference." Read more
"...like John Cornwell, in "Hitler's Pope." Kertzer has strong academic chops and is a no-nonsense researcher and writer...." Read more
"...Why? Kertzer researched and wrote from outstanding bibliographic sources and an admirable thesis...." Read more
Customers find the book readable and well-written. They say it's an insightful examination of the Catholic Church's press, though some find it challenging at times. The book provides detailed and important documentary history while exploring papal involvement in graphic detail.
"...Aside from this a great read." Read more
"...Well written and documented, Kertzer has a way of making history come alive. A good book to have for historical reference." Read more
"...It's really amazing reading...." Read more
"This was an amazing book, full of facts from cover to cover...." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on October 2, 2011The main thrust of David Kertzer's book is to examine the Catholic Church's claims that it was in no way responsible for the type of anti-Semitism that made the Holocaust possible, and to see if the Church's claims are historically accurate.
Using documents from the Vatican's own secret archives, David Kertzer proves beyond a shadow of doubt that the Church's claims of innocence are a sham. The Church set the stage for anti-Semites like Adolph Hitler. Without the massive propaganda war that was organized, funded and carried out by the Catholic Church, Hitler would not have been able to become the monster that we know him as today.
Beginning in the 1840s under Pope Pius IX and continuing on well into the 1940s the Catholic Church waged a propaganda campaign against the Jews all over Europe. Catholic newspapers (some published by the Vatican itself) made certain that Germans, Austrians, Italians, Poles and others all across Europe got their daily does of anti-Semitic propaganda.
1. There is a secret Jewish conspiracy
2. The Jews seek to conquer the world
3. Jews are an evil sect who seek to do the Christians harm
4. Jews are by nature immoral
5. Jews care only for money and will do anything to get it
6. Jews control the press
7. Jews control the banks and are responsible for the economic ruination of untold numbers of Christian families
8. Jews are responsible for communism
9. Judaism commands it's adherents to murder defenseless Christian children and drink their blood
10. Jews seek to destroy the Christian religion
11. Jews are unpatriotic, ever ready to sell their country out to the enemy
12. For the larger society to be properly protected, Jews must be segregated and their rights limited
The Church played an important role in promulgating every one of these ideas that are central to modern anti-Semitism. Every one of them had the support of the highest Church authorities, including the Popes.
The Church was still publishing newspapers with such anti-Semitic propaganda as recently as 1945. Adolph Hitler (born and raised a Catholic) would have grown up exposed to this propaganda on a daily basis.
In addition the Church was an admirer and enthusiastic supporter of Karl Lueger and his Christian Social Party, which took Austria from a largely secular country where Jews could largely feel welcome into a country with frequent and often rowdy anti-Semitic rallies.
And when the infamous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was published, the best known disseminators of the book were Catholic priests. Monsignor Umberto Benigni used the book to help lead a new renewed anti-Semitic crusade in the 1920s.
It is simply illogical to expect that Adolph Hitler could have been born into a Catholic family and been surrounded by the anti-Semitic propaganda that the Catholic Church itself created and constantly reinforced and expect him to NOT be influenced by it or expect him NOT react to it.
While the Pope did not personally invite Adolph Hitler to the Vatican and personally order him to round up millions of Jews and enact a systematic program for murdering them, this isn't much of a defense. The Catholic Church used a mighty propaganda machine to chronically condition millions of Catholics across Europe into believing that the Jews were an immediate threat and that drastic action needed to be taken to protect the lives, freedoms and property of good God fearing Christians.
The Catholic Church was not responsible for Hitler's actions? HAH! They CREATED Hitler!
David Kertzer is a historian and a gentleman and refuses to take that final, vulgar step of accusing the Catholic Church of creating the evil man who killed six million Jews; however I do not have Kertzer's sense of self-restraint. I point my finger at a multitude of anti-Semitic Popes who shaped the opinions of millions of Catholics and say, "You caused this to happen".
You, of course are entitled to form your own opinions, however once you read this meticulously researched, unflinching and reasoned study I dare you to not come to the same conclusion.
- Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2024Sometimes gets mired in minor details like clothing worn. Aside from this a great read.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 14, 2016An interesting and sad read. It is amazing how far back things started, and the cycle continues to this day.
Well written and documented, Kertzer has a way of making history come alive.
A good book to have for historical reference.
- Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2008...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.
Top reviews from other countries
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jacquesReviewed in France on May 4, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars Ce qu'il faut savoir sur les papes
pour moi-même. Livre facile à lire et bien documenté
- 'AlloReviewed in the United Kingdom on November 26, 2017
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly readable scholarly but accessible work that will at times ...
Highly readable scholarly but accessible work that will at times disturb. The author was one of the academics invited to use the Vatican's long-kept secret archives for his research into the approach of the pontiffs, focusing largely on the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kertzer distinguishes between those in the Church who were hostile, repressive or reactionary and those who embraced charity and humanity for all. It includes the last days in the life of Pius XI, with the suggestion that the ailing Pope might have contributed to a different outcome for WWII Jewry, had he lived longer.
This appears to be the same work as Unholy War, published under different titles in the UK and US
- Penna BluReviewed in Canada on September 21, 2012
5.0 out of 5 stars The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican Role in the Rise of modern Anti-Semitism
An outstanding result of an outstanding research.
The Vatican couldn't hide it anymore. The immense documentation hidden in their secret Archives for centuries was forced to come out, and scholars like David I. Kretzer are finally bringing it to the public attention, confirming, in this case, a painful truth: the millenary persecution of the Jews on the part of the Catholic Church and the Popes, which contributed to the final tragic explosion of the genocide promoted by the Nazi.
In an extremely detailed presentation of the documents, the author with an admirable painstaking effort proves his thesis.
In order to promote and impose their theology, the Christian Church had to crash the Jewish influence. Starting with the accusation of deicide, they subtly proceeded through the centuries to spread infamy against the Jews, and to encourage their persecution.
The Jews were presented by the Church as the enemies of Christianity, and consequently they had to be segregated in ghettos in order to avoid their immoral influence on the Christians.
The book concentrates mainly on the most recent form of anti-semitism, practiced by the modern Popes after the dissolution of the Papal State, when Italy became a nation at the end of the 19th ct. The author demonstrates the active participation of the Popes in the persecution which lead to the Shoa.
A compulsory reading for anyone interested in and concerned about the moral history of our civilization.