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The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism Hardcover – September 18, 2001

4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 175 ratings

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A groundbreaking historical study based on documents previously locked in the Vatican’s secret archives: The Popes Against the Jews graphically shows how the Catholic Church helped make the Holocaust possible.

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.
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Vatican's 1998 report "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah" purportedly exonerated the Church of complicity in the Holocaust. In The Popes Against the Jews, David I. Kertzer argues that the report is "not the product of a Church that wants to confront its history." Kertzer's book refutes the Church's thesis that the Holocaust grew out of "an anti-Judaism that was essentially more sociological and political than religious." In fact, Kertzer asserts, those dimensions of European anti-Semitism developed "in no small part due to the efforts of the Roman Catholic Church itself." The racial laws of fascist Italy and the Nuremberg Laws of 1930s Germany, for example, were directly modeled on the Church's own rules governing treatment of Jews: until the collapse of the Papal States in the late 19th century, Jews living in these territories were forced to wear yellow badges and live in ghettos. Kertzer's arguments make for compelling reading because they're presented in story form, based on the actions of the popes themselves. Access to long-sealed Church archives allowed Kertzer to reconstruct some of the most shocking, secret conversations that occurred in the Vatican in the decades leading up to World War II. --Michael Joseph Gross

From Publishers Weekly

A number of excellent studies have recently addressed the political and social role of the Catholic Church in Europe during the Holocaust. Along comes a book that explores the church's role in setting the stage for that Holocaust. If the title of The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism isn't enough of a hint, David Kertzer spells out his thesis in the introduction: Although "the Vatican never approved the extermination of the Jews... the teachings and actions of the Church, including those of the popes themselves, helped make it possible." Kertzer argues that centuries of the church's demonization of the Jews paved the way for genocide.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 175 ratings

About the author

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David I. Kertzer
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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 say

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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16 customers mention "Scholarly content"16 positive0 negative

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

14 customers mention "Readability"14 positive0 negative

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

  • Reviewed in the United States on October 2, 2011
    The 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.
    9 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2024
    Sometimes gets mired in minor details like clothing worn. Aside from this a great read.
  • Reviewed in the United States on November 14, 2016
    An 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.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • 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.
    82 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • jacques
    5.0 out of 5 stars Ce qu'il faut savoir sur les papes
    Reviewed in France on May 4, 2023
    pour moi-même. Livre facile à lire et bien documenté
  • 'Allo
    5.0 out of 5 stars Highly readable scholarly but accessible work that will at times ...
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 26, 2017
    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 Blu
    5.0 out of 5 stars The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican Role in the Rise of modern Anti-Semitism
    Reviewed in Canada on September 21, 2012
    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.