A History Of Catholic Antisemitism

Moving from the Catholic Church's pagan origins, through the Roman era, middle ages, and Reformation to the present, Robert Michael here provides a definitive history of Catholic antisemitism.

Interwar Poland was home to more Jews than any other country in Europe. Its commonplace but simplistic identification with antisemitism was due largely to nationalist efforts to boycott Jewish business. That they failed was not for want of support by the Catholic clergy, for whom the ''Jewish question'' was more than economic. The myth of a Masonic-Jewish alliance to subvert Christian culture first flourished in France but held considerable sway over Catholics in 1930s Poland as elsewhere. This book examines how, following Vatican policy, Polish church leaders resisted separation of church and state in the name of Catholic culture. In that struggle, every assimilated Jew served as both a symbol and a potential agent of security. Antisemitism is no longer regarded as a legitimate political stance. But in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, the issues of religious culture, national identity, and minorities are with us still. This study of interwar Poland will shed light on dilemmas that still effect us today.

A rare book that combines searing passion with a subject that has affected all of our lives. "Chicago Tribune" Novelist, cultural critic, and former priest James Carroll marries history with memoir as he maps the two-thousand-year course of the Church s battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of faith it has sparked in his own life. Fascinating, brave, and sometimes infuriating ("Time"), this dark history is more than a chronicle of religion. It is the central tragedy of Western civilization, its fault lines reaching deep into our culture to create a deeply felt work ("San Francisco Chronicle") as Carroll wrangles with centuries of strife and tragedy to reach a courageous and affecting reckoning with difficult truths."

The most prominent story of nineteenth-century German and French Jewry has focused on Jewish adoption of liberal middle-class values. The Modernity of Others points to an equally powerful but largely unexplored aspect of modern Jewish history: the extent to which German and French Jews sought to become modern by criticizing the anti-modern positions of the Catholic Church. Drawing attention to the pervasiveness of anti-Catholic anticlericalism among Jewish thinkers and activists from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, the book turns the master narrative of Western and Central European Jewish history on its head. From the moment in which Jews began to enter the fray of modern European politics, they found that Catholicism served as a convenient foil that helped them define what it meant to be a good citizen, to practice a respectable religion, and to have a healthy family life. Throughout the long nineteenth century, myriad Jewish intellectuals, politicians, and activists employed anti-Catholic tropes wherever questions of political and national belonging were at stake: in theoretical treatises, parliamentary speeches, newspaper debates, the founding moments of the Reform movement, and campaigns against antisemitism.

This book reveals in considerable detail the two millennial history of the virulent anti-Semitism of the Roman Catholic Church. It demonstrates that the Church's persistent barrage of invective and derogatory allegations led to wholesale slaughters of Jewish men, women and children. Furthermore, under canon law the Jew had scarcely the right of existence, and could only survive under conditions of virtual slavery. Consequently, Catholics 'plundered and persecuted the chosen race until their lives became a curse.' This Catholic hatred of the Jew, the longest hatred in human history, peaked during the Nazi Holocaust. The book clearly discloses that the Church, at all levels, facilitated the ascent of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, and enabled the 'Final Solution to the Jewish Question'. It veri'es that most of the major participants in the planning, implementation, and butchering of the Holocaust were born and bred Catholics. Signi'cantly, the book also reveals that, over the centuries, the Catholic Church has itself been responsible for the deaths of at least as many Jews as were killed by the Nazis. Yet the Church has never admitted, nor apologised, nor made reparation, nor been punished for its fundamental role in these diabolical sins. In conclusion, the book con'rms that this proclaimed holy institution continues to deny its unholy history.

This book examines how, following Vatican policy, Polish church leaders resisted separation of church and state in the name of Catholic culture. In that struggle, every assimilated Jew served as both a symbol and a potential agent of security.

In 1965 the Second Vatican Council declared that God loves the Jews. Before that, the Church had taught for centuries that Jews were cursed by God and, in the 1940s, mostly kept silent as Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis. How did an institution whose wisdom is said to be unchanging undertake one of the most enormous, yet undiscussed, ideological swings in modern history? The radical shift of Vatican II grew out of a buried history, a theological struggle in Central Europe in the years just before the Holocaust, when a small group of Catholic converts (especially former Jew Johannes Oesterreicher and former Protestant Karl Thieme) fought to keep Nazi racism from entering their newfound church. Through decades of engagement, extending from debates in academic journals, to popular education, to lobbying in the corridors of the Vatican, this unlikely duo overcame the most problematic aspect of Catholic history. Their success came not through appeals to morality but rather from a rediscovery of neglected portions of scripture. From Enemy to Brother illuminates the baffling silence of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, showing how the ancient teaching of deicide—according to which the Jews were condemned to suffer until they turned to Christ—constituted the Church’s only language to talk about the Jews. As he explores the process of theological change, John Connelly moves from the speechless Vatican to those Catholics who endeavored to find a new language to speak to the Jews on the eve of, and in the shadow of, the Holocaust.

In this meticulously researched, unflinching, and reasoned study, National Book Award finalist David I. Kertzer presents shocking revelations about the role played by the Vatican in the development of modern anti-Semitism. Working in long-sealed Vatican archives, Kertzer unearths startling evidence to undermine the Church’s argument that it played no direct role in the spread of modern anti-Semitism. In doing so, he challenges the Vatican’s recent official statement on the subject, We Remember. Kertzer tells an unsettling story that has stirred up controversy around the world and sheds a much-needed light on the past.