<i>Review Essay</i> War without End: The Popes and the Jews between Polemic and History

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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