Volume 49, Number 5 · March 28, 2002
Bad for the Jews
By Owen Chadwick
The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism
by David I. Kertzer
Knopf, 355 pp., $27.95
Five years ago David Kertzer wrote a well-received book about the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, a six-year-old Jewish boy in Bologna who, in 1858, was taken from his family with the approval of Pope Pius IX on the grounds that he had been baptized by a Catholic house servant.[*] For historians of the papacy that was a bad moment in the reign of Pius IX. David Kertzer's account of it showed how strong secular opposition could be used by a conservative pope to vindicate a defiant and politically damaging position in the name of what he considered to be higher, Christian truth.
Review, 3434 words
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