Volume 50, Number 4 · March 13, 2003
Jews and Catholics: An Exchange
By A.F. Crispin, David Kertzer, Reply by Istvan Deak
In response to Jews and Catholics
(December 19, 2002)
In "Jews and Catholics" [NYR, December 19, 2002], István Deák, in criticizing recent historical work on the Vatican's role in the rise of modern anti-Semitism, completely misrepresents my book, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. In 1858, the six-year-old Edgardo was taken from his parents by the police in Bologna, then part of the Papal States. He had allegedly been secretly baptized by a Catholic servant girl and so, the Inquisition ruled, could not remain with his Jewish parents. Pope Pius IX, in withstanding international pressure to return the child to his parents, came to regard the boy as his own son. Although the Pope realized that keeping the child would cost him dearly, and even his secretary of state begged him to return the boy, he believed it his holy duty to protect the (in his eyes) Catholic Edgardo from the horror of rejoining his Jewish family and so committing apostasy. I am charged by Deák of arguing in my book that this story proves "the Church's radical racism," which then allows him to easily show the fallacy of my interpretation. The only problem is that nowhere in the book do I make any such argument, which is clearly preposterous. The case clearly shows the Church's long-time belief that the only solution to the Jewish problem is the conversion of the Jews, a theology that stands directly counter to any racist theories of human difference.
Deák then goes on to dismiss my work (including the more recent Popes Against the Jews) on the grounds that it erroneously characterizes the Church's anti-Judaism as "out-and-out racist." Here Deák echoes the official position of the Vatican from its landmark 1998 statement, "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah." There, and in more recent Vatican-linked statements (notably one in a June 2002 issue of Civiltà Cattolica, whose text is approved in advance by the Vatican Secretariat of State), the Church argues that it bears no responsibility for the rise of modern anti-Semitism of the sort that made the Holocaust possible, because the latter was based on racial notions that were at odds with the Church's universalist mission. That Nazi racial ideology was in opposition to Catholic Church theology can hardly be denied, yet the Nazi anti-Semitic campaign incorporated several key elements, and race was only one of them. Most of the Nazis' anti-Semitic charges—that the Jews were everywhere a foreign body lacking any loyalty to the country where they lived, that they cared only for money, that they sought to enslave Christians, that they were responsible for communism, that they should never have been given equal rights, that their religion commanded them to murder Christian children and drink their blood—were actively promulgated by the Vatican in the twentieth century.
The Popes Against the Jews also points out that although the Church's theology was clearly in direct conflict with racist theory, it is not true that the Church never used race and racial thinking as a means of denigrating the Jews. The pages of Civiltà Cattolica of the late nineteenth century, when modern anti-Semitism was first taking hold, are filled with representations of the Jews as a degenerate "race." And even Deák mentions the Jesuit rule of the time—cited by the Nazis and Italian Fascists in support of their racial project in the 1930s—prohibiting any Catholic tainted by any Jewish blood up to the fifth generation from being allowed into the order.
To dismiss my demonstration of the Vatican's role in the rise of modern anti-Semitism—as Deák does—on the grounds that it fails to differentiate between Nazi and Church anti-Semitism again misrepresents the argument. Of course Nazi anti-Semitism was very different from Church anti-Semitism. The Church never called for the murder of the Jews as a solution to the Jewish problem, much less their mass extermination. Yet the Church's vilification of the Jews in the decades preceding the Holocaust, accusing them of the most diabolical treachery and representing them as a danger to Christian society and Christian people—played an undeniable role in allowing the Nazis' more lethal brand of anti-Semitism to gain popularity. This is the historical truth that the Vatican continues to deny, and that Deák's misrepresentations of my work should not obscure.
David Kertzer
Dupee University Professor of Social Science
Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island
To the Editors:
In his review of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's A Moral Reckoning [NYR, December 19, 2002], Mr. István Deák quotes the author as saying that it was, after all, the Catholic Church, especially through its Jesuit spokesmen, which taught the faithful to abominate the Jewish race.
This is not true. The Jesuits were one of the most tolerant of the religious orders. Ignacio de Loyola stated unequivocally that no obstacle to the admission into the order was to be raised because of the ori-gin of the postulant. And several of his close collaborators, including his successor Diego Laynez, Juan de Polanco, Francisco de Toledo, and others were of Jewish origin. He is reported to have been proud of the suspected Jewish blood in his lineage and on many occasions fought the discriminatory edicts of the Inquisition. Later on, some of his followers were pressured into taking a more anti-Semitic line, but this has to be seen in the context of the great religious upheavals following the Reformation, during which so many people in Europe were victimized in the name of religion.
As for the Papacy, it should also be noted that Rome and Avignon were always considered to be hospitable to Jews.
A.F. Crispin
Grasse, France
There are many reviewers who enjoy a good fight; I am not one of them. What to do, then, when the critic is in many ways correct, as David Kertzer is when he points out that his fascinating The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara in no way argues that the case of the kidnapped boy proves the Church's "radical racism"? The book shows that, in the 1850s, when the Mortara affair took place, Pope Pius IX and the Church as a whole were willing to regard Jewish converts as their own; Italian princes and princesses acted as godparents at the baptismal font and, in Edgardo's own case, the Pope treated the Jewish boy as his son.
The question I should have raised is why, then, has Professor Kertzer included, as an essential step in his argument of inevitable progression, the Mortara kidnapping and similar clerical outrages in his justly celebrated The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (Knopf, 2001)? The very title and subtitle of this book categorically connect the Papacy to modern, i.e., racist anti-Semitism. For what else does modern anti-Semitism represent but the addition of racism to old-fashioned anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism, which was religious and ideological, political and economic, but was not based on considerations of race?
Contrary to what is often said, pre-modern anti-Semitism was not motivated by religious convictions alone but was also driven by envy and greed and by the desire to use the Jewish question for political advantage, such as whipping up popular emotions for one purpose or another. The racial element, which is modern anti-Semitism's crucial contribution to the old hatreds, has proven lethal because it has closed the escape door of conversion. From race, as defined by the modern radical anti-Semite, there is no path to freedom. And here, in my opinion, is where it is wrong to see Church policy as leading directly to Auschwitz. This, however, exculpates neither the many Church leaders for their hatred of Jews nor Pius XII for his criminal negligence during the Shoah.
Similar to other learned critics of the Church, David Kertzer assures the reader in The Popes Against the Jews that "belief in extermination as the proper solution to the 'Jewish question'...was never espoused by the Church, and, indeed, went against basic Church doctrine. Nor was the Nazi goal of a racially purified society...ever shared by the Church; it too ran contrary to Catholic theology." And yet in the same book David Kertzer writes that the Nuremberg Laws were "modeled on measures that the Church itself had enforced for as long as it was in a position to do so." How else to interpret this sentence but that there was basically no difference between the Nuremberg Laws and the Papal States' discriminatory policy toward the Jews in the past? Yet the Vatican never forbade—rather it encouraged—marriages between Christians and converted Jews, while the Nuremberg Laws' main goal was the protection of race; they forbade marriage between Christians and Jews, between Christians and baptized Jews, and even between Christians and such other Christians who were of a partial Jewish descent.
As David Kertzer himself states, when a similar race protection law was introduced in Italy in 1938, "the Pope asked the king only to do something about the provision regarding the marriage of Catholics who were born Jewish." This means that those who criticize the Church for favoring Jewish converts over unconverted Jews are mistaken when they simultaneously accuse the Church of being greatly responsible for the rise of modern racial anti-Semitism, which sentenced both converts and non-converts to death.
Professor Kertzer also states in the same book that "the Church, despite its hierarchical structure, is not monolithic. In this sense it is misleading to speak of how 'the Church' acted toward the Jews. We need to look at the panoply of different players...." But if the Church was not a monolith, as it most decidedly was not, then Professor Kertzer should not write, for instance in connection with the anti-Semitic fulminations of an Austrian bishop at the time of the Anschluss, that "the Austrian bishop's statement was, in many ways, characteristic of the Roman Catholic Church's approach to the rise of Nazism in Germany and Austria." The Catholic Church is an immense institution and the Austrian bishop's statement, driven primarily by German nationalist sentiments, did not apply, for example, to contemporary British, American, French, Brazilian, and Chinese bishops who themselves may have been driven by their own particular nationalist sentiments.
Not even the Society of Jesus, known as the Order of the Jesuits, was as disciplined, united, and purposeful as it seemed, for instance to the Nazis, who considered the order as one of the main international conspiracies threatening the German race. Within the SS, the almighty SD or Security Service maintained an anti-Jesuit office that was theoretically equal in importance to Adolf Eichmann's anti-Jewish office. In reality, depending on the historical period, there were progressive and regressive, nationalist and antinationalist, non-anti-Semitic and anti-Semitic Jesuits, with the latter being particularly vicious in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A.F. Crispin is perfectly right in saying that the early Jesuit Order had quite a few leaders of Jewish origin; yet, when it turned out that some Jewish converts in Spain were secretly clinging to the faith of their ancestors, the order began to apply, in the late sixteenth century, the existing Spanish statutes regarding blood purity to its own members. This meant that no one of Jewish origin could join. The statutes were maintained almost unchanged for the next several centuries. It is not clear to me who outside the order could have put it under pressure to take such measures when we consider that the popes and almost all other monastic orders welcomed Jewish converts, and that the Church as a whole, and thus also the Jesuits, aimed at winning over the people of the Old Testament.
There were many popes, bishops, and ordinary clergymen who hated the Jews with passion, but the Church as an institution has never embraced racist doctrines. This is what makes the task of the critics of the Church so difficult. They are correct in asking the Church to make amends for an often horrifying past; but they weaken their cause by not making clear that one type of guilt does not equal another type of guilt.
