An indictment: half right

Commonweal, Sept 28, 2001 by Marc Saperstein, David Kutzu

The Popes against the Jews
The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism.
David Kertzer
Alfred A Knopf, $27.95, 355 pp.

Two different though related books coexist uneasily within the covers of this volume by a Brown University historian, author of The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (1997). The first is a compelling work of scholarship, based largely on David Kertzer's extensive research in the Vatican's own archives, documenting the church's policy toward the Jews in the territories where it held temporal power, and especially in Rome, during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. In this treatment, the material is presented dispassionately, without editorial comment, allowed to speak for itself. The dismal picture that emerges is indeed depressing, and sometimes infuriating.

Kertzer maintains that with the restoration of the Papal States in 1814 following the defeat of Napoleon's armies, there was an opportunity for a new policy in the exercise of papal power toward the Jews. But Pope Pius VII rejected the appeal of the Austrian government and the advice of his own secretary of state, following instead the conservative majority of the curia and reinstituting the worst aspects of the earlier status of Jews in the papal domain.

These included restoring the mandatory ghettos, particularly oppressive in Rome, where the overcrowded, squalid conditions seemed appalling even to a Vatican commission instructed to investigate. Also restored were the requirements of attendance at conversionary sermons and acts of ritual degradation associated with the Christian Carnival. No schools teaching nonreligious subjects were permitted in the ghetto, and Jewish children were forbidden to attend schools outside its walls, or to engage in professions or skilled occupations. Unlike their medieval predecessors, the nineteenth-century popes declined to issue public repudiations of charges of "ritual murder" by Jews, most notably in the notorious Damascus affair of 1840. The most influential pope of the century, Pius IX, alarmed by the revolutions of 1848, became an inveterate opponent of all modern movements and ideas and, in Kertzer's words, "helped to give the charge of Jewish ritual murder new respectability" by affirming the status of the cult of a "martyred" child and endorsing a French book that defended the blood libel.

Especially oppressive was the Vatican's policy regarding conversion. When it was reported that a Christian midwife secretly baptized a Jewish infant who died a few days later, the body was exhumed from the Jewish cemetery and buried beside the local church. If a Jew expressed a desire to convert, police were sent into the ghetto to bring the other members of his nuclear family to the House of Catechumens against their will, so that the man would not be deprived of his natural right to cohabit with his wife.

Kertzer's claim here, which seems to me to be largely unassailable, is that with occasional minor variations, the Vatican opposed any tendency to ameliorate the legal and social status of the Jews living under its control. The idea that Jews should be entitled to equal rights alongside Christians remained anathema to the church's leadership. In this respect, it was following the medieval tradition, when popes vigorously complained to political rulers who permitted Jews to flourish to the point where their status of subjugation was no longer obvious. But the medieval popes also spoke out forcefully against overt oppression and were viewed by many Jews as their protectors. This aspect of the traditional policy was largely abandoned in the period under review.

The second component of the book is quite different. Polemic in character (as can be seen in the title), it marshals evidence and arguments for the claim that the church played an integral role in the emergence and spread of modern anti-Semitism during the last decades of the nineteenth century. This polemic was occasioned by the 1998 Vatican statement, "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," which distinguished between the old theological "anti-Judaism" and a new, nineteenth-century form of anti-Jewish animus, based on sociological and political rather than religious claims, and defining the Jew in racial terms, a view from which the statement dissociated the church. Kertzer sets out to dismantle, indeed to demolish, this dissociation.

His thesis is that the church perceived the Jews first as the great beneficiaries of the loss of temporal power in the papal states, and then as the agents responsible for this catastrophe. "No longer the frightened denizens of ghettos, Jews, in the eyes of leading churchmen, had now rapidly become insolent and evil masterminds plotting the destruction of the church and all that was holy." As Jewish emancipation produced reactionary movements of malcontents who blamed the Jews for the social and economic dislocations of change, the church found a natural ally in those who wanted to turn the clock back and restore a more traditional ordering of society.