Within Western societies the perception and representation of Jews during the post-Holocaust period have undergone various changes and transformations, shifting between opposite poles: from victims par excellence to prosecutors who persecute. The tortuous process of dealing with the memory of the Shoah, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the Arab-Zionist conflict, culminating in frequent wars, contributed towards making increasingly complex the formation of a new consciousness and attitude towards Jewish minorities and their reintegration within national communities.Footnote 1 In the Arab world these elements were exacerbated by a history of Arab antisemitism and especially by a particular argument that had been made by contemporary observers since 1948 and had a long and pervasive history: the parallel evoked between the Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian ‘catastrophe’, the Nakba. The politicisation of these topics in the current debate is linked to the promotion of the controversial thesis of the ‘natural’ and ‘unyielding’ antisemitic attitude of the Arabs (especially Muslim), their full support of the Nazi regime, and the equivalence between antisemitism and anti-Zionism as a propagandistic tool to support the Israeli colonisation in the Palestinian Territories. Some scholars have refuted these arguments.Footnote 2
The events of June 1967 marked the first turning-point in Western attitudes towards Israel and, more broadly, the Jewish people.Footnote 3 The Six-Day War, the occupation of the Palestinian territories (East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) and the implications of Zionism in an increasingly religious sense constituted the beginning of a process of deep change in attitudes towards Jews and Israel, culminating fifteen years later in the shock of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Whereas, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Jews were considered as its main victims, they (and the Jewish State) started to be viewed instead as military occupiers and oppressors. The tragic condition of the second wave of Palestinian refugees, after the first in 1947–9, had a huge impact on the international community, provoking harsh criticisms and a new campaign of antisemitic attacks. In fact, this phase coincided with the publication, in various countries, of many articles, essays and cartoons where the overlap between Nazism and Zionism was presented as a self-evident fact, exemplified by recent events in the Middle East.
However, the parallel between Nazism and Zionism dates much further back than to the 1967 war. Although it is true that ‘Jew’ and ‘Nazism’ had been linked in the public imagination since the Nazi seizure of power, during the post-war period the two words continued to resonate.Footnote 4 It was during the years immediately after the end of World War II, and especially during the bloody fight between Zionists and Arabs for the partition of Palestine, that, in the eyes of some observers, a direct comparison between the Jewish national movement and the Nazi regime began to be made.
Christians, particularly Catholic ones, were among the first proponents of this parallel. This paper will attempt to trace the recurrence of this argument within the Latin Catholic Church of Jerusalem.Footnote 5 This Church is a particularly interesting observation point: it was a community mainly composed of Arab faithful, but served by European or American clergy. At different levels, the Jerusalem Church shared Catholic culture and tradition, historically characterised by anti-Judaic feelings and antisemitic prejudicesFootnote 6 that in the Palestinian context were often translated into anti-Zionism. Catholic, Arab and European anti-Jewish influences melded in the Jerusalem Church, with varying results. Moreover, after the turmoil of 1948, this Church had been split between four territories: Israel, Jordan, Egypt (ruling the Gaza Strip) and Cyprus. Meanwhile, the community in Israel had been living in a country struggling with the memory of the Holocaust and with the troubled construction of an Israeli Jewish identity.Footnote 7 Lastly, the Catholic community in the Holy Land was under the authority of Rome and consequently affected by Vatican attitudes vis-à-vis Zionism.Footnote 8 It is in this context that some Christian figures, who wrote about the Holocaust in their private correspondence or in public documents, demonstrated their hostility to Zionist leaders and politics.
The Catholic Church was not alone, in the immediate post-war period, in maintaining silence about the extermination of the Jews: papal pronouncements on the war were directed rather towards condemning totalitarian regimes, whose origin was traced back – in keeping with a classic Catholic paradigm – to the beginning of modernity, i.e. the period that Catholicism identified as the moment when man had turned away from God towards autonomy and self-determination.Footnote 9 The absence, at the heart of the Catholic Church, of a clear stance against the persecution of the Jews, which had characterised the years of the Holocaust and had provoked harsh criticism from Jewish communities and their representatives, continued into the post-war period.
However, the effects and consequences of the Holocaust raised in some European and American Catholic circles an awareness that Christian responsibilities in the Nazi extermination of the Jews should be faced. According to philosophers such as Jacques Maritain, this had to be accompanied by a revision of the long tradition of Christian anti-Judaic and antisemitic teaching.
In the aftermath of the Holocaust this was challenging. The weight of a long tradition of Christian antisemitism and its influence on the Nazi extermination programme, as well as the revision of this attitude before and after the Shoah by various Catholic circles as a means of promoting a rapprochement made it difficult to redefine the image of the Jewish people in the Catholic imagination, and gave rise to different and conflicting interpretations. These perceptions ranged from the influence of anti-Jewish stereotypes that still shaped the Catholic mind-set, education and liturgy, to new openings and redefinitions that took into account the concentration camp experience (and therefore the characterisation of the Jews as victims). In the Jerusalem Church, some members began to state that there were elements of analogy between Nazism and Zionism. They were mainly people of European origins, who therefore had direct experience of Nazi Fascism and were more influenced by Catholic anti-Judaism and racial antisemitism. Between 1947 and 1967 this assertion took different forms, disappearing and reappearing in relation to the evolution of the Palestinian political situation and to the changes in the Church's stance towards the Jews that took place before and during the debates of the Second Vatican Council (1962–5).
Although the Catholic presence in Israel was limited,Footnote 10 these views merit attention in the larger history of Catholic-Jewish relations. Firstly, they were discussed in Jerusalem, a politically and religiously crucial city, and they were expressed by representatives of a faith community – the Latin Catholic one – which owed allegiance to the Holy See in Rome. In the crucial years that witnessed the foundation of the State of Israel, the status of the city was subject to international discussion.Footnote 11 The aspirations of the Vatican to see Jerusalem recognised as an international city clashed with its partition between Israel and Jordan as a result of the first Arab-Israeli war. During the debate at the United Nations, the Holy See made every effort to mobilise the ‘Catholic nations’ of Europe, Asia and Latin America in order to have them vote for the internationalisation of the city and its holy places.Footnote 12 The diplomatic policy deployed by the Vatican and the pronouncements of Pius xii caused fierce disagreements with Israeli delegates at the United Nations.
This conflict was also important at a local level: in Jerusalem the Church and the Israeli government confronted each other on practical, day-by-day issues relating to the situation of the Catholic population. Their mutual perceptions and suspicions played a role in attempts at a compromise in their relations, especially concerning religious freedom and Christian rights (access to the holy places, status of Catholic institutions such as schools and hospitals, return of Christian refugees to their villages). The elaboration of a rhetoric depicting the Jews as ‘Nazi-Zionists’ needs to be considered in this broader perspective.
Secondly, the importance of these topics in Christian-Jewish relations must be measured in the light of the consequences not only of adherence to but also of opposition to such views: within the Jerusalem Church a very small but internationally connected group of Catholic clergy and laymen (mostly of Jewish origin) that was attached to the St James Association tried to counter the Catholic anti-Jewish and antisemitic thesis. These same individuals would later be active in Jewish-Catholic dialogue in preparations for the Second Vatican Council and during its discussions, as well as in the aftermath in the Middle East of the Six-Day War.
In order to follow the history of the Nazi-Zionist topos before 1967, three main moments may be considered: the 1947–9 Arab-Israeli war; the consolidation of the State of Israel in the 1950s; and the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961–2.
The first Arab-Israeli war
During Second World War, the Church of Jerusalem had been spared the horrors of the conflict. In the sources available so far on Patriarch Luigi BarlassinaFootnote 13 and Custos Alberto GoriFootnote 14 there are no specific references to the ongoing extermination of the Jews. The Holocaust was to re-emerge a few years later in the letters of the clergy of Palestine, reinterpreted in the light of the clash between the Latin Church in the Holy Land and the new State of Israel.
Among the religious orders, reflection on, and coming to terms with, the Nazi extermination programme touched first those that were historically more closely related to the apostolate to and in the Jewish world. The need to present Catholic action towards the Jews from a favourable point of view was evident in the work of different authors, and was a long-standing trait in Holocaust-related documents written by members of the Latin Church in the Holy Land.Footnote 15
In the years that followed, the rapid escalation of violence in Jerusalem and the whole Holy Land opened a troubled phase. Whereas the battles of World War II had not focused on the Middle East, the outbreak of violence that followed the vote of 29 November 1947 started a period of great uncertainty for the local civilian population. In the UN discussion on Palestine, Arab protests and Zionist concern for the future of the yishuv (Jewish settlement) were both signs of what was to come. Each of the two sides was, of course, far from being united. The Arab world was divided internally into several factions; in addition, the best-organised army, that of Jordan, was under the authority of a ruler, King Abdullah, who at that stage was secretly involved with the Jewish Agency.Footnote 16 The Jewish sector, too, was split between the Zionist leadership, which was aware that affairs were delicately balanced, and terrorist groups like Irgun and Stern, which regarded the UN resolution as a defeat because the whole of Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel, as Zionists called Palestine) had not been granted to the Jews. Historiography has shown that the assignment of a part of Palestine to the Arabs was seen by Jewish extremist gangs as a ‘new Munich’ that amounted to a second Holocaust of the Jewish people, this time perpetrated by the Arabs. According to this reading, the British authorities were seen as ‘new Nazis’ because of their military response to terrorist actions by the Stern and Irgun brigades. However, Zionist extremists were not the only ones who accused the British government of taking political decisions that could be compared to those of the Nazis. In the months leading up to the departure of the British troops and therefore to the end of the mandate which Britain had exercised since 1917, the Arabs, especially Arab nationalists, regarded the British as enemies, as one of the main causes of the failure of the Arabs' hope of avoiding a division of the territory, and also of the Israeli victory after 15 May 1948.
The designation of ‘new Nazis’ continued to shift between the Arabs and the Jews: Hajj al-Hussein was described as ‘Hitler's Mufti’ for his relations with the Third Reich, while, since the Nazi seizure of power, Palestinian Marxists, under the influence of Moscow, had emphasised the similarities between the National Socialist Party and Zionism, coining the designation ‘Zionist-Fascist’.Footnote 17 The events of 1947–9 further strengthened this argument, which was to undergo a prolonged development, pointing out what was considered by these factions as a clear analogy between the Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba.
The first Arab-Israeli war also a crucial moment in the history of the Catholic community in the Holy Land. The hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who moved into territory that in May 1948 became the State of Israel and into neighbouring Arab countries also involved Christians of the Holy Land: many of the latter found themselves among the refugees or among those who saw their villages and their cities transformed by the arrival of people fleeing the hostilities.
The ferocity of the fighting, and in particular the battle for the capture of Jerusalem in the spring of 1948, shocked local Catholics. The deterioration of the already precarious situation in the Holy Land after the UN resolution of 29 November 1947 on the partition of Palestine, the proclamation of the birth of the State of Israel by David Ben Gurion on 14 May 1948, and the war that followed transformed and redefined traditional Catholic hostility to Zionism, in particular by absorbing some elements related to the experience of World War II. The violence of the Jewish troops furthered their image as ‘Nazi-Zionists’ in the eyes of local Catholics. The Jewish army was blamed for damaging religious buildings and symbols, unlike the Arab troops, which were reputed to be respectful of the Christian minority in the Holy Land.
The occupation of some religious buildings by the Haganah increased anti-Jewish resentment among some members of the Latin Church. The on-going battle for Jerusalem was presented by Mgr Vincent Gelat, Apostolic Administrator of the Patriarchal diocese, as an example of the Arab troops' respect for the Christian Holy Places, in contrast with what he considered as the Israelis' contempt for Christianity and its symbols, including the Vatican flag.Footnote 18 In this context Catholic representatives recalled the recent war and evoked Catholic attitudes towards the Jews during it: their initial way of recalling the Holocaust within the debate on contemporary events in Israel was that of recollecting World War II and above all describing Catholic attitudes to the Shoah in apologetic terms.
The Assumptionist community of Notre-Dame de France, which was occupied by the Israeli army during the battle of Jerusalem, was a case study by means of which it was possible to follow the development of the Palestinian situation.Footnote 19
In addition to damage to the entire complex, the desecration of its chapels was the action that most disturbed the Assumptionist religious, increasing feelings of hostility towards the army and the Jewish State. The tone and arguments were similar to those used by Catholic clergy in relation to other instances of desecration in Galilee.Footnote 20 In the two chapels, the gilded-copper doors of the tabernacles had been forced, the white silk veil torn, the statues of Christ detached from the crosses and stolen. What was most upsetting to Fr Pascal Saint-Jean, who had been superior of the community since 1948, was that, in the larger chapel, he had found ‘soldiers of both sexes dancing inside the sanctuary to the sound of the harmonium, the church pews moved and used for secular purposes’.Footnote 21
Accounts of this episode spread rapidly among religious and political representatives in Jerusalem. The image of Tsahal soldiers removing the crucifix and dancing before the altar was portrayed as pagan, immoral and demoniac; such a narrative served to foment and confirm prejudices and doubts about the real willingness of the State of Israel to respect the Church, its institutions, its members and its symbols. Fr Pascal himself decided to report the situation to the Jewish authorities, sending various letters in the ensuing months.
At the end of the year he wrote that he was still waiting for the Jewish troops to leave Notre-Dame de France, and claimed, for that site and for its resident religious community, the neutrality due to them as French Catholics, and therefore – from his point of view at least – not enemies of Israel. To support this argument he mentioned ‘the services rendered to them during the last war by our spiritual chief the Roman Pope, our French religious brothers and a great number of compatriots who risked their lives to save many persecuted Jews’.Footnote 22
Fr Pascal's words echoed others. On the night of 17 July, soldiers of the Israeli army entered the two monasteries of Deir Rafat: in his account of what happened, Fr Albino Gorla emphasised the ‘smiles and comments [of the soldiers] in the dormitory of the sisters at the sight of crucifixes, rosaries and sacred images’.Footnote 23 Such descriptions, provided by various members of the Latin Church, that portrayed the Israeli army as disrespectful of Christians represented the continuation of a long-standing Catholic view, that, since the establishment of the yishuv, Jewish settlers and Zionist leaders had been godless and immoral.
From Deir Rafat, protests rose against the actions of the Jewish army. A series of letters were sent to the Minister for Religious Affairs to report the behaviour of Israeli soldiers towards the Patriarchal monasteries. Again, it was Fr Gorla who voiced these complaints: he reflected the indignation of many of the clergy at the army's treatment of Christian buildings. However, the most interesting aspect of Fr Gorla's letters was his description of the Israeli army as a promiscuous body of men and women who had no respect for any religious symbol. The protests of the priests became more heated after Fr Gorla found ‘two pieces of the CRUCIFIX in the garbage’.Footnote 24
On 14 September, a few weeks after the occupation of the village, Deir Rafat was blown up; the monasteries were evacuated in November and the priests had to leave.
The conclusion drawn from such happenings was that these provocative acts were interpreted as revealing the ‘true’ nature and mentality of the Israeli authorities (and of the whole Jewish population), although in public they tried to hide their deep-rooted contempt for Christianity. This was stated explicitly by two Franciscans of the Holy Land College in Jerusalem, Patrick J. Coyle and Theophane Carrell:
The desecrations that have happened … reveal only too well the mentality of a cross-section of the Jewish people. The Christian, not without reason then, lives in a state of anxiety, not to say fear, while he awaits the outcome of the Palestine Problem and the Problem of Jerusalem.Footnote 25
It is only by reading between the lines that this characterisation of the Jewish army can be equated with the behaviour of occupying armies during World War II. However, some Catholic voices began to make explicit reference to Nazism.
In letters of the clergy of the Holy Land during the 1948 war, the connection with the Holocaust was expressed in several ways. The first was to describe the support that some Christians, individually or as congregations and groups, had given to some Jews in order to save them from persecution, presenting these actions in a highly laudatory way and extending them by inference to the entire Catholic world. The supporters of this thesis stated that, since the Church had worked so hard to help the Jews, Israel revealed its ingratitude, in the setting of the events of 1948, when it directly attacked the Christians of the Holy Land.
An example of this way of thinking can be found in the letters of Fr Alberto Rock. Writing from Acre, the ancient crusader citadel where there had been a Franciscan parish since 1690, Fr Rock told Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, Secretary of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches, what had happened during the conflict. He put forward a comparison between the aid that Catholic institutions were offering to the Palestinian Arabs and their assistance to the Jews during the Holocaust:
Since the month of April I have had no communication with my superiors … In June and in August I had the happiness of seeing, for a few hours, Mgr Antonio Vergani …. From the first day of Jewish occupation we have been dedicated to alleviating the moral and material suffering of the Arab people, … in the same way that the Catholic clergy offered protection, support and all kinds of material and spiritual aid to the Jewish people, in the darkest days of its modern history.Footnote 26
This was a very celebratory reading of the actions of the Church both during World War II and during the first Arab-Israeli war: these events were placed next to each other, not only chronologically, but as an interpretive tool. Also visible here is the first example of an interpretation which was to spread later, especially in the 1950s: whereas the Church had rescued some Jews during the Holocaust, right now the Jews themselves were wronging the Arabs in Israel, so much so as to deserve the epithet of ‘new Nazis’ chosen by prominent Catholic leaders, including Mgr (later Cardinal) Domenico Tardini, at that time Under-Secretary of State at the Vatican for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs.Footnote 27 However, this further refinement was not present in Fr Rock's text. He continued:
I have not ceased to be Arab, neither do I forget to be a priest … I have a noble mission to play for the suffering and I have an obligation to resist injustice …, although with the risk of ending up in some concentration camps, as many Catholic priests in Europe did for having defended and protected the oppressed Jews.Footnote 28
Such rhetoric, expressed by a Western cleric, would have conformed to the European tradition of anti-Judaism. However, when used by an Arab, such as Fr Rock, the question is whether it reflected the perceptions of a parallel between Nazi atrocities and Israeli outrages maintained by the Muslim majority in the region. It is difficult to say, since Catholic sources are reticent on the subject of relations with the Muslim population. However, some facts are self-evident: Muslims and Catholics were Arabs. They lived in the same villages and cities, and they had had to cope with Jewish immigration to Palestine since the nineteenth century, even trying to create joint Muslim-Christian committees, especially during the riots in 1929 and the Arab revolt of 1936–9.Footnote 29 Moreover the spread of anti-Jewish feelings among Catholics was also a way in which Palestinian Christians could assert their loyalty to the Arab cause. Muslims accused the Christians of holding secret negotiations with the Jews in order to sell land and establish fruitful business relationships. This accusation, made in particularly harsh terms against the Orthodox community, was also extended to the Catholics. In the second half of the 1940s the fear of a Muslim reaction was shared by the Western clergy: Mgr Barlassina feared to see Catholics ‘between two fires’,Footnote 30 between Jews and Muslims, and therefore repeatedly asked the Vatican in the years before 1947 to make an open and public pro-Arab stand. For these reasons, in the Catholic mind, recourse to a rhetoric which it shared with the Muslim population could be a valuable card to demonstrate Christian opposition to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The Catholic fear of a Muslim reactions in the event of a Jewish-Christian rapprochement was, moreover, to play an important role in the Vatican Council's discussions on its document on the Jews, causing a ‘watering-down’ of the text.Footnote 31
In the elaboration of the rhetoric of the ‘new Nazis’, a further argument was expressed by those in the Jerusalem Church who placed Zionism, Nazism and Communism in close relationship. From this point of view it is interesting to see what the Custos and future Patriarch, Mgr Alberto Gori, wrote during those months. In the summer of 1948, an extract of a letter from the Franciscan Minister-General, Fr Pacifico Perantoni, to Cardinal Tisserant reported on a document addressed to him by Gori on the situation of Palestinian refugees:
The Arab population, Christian and Muslim, is suffering a lot. More than 400,000 have fled to Transjordan, Lebanon and Syria. They are quite destroyed. They would like to see a gesture by the Holy See in their favour. As far as I am concerned, they deserve it and I think it would do much good. They make a comparison with what was done to the Jews during the war. And you have to see who these Zionists are and what they do. God save us! The true Bolsheviks. The Arabs are full of respect.Footnote 32
In Gori's words, the request for intervention in support of the Palestinian refugees was linked to a condemnation of Zionism, identified as another manifestation of the Communist threat. Significantly, once again, to support his argument the Custos highlighted the actions of the Holy See in favour of the Jews during the Holocaust.
As was the case with the history of the Zionist movement in period of the yishuv, Catholic anti-Jewish prejudices were attached to a centuries-old tradition and were reshaped in the light of the developing policies of the State of Israel. Moreover, the Church was afraid that the privileges traditionally enjoyed in the Holy Land by Catholic institutions (especially in the fields of education and the social services) might be undermined. Finally, in the eyes of many, the fact that the Holy See had not recognised the new Jewish state further legitimised an attitude of suspicion and opposition with regard to Israel's political and military choices.
The episodes of desecration and the plight of the refugees were the two main terms of reference in the parallel – which at times took on the contours of a blurred analogy – between Zionism and Nazism theorised by some members of the Church of Jerusalem. These same arguments also appeared in the Italian Catholic press, for instance in some articles in Il nuovo cittadino and Gentes.Footnote 33
In the same months, similar reflections were further elaborated by the French Islamologist Louis Massignon (1883–1962) who was among the first to point out the transformation of the Jews from victims to offenders, from a people exiled since ancient times to a state that was violently forcing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee, forcing them into a future as refugees.
Massignon had already written about this during the months following the end of the conflict, in the reports sent by the missions around Bethlehem, where he went to bring aid on behalf of the French Committee for Bethlehem Relief. A more precisely focused appraisal of this subject can be found in an article entitled ‘Le Problème des réfugiés arabes de Palestine’ that he published in 1951.Footnote 34 The political phase during which this text came out was marked by statements by the Israeli political leadership on the question of Palestinian refugees which revealed that the right of return could not be applied to them because it was considered a threat to Jewish state security.Footnote 35 In addition, the Israeli army was engaged in fighting Arab infiltrators who were trying to return to the villages that they had abandoned during the 1947–9 war. The Israeli decisions were communicated to the United Nations with the release of the report of the Israeli representative at the UN, Aubrey (then Abba) Eban. According to Massignon, the arguments used by Eban demonstrated that the Israeli policy was nothing more than a form of colonialism, comparable to French domination in the Maghreb or to the segregation of blacks in South Africa.Footnote 36 He then asked his readers to recall the origins of biblical Israel:
Israel's every right derives from the promise made to Abraham, and the whole privilege of Abraham stems from the fact that he was a guêr,Footnote 37 a foreign guest in this Holy Land, and founded a settlement on the traditional practice of hospitality … It is incredible to think that after all the pain suffered by the Jews in galuth,Footnote 38 as refugees, they have allowed a refugee problem, and Arab refugees, to appear in the yishuv.Footnote 39
Massignon took up the rhetorical argument that the Jews, who had been recognised as victims of Nazi-Fascist persecution, were now behaving towards the Palestinians as their Nazi executioners had behaved towards them. The treatment meted out to the Arab refugees by the Israeli army and government was put forward as evidence. Massignon did not directly evoke the Holocaust, but rather shifted the emphasis from the theme of Israel as the home of the ‘new Nazis’ to that of the Jewish people as a people that in the past had known very well what exile was, but now had become the cause of the Palestinian diaspora. This argument was problematic too, and it did not escape the logic of ahistorical reversal (from victims to persecutors) that had surrounded most references to the Jews since the end of the war, and with gradually increasing force.
During the first Arab-Israeli war memories of World War II re-surfaced and provided a precise characterisation for the Jews among Catholic representatives: according to this Christian narrative, the victim became the offender; the proof of this role reversal was the disrespectful treatment inflicted by the Israeli army on the Christian world in the Holy Land. The image of the Jew as a bearer of de-Christianisation, which dated back at least to the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, was now updated and transferred to Israel. Occupation of religious buildings, bombings of Christian symbols and profanations of churches were not interpreted as a part of the war, but as a mark of Israel's willingness to damage the Christian minority. During and after the first Arab-Israeli war, religious buildings became a lieu de mémoire of a past that no longer existed: their ruins were viewed as warnings not to place any confidence in the Jewish government's promises of religious freedom, which were nothing but lies. This was summarised by a word that began to appear in newsletters and articles in the Catholic press after 1948: persecution.
The lexicon of ‘persecution’, used by the Christian world against the Israeli state, was to remain as a linguistic choice for describing the situation in the 1950s: political discussion about Christian schools in Israel and about converts was to be interpreted as a further manifestation of Israel's ‘persecution’ of the Christian presence in the Holy Land.
The fifties: the ‘persecution’
The signing of the armistices between Israel and the Arab states involved in the conflict did not lead to any improvement in relations between the Church of Jerusalem and the Jewish state. Some issues remained unresolved: the reorganisation of the parishes that had been closed and destroyed during the war, the granting of the right of return to Christian refugees, and the restitution of land that had been confiscated and declared ‘absentee property’.
In the opinion of Custos Gori, expressed in a circular letter of 12 May 1949, events at the end of the hostilities had shown that the Church could not have any ‘confidence in people [the Jews] who should at least feel a duty to those who risked their lives, quite recently, to save and protect them’.Footnote 40 These words marked the re-emergence of a further anti-Jewish topos, that of the ‘lazy, lying Jew’, now translated and adapted to the new context of the State of Israel, and combined with a reference – in this case apologetic – to the actions of the Church to assist the Jews during the Holocaust.
In the fifties, a period marked by uncertainties, and dominated by social conflicts inside Israel and the fear of a new war on its borders, numerous members of the Catholic Church – in Jerusalem and in Rome – had recourse to the concept of ‘persecution’ to define the policy implemented by the Jewish political and military authorities toward the Christian population.
On 7 May 1949 the Catholic news agency Fides, the voice of the Congregation de Propaganda Fide, published a report dated April 20 on the situation of the Church in Israel: in this Zionism was described as a serious threat to the Christians of the Holy Land.Footnote 41 The anonymous author of the article added that the acts of vandalism that had taken place during and after the war of 1948 were evidence of an intense anti–Christian hatred in Israel.Footnote 42
A few days before the article appeared, the French newspaper La Croix, founded by the Assumptionist Fathers, published an article by an anonymous traveller in Israel.Footnote 43 This was actually the text of a letter sent by Fr Pascal Saint-Jean to his General-Superior in Rome, Fr Gervais Quénard.Footnote 44 It constituted a severe indictment of Israel: the Jewish army was accused of having caused a dramatic humanitarian crisis: refugees were confined by them in ‘concentration camps’ and ‘ghettos’.Footnote 45 The author drew on symbols of Jewish discrimination, accusing Israel of meting out to Palestinian refugees the same treatment that Jews had undergone during the centuries of the diaspora. The author did not forbear to criticise Arab governments, but he focused primarily on the Israelis.
The picture was further complicated by the publication of Custos Gori's circular letter, just days before the first anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel.Footnote 46 On 8 June 1949 the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz published a United Press report from Rome that quoted some short excerpts from the letter, highlighting in particular the harsh tones of the Custos's comment on the desecration of Christian buildings by the Jewish army. This story revealed two important points: the first was related to the anti-Jewish feelings underlying Gori's arguments, while the second was linked to the reaction of the Israeli public, and even the international community, to documents produced by the Church of the Holy Land, and showed that it was necessary for its representatives to be particularly cautious when drafting their texts.
If these events are considered from an Israeli perspective, it is possible at this stage to see the beginnings of an attitude that was to persist for decades: the Israeli belief that the Latin Catholic Church was, in the Christian landscape in the Holy Land, the most hostile to the Jewish state and its government. In the summer of 1949 a series of articles that appeared in the Jewish newspaper Palestine Post described the Latin Church as the only voice that asserted that the Israeli government was currently persecuting Christians.Footnote 47
In the following years, parliamentary debate on the laws on marriage, education and (later) conversion ignited further conflict between the Church and Israel. According to Antonio Vergani, Patriarchal Vicar for Israel, the marriage law was a heavy blow inflicted by Israel on the Church: he called it a ‘real systemic persecution’.Footnote 48
In correspondence between the various members of the Jerusalem Latin Church, allegations re-emerged against Israel of applying towards Christians the same measures that they had been subjected to themselves a few years earlier under the Third Reich. Vergani was not afraid to share such views even with a pro-Israel cardinal such as Tisserant:
They [Israel] aim to prevent any conversion: the only thing they have not done yet is to behave like the French, during the Nazi occupation, when the Jews were forced to wear the medal [star of David]: it will come to this with the Christians in Israel.Footnote 49
Less than a decade after the first Arab-Israel war, the 1956 Suez crisis and the possibility of a new Middle East conflict – extended this time to a war of global dimensions – led to accusations being levelled at Arab leaders by Israeli politicians and commentators. In particular the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was portrayed as the ‘new Hitler’, while the political regime that emerged after the 1952 Free Officers coup d’état was described as a new incarnation of the Third Reich, threatening the very existence of the Jewish state.Footnote 50
However, the rhetoric of the Jews (Israelis) as the ‘new Nazis’ peaked a few years later with the Eichmann trial, which had a profound impact on the public in Israel and elsewhere,Footnote 51 and on the Jerusalem Church itself.
The Eichmann trial
The Eichmann trial was a decisive moment in the history of the State of Israel. It was when knowledge of the Nazi-Fascist extermination programme powerfully entered the collective national consciousness.Footnote 52 Although recent historiography has questioned the ‘myth of silence’ on the Holocaust in the immediate post-war period,Footnote 53 demonstrating various initiatives by means of which some survivors attempted, even before the liberation, to document their tragic experiences, the Israeli case presents some specific features.
During the decades preceding the Eichmann trial, the legacy of the Holocaust had marked the lives of Israeli Jews, but mostly in private.Footnote 54 In the post-1945 (and post-1948) period it was restricted to personal grief. Some political events had placed the Holocaust in the public sphere in the late forties and fifties, especially during the negotiations between the Israeli government and the German Federal Republic on the definition of reparations. However, that debate had taken place on the international stage and did not lead to any processing of the memory of the Shoah. Every effort had to be directed towards strengthening the young state, which was threatened at its borders, and weakened within by its Arab population and the fragmentation of its Jewish elements. Building a strong state was not simply a military matter, depending on efficient defences: what was at stake was the birth and formation of the ‘new Jew’, the persona that Zionism had pursued since its foundation, in opposition to the image of the ‘old diaspora Jew’, victim of centuries of persecution.
The Nazi extermination programme stood out as the moment of Jewish weakness par excellence, and for this reason the Jewish state needed to contain and confine the (decidedly difficult) trauerarbeit to the private sphere. The Shoah gave Jews a feeling of fatigue and shame, shame that they had been unable to prevent it. The public memory of the Holocaust preferred to concentrate on episodes of Jewish resistance, especially on the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. For this reason, Holocaust survivors were often marginalised and had to struggle to find a place within the state. The political goal of the Zionist authorities was to transform them as quickly as possible into citizens of a state that was to redeem the previous Jewish history of pain and defeat. The Zionist leadership strove to reshape the national consciousness no longer around the feeling of being victims, but on the basis of pride in the Jewish people and in the country's strength. In this way, the founders of the State of Israel managed to avoid dealing with the uncomfortable questions that were silently circulating about their collusion with the Third Reich.
The Eichmann trial brought about a fundamental change in the public memory of the Holocaust: for the first time the amount of documentation and information about what had happened that spread around Israel and the world during the hearings brought clearly into the light of day the dimensions and character of the Nazi horror. The personal testimonies of the series of victims who appeared at the Eichmann trial went hand in hand with the historical reconstruction of the Jewish tragedy that was beginning to be published in those years. Thus the story of the Holocaust entered into the public memory and into collective discussion within Israeli society and beyond.
It involved the Christian world too. The trial subjected to close examination not only the accused – Adolf Eichmann – but also the long history of antisemitism. The attorney-general, Gideon Hausner, presented Eichmann as a Nazi in real and symbolic terms: in addition to his actions, he was described as the perfect example of a world, the German world, characterised not only by racism and by a bureaucracy enslaved to a system aiming at annihilation, but also by a tradition of Christian antisemitism.Footnote 55
The Catholic world in Jerusalem followed what was happening in the courtroom. In the summer of 1961 Tierra Santa, a Spanish-language journal of the Franciscan Custody, devoted an editorialFootnote 56 and an articleFootnote 57 to the Eichmann case.
From its first words, the author of the editorial – presumably the editor, Fr Francisco Güemes – recorded the extensive attention paid to the trial, portraying a Jerusalem invaded by the words of journalists and commentators. In his eyes it was evident that the hearings had quickly become not only a criminal trial, but also constituted a symbolic and meta-historical judgement, confirming what ‘Ben Gurion himself had declared’: the trial was affirming, unmistakably, that ‘Eichmann is but a symbol of all those who, across the centuries, did not sympathise with the Jewish people. Thus this is a “historic trial” of racism.’Footnote 58
The priest then addressed the question of whether the Jewish people had a legitimate right to conduct these proceedings: ‘While they accuse so strongly, can they sincerely state that they always played the role of innocent victims? Are the Jews innocent of the same sin that they are judging now, racism?’ This question, clearly rhetorical, could elicit only one answer: according to Güemes, ‘There is the coincidence that this same Israeli State owes its existence to a racist principle.’ In support of this argument, Tierra Santa recalled the events of the first Arab-Israeli war: the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and ‘some coldly calculated extermination methods carried out against the local population’ were clear evidence that Israel itself was responsible for racially motivated crimes in the recent past. Furthermore, in the author's opinion, Israel had been created ‘more or less artificially to give refuge to a race, without considering whether this might cause great problems to those who were forced to leave the place’.Footnote 59
In similar terms the editorial reported the indirect testimony of an unidentified Catholic priest who had spent two years in a Nazi concentration camp – also unnamed – and was now resident in Israel: he had ‘stated that currently there is the same racism against Christians in Israel as there was against Jews in Germany twenty or twenty-five years ago, although with different methods, of course’. After this statement, which clearly expressed the Nazi-Zionist analogy, the article concluded by saying that, taking into account Jewish responsibility in perpetrating racist crimes, even the Eichmann trial should be considered nothing but a ‘Israeli publicity stunt’.
In the same issue of Tierra Santa, an article by Fr Angel Garcia entitled ‘Los jueces de Israel’ echoed the editorial's interpretation of events. The Jew, having fulfilled his ‘centuries-old dream’ of coming back to the ‘land of his ancestors’, now set himself up as a ‘judge neither of a man (Eichmann) nor of a regime (Nazi), but of humankind itself and of history’.Footnote 60 Therefore the Jews, ‘from the role of victim that they believed that they had played for centuries, turned, with unprecedented self-determination, into judges of the offences that they had suffered themselves’.Footnote 61 In Fr Garcia's opinion the question at issue was the analysis of centuries of hatred for the Jews: during the Eichmann trial Israelis had refused to look for the origins of antisemitism. Garcia added that its roots ‘could originate – without justifying it – in an attitude against the Jewish people that they regard as universal’.Footnote 62 The next sentence shifted onto a meta-historical level: Fr Garcia wrote that ‘this is not the first time that the Jewish people have sat “pro tribunali” and pronounced a transcendental judgement dividing the world by means of a moat of indelible rancour’.Footnote 63 This statement echoed the accusation of deicide, the same accusation that for centuries had been the main weapon of attack in the Christian anti-Jewish arsenal.
Addressing the issue of Holocaust, Fr Garcia had an additional purpose: that of defending the Church against charges of having collaborated in hiding Nazi leaders in the immediate post-war period. The arrest of Eichmann fuelled suspicion and accusations against the Vatican with regard to the possible involvement of high-ranking members of the Catholic Church in granting Eichmann a Red Cross passport that allowed him to escape to Argentina. The debate immediately spread from the Eichmann case to the broader question of the Church's silence during the extermination of the Jews and of Christian – and especially Catholic – support for Nazism. The article published in Tierra Santa was part of this heated and dramatic debate. Fr Garcia argued that the victims of the Holocaust (the Jews) had now become illegitimate judges, in a trial where not only Eichmann was being accused, but also the Church, especially in the person of Pope Pius xii. According to Tierra Santa, only the Church – unlike the Jews – could be said to be completely innocent, in 1939 as in 1961. In fact, during the Holocaust, the Franciscan wrote, the Church placed at the service of the Jews ‘all the warmth of Christian charity, rescuing many people to save their lives’. For this reason, the author considered it a serious offence to ‘hint, even fleetingly, that at that time the Pontiff might be responsible for not denouncing the Nazi crimes’.Footnote 64
Both these texts clearly expressed that the Jewish people had gone through a role reversal, from victim to perpetrator, during the period from the Holocaust to the founding of the State of Israel. Both the articles openly compared Israeli actions to those of the Nazis. Another ancient cliché subtly underlay these arguments: that of an anti-Church conspiracy hatched by the Jews and led, now, particularly by Israeli Jews.
The articles published in Tierra Santa did not go unnoticed, either within the Latin Church in Jerusalem or within the wider Israeli society.
In early September a French priest who had lived in Israel since 1951 responded. Jean Leroy, naturalised as Yochanan Elichai, was a Little Brother of Jesus and a member of the St James Association, a Patriarchal group of clergy and faithful whose pastoral work was characterised by a completely different spirit from the strong hostility to the Jewish State and antisemitic clichés that pervaded both of the texts published in Tierra Santa.Footnote 65
After reading the articles, Yochanan Elichai expressed his deep bitterness in a letter to Patriarch Alberto Gori, in which he replied to the arguments that they contained. First of all, he expressed a completely different reading of the founding of Israel and of the legitimacy of Jewish settlement since the time of the yishuv, at the same time also asserting the need to respect the rights of the Arab population. The core of the article, however, lay in his rejection of any comparison between Zionism and Nazism:
I only regret that as parallels to Nazism and its methodical racism the article recalls incidents of war, excesses and atrocities of 1948, serious incidents, of course, but present in every war and carried out on both the two sides; the quoted cases are one or two isolated cases, temporary, much deplored by the entire population. Comparing them to Nazi racism, to the methodical destruction and torture endured by six million Jews for over ten years (1933), is a glaring injustice, an injury to a people that has not yet healed from its recent sufferings.Footnote 66
In addition, Br Elichai contested another allegation reported in Tierra Santa, that the Jews' own attitudes had triggered the persecution, stating that this was unacceptable. Commenting on the ambiguous reference to Jesus' trial, Elichai wrote that ‘If a comparison is made between Eichmann and Christ, it is blasphemy, isn't it? If this is not the intention, it is grievous that this passage sounds ambiguous and that readers can misunderstand it this way.’Footnote 67
The comparison between Jewish racism vis-à-vis Christians in Israel and the Nazi persecution of Jews deserved to be regarded as ‘serious slander’.Footnote 68 Elichai also rejected the report in Tierra Santa of a statement made by a priest who had spent two years in a concentration camp. Br Elichai wrote that this priest had denied that he had spoken of racism, since, on the contrary, he viewed the Jewish attitude towards the Christians with favour. In support of this argument, Elichai mentioned his own experience in Israel: although some episodes of intolerance had really happened and deserved to be recorded, in his opinion they were motivated by the fact that the Christians attributed the harm to the anti-Jewish actions carried out by individuals and governments who called themselves Christian. While asserting the need to stop all forms of intolerance towards Christians in the Jewish state, Christians could not ‘generalise by saying “the Jews” for every mistake’. This attitude, Elichai continued, was likely to fuel rather than extinguish anti-Christian polemic. For this reason it was important to cultivate an attitude of friendship, as was being recommended by Pope John xxiii at that time.
The response of the Patriarch was telegraphic and chiefly aimed at hushing up any kind of controversy that might arise from the publication of the articles in Tierra Santa.Footnote 69
During the following days other members of the St James Association wrote to the Patriarch criticising the Franciscan articles, and chiefly echoing Elichai's reflections.Footnote 70 In the meantime many complaints had arrived from different quarters, including the Israeli Jewish press.
Although the sources do not make it possible to investigate how this episode developed subsequently, it is reasonable to surmise that fear of further controversy led the Catholic press in the Holy Land to remain silent for the rest of the Eichmann trial, right up to its final conclusion and verdict.
From the sixties to the eighties
The construction by the Catholic Church in the Holy Land of an analogy between the Jewish State and the Nazi regime can be traced in different sources: the foundation and progressive consolidation of this rhetoric was not a linear process, but an irregular movement whose most acute moments coincided with the battles of 1948 and the Eichmann trial.
During the 1948 war, in some letters and documents written by Catholic representatives in Jerusalem, the first elements of identification between the Jews and the ‘new Nazis’ were outlined. This did not end with the 1949 armistices, but was to continue into the following decade, assuming different forms in relation to the new situation that emerged from the first Arab-Zionist conflict.
In the fifties, Israeli government measures in education, marriage and the status of religious institutions, and the debate on the conversion of Jews to Christianity led to some images that had been used during the war of 1948 being repeated, although in a new way: it was not only the Israeli army, but the Israeli State itself that aimed to persecute the Catholic minority of the Holy Land.
However, while the fifties represented a period of consolidation, another real shift in the relationship between the Catholics of the Holy Land and the Jewish world took place during the sixties: for the Jerusalem Church, the Second Vatican Council and the Six-Day War were two events so relevant and so contiguous as to be considered a single prolonged instance of epoch-making change that shook the Middle East. In fact, the difficult drafting of the declaration Nostra Aetate Footnote 71 revealed the weight of a long history of Catholic anti-Judaism and its consequences for an Arab Church in the Israeli State. These events took place in a context that was influenced by the public importance that the memory of the Holocaust was acquiring in European societies and in Israel after the Eichmann trial, but also by the persistence of instability in the Middle East, especially after the Suez Crisis.
How influential within the wider Catholic Church was the rhetoric of the ‘new Nazis’, particularly in the period leading up to the Second Vatican Council? Jerusalem in some way reflected the different positions being taken within the Church as whole, between a majority hostile to Israel and a minority willing to promote new encounters between Jews and Christians. The Patriarch Gori was not particularly authoritative or popular in the Vatican circles, but he shared the feelings of suspicion toward Israel expressed by several members of the curia, because these recalled a centuries-old cultural substratum of Catholic education and teaching. Gori's major opponent was Cardinal Tisserant, the main supporter of Israel in the Vatican.Footnote 72 From the beginning of the fifties Tisserant had urged the Latin Patriarch to organise pastoral assistance for Jewish converts: despite Gori's criticism and reluctance, Tisserant explicitly supported the foundation of the St James Association and particularly encouraged the work conducted by Yochanan Elichai in the development of a Catholic liturgy in Hebrew. This increased the distance between Tisserant and Gori.
Elichai was also in contact with Jacques and Raissa Maritain, and he helped persuade the French philosopher to collect his major writings on ‘the mystery of Israel’ into a book.Footnote 73 Various members of the St James Association were active representatives of the French circles engaged in promoting a different image of Israel and a philo-Zionist attitude within the Catholic Church.Footnote 74 This is clearly reflected in the stand taken by Elichai against the Franciscan articles published in Tierra Santa, and also the opinions expressed by the members of the St James Association, especially Fr Bruno Hussar, who were later to contribute directly or to participate in the Vatican Council.Footnote 75
Before the Second Vatican Council, the beginning of the sixties was marked by the Eichmann trial. This, and its effects in Israel and all over the world, challenged the Church of Jerusalem to deal with the past, with the memory of the Holocaust. The hearings that took place in Jerusalem elicited, in the Church of Jerusalem, opposing views and interpretations of what was happening and, more generally, of Christian-Jewish relations in Israel, as well as of the legitimacy of the State of Israel from a Catholic perspective.
The development of an anti-Zionist rhetoric that sought to demonstrate an analogy between Zionism and Nazism during these three specific phases (1948, 1950s and 1961–2) was to be deeply affected and redefined by events during the sixties, which opened a new chapter in the history of the Catholic presence in Israel. The Six-Day War generated, among intellectuals and in Europe as a whole, a new wave of criticism of Israel and antisemitic attacks. Even in previously strong supporters of the Zionism, the events of June 1967 provoked a deep shock, which in some cases affected subsequent attitudes to the Israeli state. The invasion of Lebanon by the troops of Tsahal would later exacerbate this.
Politicians, journalists and cartoonists compared Israel to the Nazi regime, resorting to Christian stereotypes of Jews as traitors and deicides. If, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jews were somehow sacralised and dehistoricised as the eternal victims, after 1967 and 1982 these images were reversed, proposing instead Jews as the eternal persecutors, from ancient times to the present day, from the trial of Jesus to the plight of the Palestinian refugees. The most powerful argument was to apply to Jews Nazi characteristics, symbols of evil par excellence.
The case of the Church in the Holy Land shows how these elements were already present in Catholic discourse during the post-Holocaust decades, when antisemitic stereotypes were still operating in liturgy, prayers and teachings. The ongoing process of eradicating this tradition is part of a still unresolved problem as Catholic culture confronts modernity.
