Golgotha to Auschwitz and Beyond: Interpretations and Debates

“I kneel at this Golgotha of the modern world.” Thus spoke Pope John Paul II in 1979 at Brzezinka, Poland, not far from Auschwitz.Footnote ⁶ The writer James Carroll draws a nominally similar analogy when he describes Auschwitz, understood here as the iconic symbol of the Shoah, as the “climax of the story that begins at Golgotha.”Footnote ⁷ As one would expect, these disparate ways of associating the place where Jesus of Nazareth was supposed to have been crucified with the most notorious Nazi death camp of World War II are problematic, albeit for different reasons. The former might be seen as an attempt to “Christianize” a site of cataclysmic Jewish suffering; the latter could be taken to implicate Christianity in the violently exclusionary politics of a radical nationalist secular state. Still, the provocative association may be useful as a heuristic device to frame a measured reflection on the place of Jews and Judaism in Christian theology and eschatology. That is, it can serve as an instructive starting point to begin to understand the tangled web of threads linking Christian religious beliefs and practices to the complex matrix of social, cultural, and political factors that defined and eventually deformed Jewish-Gentile relations on the eve of the Holocaust.

The arduous task of untangling this complicated web has generated something of a small publishing industry and an effluence of heated debate in various print media. The controversies engendered by the more popular and polemical titles have overshadowed the small but solid corpus of scholarship, mainly from continental Europe, which emerged by the late 1990s that engaged seriously with the burning question about the relationship between Christian anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism.Footnote ⁸

Predictably, in the more popular vein of literature, the popes have been the main draw, together with the ensemble of colorful characters and of inscrutable curial offices that inform the popular imagination of the Vatican.Footnote ⁹ The more sensationalistic accounts (in particular John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope, a specious “secret history” of Pope Pius XII) provoked a predictable response by apologists—understood here in the traditional sense of the term—who sought to defend the church's record vis-à-vis Nazism before and during the Shoah. The results were desultory, producing mainly polemical-apologetic arguments that largely overshadowed critical-historical analysis.Footnote ¹⁰ These apologetic works are not without some merit, though they are hindered by a certain myopia and at times defensive tone. In seeking to refute and to rebut at every turn, they constitute advocacy and hagiography rather than critical history, thereby glossing over the many complexities of historical experiences.

Discerning readers can readily appreciate that, despite its shortcomings, Kertzer's study is more fully grounded than most others in the relevant archival sources and scholarship. In an early review, John Pawlikowski called Kertzer's book a “serious work” based on “sound scholarship,” which he believed merited the “significant attention” of Catholics and of all students of the subject.Footnote ¹¹ Doubtless one reason why it drew serious attention was that Kertzer's avowed aim was to dismantle the weighty, if cursory, thesis advanced by the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews on the eve of the jubilee year in 2000, which differentiated modern anti-Semitism from traditional anti-Judaism. In its historic and much-criticized report, “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” the Commission reasoned that modern anti-Semitism drew on racial and political theories that violated Catholic teachings on the intrinsic worth, dignity, and equality of “all races and peoples.” Anti-Judaism, by contrast, was defined by the Commission vaguely and superficially as “the long-standing sentiments of mistrust and hostility” towards Jews.Footnote ¹²

It is instructive to recall that “We Remember” was the culmination of some ten years of critical reflection—undertaken at John Paul II's behest—with the aim of offering an authoritative Catholic statement on the origins, history, and consequences of the Holocaust. Indeed, its primary purpose is apologetic and pastoral, not historical.Footnote ¹³ Writing in 1998 to the President of the Commission, Cardinal Edward Cassidy, John Paul II said that as the church prepared to celebrate the start of Christianity's third millennium, it felt impelled to renew its recognition of the Shoah as “an indelible stain” on the twentieth century and to encourage Christians to acknowledge and to repent of “past errors and infidelities.”Footnote ¹⁴

Principal among these past errors, the Vatican could admit, was Christian anti-Judaism—that complex web of theological tenets, cultural norms, and social practices that spawned and sustained Christian hostility towards Jews from the earliest days of Christianity. Over the centuries, in fact, religious anti-Judaism buttressed legal and extra-legal measures, ecclesial and civil, aimed at marginalizing and excluding Jews from the social life of communities across Europe; this included such notorious measures as forced conversions or expulsions. It played its part during the Holocaust, too, as John Paul II readily acknowledged on numerous occasions. Despite the courageous witness of those Christians who actively worked to rescue Jewish lives, he said, there were those “sons and daughters of the Church whose actions on behalf of their persecuted Jewish neighbors fell short of what might be expected of ‘Christ's followers’.”Footnote ¹⁵ Standing at the threshold of its third millennium, the church acknowledged and expressed its profound “regret” for these many “errors and failures of those sons and daughters of the Church.” And the church fervently hoped that “We Remember” would “help to heal the wounds of past misunderstandings and injustices.”Footnote ¹⁶

Clearly, “We Remember” is not a work of history. Sir Owen Chadwick appropriately has cautioned against using it as a tool for historical investigation and interpretation, while also questioning its general usefulness. “History is much too complex to be painted with a brush that daubs a few crude red or purple lines,” Chadwick wrote when “We Remember” was published in 1998. “History takes time,” Chadwick admonished. “It is the nature of history that it is only little by little that the truth about the past is found.” In short, “We Remember” should not be expected to contribute to genuine historical understanding since, as Chadwick concluded astutely, “that is not the purpose of such a publication.”Footnote ¹⁷

Still, as it was a document begun and completed under the patronage of John Paul II and widely diffused for study and reflection as the latest in a line of authoritative statements, we should take care not to dismiss “We Remember” too summarily or to minimize its significance. David Kertzer certainly did not, identifying the Commission's historical reflection about the causes of the Holocaust as a real catalyst for his work. Kertzer states explicitly in the introduction to The Popes against the Jews that he was motivated to accept what he saw as John Paul II's “challenge” to consider the role the Catholic Church played in the “historical hatred and persecution of Jews.” This in turn explains the purposefully narrow focus of the book on one deeply consequential question: how “traditional” Catholic attitudes and actions towards Jews and Judaism “became transformed” into modern anti-Semitism.Footnote ¹⁸ Some might suggest that “mutation” or “deformation” or “comingling” or “grafting” are more apt descriptions of the process. Kertzer prefers to speak of a transformation, presumably to underscore a central tenet of his thesis, namely, of continuity over time and a developmental, linear relationship between religious and secular manifestations of anti-Jewish sentiment. It is a perspective that puts him on a collision course with the Vatican's version of history, not to mention the apologetic camp to which writers like Justus George Lawler belong.

The most historically pertinent parts of “We Remember” are the third and fourth sections, dealing, respectively, with Jewish-Christian relations since the birth of Christianity and the road from Nazi anti-Semitism to the Shoah in World War II. This is a considerable amount of ground to cover in a few pithy paragraphs. Although these sections necessarily pass over centuries of complex history with proverbial leaps and bounds, they do not fail to deliver some rather assertive claims. The most contentious is the argument that in the nineteenth century there emerged in various parts of Europe forms of anti-Judaism that were “essentially more sociological and political than religious.” This is another way of differentiating the theological strains of anti-Judaism in Christian belief and liturgical practices from the mix of attitudes, resentments, and prejudices—that is to say, anti-Semitism—that Christians felt towards their Jewish neighbors. In this latter form, the Commission inferred, Judaic religious beliefs and practices mattered less than the attitudes and behaviors that betrayed a deep-seated unease with Jewish presence in the social, economic, and civic life of communities, whether local, regional, or national.Footnote ¹⁹ From this it followed that sociological and political currents of anti-Judaism seeped into radical nationalist movements like National Socialism, fusing with racialist and eugenic theories to produce a noxious cocktail that morphed into Nazism—an “extreme ideology,” as We Remember puts it, which was at its core modern, secular, and neo-pagan. It was this ideology, the Vatican's Commission concluded, accurately enough that gave rise to the violently exclusionary measures that drove European Jews from their homes and then exterminated them in the millions in the middle of the twentieth century.Footnote ²⁰ Moreover, while its anti-Semitism might have aped traditional forms of religious anti-Judaism, its roots were “outside of Christianity.” In fact, it was even anti-Christian in certain key respects, and thus it persecuted the church and its adherents, too.Footnote ²¹

For Kertzer, as for many other critics, it was the assertion of an anti-Judaism that was “more sociological and political”Footnote ²² than religious or theological that presented the most serious problem. The argument sounded like a thinly-veiled attempt to exculpate religious anti-Judaism and, by extension, the institution whose leadership had persistently failed to repudiate clearly and officially the hoariest anti-Jewish prejudices; these included medieval leftovers like the blood libel myth, which drew from religious roots to poison Jewish-Christian social relations in modern civil society. In fact, the Vatican's official history steered clear of implicating papal thought in the seeming transformation of religious anti-Judaism into the political anti-Semitism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To the extent that a degree of Christian complicity was to be broached at all, it was to be located not in authoritative papal statements (or the lack thereof) but in the so-called “anti-Jewish prejudices imbedded in some Christian minds and hearts.”Footnote ²³ To the point, the Vatican's Commission wondered whether anti-Jewish “sentiment” among ordinary Christians rendered them “less sensitive” or perhaps “indifferent” to the successive waves, each more radical than the next, of the Nazi assault on the Jews after 1933.

Having preemptively excluded any systematic interrogation of modern papal thought about Jews and Judaism, the Commission's report narrowed the window of Christian complicity even further by qualifying that, since the question at hand entails a study of “people's attitudes and ways of thinking” and since these ways of thinking were susceptible to “multiple influences,” it was necessary to assess the nature and degree of Christian complicity in Nazi anti-Semitism “case by case.” With the institutional church, its leaders, and a long line of papal thought safely removed from the picture, the Commission could proceed to acknowledge that, sadly, some Christians had not offered the kind of “spiritual resistance” and “concrete action” one might have expected from sons and daughters of the church to oppose Nazi anti-Semitism and to save Jewish lives.Footnote ²⁴

Kertzer emphatically dismisses the central tenet of the Vatican's abridged history. The attempt to posit a “neat” and fundamental distinction between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, Kertzer insists, cannot stand the test of serious historical analysis.Footnote ²⁵ Although he focuses on the decades after the fall of the Papal States during Italian Unification in the latter half of the nineteenth century, culminating fatefully in the fall of papal Rome itself in 1870, Kertzer detects an unmistakable and decisive intermingling of anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic currents in papal thought already in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, some of the most evocative and compelling parts of Kertzer's analysis are his descriptions of the “rechristianizing” campaigns in papal Rome in the opening decades of the 1800s. These included the resurrection under papal authority of exclusionary and repressive practices from the Middle Ages, notably the ghetto and the predica coatta, the forced sermon, as well as the Carnival tradition in Rome of publicly upbraiding the Jews. Such measures were deeply emblematic of a matrix of religious, legal, and folkloric strands to anti-Jewish sentiment, discourse, and practice. They are arguably the most apt demonstrations of the extent to which religious anti-Judaism inspired, justified, and conditioned the social, economic, and cultural treatment of Jews at the grassroots level, so to speak. While it would be anachronistic to speak of an overtly racial or political anti-Semitism at work in mid-nineteenth century papal Rome, Kertzer demonstrates convincingly that motifs, symbols, and practices drawn from traditional anti-Judaism provided a powerful cultural antecedent and even theological justification for an emerging politics of anti-Jewish marginalization and exclusion.

The infusion of religious anti-Judaism into legal, social, and cultural norms and practices received authoritative impetus by such popes as Gregory XVI. Elected in 1831 at a time of momentous revolutionary upheaval in much of Europe, Gregory reigned until his death in 1846. Kertzer paints a decidedly monochromatic view of this controversial figure of modern papal history, seeing in Gregory the quintessential papal reaction to the various forces of modernity that were bearing down on the last vestiges of the papal monarchy. The view is not entirely unjustified. In both doctrine and diplomacy, Gregory hit back hard against what he, like his predecessors and successors, identified as the great evils of the modern world—liberalism, religious “indifferentism,” and the nefarious influences of freemasonry. Before long, the Jews of Rome came into his sights as word reached the pope of unsanitary living conditions in the over-crowded Jewish ghetto and the revival of popular Carnival rituals that derided Jewish residents. Complaints about the treatment of Jews in papal Rome eventually came from influential circles outside of Italy, as in 1843 when Count Metternich of Austria wrote to the Vatican at the prompting of the powerful financier Baron Salomon Rothschild of Vienna to complain about the treatment of Jews.

Directly and indirectly, both Metternich and Rothschild represented hugely influential political and financial backing for the Papal States. So presumably Gregory XVI had an incentive to comply with Metternich's request that Jews living in the Papal States be accorded similar rights and freedoms as their Christian neighbors. In a telling response, Gregory XVI reasoned that now more than ever, precisely because Jews were said to be less and less attached to their religious beliefs and traditions, the Jewish threat was that much greater. To Metternich's assurances that the Jews of the nineteenth century were less threatening than in previous eras because they had lost what he called their “primitive fanaticism” of a religious nature, Pope Gregory urged ever greater vigilance and suspicion. Indeed, he said, the loss of this religious commitment made laws circumscribing the rights and freedoms of Jews all the more urgent because, “if they lose their fanaticism regarding Jewish laws and practice, they certainly do not lose their national hatred for the Religion of Jesus Christ, and for the Christian name itself.”Footnote ²⁶

Although it was not yet clearly articulated, Gregory's notion of the “national hatred” of the Jews towards Christianity arguably prefigures a process that Hannah Arendt described in The Origins of Totalitarianism as the “transformation” in the modern era of the so-called “crime” of Judaism into the “fashionable ‘vice’ of Jewishness.” Although Arendt does not mean to identify the papacy or Catholicism as the source of this transformation, her point about the consequences of this decisive shift may be instructive for a critical evaluation of Kertzer's thesis. Arendt reasons that this transformation was “dangerous in the extreme” for European Jews because whereas historically they might have been able to “escape from Judaism into conversion,” from “Jewishness,” she concludes, “there was no escape.”Footnote ²⁷ To be clear, I do not read Kertzer to be saying that Pope Gregory or the Catholic church alone were responsible for this dangerous transformation. What the case of Gregory XVI does suggest, however, is an inchoate but unmistakable comingling of religious, secular-traditional, and modern forms of anti-Jewish sentiment, and it is through this dynamic that a theological rejection of Judaism was inexorably being transformed into or grafted onto a spreading politics of anti-Jewish sentiment, repression, and exclusion.

As we have seen, Kertzer pushed the envelope further still by implicating the Vatican and the Catholic church writ large in the emergence of modern anti-Semitism. As virulently anti-Semitic political movements, large and small, proliferated across Europe in the decades before World War I; as innocent Jews languished in prison or stood wrongly accused in civilian and military courts for alleged crimes against persons or the state; as nasty, crude caricatures of disloyal, avaricious, and licentious Jews began to crowd the pages of various newspapers and magazines; as more intellectualized responses to the presumed Jewish problem found their way into authoritative publications like the Jesuits’ La Civiltà Cattolica; in the decisive hour when anti-Semitism was being transformed from a fringe movement into a viable platform for modern mass-based political phenomena like Nazism, Kertzer maintains, the Catholic church and successive popes not only “embraced” the chief elements of modern anti-Semitism, they “actively promulgated” the same by means of “official and unofficial Church organs.”Footnote ²⁸

It is in this sense that Kertzer sees the church as being decisive in the fateful transition from traditional anti-Judaism to modern political anti-Semitism. More damningly, Kertzer posits a causal link between this transformational moment in the late nineteenth century and the Nazi war against the Jews several decades later. Kertzer has to admit, of course, that the Vatican never “approved” of the attempt to exterminate European Jewry. He even concedes that the Vatican “opposed it”—though “quietly,” he notes—which presumably refers to the fact that the pope, his staff, and papal diplomats around the world worked discreetly, behind the scenes, to voice Catholic opposition to the exterminatory campaign. Yet Kertzer does not doubt that the Catholic church was deeply complicit in the Holocaust. The teachings, attitudes, and policies of the church, Kertzer argues, including the authoritative role of the popes, “helped to make it possible.”Footnote ²⁹

Were the Popes against the Jews? The Case Awaiting an Answer

As a writer, editor, and literary critic in his own right, it is not surprising that Justus George Lawler should choose to engage in a vigorous exegetical exercise, concerning himself primarily with dissecting the how and the why of Kertzer's discursive and interpretive choices in order to dismantle the what of Kertzer's case against the modern papacy. Obviously, Lawler thinks very little of Kertzer's central thesis, and even less of Kertzer's analytical methods, tropes, and argumentation. Indeed, Lawler purports to make an altogether different case, reasoning that the modern popes were not against the Jews in the way that Kertzer says they were; quite the contrary, Lawler insists. Although it would take some time to be articulated clearly and forcefully, Lawler argues, from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War II, successive popes actually were very much for the Jews and were moving the church inexorably towards the epochal transformations in Catholic-Jewish relations signaled by the Second Vatican Council. On the face of it, this is a tenuous hypothesis at best, but to the book's great disservice, Lawler gets derailed from a serious exploration of the idea by focusing almost all of his attention on refuting David Kertzer's work.

It is especially unfortunate that Lawler should think it appropriate to engage in ad hominem insinuation bordering on insult. Like the centrifugal waves of an aftershock, these personal attacks radiate further and further outward and away from the epicenter of the original quake. No one is safe from Lawler's piercing glare; no shelter is refuge enough from his weighty accusations of professional incompetence or of collusion with the so-called “conjectural calumnies” of David Kertzer and his fellow travelers. Representative in this regard is Lawler's wholly imagined conjecture that the 2010 conference that David Kertzer helped to organize and host at Brown University was comprised of so many like-minded automatons—“homo academicus”—with their “mute acquiescence” to the established orthodoxy enforced by the inquisitor-cum-provost of Brown University.Footnote ³⁰

Lawler has misfired badly by imputing such motives to the conference organizers and participants. It bears repeating that, as Lawler acknowledges, the participants were a diverse mix of distinguished senior scholars and promising junior scholars from Europe and North America. His commentary hits an early atonal note when Lawler suggests that participants, simply by virtue of their attendance, gave some kind of “imprimatur”Footnote ³¹ to Kertzer's arguments about the papacy and modern anti-Semitism. As those of us who attended that gathering can attest, the conference was a rare opportunity to showcase a wide range of new, incisive research and analysis, drawn from rich and diverse archival material. Participants read each other's papers and offered spirited, constructive feedback in an atmosphere of completely forthright, respectful debate. It was a model conference in every respect, punctuated by the gracious hospitality of the organizers and of the host institution.

Lawler's tangential harangue, which comes in the opening pages no less, is a most inauspicious start to a loosely organized and discursive book whose raison d’être presumably is to set the record straight. Strike one, let us say. Troublingly, the swings and misses continue apace as the author moves polemically from one ad hominem attack to another. So it is that reviewers who dared to offer so-called “glowing comments” of Kertzer's 2001 work are derided collectively as “a combination of genteel irenicists and kindly reformists.”Footnote ³² Such patronizing treatment of one's interlocutors reveals that, despite the inflated claim to be “confronting the ideologues,” this book has an “ideological fixation” of its own. In fact, despite his pretenses to unmask an unholy trinity of “factual errors, mistranslations, and faulty arguments”Footnote ³³ in Kertzer's work, Lawler himself is guilty of interpretative and methodological slips and leaps of logic in the service of his own obvious agenda. Consequently, the book is replete with its own generous doses of selectively parsed sources, wishful translations, contorted arguments, and forced inferences.

One illustrative example may be seen in Lawler's attempts to attribute to Pius XII a wartime declaration on behalf of persecuted Jews and other civilians. The speech was an Easter radio address by Pius XII on 13 April 1941. Lawler says, correctly, that the pope decried the situation of the “defenseless, the sick, and the aged.” Lawler stretches the argument, though, when he spins this address to infer that the pope referred explicitly to Jews, along with Catholics and Protestants, as being “very dear” to his heart.Footnote ³⁴ In fact, what Pius XII said was that he could not fail in that grave hour of violence and bloodshed to recall to the great precept of love all those “who are children of the Church of Christ, those who are near to us with faith in the Savior, or at least in the Father who is in heaven.”Footnote ³⁵ It is reasonable enough to infer that Pius XII must have meant Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, respectively. But he does not mention them by name in the manner that Lawler suggests. And that was the problem from the perspective of the many critics of Pius XII, then and in the years since.

It forces, or rather misconstrues, the inference to say that this oblique comment about those who share the church's faith in God amounts to a public expression of solidarity for persecuted Jews. To remind people of faith in a time of war—of the great commandment to love one another—is a laudable pastoral thing to do; so too was it laudable and significant that Pius XII should choose to devote his first encyclical in 1939 to the “unity of the human society.” Yet, while allowing for the fact that an excessively critical view of the wartime pope has contributed to an underestimation of these meaningful statements of principle, we should not construe them to be authoritative papal defenses of persecuted Jews facing violent, systematic repression. One can well understand why a certain apologetic would want to attribute such sentiment and such words, publicly expressed on a solemn religious feast, to the often unfairly maligned wartime pope. But Pius XII did not say what Lawler wants the reader to think he said and certainly not in the manner in which Lawler suggests that he said it. Ironically, in seeking to place the most favorable spin possible by means of wishful paraphrasing of the pope's statement, Lawler employs the very interpretive “tactic” for which he excoriates Kertzer and others.

The same must be said about a familiar wartime account which Lawler unconvincingly invests with an evidentiary and historical import beyond its worth. Lawler recounts the story, as reported in The Palestine Post in 1944, of a Jewish refugee who met with Pius XII before making his way to Palestine. During a papal audience at the Vatican in the autumn of 1941, Pius XII is reported to have said aloud to the refugee, in a voice that was audible to everyone in the room, “My son … believe me, you are at least as worthy as every other human being that lives on our earth! And now, my Jewish friend, go with the protection of the Lord, and never forget, you must always be proud to be a Jew!”Footnote ³⁶

What is at issue is not the story itself but the manner in which Lawler exploits it for his apologetic-polemical end. It strains the limits of logic to claim, as Lawler does, that this purported spontaneous public statement constitutes one of the most important papal utterances of all time. Lawler would have readers believe that this single remark, made before a kneeling Jewish refugee beseeching papal assistance, automatically reversed centuries of overt anti-Judaic thought and discourse. Indeed, he describes it as a “revolutionary clarion” that prefigured by many years the “actual revolution” in Catholic-Jewish relations ushered in by the Second Vatican Council.Footnote ³⁷ How far the papacy and the church writ large had come since the sixteenth century, Lawler affirms, when another Pius—the fifth—issued a nasty bull decrying Jews as the “accomplices of thieves and robbers,” as dangerous spiritual predators who “lure the unsuspecting through magical incantations, superstition, and witchcraft.” For the “gravity of their crimes” and for the “salvation of our own people,” Pius V decreed, “all Jews in our entire earthly realm of justice—in all towns, districts, and places—must depart these regions.”Footnote ³⁸

It was 1569 when Pius V decreed his version of a solution to the Jewish problem in Christian Europe. Lawler readily acknowledges that the decree exemplified a deeply entrenched adversus Iudaeos strain in papal thought that was bequeathed to the mentalities, norms, and even the civil-legal parameters of manifold communities, small and large, across the centuries.Footnote ³⁹ All that changed decisively, Lawler maintains, with Pius XII's remarks. “It took nearly five hundred years,” Lawler declares euphorically, “for Pius XII's blessing to obliterate Pius V's curse.” Obliterate is a very strong word indeed. The contrast between the two papal utterances, Lawler contends reasonably enough, is “stark.” Stark, too, is the astonishing claim that Pius XII's purported wartime blessing to a Jewish refugee amounts to obliterating a deep-seated anti-Jewish tradition. It simply is implausible to argue that one random, unsubstantiated comment attributed to Pius XII in the course of a personal audience rises to the level of magisterial teaching, to a repudiation of centuries of anti-Judaic thinking, preaching, and teaching that had seeped into the recesses of European social life and civil society. What is missing in Lawler's grandiose narrative of the event is a judicious and properly critical evaluation of the story and its significance. Here again, as in so many other aspects of this book, the author's own “ideological fixation”—a sin for which Kertzer and company are constantly excoriated—sacrifices critical-historical analysis for a forced argument constructed to rehabilitate a seemingly “defamed” pope.Footnote ⁴⁰

The middle chapters of Lawler's book are the most substantive and show some promise of pointing the way to a legitimate, critical evaluation of Kertzer's arguments, methods, and sources. For instance, Lawler instructively calls our attention to the arguably exaggerated claims made by Kertzer and others about the presumed influence in the latter nineteenth century of the authoritative Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica. Kertzer singles out the Jesuit journal for having played a decisive role in providing the intellectual and theological fodder to weld traditional anti-Judaism to an emerging national, racial, and political anti-Semitism. Calling La Civiltà Cattolica the “most influential Catholic periodical anywhere in the world,” Kertzer goes on to conclude that both in substance and in timing, the journal's “anti-Jewish campaign … proved crucial to the rise of modern anti-Semitism.”Footnote ⁴¹ Kertzer is not alone in identifying this influential journal in particular as the forum for promoting a crucial intellectual-doctrinal bridge between traditional anti-Judaism and the political anti-Semitism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:Footnote ⁴² or what Oliver Logan has instructively described as a “slippage” at authoritative and influential ecclesial levels from anti-Judaic discourse to more overtly political, national, and even racial anti-Semitism.Footnote ⁴³

Several insightful scholarly studies have paralleled (and even predated) Kertzer's line of argument, and examine in detail the writings in La Civiltà Cattolica of men such as Father Giuseppe Oreglia. Francesco Crepaldi, for instance, has conducted a detailed study of Oreglia's writings, which propagated anew in the 1880s the old blood libel myth of the ritual murder of Christians by Jews. In Oreglia's hands, modernizing these old myths entailed a systematic study of historical cases in order to establish whether Jews in the present day were still killing Christians, especially children, in fulfillment of a Talmudic ritual for Passover. The crucial “slippage,” to borrow again from Logan, came when Oreglia imputed to a supposedly religious practice the character of a “national” crime. The alleged ritual murder of Christians by Jews thus came to be seen, as Oreglia put it in the early 1880s, as “a strict duty, a conscious obligation and legal practice demanded of [Jews] by the Talmud and by their Rabbis.” In the hands of men like Oreglia, then, an imagined religious edict was conceptualized as something approaching a kind of civic duty for Jews.Footnote ⁴⁴ What was once an apologetic conflict between Jews and Christians over tenets of religious belief thereby degenerated into a clash of cultures, nations, and even races. Judaism's repudiation of Christianity was said to have morphed into Jewish transgressions and threats against Christian social, economic, and civic life.

Lawler objects to what he sees as inflation by Kertzer of the importance of La Civiltà Cattolica. He believes, for example, that Kertzer overestimates the true extent of papal approval of the journal and that he systematically ignores the manifold tensions over the years between the editors and the popes themselves. Undermining Kertzer's argument even further, Lawler contends, is his sparse use of direct quotations from La Civiltà Cattolica—or from other Catholic publications for that matter—to substantiate the charge of an openly anti-Semitic worldwide Catholic press at the turn of the century.Footnote ⁴⁵

Lawler is on firmer ground in at least some aspects of this critique. For instance, we would do well to ask whether a close textual analysis of the writings of a comparatively small handful of individuals like Father Oreglia makes for a compelling case about the transition from traditional anti-Judaism to political anti-Semitism. After all, as Oliver Logan reminds us, Father Oreglia was a rather “eccentric figure” writing near the end of a “supremely bizarre” phase of his career. Should the “ramblings” of this or other marginal and largely forgotten figures warrant such attention or be invested with such historical significance?Footnote ⁴⁶ Although Lawler is correct in warning against overinflation, we cannot deny that these writings were significant if for no other reason than that they expressed in explicit terms, and in the pages of an authoritative Catholic periodical of the late nineteenth century, an unmistakable grafting—Kertzer would call it a transformation—of traditional anti-Judaic beliefs onto the branch of modern anti-Semitism.Footnote ⁴⁷ Admittedly, the readership for a periodical such as La Civiltà Cattolica would have been very small and highly specialized. Yet there can be no disputing two salient facts. For one, the journal was unquestionably authoritative. While it did not necessarily reflect the official view of the Holy See, it did express a range of acceptable or tolerable viewpoints and hypotheses. At the same time, it could be argued that the conflation of anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic ideas, motifs, and grand narratives constituted a potent trope for an evolving political anti-Semitism whose overarching objective was to find a “solution” to Europe's age-old “Jewish problem.”

Lawler's attempt to muster a resounding answer to Kertzer's case would have been better served had he interrogated further the emphasis that Kertzer, like others before him, placed on elite sources such as specialized journals and limited-run periodicals. Such sources alone will not suffice to make the case that Kertzer and others wish to make. Indeed, these rather static textual analyses, however instructive, are inherently limited and fail to capture adequately the relational and diachronic nature of evolving Catholic attitudes towards Jews and Judaism in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Consequently, it is necessary to explore, where possible, any threads linking anti-Judaic discourse to anti-Semitic politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—to see, that is, how Catholic ideas about Jews and Judaism informed Catholic responses to the modern secular state and to the social, economic, and civil-legal status of Jews therein.

Here Giovanni Miccoli's work is instructive since it searches—not always successfully—for just such connective threads. The decisive link, for Miccoli as for Kertzer, can be located in the period after the fall of papal Rome, in the culminating act of Italian Unification in 1870. With the loss of papal sovereignty, the argument goes, there emerged, in papal circles and beyond, a distinctive doctrinal and political rejection not simply of modern ideas and philosophies but of the evolving modern secular state. It was a sweeping rejection that invariably covered some of the main benefactors and beneficiaries of modernity, namely, freemasons, and Jews. Miccoli argues that it was around the same time, in the fin de siècle, that Jews went from being identified not simply as beneficiaries of the so-called “liberal revolution” but, more menacingly, as its furtive source.Footnote ⁴⁸ It should come as no surprise, then, that a Catholic newspaper no less authoritative than the Vatican's L’Osservatore Romano could feature on its front page, and not infrequently around the turn of the century, opinion pieces bearing such titles as “Giudaismo e Massoneria” (Judaism and Masonry). This particular piece, for instance, which was published in early January 1899, declared that Judaism and Masonry were one and the same thing. After all, the reasoning went, “only the un-baptized descendants of those who crucified Jesus Christ could nurture such hatred against the Kingdom of Christ on earth, which is the Holy Roman Catholic Church.”Footnote ⁴⁹

In effect, we are talking about a kind of clerical politics avant la lettre, which then descended onto the public square in the form of a strident critique of the social, economic, and political realities of the secular state and its seeming beneficiaries.Footnote ⁵⁰ This infusion of traditional anti-Judaic beliefs and motifs into anti-Semitic politics at the turn of the century can be seen in the activism of certain politically engaged Catholics and other secular political actors willing to exploit anti-Judaic religious-cultural antecedents. This included the anti-Semitic political leagues and parties spreading in parts of Europe at the end of the century.Footnote ⁵¹

Recent research, which Lawler largely ignores, tends to reinforce the earlier claims by Miccoli, Kertzer, and others about some fundamental lines of continuity between religious anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism during the decisive end of the century. In an instructive study of political Catholicism and anti-Semitism in fin-de-siècle France, for instance, Vicki Caron rejects as too simplistic any stark distinction between religious anti-Judaism and secular anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth century. Caron concludes that the lines between the two were, in practice, “far more blurry than previously believed.” By means of a richly detailed micro-study drawn from original sources, Caron paints a picture of “extensive overlap” between traditional anti-Judaism and emerging forms of political anti-Semitism, both in terms of “ideology” and through the concrete medium of “organizational cooperation.” By studying Catholic anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism in motion, as it were, within an applied social and political setting rather than simply through static textual analyses, Caron is able to offer a more nuanced and documented argument than either Miccoli or Kertzer, though her findings do tend to support their central arguments. While she does not see Catholic attitudes as necessarily laying the “groundwork” for modern anti-Semitism, Caron thinks that it is untenable simply to push traditional anti-Judaism aside as if were “ancillary” or tangential. On the contrary, she maintains that it was a “central component” of a new form of modern anti-Semitism that was then harnessed to an increasingly reactionary nationalism. In what is arguably the most original dimension of her work, Caron suggests that religious anti-Judaism was in effect “becoming modernized,” and along the way it was grafted in as an “integral component” of a new, nationalist political and, in some circles, overtly racial anti-Semitism.Footnote ⁵²

This apparent fusion of anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic sentiment and polemic is central to the argument that sees the Vatican and its various transnational influences playing a decisive role in the rise of modern anti-Semitism on the eve of the Holocaust. Untying this Gordian knot is ostensibly Lawler's driving motivation. We approach the substantive heart of the matter when Lawler finally identifies what he says are the four central “myths,” which he describes as jalons—that is, “pegs” or “indicators”—of Kertzer's allegedly spurious case against the modern popes.Footnote ⁵³ The first pertains to Kertzer's assertion that both Pius IX and his successor Leo XIII used pejorative terms, such as “synagogue of Satan,” to describe Jews and Judaism. A second presumed myth lies in Kertzer's claim that Pius IX publicly referred to the Jews as “dogs” who were pestering the good Christians of Rome. Thirdly, Kertzer states that both Leo XIII and his successor Pius X lent authoritative credence, if only by their caution and silence, to the age-old blood libel myth at a time when the old canard was conjured up in modern-day legal proceedings against several Jews accused of murder in parts of Europe. Finally, Lawler takes great exception to Kertzer's treatment of the brief tenure of Achille Ratti as papal nuncio in Poland just after World War I. The future Pius XI's Polish experience, Kertzer argues, schooled him in the au courant anti-Semitism that saw erstwhile religious differences between Jews and Christians being transformed into political and national differences. These experiences, Kertzer maintains, constituted a formative influence on Ratti, who then presumably brought the prevailing prejudices of modern anti-Semitism to the very heart of the church when he ascended the Chair of Peter in 1922.Footnote ⁵⁴

To attribute to Pius IX and to a long line of his successors sentiments and modes of discourse that “vilified” Jews in modern times by means of scriptural motifs—such as Pius IX's allusion in 1873 to dangerous contemporary forces as representing the “synagogue of Satan”—is to tie together the connective threads between traditional anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism. This is what Kertzer and Miccoli do when they try to demonstrate that, as part of his sweeping rejection of all things modern, from philosophies to the civil liberties of the modern state, Pius IX—and later Leo XIII—deliberately conjured up anti-Judaic strands from Scripture to mobilize contemporary political and social repudiations of the church's manifold enemies. In an encyclical from November 1873, titled Etsi multa, Pius IX revisited a familiar lament of his, decrying the sad state of religious faith in much of Catholic Europe and even in America. He spoke in unqualified terms of a “great war” being waged presently against the Catholic church, the work, the pope said, of “the sects, whether they be called Masonic or bear another name.” There follows the “fateful” scriptural reference (drawn from Rev 2:9 and 3:9) in which Kertzer invests so much. It is from these sects, Pius IX declared, “that the synagogue of Satan, which gathers its troops against the Church of Christ, takes its strength” [emphasis added]. With this single phrase, Kertzer maintains, the “fateful papal identification of the Jews as the hidden enemies of the Church began to gain ground.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Although the Jews are not mentioned by name, for Kertzer, as for Miccoli before him, the allusion about the Jews is plain and unmistakable. Indeed, Pius IX himself comes very close to making explicit what Kertzer takes to be implicit in the 1873 statement, invoking the memory of previous popes who had been “vigilant even from the beginning in Israel” and had never ceased to denounce these unnamed sects “to the kings and the nations,” having condemned them “time and time again.”

The plot thickens—to Lawler's increasing irritation—as Kertzer tells the story of how Pius IX once publicly compared Jews to dogs. The occasion was at an audience with a Catholic women's group from Rome in August 1871. Before the coming of Jesus, the Pope said, the Jews “had been children in the house of God.” Now, because of what he called their “obstinacy” and their rejection of Christ, “they have become dogs.” As if to add insult to injury, and presumably to draw the connective thread from biblical roots to contemporary crises, Pius IX added, “We have today in Rome unfortunately too many of these dogs, and we hear them barking in all the streets and going around molesting people everywhere.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Here, again, one should underscore what David Kertzer believes to be a fateful linkage: traditional religious anti-Jewish language and motifs, drawn in some instances directly from the New Testament, grafted into an inchoate but hardening modern anti-Semitism which imputed to Jews living and working in civil society all the attributes and maledictions of the church's foundational texts and beliefs. Paradoxically, in raging against modern secular society, the church had allowed some of its primordial beliefs to be adapted by a thoroughly secular political current whose radical solution to the Jewish question would contravene the most elementary of Christian commandments. In this manner, the place of the Jews in Christian self-understanding was detached from its original scriptural context and grafted onto a secular belief system whose objective was to marginalize, to contain, or to remove altogether the persistent Jewish presence in social and civic life.

As is his wont, in order to refute Kertzer's point, Lawler constructs a grandiose but an unconvincing argument. This is unfortunate because there is a legitimate case to be made that Kertzer's conclusions regarding the popes from Pius IX to Pius XI are sometimes overly-reductionist and unsubstantiated. Where he might treat the subject with a measure of serene critical-historical evaluation, Lawler feels compelled to explain away what he acknowledges elsewhere is often patently offensive papal language about Jews and Judaism. Put simply, Lawler would have us dwell only fleetingly, if at all, on Pius IX's troubling analogies since, as he maintains, Pius did not mean to say what it sounds as if he said, which is another way of saying that the pope did not mean to say simply that Jews were like dogs.

That Pius IX's words were misconstrued is in itself a valid point meriting further explication within a proper context—something admittedly Kertzer fails to provide. Yet Lawler gets bogged down in an evasive explanation of the place of animal imagery in Scripture and in Western art more generally as a devotional motif. In short, far from a nasty caricature of a pariah people, Lawler would have us believe that Pius IX's utterances should be understood as expression of the pope's abiding love of the Jews; that they who once were children but now are dogs for their disbelief (a role reversal, as it were, with the Canaanites who were the original dogs, according to Matt 15:21–28) might yet return to “being children,” (Pius IX) which is to say by becoming Christians and finding salvation. Rather than excoriating the Jews or resurrecting hoary medieval notions of the perfidious Jews, Lawler reasons, Pius IX's allusion to the Jews as dogs was a scripturally-based revolutionary moment in Jewish-Catholic relations, marking “the approach of the end to the theological hatred for Jews instituted … by the church fathers who engendered the adversus Iudaeos tradition.”Footnote ⁵⁷ So we should not take Pius IX to be the patron of an incipient Catholic anti-Semitism, as the injudicious critics suggest. Instead, Pius IX stands, in Lawler's vision, as a great prophet and pioneer of papal reconciliation with the people of the covenant. Not for the first or last time, hyperbole and unnecessary contortions detract from an otherwise legitimate critique that might be made about how Pius IX's words were misconstrued or taken out of context.

The cycle of parsing, wishful inference, and forced argument reaches its height when Lawler critiques Kertzer's claims of papal “duplicity” in the resurrection of old blood libel myths in prominent legal proceedings around the turn of the century. Emblematic in this regard is the discussion of a notorious case of the ritual murder trial of a Russian Jew, Mendel Beilis, in Kiev (Ukraine) in 1913.Footnote ⁵⁸ At issue is the Vatican's response to an appeal that emanated from prominent members of the Jewish community in England via powerful English Catholics, asking for a firm and clear papal repudiation of the blood libel myth. Actually, the would-be defenders of Beilis were asking for something less than that: they simply wanted to hear from the Holy See confirmation of the validity of two presumably authoritative papal statements from the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries that had forcefully repudiated the blood libel myth. The two statements in question were one by Innocent IV and another by Cardinal Lorenzo Ganganelli before he became Pope Clement XIV. Lawler places special emphasis on the Ganganelli memorandum from 1758, which was notable for its attempt to counter the spread of blood libel accusations in Jampol, Poland; this presumably explains why a portrait of Ganganelli as Clement XIV should earn pride of place on Lawler's book cover. The long and the short of the matter is that then Cardinal Secretary of State, Merry del Val, did offer written confirmation of the validity of these repudiations. Yet, largely due to the obstructionist role of the Russian ambassador in Rome, the cardinal's note arrived too late to influence deliberations and the eventual verdict—a hung jury—which set Beilis free.

Kertzer acknowledges all of this, but guardedly and skeptically, reasoning that neither Merry del Val nor the pope, by this time Pius X, moved decisively or quickly enough to seize on a golden opportunity to repudiate publicly all charges of ritual murder being leveled against Jews.Footnote ⁵⁹ Moreover, Kertzer complains that there was nothing like an official rebuke of the campaign conducted in various Catholic newspapers around Europe that spoke assuredly of Beilis's guilt and expressed righteous indignation at the very thought of Jews asking the Holy See to authenticate papal statements on the public record. To that end, Kertzer points out that there was never any public repudiation of articles in La Civiltà Cattolica, for instance, which in the spring of 1914, were suggesting that Beilis was guilty of ritual murder.Footnote ⁶⁰

An attentive reading of the relevant sources suggests that Kertzer's account of the Beilis trial and his criticisms of the role of the Vatican leave something to be desired. Kertzer fails to acknowledge fully, for instance, that the exchanges between Lord Rothschild and Cardinal Merry del Val were widely publicized in the major newspapers of the day, leaving an embarrassed anti-Semitic Catholic press to dismiss the cardinal's conclusions as a matter of what Zosa Szajkowski described as “personal opinion” rather than papal policy. So, too, does Kertzer fail to appreciate fully that Beilis's defenders generally favored a “discreet diplomacy” over brash public statements, for fear of provoking any strong public reaction at the prospect of such high-level intervention on behalf of a lone Jew on trial for murder.Footnote ⁶¹

Yet Lawler goes well beyond the normal scholarly critique of a respected colleague's work by accusing Kertzer of outright “fabrication” in addition to “drastically mistranslating or doctoring crucial texts.”Footnote ⁶² These are most serious charges. Doubtless, Lawler's sharp tone will give readers pause, but they must not dwell on these charges too long or too seriously. The charges are unfounded and strain the standards of collegial scholarly confrontation and disagreement. One might take issue with Kertzer's selective presentation of certain historical evidence—an occasional quote here and there that is taken out of context or parsed selectively to buttress an argument. Yet this hardly constitutes “fabrication” or “doctoring” of texts no matter how caustically and emphatically one insists.

The charges continue apace as Lawler suggests that Kertzer purposefully mistranslated a handwritten note found in the Archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the old Holy Office of the Inquisition. The note is attached to a resolution from 1900 concluding that the practice of ritual murder was, in fact, a historical reality.Footnote ⁶³ The unsigned note dismissed contemptuously the suggestion that the Holy See should issue a declaration to repudiate openly the blood libel myth. Any such statement, the note said, “[W]hile it may please a few dupes in England, would trigger widespread protests and scandal elsewhere.” Lawler dismisses the offending phrase “a few dupes in England” as the product of Kertzer's highly imaginative rendering of the original Italian term illuso. Not even the most “bigoted churchmen,” Lawler says, would use such offensive, strident language. Kertzer, on the other hand, presumably does precisely that, for effect, or so Lawler infers. For his part, Lawler argues that the word illuso is a cognate of “illusory” and, as such, it is better rendered as “dreamer” or “wishful thinker” rather than by “the most damning translation” chosen by Kertzer.Footnote ⁶⁴ In fact, there simply is no compelling reason to privilege Lawler's version (“a few dreamers in England”) over Kertzer's rendering (“a few dupes in England”). Indeed, whether taken as a cognate of the noun “illusion” or of the adjective “illusory,” we still are left with language that is meant to connote deception, falsehoods, and the intent to mislead.

Admittedly, it would be difficult if not impossible ever to know precisely what the author of this note intended to say or to whom he was referring. It is safe to assume at the very least that he was referring to the prominent English Catholics who had asked for a formal papal repudiation of the blood libel myth. But it is difficult to say in the light of the extant record whether the author meant to deride these Englishmen for having been hoodwinked by artful Jews or to praise them as visionary prophets who were ahead of their time. Given the wider context involved—a formal Holy Office resolution that took ritual murder to be a historical reality rather than a medieval myth—the more logical (if necessarily speculative) inference to be drawn is that the note intended to deride the duped rather than to praise the prophetic. One might argue, then, that it is Lawler who has chosen the more “outlandish” and the less convincing translation as part of a deliberate rhetorical strategy to force the argument towards a more favorable depiction of the Vatican.Footnote ⁶⁵

In like manner, Lawler undercuts the efficacy of an otherwise promising line of critique when he carts out the now familiar allegations of mistranslation and outright fabrication in order to dissect the fourth of Kertzer's jalons—the attempt to place the future Pius XI “in the antechamber to the Holocaust,” which is to say, the anti-Semitic climate of interwar Poland.Footnote ⁶⁶ One need not have recourse to false charges of misrepresentation in order to build the case that Kertzer and others perhaps have forced the evidence by extrapolating from a few of Ratti's reports during his brief tenure as papal representative in Poland the interpretive key to be able to read the “mind of the man” who as pope would “plot the Church's reaction to the gathering clouds of the Holocaust.”Footnote ⁶⁷ In fact, Kertzer's failure to explain fully and precisely what that “reaction” was and how directly it bore out the influence of Ratti's Polish sojourn can legitimately be considered an interpretive gap that renders the argument less than persuasive. But an unconvincing argument is a far cry from the fabrication and distortion that Lawler unfairly imputes to Kertzer's work.

Lawler would have done well to stay the course in exploiting this interpretive gap to build his case rather than to be lured away by the more personal and polemical line of critique, which, as mentioned previously, detracts from the professionalism and academic rigor of this book. Kertzer insists plausibly enough that the Ratti reports “give us precious insight into his evolving view of the Jews.”Footnote ⁶⁸ What Ratti says about the Jews of Poland in these reports paints a decidedly unflattering, even damning, picture of the man soon to be elected pope and charged with the leadership of the Catholic church on the eve of the rise to power first of Fascism in Italy and then of Nazism in Germany. More damning, though, is Kertzer's charge that Ratti actually procrastinated and obstructed papal efforts to gather information for the Vatican on news of spreading anti-Jewish violence in parts of Poland. Rather than advocate in the pope's name on behalf of the persecuted Jews, Kertzer suggests, Ratti occupied himself with reports back to the Holy See that warned of the nefarious influence the Jews posed, mainly under the guise of Bolshevism, to Poland's social and civic peace.Footnote ⁶⁹

As noted above, Kertzer's argument falters by failing to connect the dots, as it were, between Ratti's reports on the situation of the Jews in Poland and his eventual dealings with Fascist dictators, beginning with Mussolini. Doubtless, what Ratti wrote about Jews during his brief stay in Poland warrants our close reading and critical interpretation for what it reveals not only about the man himself but about the prevailing assumptions, anxieties, and even prejudices of papal diplomats of his generation—a cohort that counted among its more illustrious practitioners a young Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII. But Kertzer does not adequately provide the substantive evidence to connect Ratti's Polish reports to his tenure as pope for nearly two decades on the eve of World War II. Instead, Kertzer makes both a chronological and an interpretive leap, taking us from the reports of 1918–1921 to a “conversation” between Pius XI and Mussolini in 1932 in which the pope claimed that Judaism's “antipathy” for the Christian faith was the source of many of the church's problems. Falling back on a commonplace association of the day, Ratti recalled how, when he was in Warsaw, he learned firsthand that the Bolsheviks there were “all Jews.” Where once it was the tenacious faith of the Jews that posed a threat to the spiritual life of Christian communities, it was now the modern political machinations of the Jews, most ominously in the form of Bolshevism, that posed a threat to the Christian heritage of European societies. So Pius XI seemed to be passing along to Mussolini in this conversation, Kertzer reports, a “lesson” Ratti learned firsthand while in Poland a decade earlier.Footnote ⁷⁰

Kertzer's point ostensibly is to draw a direct causal link between the future pope's brief tenure in Poland and the “attitudes towards the Jews” that Ratti carried with him to the Chair of Peter.Footnote ⁷¹ It is eminently sensible for any worthy critique to interrogate the claim that Ratti's Polish experiences influenced decisively the pope's “reaction” to the gathering persecution of Jews in the 1930s. It would not be surprising to find that the “lessons” Ratti learned while in Poland indeed were decisive during his papacy; the problem is that Kertzer does not show substantively or definitively that this was the case. To be fair, when he was working on his book, Kertzer did not have the benefit of access to the relevant archival material from Ratti's pontificate (1922–1939), made available to researchers at Benedict XVI's behest in early 2006. This rich font of primary documentation already has yielded several serious, insightful scholarly studies about Ratti's pontificate on the eve of World War IIFootnote ⁷² The picture of Pius XI that emerges from these studies suggests that Ratti's attitude towards Jews and Judaism through the latter 1920s and the 1930s was more complex than Kertzer's static inference allows and evinced an evolving concern about the dangers of anti-Semitism and radical nationalism, as well as the racist and eugenic dimensions of Fascist biopolitics. At any rate, it bears repeating that whatever doubts one might have about the cogency and persuasiveness of Kertzer's argument, it simply will not do to suggest that he has fabricated or doctored evidence in order to prove his point.Footnote ⁷³

The Case for History

The last chapter of Lawler's long and argumentative book begins with a self-evident truth, namely that his analysis has travelled a “considerable distance” from the texts and context introduced at the outset.Footnote ⁷⁴ That is a significant understatement in a vastly overstated book. Rather than offer weary readers a respite, we are treated to the most tangential and polemical of all the chapters, featuring a rambling editorial on the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lawler goes so far as to draw ahistorical parallels between the condition of Jews in the ghettos of nineteenth-century papal Rome and the status of Palestinians in the “occupied territories.” Empathy for the current situation of many Palestinians should not distract us from concluding that this untenable analogy is irrelevant to the question under study. It is little more than a diversionary ploy aimed at criticizing the present-day state of Israel rather than at offering an informed and instructive answer to the question, Were the Popes against the Jews? In the final and most troubling of contortions, Lawler adapts the words of poet Nelly Sachs to ask “why the black answer of hate to your existence, Israel?” It is unfortunate that a book whose ostensible purpose is to shine the light of truth on the past in order that we might better understand the tortuous path that led to Auschwitz should wander so far from the path of historical study.

Such an ending is the predictable outcome of a work that is driven by ideological and emotional impulses rather than by the imperatives of critical history, the latter demanding a deft blending of factual accuracy, logical inferences, and fully informed arguments. Disagreement is inevitable, of course; indeed, it should be welcomed and valorized. Yet it behooves those charged with the responsibility of thinking and writing for the sake of truth and understanding to conduct their inquiries and, especially their disagreements, in a spirit of meaningful, respectful dialogue and to accord pride of place to what the American philosopher and writer Mortimer J. Adler once described as “understood disagreement.” Indeed, Adler reminds us that respectful, informed disagreement is actually a “great good” to seek. Yet the good that might come from “understood disagreement” will contine to elude us as long as we allow our sometimes competing ideological engagements to deform our professional commitments to collegial, scholarly exchange and to informed public reasoning on historical matters of contemporary relevance.