Rare is the scholarly study that is so rich and eclectic in approaches, themes, and evidence as to defy categorization. Nonetheless, John Connelly's From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 does precisely this. No brief review can do it justice. It is at once a deep exercise in transnational European intellectual history, a critical history of Roman Catholicism, and a major contribution to multiple national and regional historiographies within modern European history—especially for Austria, Germany, and Central Europe more broadly.
In October 1965, the closing session of the Second Vatican Council witnessed the promulgation, alongside a host of other documents of revolutionary consequence for the Catholic Church, of a text entitled Nostra Aetate (In Our Time). This declaration tasked Catholics for the first time in their religion's history with “dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions.” Most revolutionary within the declaration, however, was its fourth heading, which reversed two millennia of Christian anti-Judaism, dismissing the notion of collective Jewish guilt for Christ's death and asserting that “by His cross Christ, Our Peace, reconciled Jews and Gentiles, making both one in Himself.”
Connelly hones in on this fourth chapter of Nostra Aetate, seeking its origins in the 1930s in “the transalpine lands where German is spoken” (66). Between the end of World War I and Hitler's rise to power, traditional Catholic anti-Judaism bred a biologized, racist Catholic anti-Semitism, which in turn generated a vocal—if small—opposition in the form of an emerging network of Catholic thinkers and activists dedicated to antiracism.
From Enemy to Brother clearly divides protagonists from antagonists, yet treatment at the hands of Nazis or Fascists is not the key to determining who was who. Indeed, Catholic racists like the Jesuit biologist Hermann Muckermann or future Pope Benedict XVI's spiritual hero Karl Adam faced persecution at the hands of the Nazis. At the same time, most of John Connelly's protagonists were hardly pluralistic liberals: the setting that From Enemy to Brother unequivocally identifies as both crucible and incubation site of principled Catholic antiracism is Austro-Fascist Vienna. Connelly argues, “Austro-Fascism was destined to bring forth new Catholic insights on Jews and race because its survival depended upon seeming non-Nazi—therefore anti-racist—while successfully competing with the Nazis on the platform of German nationalism” (107).
Connelly focuses on a vibrant milieu of German-language converts to Catholicism who came to Vienna from all across Germany, as well as formerly Habsburg lands. These were “border-crossers” in at least two different senses: geographical and religious. Jewish or Protestant converts to Catholicism, these men and women also became emigrés on the run from Nazism, with Vienna as their crucial point of confluence, followed in some cases—in the wake of the Anschluss and the outbreak of World War II—by Paris and then the United States. Why focus on this small network on the margins of European Catholic life? As Connelly amply demonstrates, “Intellectually speaking, the Vatican was not where the action was” (133).
The rejection beginning in the 1930s of Catholic racism and anti-Semitism did not, however, immediately imply an end to anti-Judaism. As Paul Hanebrink has demonstrated in the case of Hungary, Catholic episcopates across occupied and collaborationist Europe throughout World War II hesitated to speak out even on behalf of baptized Jews (In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890–1944, Ithaca, NY, 2006), let alone those outside the Catholic fold. Even the antiracist border-crossers in some cases needed decades to move beyond belief in an imperative to baptize all Jews. Between Austro-Fascist Vienna and conciliar Rome came thirty years of debate, reflection, and rereading of biblical texts—most importantly, Paul's epistle to the Romans—that gave the border-crossers a new “language to talk about the Jews after the Holocaust” (256).
From Enemy to Brother includes a few better-known thinkers—for example, Jacques Maritain and Dietrich von Hildebrand—but, by and large, these forerunners and midwives of Nostra Aetate to this day occupy but “shadow spaces in European intellectual history” (121). Yet, Connelly's painstaking reconstruction of these converts’ intellectual and spiritual trajectories demonstrates the degree to which not only Hildebrand, but also particularly the Moravian-born John (Johannes) Oesterreicher and the Dresden-born Karl Thieme, belong in the mainstream of twentieth-century European intellectual history. These three in particular embody a transnational, transatlantic trajectory of Catholic teaching on the Jews that defies Europe's own borders.
From Enemy to Brother leaves much room for further discussion across multiple historiographies, for example, on the Dollfuss regime, on the trajectory of Catholic mission, and on connections between the antiracists and other twentieth-century Catholic border-crossing networks (e.g., social Catholics, progressive Catholics, Christian Democrats). That said, John Connelly has launched a major scholarly conversation with elegant, profoundly considered reflection. His book demonstrates the relevance of theology to mainstream intellectual and social history. It illuminates the relationship between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, the encounter of Catholicism with modernity, and the substantial role of converts and mission in reshaping the twentieth-century Catholic imaginary. All of this it achieves with eminently readable prose.
