Adrian Ciani begins his carefully researched book about the Roman Catholic Church’s diplomacy in Palestine after World War II with the 1993 agreement by Rome to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. In an understated manner, the author describes this “Fundamental Agreement” as a “conventional political accord” (3). Below the surface, however, Ciani adds that this accord was a “significant and historic rapprochement” (3). Even that interpretation of the agreement’s deeper meaning misses the extraordinary nature of the 1993 development. As Ciani’s book shows, establishing diplomatic ties between the Vatican and Israel took almost two millennia of rivalry and polemics between Christians and Jews. After World War II, the last chapter in that long history, Jewish-Roman Catholic disputes played out in the wider context of the plausibility of Zionist desires for a Jewish state after the Holocaust, mediating hostilities between Jews and Palestinians (Arab and Christian), new borders in the region drawn by Western powers, and the Roman Catholic Church’s historic devotion to Jerusalem as the birthplace of Christianity. Ciani’s book is primarily about the incompatibility between Zionist demands for an Israeli state and Rome’s insistence upon access to sacred sites in Palestine. At the same time, the story he tells cannot help but include subjects like the beginnings of the Cold War, conflicts between Jews and Palestinians, and even sometimes rocky relations between Roman Catholics and Protestants in the United States, a nation that in the late 1940s was flexing its muscles as the guardian of a new international order.

The historical drama of Christian-Jewish relations after World War II was complex, not simply because of the specific challenges of the moment. Access to the Holy Land by Christians and Jews had a long history of conflict. Although brief, the author’s summary of Christian perceptions of Jews from the early church until the early modern period may on its own be worth the price of the book. At a time when contemporary readers understand Palestine chiefly through the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian rivalry, Ciani provides a poignant reminder of the claims that Christians themselves had on the Holy Land and the legacy of those convictions for the West’s attempts to stabilize the region after the fall of the Ottoman Empire (1923). The early church, as Ciani summarizes, did not develop a theology of land per se, but most of the church fathers taught that the Abrahamic covenant, after Christ’s life and death, no longer applied to the Jewish people. Once Muslims dominated the Levant in the seventh century, the Christian reconquest of Jerusalem and the Holy Land emerged as a central piece of Rome’s aims in Palestine. The Crusades were one consequence of this attachment to the Holy Land, as well as the administration of shrines set up to increase Christian presence in the Holy Land. By the nineteenth century, despite the Ottomans’ control of the region, Pope Gregory XVI extended the authority of Latin Rite Eastern Churches and assisted the establishment of hostels and hospitals in Palestine.

The rise of Zionism, especially under the leadership of Theodor Herzl in the 1890s, dramatically altered Rome’s calculations for Christian activity in the Holy Land. Interactions between Herzl and the Vatican staked out Rome’s basic posture: the church could not support a Jewish state for religious reasons (Jewish denials of Christ’s divinity), and Christians needed access to sacred places in the Holy Land. Roman officials were not indifferent to the persecution of Jews. Nor did they oppose the emigration of Jewish refugees to Palestine. But Rome was essentially opposed to the creation of a Jewish nation in Palestine because it threatened Christian access to and control of holy sites. Once the British government administered the territory after 1920 (until 1948), Vatican officials needed to navigate another layer of diplomats. This was also the period when Roman Catholics in America (bishops and laity) became the chief representatives of the Vatican’s positions during negotiations among British, American, and United Nations officials. The bulk of Ciani’s book covers this roughly thirty-year period and the increasing influence not only of the United States in international affairs but also of the American Church’s leaders within the upper echelons of the Roman Catholic Church.

Although the larger historical perspective in Cianis’ book is Rome’s involvement and interests in the Holy Land, the bulk of the story concerns the prominence of the American Church in advancing the Vatican’s position. The diplomacy carried out by American bishops and laity was a consequence of the United States’ emergence after World War II as a dominant player in the new international order. Ciani plausibly situates his research within the historiographical tradition pioneered by Peter D’Agostino on the transnational character of Roman Catholics in the United States. Instead of simply transplanting European Christianity to North America as many Protestants did, the American Church needed to navigate Roman Catholic teaching and practice both in relation to American society and the Vatican’s oversight of churches around the world. These multiple layers of negotiation—American Catholics adjusting to American society and the Vatican adapting to the United States’ foreign policy—make the history of Roman Catholicism in the United States anything but a simple narrative. Ciani capably juggles all the balls of Rome’s multiple institutions and motivations, even if the theories about transnational institutions that he briefly invokes may be an obstacle to his otherwise intriguing story.

The emergence of Israel as a sovereign state, the role that the United States played in Israel’s genesis, not to mention the motivations of Christians, Jews, and Muslims for maintaining access to if not control of Palestine—all of these subjects are more than enough for any single monograph. To Ciani’s credit, he covers the American Church’s place in this thicket of rivalries convincingly.