Some discontinuities in belief are so massive that the historian must strain to re-create the lost mental universe that preceded the change. We take the challenge of such re-creation for granted when the world of lost belief lies far away in time or space. But when shifts in belief are rapid, the alien mental world may lie in the recent past. Such is the case with the attitude of the Roman Catholic church toward the Jews. After a long tradition of regarding the Jews as cursed for their for their failure to acknowledge Jesus as messiah (and as culpable for their purported role in his crucifixion), the assembled bishops at the Second Vatican Council in 1965 approved Nostra Aetate, a declaration of Catholic relations to non-Christian religions, the fourth chapter of which dealt with relations with Jews. The document “remembers the bond that spiritually ties the people of the New Covenant to Abraham's stock” and declares that “Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. . . . [The Church] decries hatred, persecutions, displays of antisemitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.” How this change in Church teaching came about is the subject of John Connelly's new book.

His key contention is that the motive force behind this transformation lay in a number of central European converts to Catholicism, a few of Protestant origin, the bulk of Jewish origin. Foremost among them are the theologians Johannes Oesterreicher (1904–1993) (who converted from Judaism to Catholicism in interwar Vienna), Karl Thieme (1902–1963), and Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889–1977) (both of whom converted from Protestantism to Catholicism in Weimar Germany). A good deal of the book traces the intellectual and organizational transmogrifications of these protagonists, who, in combination, fostered a new set of religious lenses through which Catholics could come to a changed understanding of their relationship with the Jews. “Without converts the Catholic Church would not have found a new language to speak to the Jews after the Holocaust” (p. 5), Connelly maintains. This is a fascinating story, full of ironies and unexpected twists and turns. Even readers who find the key contention overstated will find themselves grateful for Connelly's genealogy of Nostra Aetate, based primarily on wide reading in a number of languages, supplemented by investigation of the Nachlässe of some of the key protagonists.

During the first stage, between 1933 and 1945, Oesterreicher, Thieme, and others led a campaign against racist beliefs among Catholics themselves. For a variety of reasons that Connelly elucidates, such racial understandings—which treated even baptized Jews as Jews, on the grounds that their inferior Jewish qualities were inborn—were more salient in German-speaking central Europe than elsewhere. At a time when the recently converted Oesterreicher was engaged in missionizing to the Jews, such views were not only a challenge to his self-conception, but also bad for the business of proselytization. Together with Thieme and others, he launched a broad campaign against racial conceptions within the Church. It was the very prominence of racial thought in German-speaking Europe that brought forth an articulated attack on racism, Connelly argues. Yet at this stage, as Connelly shows, Catholic opponents of racism usually retained traditional Catholic anti-Jewish tropes, according to which the Jews were doomed to suffering and continued to advocate their conversion to Catholicism. (Connelly devotes a number of pages to debates on eugenics, which distract from his argument and are superfluous. Despite the propensity after 1945 to conflate racism, antisemitism, and eugenics, they were often discrete phenomena. There were eugenicists who were not racists, and there were Jewish eugenicists.)

In the second stage, roughly from 1945 to 1960, Oesterreicher (who had moved to the United States, anglicized his name to “John,” and taught at Seton Hall University), Thieme (the center of the Freiburg circle devoted to Christian-Jewish understanding), and like-minded colleagues moved toward a fundamental reevaluation and legitimization of Judaism. Connelly adduces a variety of factors to explain the shift: the experience of the Holocaust and a greater sensitivity (aided by the work of the French Jewish scholar, Jules Isaac) to the role of anti-Jewish motifs in Christianity in fostering a more general antisemitism, as well as the experience of actually speaking to Jewish interlocutors and recognizing that there was more to Judaism and to Jewish identity than the stunted, hardened fossils of the Christian imagination.

The ultimate stimulus for an official reconsideration of the Church's relationship to the Jews came, as Connelly notes, from Pope John XXIII, whose concern for the Jews dated back to his wartime service as Papal Nuncio in Turkey, in which capacity he helped thousands of Jews and who was moved to further action by an encounter with Jules Isaac in 1960. But once the pope had set the ball rolling, the formulations of the papal commission (the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity) were guided by those who had participated in circles in Europe and the United States in which Oesterreicher and Thieme were active.

Connelly's genealogy of Nostra Aetate, then, is one that stresses the formative role of converts to Catholicism from German-speaking Europe. Having uncovered this previously neglected line of descent, he would not be the first historian to overstate his case. It is a mark of his objectivity as a historian that he provides a good deal of evidence for other causal emphases. The role of Jules Isaac and of John XXIII (emphasized by other historians) have already been mentioned. Connelly also notes the significance of an encounter of the head of the commission, Cardinal Bea, with the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel in New York, and the role of American Jewish figures in pushing the discussion forward, especially Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum of the American Jewish Committee. Similarly, Connelly notes but underplays the role of several American cardinals and bishops (Cushing of Boston and O'Boyle of Washington, D.C., to which he might have added Spellman of New York) who brought with them a personal history of interaction with substantial Jewish communities in their dioceses and a heightened awareness of Jewish sensitivities, the product of increased cooperation between American Catholics and Jews in the post-World War II era (recently explored in Kevin M. Shultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011]). He also notes the increased sensitivity to the issue of the Church and antisemitism generated by the controversy over Rolf Hochhuth's play, The Deputy. One may suspect that these additional factors bear more causal weight than Connelly assigns them, while remaining appreciative of his account.

One of the incidental by-products of this study concerns the debate over Pope Pius XII and whether he ought to have spoken out more forthrightly on behalf of the Jews of Europe—the subject of a shelf full of books. For by re-creating the unarticulated, taken-for-granted attitudes and beliefs that European Catholics shared about the Jews (what, in another context, James Joll called “the unspoken assumptions” of policy makers), Connelly reminds us that to the vast majority of his contemporaries, the notion that Pius would have taken risks on the behalf of a people condemned to suffering by their blindness would have strained credulity.

The book would have been stronger yet had the author put the change in Catholic doctrine into the context of comparable changes regarding slavery, usury, marriage, and freedom of religious conscience (on which, see John T. Noonan, Jr., “Development in Moral Doctrine,” Theological Studies 54 [1993]: 662–77, subsequently expanded in his A Church that Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Moral Doctrine [2005]). In these cases, too, the church faced discontinuity of doctrine. But the most common way of handling it was by quiet neglect, rather than explicit reformulation. It would also be instructive to compare the debate over Nostra Aetate with the near-contemporaneous debate over the Church's attitude toward artificial contraception, in which a papally convened commission recommended an acceptance by the Church of contraceptive technologies, only to be overturned by the same pope, Paul VI, who promulgated Nostra Aetate. Indeed, some of the same arguments made against Nostra Aetate were also made in the controversy over birth control, namely that by altering official doctrine, thus giving the appearance that past doctrine had been in error, the Church would damage its credibility. The Jews, it seems, were more easily accepted than the pill.