Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era (review)

Few issues are more troublesome for historians of Poland, or of the Roman Catholic Church, than the legacy of centuries of hostility towards the Jews. The scholarly literature on this topic (much of which is not really very scholarly) all too often fluctuates between sweeping, overgeneralized accusations on one side, and stubborn denials and apologetics on the other. This makes it that much harder for a historian to deal with the nuances, subtleties, and complexities of Catholic Judeophobia in Poland, to explore the precise relationship between religious faith and ethnic hatred, or to calmly trace the origins and motives of those who propagated unsavory views. Magda Teter has courageously stepped into this polemical minefield, bringing scholarly rigor, careful argumentation, and a fresh viewpoint to the topic. This volume not only fills a gaping hole in the historical literature on Polish Catholicism and Polish-Jewish relations, but it does so with admirable professionalism. Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland will remain the standard work on Catholic Judeophobia in early-modern Poland for years to come.

The basic thesis of Teter’s work will surprise many readers. As suggested in the subtitle to the book, she counter-intuitively describes Polish Catholicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth century as a “beleaguered Church.” This hardly fits with the general image of Poland as a distinctly Catholic nation, a place where religiosity is so deeply rooted that even the sweeping forces of twentieth-century European secularization have mostly passed it by. The accepted narrative of Poland’s early-modern history posits a brief flirtation with religious dissent in the sixteenth century, followed by an overwhelming Catholic triumph by the mid-seventeenth century. As Teter points out, however, this victory was far from complete, and Catholics at the time acutely felt their continued vulnerability. To be sure, nearly all members of the nobility did return to the Church after a few decades in the late sixteenth century when many of them experimented with Calvinism. Since the nobles of that time equated themselves with the nation as a whole, this facilitated the later construction of a myth of Catholic homogeneity (or at least hegemony). But priests in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tended to take a more expansive view, envisioning a social space occupied by townsmen and peasants as well as nobles. Seen in this way, Poland (or more precisely, the Republic of Poland-Lithuania) was probably the most heterogeneous place in all of Europe. Roman Catholics were a minority in a country where Jews, Eastern Orthodox, Greek Catholics, and Protestants lived side by side. Even as laws were passed that discriminated against Catholics in political life and closed off the nobility to “schismatics” and “heretics,” little was done to alter the underlying diversity of the Republic’s overall population. A typical parish priest saw himself surrounded by non-Catholics of every sort, and struggled to sustain authority over his flock in a world marked by what we would today call multiculturalism. Meanwhile, even the Catholic nobility sustained a vibrant tradition of anticlericalism that constrained the influence of the Church on a national level. As Teter demonstrates, the formal dominance of Catholicism did not give the clergy the power they considered their due, and left them unable to dictate state policies on matters of religion or morality. Their post-Reformation “triumph” seemed fragile to them.

This perception of vulnerability and this discomfort with diversity constitute the crucial backdrop to Teter’s story. In this environment, she argues, Catholics felt too insecure to embrace many of the key theological developments promoted by their coreligionists to the West, particularly with regards to Jews and Protestants. Teter claims that while West European Catholics were moving to a more sophisticated engagement with Judaism, grounded in the study of ancient languages and a careful reading (and critiquing) of Jewish sacred texts, Polish Catholics continued to propagate medieval legends about ritual murder, desecration...