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  • From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965
  • Nelson H. Minnich, Eugene J. Fisher, Thomas Stransky, Susannah Heschel, Alberto Melloni, and John Connelly
From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965. By John Connelly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2012. Pp. viii, 376. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-674-05782-1.

Introduction by Nelson H. Minnich (The Catholic University of America)

This book began as an open-ended study of Catholics who opposed racism and anti-Semitism in the interwar years. I wanted to find out about those who swam against the racist currents of their time. It turned out that virtually all of the Catholics concerned about protecting the “other” were people Catholics in Central Europe considered “others.” The solidarity of these new Catholics with the other was in a sense self-interest: Oesterreicher recalled with bitterness that some Catholics refused to take Communion from the fingers of a “Jew”

(Connelly, From Enemy, p. 290).

Connelly’s research in archives in Munich, Vienna, Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and Washington, DC, as well as in numerous journals and books of the period, have helped him to trace the origins of the teachings in chapter 4 of the Declaration Nostra Aetate (1965) of the Second Vatican Council on relations with the Jews. He has identified in the process more than two-dozen persons whom he describes as “border transgressors” (p. 287) who were converts to Catholicism and helped it to come to a new understanding of Judaism. This summary of his book will concentrate on some of the major figures.

In formulating their teachings, church leaders were guided by what was previously taught by scripture and tradition as well as by the findings of science. The New Testament made many relevant statements: Jesus of Nazareth, his mother, his apostles, and many of his early followers were all Jews (Matt. 1:16, 10:2–4; Luke 1:27, 2:23, 6:13–16; Acts 2:5–42). His mission was to the house of Israel (Matt. 10:6, 15:24). The leaders of the Jews and some of their followers rejected him and called down his blood upon them and their children (Matt. 27:25, Acts 3:14–15). Jesus established a new and everlasting covenant (Matt. 26:28; Mark 14:24; Luke 22:20; Heb. 12:24, 13:20), the former covenant becoming obsolete (Heb. 8:13). As regards the Gospel, Jews are enemies [End Page 751] of God (Rom. 11:28). They persecuted and sought to kill him (John 5:16–18). They denied and killed the author of life (Acts 3:15). Jesus ordered his apostles to go out and make disciples of all nations [πάντα τà ɛ́θνη] (Matt. 28:19), beginning with Jerusalem (Luke 24:47; Acts 1:8; 2:5, 38). Over the centuries Christians have seen this commission as a call to work for the conversion also of the Jews. The destruction of Jerusalem and the scattering of Jews and their sufferings were seen as punishments for having rejected Jesus and hindered the spread of his Gospel (Luke 19:41–44, 21:20–24; I Thess. 2:16). The church fathers in the fourth century claimed that these sufferings are signs that they have been cursed by God because of their deicide. Some Christian writers saw Jews as having special genetic traits or propensities for evil, a kind of second original or inherited sin (Erbsünde) committed by rejecting Jesus as their Messiah that renders them morally deficient (deceitful, subversive, lascivious, and so forth). To protect Christians from their evil influence, Jews were expelled or segregated. Ethnologists and anthropologists of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century discussed the question of race, holding that humanity was naturally divided into various races or national Volkstümer, that environment and culture shaped a Volk so that some are more civilized and superior to others. Moral theologians taught a doctrine of ordered love whereby one is to love oneself first and then family, friends, colleagues, coreligionists, people, and nation. Although Christ taught that one should love one’s neighbor as oneself (Matt. 19:19, 22:39; Mark...

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