-
3 | “L’Osservatore Cattolico” and Davide Albertario | Ulrich Wyrwa
- Brandeis University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
61 about the language of political antisemitism the remark that “religious hostility ” has not yet been completely extinguished. “It had not been abolished, but was instead embedded in society as a ‘cultural legacy.’” This dialectic of religious Jew hatred and secular antisemitism shaped not only the rhetoric of political antisemitism, but also paradoxically the very language of the Church in a time of social upheaval in the nineteenth century. In the second volume of his overview of contemporary Jewish history published in 1910, the Jewish historian Martin Philippson focused on the origin and development of antisemitism in Europe. Philippson, an attentive observer, pointed out that in a speech from the early 1870s, Pope Pius IX had attacked Jewish journalists and suggested that Jews only “surrendered to the love of money.” The papal charges, Philippson noted, anticipated the language of secular antisemitism far more than they drew on the repertoire of religious Jew hatred. For Philippson, “the signal” for the beginning of this new war against Jewry had been “given by the highest office of the Catholic Christianity, Pope Pius IX. This was the moment when modern antisemitism was born.”1 In this context, Philippson emphasized in particular the importance of the Catholic ultramontane press in the new battle against Jewry. The mouthpiece of the Vatican, La Civiltà Cattolica (Catholic Civilization), played an influential role in the dissemination of the language of antisemitism.2 In the intransigent Church circles close to the Holy See, antisemitism became a cultural code, in which the new language of antisemitism replaced the traditional themes of Christian hatred of Jews.3 Ulrich Wyrwa “L’OSSERVATORE CATTOLICO” AND DAVIDE ALBERTARIO CATHOLIC PUBLIC RELATIONS AND ANTISEMITIC PROPAGANDA IN MILAN Blaming Jews for being stubborn unbelievers will not bring the masses into the movement. — Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of the Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno added to their observation 3 62 : Catholicism, Antisemitism In the following, I will examine this dialectic using the example of L’Osservatore Cattolico (Catholic Observer), a newspaper founded in 1864 in Milan and directed from 1869 to 1893 by Father Davide Albertario (1846–1902).4 It was in Milan, then, that one of the most virulently antisemitic Catholic publications was produced under Albertario’s editorship and where factions of the church came to view Jews, socialists, and liberals as enemies of Catholicism. Through a discussion of Albertario and the Catholic Church in Milan, this chapter will consider the promotion of antisemitism within the Milan church in particular and Italian Catholicism more generally; as this chapter shows, Albertario ’s activity in Milan attracted attention far beyond the Italian peninsula. At the center of this analysis I pose the question of whether conflicts broke out inside the Catholic Church over this issue, and if so, which specific positions in the debates were promoted by L’Osservatore Cattolico.5 After a brief overview of Italian historiography and the question of antisemitism , the first section will outline Church history in the context of the city of Milan, the founding of L’Osservatore Cattolico, and the biography of its chief editor, Davide Albertario. In the second section, I analyze important antisemitic articles from this publication, and the third part introduces this paper’s campaign against ritual murders allegedly carried out by Jews.Through its anti-Jewish campaign, this Milan Catholic newspaper became widely known throughout Europe. The final section will analyze the reporting of this newspaper in the context of the dialectic of traditional religious hostility toward Jews and secular antisemitism. Italy has been widely disregarded in historical research on European antisemitism ,6 and Italian historiography, in turn, has long ignored antisemitism. Again and again Italian historians have cited the eminent historian Arnaldo Momigliano, who asserted in 1933 that antisemitism did not exist in Italy.7 His position gained broad acceptance in postwar Italian historiography, in part because Antonio Gramsci had referred to it in his prison notebooks.8 Only in the mid- 1970s did the Italian- American historian Andrew M. Canepa begin to draw attention to the long history of Jewish- Catholic conflict in Italy,9 pointing in particular to the emergence of antisemitic voices in Italy during the liberal era.10 Taking up these lines of interpretation, the Italian historian Mario Toscano has opened new directions for Italian historiography in a number of important articles regarding Jewish history and antisemitism in Italy.11 Canepa also had emphasized the central role of the Catholic Church in the emergence of antisemitism in Italy.12 As a result...