A History of Catholic Antisemitism: The Dark Side of the Church (review)

This book lives up to its subtitle, presenting in detail “the dark side” of Christian attitudes toward Judaism and treatment of Jews over the centuries. It occasionally mentions mitigating factors, such as St. Augustine’s argument that the Jews witness to the validity of their Bible; are thus necessary to the proclamation of the Gospel; and should therefore, alone among all the non-Christian religions of the Roman empire, be allowed to worship freely. But such acknowledgments are overwhelmed by numerous negative examples, to the point where readers may be unable to answer the following simple question: So why did Jews choose to stay in Christendom, when they could have moved to Islamic or Asian countries? This is a question that the author never asks, most likely because the answer would be an acknowledgment that a true presentation of Jewish-Christian relations over the centuries would have many more bright spots in many countries over many centuries in which Jews lived peacefully and relatively prosperously with their Christian neighbors. But this shade of gray reality is, I fear, beyond the author’s intent, which is to show only “the dark side of the Church.”

In the introduction (p. 1), the author states that Catholic “as distinguished from ‘Orthodox’ and ‘Protestant,’ refers to those Christians who are in communion with the Holy See of Rome.” He includes the eastern Church Fathers, such as St. John Chrysostom, as purveyors of “Catholic antisemitism.” Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish screeds, which were if anything even more vitriolic than Chrysostom, become a key part of the history of “Catholic” antisemitism, since the author, before devoting several pages to him, describes him simply as a “former Augustinian.” The book consistently blames the Catholic Church for the anti-Jewishness and antisemitism of all baptized Christians. I am not sure why the author feels the need to do this. Catholic sins are quite sufficient; one does not have to blame the Catholic Church for the sins of others. Alternately, the author could have admitted that what he has really written is a history of Christian, not just Catholic, antisemitism.

Chapter 1, “Pagans and Early Catholics,” treats the New Testament, emphasizing its later and more negative passages as what it means overall and often interweaving what the New Testament actually said with what later generations of (gentile) Christians said that it said, so that most readers will find it difficult to distinguish the New Testament from the later “teaching of contempt” of the Fathers of the Church (Augustine excepted) toward the Jews. Subsequent chapters (2 through 5) march chronologically through the centuries, carefully culling out everything negative and for the most part ignoring positive developments. What the author says about the crusades in chapter 5 is summarized in the Postscript (p. 195) as “Every Crusade started out murderously attacking European Jews.” Here, he cites the classic studies by Robert Chazan and others of the First Crusade, which was qualitatively different from subsequent crusades in its massacres of Jews and attempts to convert them by force, over the protests of the local bishops, as Chazan reports but Michael fails to mention.

Chapter 6 (pp. 75–100) deals with medieval “Papal Policy” while the final chapter, 10, treats “Modern Papal Policy,” especially with regard to the Holocaust. These chapters bracket the countries Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, and Poland. Throughout these presentations, the author heaps up mounds of details, often accompanied by misleading generalizations. To his credit, Michael does attempt a more balanced approach of the question of Pope Pius XII and the Jews than many of Pius’s detractors. However, he does not succeed in this attempt, as his vision of “the dark side” seems to predominate, even when he has no evidence to support a given claim. One example is his assertion that the deportations of the Jews from Rome by the Germans continued unabated after Pius’s intervention. In fact...