Were the Popes against the Jews? Tracking the Myths, Confronting the Ideologues (review)

Historian David Kertzer contributed constructively to our understanding of one of the most infamous events in Catholic-Jewish history with his The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (New York, 1997). That incident, which took place during the waning days of the Papal States in the pontificate of Pius IX, ranks only slightly behind the Dreyfus affair in Jewish memory as a precursor of the tragic events of the mid-twentieth century. Kertzer’s more recent effort, The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York, 2001), however, was a much more cursory swing through history that, in essence, cobbled together all the negatives it could find, exaggerated some facts, and ignored many others in what amounted to a polemical indictment of the papacy as responsible for the rise of racial antisemitism (which it opposed) and therefore for the Holocaust itself. Justus George Lawler’s study, as its title indicates, takes on the serious methodological flaws not only in Kertzer’s book but also in others of the genre such as those by Daniel Goldhagen and John Cornwell. Lawler is both correct and effective in surfacing and debunking the antipapal ideology that lies behind such studies.

Lawler analyzes the sleight-of-hand rhetoric in which Kertzer engages to draw his readers into unwarranted conclusions and, where appropriate, supplies necessary historical context and interpretation. Kertzer, for example, presumes that the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica is on the same level of presenting the official views of the Holy See as L’Osservatore Romano and that all other Jesuit publications around the world mirror every article in it. Although it is true that there were a handful of anti-Jewish articles in La Civilta Cattolica at the turn of the twentieth century, the Jesuit publications of France, England, and the United States such as America had a quite different and more positive approach when dealing with Jewish concerns. Lawler quite helpfully rejects such misleading generalizations of Kertzer’s through analysis and example.

Although Lawler’s book will be of interest to historians of the papacy and its dealings with the Jews from the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, it has its own serious flaws with regard to the history of Catholic-Jewish relations over the centuries and especially from World War II to the present. He cites Rosemary Radford Reuther’s deeply flawed Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York, 1974) as “pioneering and still indispensable” (p. 306), for example, when in fact its simplistic equation of the anti-Judaic polemics of the later strata of the New Testament with the antisemitism of the Nazis ignored both the intervening historical developments over the centuries and the distinction that must be made between religious disputation and modern racism. Likewise on the same page he equates Ss. John Chrysostom and Augustine as making essentially the same “inevitably negative” judgment on Jews and Judaism, despite the fact that the book he cites—Paula Frederiksen’s excellent Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York, 2008)—argues, and proves, the opposite.

Lawler similarly reprints on pages 288–97 his own 1965 negative review of the truly pioneering and still indispensable study of Edward Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews (New York, 1965), despite its substantially revised second edition (New York, 1985), of which he is seemingly unaware. He seems likewise to be unaware of the numerous official statements of the Holy See, the popes, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, as well as those of other bishops’ conferences, issued since the Second Vatican Council, which have significantly and carefully developed church teaching on Judaism and the Church’s relationship with the Jewish people.