Antisemitism, Holocaust and the Holy See: An Appraisal of New Books About the Vatican and the Holocaust

Walter Zwi Bacharach

  1. Saul Friedländer, Pie XII et le IIIe Reich, Documents (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1964); in English, Pius XII and the Third Reich, A Documentation (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1966).
  2. Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust 1930-1965 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000); Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); José M. Sanchez, Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2002); John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Viking, 1999); David Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2001).
  3. Sanchez, Pius XII and the Holocaust, p. 179. Another example of this sort of study is Ronald J. Rychlak, Hitler, the War and the Pope (Columbus: Genesis Press, 2000).
  4. After completing this article, I received the recent study by Daniel Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2002). The book is written cum ira et studio, similar to his problematic incendiary book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. More than being a research study, his book about the Church is a polemic primarily about moral judgment, which is devoid of balanced rational deliberation, as has already been stated by the historian Richard Evans in the Jewish Chronicle. The book adds nothing new to what has already been said in the works under discussion here.
  5. James Parkes, Antisemitism (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1963), p. 60.
  6. Carol Rittner, Stephen D. Smith, Irena Steinfeldt, eds., The Holocaust and the Christian World: Reflections on the Past, Challenges for the Future (London: Beth Shalom Holocaust Memorial Centre and Yad Vashem, 2000), p. 247; the significance of this remark is discussed in my article “Christianity and Judaism: Polemic or Dialogue,” Bar-Ilan Studies in History, vol. 2 (1983), p. 19.
  7. As they appear in the booklet, “The Visit of Pope John Paul II to Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, March 23, 2000” (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2000).
  8. David Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews, pp. 6, 9.
  9. Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, p. xii.
  10. Cornwell, Hitler's Pope, p. 295.
  11. Ibid., p. 277. See also Zwi Bacharach in the volume, “A Pope With an Anti-Jewish Religious Approach,” Gesher – A Journal of Jewish Affairs (Hebrew), 142 (Winter 2001), pp. 97-99.
  12. In the Afterword by the historian Alfred Grosser to the German edition of Friedlander’s book, Pius XII und das Dritte Reich: ein Dokumentation (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1965), p. 167.
  13. Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews, p. 16; Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows, p. 1; Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, pp. 291-293, 297; Pius and the Third Reich, pp. 130-133.
  14. Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, p. 223.
  15. Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows, pp. 318-319.
  16. Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, pp. 51, 218.
  17. Ibid., p. 54.
  18. Ibid., p. 57.
  19. Friedländer, Pius XII and the Third Reich, p. 237; Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, p. 57.
  20. Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows, p. 317.
  21. Ibid., pp. 318-319.
  22. Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 303- 304.
  23. Sanchez, Pius XII and the Holocaust, pp. 98-99.
  24. Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, p. 56.
  25. Sanchez, Pius XII and the Holocaust, p. 102.
  26. John S. Conway, “Catholicism and the Jews during the Nazi Period and After,” in Otto Dov Kulka and Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, ed., Judaism and Christianity under the Impact of National Socialism (Jerusalem: Historical Society for Israel, 1987), pp. 435-451.
  27. Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows, p. 317.
  28. For more on the “missing encyclical,” see Michael Marrus, “The Vatican on Racism and Antisemitism, 1938 - 1939, A New Look at a Might-Have-Been,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 2, no. 3 (1987), pp. 378-395; and see Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows, pp. 32-33; Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews, pp. 280-282; Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, pp. 189-192.
  29. “An open letter to the Pope” (no date), written by Harry James Cargas, a professor of literature at Webster University in St. Louis, in which he protests against the pope’s meeting with the controversial Dr. Kurt Waldheim; part of the letter relates to the “hidden encyclical” affair.
  30. Uriel Tal, “Patterns in the Contemporary Jewish-Christian Dialogue” (Hebrew), Study Circle on Diaspora Jewry at the Home of the President of Israel, The Institute of Contemporary Jewry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, no. 5 (1969), p. 28.
  31. Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows, p. 167.
  32. Ibid., p. 166.
  33. Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, p. 102.
  34. Ibid., p. 142; see also the entire brief chapter, pp. 138-144.
  35. Ibid., p. 139.
  36. I am grateful to Professor Dan Michman for showing me a recent article in The Spectator about the historian Peter Gumpel, who has the task of investigating candidates for sainthood by the Church. Gumpel defends the policies of Pius and cites a series of public figures and institutions-- from Albert Einstein to Chaim Weizmann, Moshe Sharett and others--that showered praise on the pope. Gumpel also attacks the Jewish members of the Catholic-Jewish historical commission that was supposed to examine documentation about the policies of the Holy See. As everyone knows, the commission has been dissolved, and Gumpel accuses its Jewish members of not having taken the trouble of reading the 8,000 pages of documentation!
  37. Shulamit Volkov, “The Written Word and the Spoken Word: On Rupture and Continuity in the History of Antisemitism in Germany,” in Yaakov Borut, Oded Heilbronner, eds., German Antisemitism: A Reasssessment (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2000), p. 32; see also, ibid., p. 47; as well as her most recent book, In the Enchanted Circle: Jews, Antisemites and Other Germans (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2002) p. 149.
  38. Jacob Katz, “Christian Jewish Antagonism on the Eve of the Modern Era,” in Kulka and Mendes-Flohr, eds., Judaism and Christianity under the Impact of National Socialism, p. 34; Professor Robert Wistrich devotes Chapter 5 of his book Hitler and the Holocaust to an issue that he called “Between the Cross and the Swastika.” In brief, he surveys the policies of Pius XII toward the Jews. Wistrich’s explanation of the hesitation and ambivalence of the Holy See is similar to that of Jacob Katz; see Robert Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001), p. 147. Once again, my thanks to Professor Michman, who drew my attention to this book.
  39. Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 321.
  40. Marcel J. Dubois, “The Challenge of the Holocaust and the History of Salvation,” in Kulka and Mendes-Flohr, ed., Judaism and Christianity under the Impact of National Socialism, p. 502.
  41. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, About God and the World: Conversations With Michael Shashar (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Keter, 1987) p. 80.