NP? book review: _The Popes Against the Jews_

[Doug Millison]

"Five years ago David Kertzer wrote a well-received book about the
kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, a six-year-old Jewish boy in Bologna who, in
1858, was taken from his family with the approval of Pope Pius IX on the
grounds that he had been baptized by a Catholic house servant.[*] For
historians of the papacy that was a bad moment in the reign of Pius IX.
David Kertzer's account of it showed how strong secular opposition could be
used by a conservative pope to vindicate a defiant and politically damaging
position in the name of what he considered to be higher, Christian truth.

"This led Kertzer to undertake research into the history of Jews in Rome
during the last decades of the Rome ghetto, which ended when the
Piedmontese army occupied Rome in September 1870 and the Papal States were
no more. Kertzer's work convinced him that history concentrates too
narrowly on the pope's record between 1939 and 1945. He believed that
anti-Jewish prejudice among Christians was a necessary background for the
Holocaust and that the Vatican bore a heavy responsibility for this
prejudice. Hence he continued his studies into the modern age, the years
between 1870 and the early years of World War II.

All popes are officially against the Jewish religion as not fully adequate,
so Kertzer's subtitle is more informative: "The Vatican's Role in the Rise
of Modern Anti-Semitism."

..continues at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15223