Moving from the Catholic Church's pagan origins, through the Roman era, middle ages, and Reformation to the present, Robert Michael here provides a definitive history of Catholic antisemitism.

This book examines how, following Vatican policy, Polish church leaders resisted separation of church and state in the name of Catholic culture. In that struggle, every assimilated Jew served as both a symbol and a potential agent of security.

A rare book that combines searing passion with a subject that has affected all of our lives. "Chicago Tribune" Novelist, cultural critic, and former priest James Carroll marries history with memoir as he maps the two-thousand-year course of the Church s battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of faith it has sparked in his own life. Fascinating, brave, and sometimes infuriating ("Time"), this dark history is more than a chronicle of religion. It is the central tragedy of Western civilization, its fault lines reaching deep into our culture to create a deeply felt work ("San Francisco Chronicle") as Carroll wrangles with centuries of strife and tragedy to reach a courageous and affecting reckoning with difficult truths."

The most prominent story of nineteenth-century German and French Jewry has focused on Jewish adoption of liberal middle-class values. The Modernity of Others points to an equally powerful but largely unexplored aspect of modern Jewish history: the extent to which German and French Jews sought to become modern by criticizing the anti-modern positions of the Catholic Church. Drawing attention to the pervasiveness of anti-Catholic anticlericalism among Jewish thinkers and activists from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, the book turns the master narrative of Western and Central European Jewish history on its head. From the moment in which Jews began to enter the fray of modern European politics, they found that Catholicism served as a convenient foil that helped them define what it meant to be a good citizen, to practice a respectable religion, and to have a healthy family life. Throughout the long nineteenth century, myriad Jewish intellectuals, politicians, and activists employed anti-Catholic tropes wherever questions of political and national belonging were at stake: in theoretical treatises, parliamentary speeches, newspaper debates, the founding moments of the Reform movement, and campaigns against antisemitism.

In this meticulously researched, unflinching, and reasoned study, National Book Award finalist David I. Kertzer presents shocking revelations about the role played by the Vatican in the development of modern anti-Semitism. Working in long-sealed Vatican archives, Kertzer unearths startling evidence to undermine the Church’s argument that it played no direct role in the spread of modern anti-Semitism. In doing so, he challenges the Vatican’s recent official statement on the subject, We Remember. Kertzer tells an unsettling story that has stirred up controversy around the world and sheds a much-needed light on the past.

In 1965 the Second Vatican Council declared that God loves the Jews. Yet the Church had taught for centuries that Jews were cursed by God, and had mostly kept silent as Jews were slaughtered by Nazis. How did an institution whose wisdom is said to be unchanging undertake one of the largest, yet most undiscussed, ideological swings in modern history?

This book reveals in considerable detail the two millennial history of the virulent anti-Semitism of the Roman Catholic Church. It demonstrates that the Church's persistent barrage of invective and derogatory allegations led to wholesale slaughters of Jewish men, women and children. Furthermore, under canon law the Jew had scarcely the right of existence, and could only survive under conditions of virtual slavery. Consequently, Catholics 'plundered and persecuted the chosen race until their lives became a curse.' This Catholic hatred of the Jew, the longest hatred in human history, peaked during the Nazi Holocaust. The book clearly discloses that the Church, at all levels, facilitated the ascent of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, and enabled the 'Final Solution to the Jewish Question'. It veri'es that most of the major participants in the planning, implementation, and butchering of the Holocaust were born and bred Catholics. Signi'cantly, the book also reveals that, over the centuries, the Catholic Church has itself been responsible for the deaths of at least as many Jews as were killed by the Nazis. Yet the Church has never admitted, nor apologised, nor made reparation, nor been punished for its fundamental role in these diabolical sins. In conclusion, the book con'rms that this proclaimed holy institution continues to deny its unholy history.

The impact of events in Nazi Germany and Europe during World War II was keenly felt in neutral Argentina among its predominantly Catholic population and its significant Jewish minority. The Catholic Church and the Jews, Argentina, 1933-1945 considers the images of Jews presented in standard Catholic teaching of that era, the attitudes of the lower clergy and faithful toward the country s Jewish citizens, and the response of the politically influential Church hierarchy to the national debate on accepting Jewish refugees from Europe. The issue was complicated by such factors as the position taken by the Vatican, Argentina s unstable political situation, and the sizeable number of citizens of German origin who were Nazi sympathizers eager to promote German interests. Argentina s self-perception was as a Catholic country. Though there were few overtly anti-Jewish acts, traditional stereotypes and prejudice were widespread and only a few voices in the Catholic community confronted the established attitudes.

With his first book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen dramatically revised our understanding of the role ordinary Germans played in the Holocaust. Now he brings his formidable powers of research and argument to bear on the Catholic Church and its complicity in the destruction of European Jewry. What emerges is a work that goes far beyond the familiar inquiries—most of which focus solely on Pope Pius XII—to address an entire history of hatred and persecution that culminated, in some cases, in an active participation in mass-murder. More than a chronicle, A Moral Reckoning is also an assessment of culpability and a bold attempt at defining what actions the Church must take to repair the harm it did to Jews—and to repair itself. Impressive in its scholarship, rigorous in its ethical focus, the result is a book of lasting importance.

While much has been written about the Catholic Church and the Holocaust, little has been published about the hostile role of priests, in particular Jesuits, toward Jews and Judaism. Jesuit Kaddish is a long overdue study that examines Jesuit hostility toward Judaism before the Shoah and the development of a new understanding of the Catholic Church’s relation to Judaism that culminated with Vatican II’s landmark decree Nostra aetate. James Bernauer undertakes a self-examination as a member of the Jesuit order and writes this story in the hopes that it will contribute to interreligious reconciliation. Jesuit Kaddish demonstrates the way Jesuit hostility operated, examining Jesuit moral theology’s dualistic approach to sexuality and, in the case of Nazi Germany, the articulation of an unholy alliance between a sexualizing and a Judaizing of German culture. Bernauer then identifies an influential group of Jesuits whose thought and action contributed to the developments in Catholic teaching about Judaism that eventually led to the watershed moment of Nostra aetate. This book concludes with a proposed statement of repentance from the Jesuits and an appendix presenting the fifteen Jesuits who have been honored as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Center. Jesuit Kaddish offers a crucial contribution to the fields of Catholicism and Nazism, Catholic-Jewish relations, Jesuit history, and the history of anti-Semitism in Europe.