WRITING THE TRUTH

I have recently read two history books (one is really a history based on a biography) on two widely varying subjects. One is on the official relationship of the Roman Catholic Church to anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish activities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the first half of the twentieth century until Vatican II. It is entitled forthrightly enough, “The Popes Against the Jews.” The author is a Jew, a professor of Italian Studies at Brown University, David I. Kertzer. He is already famous for his prize-winning best seller, “The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara,” a historical account of the Vatican’s role in the abducting and forced conversion to Catholicism of an Italian Jewish child in the nineteenth century. The book was driven by the 1998 report of the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations With the Jews. That report essentially cleared the Vatican, the popes and cardinals and bishops of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the first half of the twentieth century, including the period of the Holocaust, of anti-Semitic acts. It attributed all anti-Jewish behavior to the legitimate (from the Church’s point of view) work of the church against Judaism, but not necessarily against Jews. This dubious hairsplitting, combined with the Church’s new policy of opening its archives on the Jewish matter to serious scholars, inspired Kertzer to write this book. As the book jacket itself states: “This book is full of shocking revelations. It traces the Vatican’s role in the development of modern anti-Semitism from the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War. Kertzer shows why all the attention given to Pope Pius XII’s failure to publicly protest the slaughter of Europe’s Jews in the war misses a far more important point. What made the Holocaust possible was groundwork laid over a period of decades. In this campaign of demonization of the Jews – identifying them as traitors to their countries, enemies of all that was good, relentlessly pursuing world domination – the Vatican itself played a key role…”   

What makes Kertzer’s book so damning is that the material it contains is taken mostly from the Vatican archives. He points out that after the Napoleonic Wars the Church had a choice to make. It could attempt to adapt to the modern ideas of toleration, democracy and the end of the rule of the few over the many simply because of birth or belief. Or it could attempt to reintroduce the old medieval system of class tyranny, bigotry and coerced faith. Unfortunately for the Church and for mankind, it chose the latter path over the former. The Popes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries attempted to turn the clock of history backwards. Their prime though certainly not sole victim in this endeavor was the Jew. The Popes of the nineteenth century continued to insist on the yellow Jew badge on clothing and to forbid Christian commerce with Jews. They railed against imagined and unproven Jewish conspiracies, fostered the blood libel that certain popes of the Church itself had given the lie to centuries earlier, identified atheistic Socialism and Bolshevism with Judaism and even demanded the return of the Jews to ghettoes. All of this is documented in Kertzer’s book. The distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism that the Vatican’s commission attempted to assert, falls of its own dead weight in face of the Vatican’s own minutes and documents. The Church’s anti-Judaism turns out to be exactly synonymous with anti-Semitism. And the virulent anti-Semitism that the Church maintained in pre-Holocaust Europe certainly played a role, and a major one at that, in the coming of the Holocaust. Kertzer points out that it was no accident that the worst of the Nazis were in Austria and the greatest support that they had was from Austrians and that Austria remains very slow till today to admit its culpability in the Holocaust. Austria is the most Roman Catholic country in central Europe.

The second book deals with the biography of Rabbi Yakov Kamencki, one of the great figures in the Jewish world in the twentieth century. The book is entitled “The Making of a Gadol.’ The book was written by Rabbi Nosson Kamenetsky, the son of Rabbi Yakov Kamenecki.. The book (almost 1400 pages!) only covers the first period of Rabbi Yakov’s life. This biographical sketch only occupies a little more than one hundred pages of the text. The rest of the book is a history of Jewish life in Eastern Europe during the nineteenth century – the crucial century of the breakup of the old order and the rise of secularism in the Jewish world. And the notes, voluminous, fascinating and truthful – no hagiography here – serve to give us a clearer picture of the reality of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and help explain the current Jewish world as well. The struggles of the yeshivot and their students and heads to withstand the temptation of the Enlightenment, Marxism, secular Zionism and remain loyal to Torah and tradition, both of which were under siege from all directions, Jewish and non-Jewish, are detailed in this book. The vicious attempts of the Russian government of the last two czars, aided and abetted by naïve and self-righteous Jewish secularists, to “modernize” (read, assimilate/convert) Eastern European Jewry have been little noticed because of the flood of events that occurred to that Jewry after the fall of the Romanovs in 1917. Yet, this important chapter in recent Jewish history does deserve thought, analysis and memory, for it clearly shows a road taken in error by vast numbers of Jews one hundred years ago. Rabbi Kamenetsky presents the facts, the heartaches, the helplessness of the old generation before the tornado of change sweeping through the then Jewish world, in an unsparing and accurate fashion. His use of sources is wide and deep and the entire panorama of that terribly difficult time in the story of the Jews unfolds before the reader in a clear and orderly manner.

The common thread in these two books is the commitment to reporting things honestly over the repeating of popular myth and political correctness. The religious Jewish world suffers from a diet of books of imagined history, fables presented as facts, unmitigated hagiography that in reality dehumanize their subjects that they attempt to exalt, and fiction and fantasy about the past that passes because of current political correctness as fact. Rabbi Kamenetsky’s book does not fall into that genre. It is obvious that this dose of bitter truth about past great men and Jewish leaders and their apparent failures and disappointments allows us to view history factually and to learn important lessons that can help us in our current struggles. Kertzer’s book also treasures truth over wishful thinking and soothing bygones. It demands that the Church and the Jewish organizations that deal with the Vatican look at the facts of the last two centuries and the Church’s active role in promoting anti-Semitism. It refuses to whitewash Pius XI, the “favorite” pope of the Jewish organizations that dealt with the Church before World War II. It is a tough book to read. I think that it is tougher not to read it. In any event, it is heartening to see these types of books appear in both the general and the Jewish market. I am certain that they will be a major contribution to understanding the events of the past few centuries for all who read these books.