The Church and the Jews: Modern Period

After the Reformation, the western Church was left permanently fragmented. But the mainstream churches that emerged were still a powerful force in public and political life. Even in the Netherlands of the seventeenth century, where the freedom of religion was remarkable, the dominant Reformed Church (Calvinist) wielded significant political power.

By the eighteenth century, however, the place of churches in public life had become increasingly weaker and more ambiguous. Two related trends, both of which are associated with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, brought this about.

The first was the secularization of everyday life. Sacred matters came to occupy less time in the lives and thinking of most people - even of people who held strong religious beliefs. As human control of the natural world increased, the need people felt for supernatural intervention and explanation declined. Skepticism in religious matters became more acceptable, and doubts about even the most fundamental orthodoxies were expressed more freely.

The second was the principle of the separation of church and state, which was first articulated in the late seventeenth century: the notion that matters of conscience should not be the legitimate concern of governments. This principle lies at the heart of what we know as “freedom of religion” or “freedom of conscience.” Once this principle became embedded in law, churches lost their coercive power and their legal right to interfere in matters of government. Religion was increasingly regarded as a private, voluntary matter.

The first proponents of the idea that men and women have a right to worship according to their conscience did not emanate from the churches. The pioneers in this area belonged to non-clerical circles of thinkers, whose very existence was a “modern” phenomenon. The early proponents of the principle of freedom of conscience were also among the first to propose that Jews be accepted into society without an expectation of their conversion to Christianity. John Locke made the classic statement of the idea of a secular state, and recommended the inclusion of Jews in it. True, Locke’s main concern in his “Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689) was that of the relations between different Christian denominations. But the fact that he viewed the church as “a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord in order to the public worshipping of God” led him to the conclusion that “neither pagan, nor Mahometan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion.”

The achievement of the separation of church and state – that is, where it has been achieved – has been a long, slow process, one that we cannot examine here in detail. Suffice it to say that in virtually every modern state with a Christian majority, Jews (as well as other religious minorities) have been offered citizenship on equal terms with Christians.

The first European state to offer political equality to Jews was France. This came as a result of the great upheaval that was the French Revolution. After the aristocracy, the Catholic Church was the chief target of the revolutionaries. The French National Assembly – the revolutionary “parliament” – declared Catholicism to be no longer the religion of the state, and confiscated Church lands. Bishops and priests who refused to take an oath to the newly adopted Constitution were persecuted severely. During “the Terror,” churches were closed, the Church of Notre Dame de Paris became a “temple of reason,” and Robespierre outlined a plan for a new religion of Reason. After Robespierre’s death in 1794, Catholicism was gradually reintroduced to French society. But the Catholic Church, in France and elsewhere, was set on a course of conservative reaction against liberal ideas of all sorts.

Until the 1960s, it might be said that conservative reaction was the basic stance of the Catholic Church. Characteristically, in 1864, the pope issued an encyclical called Quanta cura, accompanied by a Syllabus of Errors. Among the Errors cited was the idea of the right to freedom of conscience. In the eyes of the Catholic Church, the granting of equality to Jews was but one of an entire array of ideas and policies that it regarded as threatening and “godless.”

Of course outside the Church, too, there was much opposition to new ideas that accompanied the emerging social order in modern Europe. Opposition to the equality of Jews in that order became a rallying point for people with grievances of all sorts. These grievances were “explained” by the time-honored technique of scapegoating the Jews, who were portrayed as “poisoning” national life, whether as grasping capitalists or disease-ridden, impoverished immigrants. Theological arguments became secondary or disappeared altogether in the new forms of secular “antisemitism” that emerged. (The term “antisemitism” was coined in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr, a German publicist who pointed to the Jews as the root cause of Germany’s social ills.)

Few can doubt that negative stereotypes, attitudes, and images fostered by the Church over many centuries impacted on the thinking of Christians in modern times – even of Christians who rejected Christian theology. Old charges with religious roots, such as the blood libel, were frequently exploited and refashioned by antisemites to illustrate alleged “racial” or anti-social characteristics of the Jews.


1936 issue of Nazi periodical Der Stuermer, supporting ritual murder charge.

In this course, however, we will focus on tracing the trajectory of the Church in the modern period – the Catholic Church in particular, but with some attention to Protestant groups as well – in its efforts to deal with an anti-Jewish theological legacy that harks back to the first century.

In the modern period, the Catholic Church witnessed its authority and power being undermined dramatically throughout Europe. With the unification of Italy in 1870-71, papal sovereignty came to an end everywhere. Its leaders, however, clung to the medieval self-image and mystique of an imperial, successfully evangelizing Church. For the Jews, this became painfully evident with the case of Edgardo Mortara.

Edgardo Mortara was the child of middle-class Jewish parents living in Bologna, Italy. In June, 1858 police went to the home of Edgardo Mortara by order of the Inquisition, and took the child from his parents. A Catholic servant who had worked in the Mortara household had reported that in his infancy, when Edgardo Mortara was mortally ill, she had baptized him lest he die in an unsaved state. He had recovered, however, and was now, in the Church’s eyes, on the basis of the servant’s testimony, a bona fide Catholic.

Despite international protests, the Church refused to return the boy, arguing that it had acted according to canon law. The Catholic press in Rome argued that if anyone was at fault, it was in fact the Mortara family, for violating canon law by employing a Christian servant in a Jewish home. It saw the attack against the Church’s behavior as part of the general liberal and revolutionary threat, and the pope, Pius IX, was hailed as a hero in refusing to bow to the forces of modernity. (Incidentally, the boy, permanently separated from his family, was raised a Catholic and eventually became a priest.)


Pope Pius IX

As modern antisemitism became more and more pervasive in Europe in the late nineteenth century, the official Catholic press participated in the agitation, publishing openly antisemitic articles. In 1880, for example, the Jesuit biweekly founded by Pius IX, Civiltà cattolica, called for governments to issue “exceptional laws for a race that is so exceptionally and profoundly perverse.” When accused of antisemitism, the paper issued defensive denials such as the following, from an article of the 1890s: “We do not write with any intention of sparking or fomenting any antisemitism in our country. Rather we seek to sound an alarm for Italians so that they defend themselves against those who, in order to impoverish them, dominate them, and make them their slaves, interfere with their faith, corrupt their morals, and suck their blood.” This Catholic paper and others even began raising the ritual murder charge – a charge that had been repeatedly condemned by popes in the past.

On the eve of the Holocaust, there was great variation in attitudes of European Catholics to Jews. To some extent this was reflected in papal policy. Pius XI (1922-1939) consistently opposed Nazi fascism and racism, and issued an anti-racist encyclical in 1937. In September, 1938, he told Belgian Catholics that Christians were the children of Abraham, stating that “spiritually we are Semites” and that “it is not possible for Christians to participate in antisemitism.”

But his successor Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) was a very different personality. While his predecessor had seen Nazism as the greatest threat to the Church, for Pius XII it was Communism. He quickly proved reluctant to antagonize the Germans, fearing that Rome and Vatican City would suffer if he spoke out against the mass killing of Jews – which the Vatican was in an especially good position to be informed about. By the end of 1942, the Holy See had received accounts about the systematic murder of Jews from at least nine different Nazi-occupied countries, including occupied Poland. Yet the Vatican did not make its information public, and refused to exchange atrocity information with President Roosevelt’s personal envoy to the Vatican. Nor did the papacy share its information with Catholic resistance movements that were trying to save Jews. In October, 1943 the pope was confronted with the choice of handing over the Jews for deportation or aerial bombardment. The Jews of Rome were deported to Auschwitz, an action the pope did not condemn. Here and there throughout Europe, there were bishops who raised their voices in protest, and Catholics who acted heroically to rescue Jews. But the pope never declared publicly that it was a sin to kill Jewish civilians.


Pope Pius XII

In the post-war period, the Catholic Church chose to depict itself as the victim of the Nazis, focussing on its own “victimization” rather than that of the Jewish (and other) targets of the Nazis. This contrasted with the Protestant World Council of Churches, which declared in 1948 that “the churches in the past have helped to foster an image of the Jews as the sole enemies of Christ which has contributed to antisemitism in the secular world.” The more tradition-bound Catholic Church remained closed in on itself until Pius XII died in 1958.

The pope who succeeded Pius XII was John XXIII, Angelo Roncalli, who had personally participated in the rescue of Jews while he was stationed in Istanbul during the war as a papal diplomat. Although he was 77 years old when he became pope, John XXIII was responsible for initiating the remarkable Second Vatican Council in 1962, in an effort to deal with a wide array of problems facing the Church. Before the issue of the Jews was brought up, however, John XXIII died; but the Council continued under his successor Paul VI.


Pope John XXIII

There was considerable resistance to issuing a document that some feared would repudiate basic Church teachings or appear to say that all religions had a right to propagate their teachings. As the Catholic Review put it, “The Church can scarcely be expected to repudiate the Gospel witness about the role of Jews in the Crucifixion….Nor can she be true to her own divinely imposed mission to bring all men to Christ without praying that the Jews and all non-Catholics may freely find in Catholicism the fullness of God’s will for them.”

But in the fall of 1965, a text dealing with non-Catholics, including Jews, was finally adopted, and Pope Paul VI issued a declaration on this subject, Nostra Aetate, a milestone in Church history. It states that “the Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in [other] religions.” Concerning Jews, it states that the Church cannot forget “that she draws sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles.” It states that Jews must not be persecuted and, most importantly from a theological point of view, that the Crucifixion “cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”

From a theological point of view, a fundamental issue remains between “the Church” and “the Jews.” This is the widespread Christian belief that the Church is obligated to evangelize the Jews - that is, bring them to convert to Christianity. This poses a delicate problem for ongoing dialogue between Christians and Jews. During the deliberations of the Second Vatican Council, some Jewish representatives had asked that the Council include a statement rejecting the Church’s basic missionizing stance toward the Jews. But as fateful and important as the Vatican II documents were, they did not renounce the evangelizing aims of the Church. The last two documents we will examine - one a statement issued by the pope on Catholic-Jewish dialogue, the other a Jewish response to that statement – will underscore some of the ongoing issues in the long and intense relationship between Christians and Jews.