Our ideologists are debating what to make of a book
David I. Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2001; cloth, 355 pp., $27.95.

In the last year or two, the Vatican, while apologizing for the historic, religious-based antisemitism of the Middle Ages, nevertheless tried to differentiate it from (and avoid responsibility for) modern antisemitism of the 1800s and 1900s, portraying Jews as a racial enemy. Kertzer, while crediting the current Pope with good will, nevertheless won't let the Church off so easy, focussing on
(1) the Nuremberg-law-style administration of the Papal states in Italy, after Napoleon was defeated and Papal rule was restored (1815-1870), and
(2) the key support of Popes for antisemitic Catholic journals and political parties (notably in the Austria of the young Adolf Hitler) after liberal revolutionists annexed Rome to Italy in 1870.

From p. 106:
[...]
"If the Church bore major (though of course not exclusive) responsibility for the inculcation of a dozen of the major ideological pillars of the modern antisemitic movement" [belief in global conspiracies by emancipated Jews against Christians] , "but a thirteenth" [racial pseudoscience] "came from other sources, are we to conclude that the Church bears little or no responsibility for the flowering of modern antisemitism in those areas where the Church had great imfluence?"

[end of quote]

Comment:
We are happy to see Vatican reactionaries embarrassed, and figure they and the Zionists deserve each other. Nevertheless, we should note that many of the Vatican charges are true, apart from the silly fable about drinking children's blood.

(Among other episodes visited in Kertzer's book was the Motherland's 1912 Beilis case, a ritual-murder accusation. It was, of course, a provocation by Tsarist reactionaries, some of whom would get the supreme measure they deserved after the Great October Socialist Revolution. Nevertheless, instead of forthrightly denouncing the accusation on grounds of proletarian internationalism, the slippery rootless-cosmopolitan defenders of Beilis tried to trick the Vatican into supporting them, by authenticating historic Vatican denunciations of a few specific ritual-murder cases. They tried to narrow the focus to those particular cases, in hopes of avoiding a broader Vatican statement that most ritual-murder cases were true. The presiding judge in the case, however, told these shysters to go back and get a legally-certified attestation from the Vatican, who thereupon quite naturally bid them get lost.)

The rootless-cosmopolitans would show their true nature when they turned their new State of Israel into a hotbed of spying and provocation against progressive forces, and when they tried to poison Comrade Stalin.

--A.A. Zhdanov