xiv Preface
the spanish and Portuguese inquisitions to distinguish Portuguese and spanish
people who were not converts from Judaism from ‘new christians’ (‘conversos’ or
‘Marranos’), terms which referred to iberian Jews and their known baptized des-
cendants who had converted to catholicism. early modern humanists were fascin-
ated by Jews because of a renewed interest in Hebrew as part of the heritage of
antiquity, and this fascination continued during the period to which we loosely
apply the term ‘Renaissance’—the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. such
interest was largely quenched by the counter Reformation of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, beginning with the council of trent (1554–1563) initiated
in response to the Protestant Reformation. There was no discussion of Jews at that
council.
certainly in contrast to the medieval—and also to the early modern era—the
history of ‘anti-semitism’ is all too familiar in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries,
and within that context papal–Jewish relations remain exceedingly complex. in the
first decade of the twentieth century Pius x (1903–1914), dismayed at the success
of the new secular italian state and the loss of the papal states, evinced a great fear
of ‘modernism’ and ‘modernists’—those who tried to drag catholicism away from
what they saw as a rigid formalism dependent on biblical fundamentalism and an
uncritical acceptance of ‘tradition’, and to adapt it to a new age. achille Ratti,
the future Pius xi (1922–1939), was appointed papal nuncio in Poland during
Pius x’s pontificate and, in his attempts to reconstruct the catholic church there,
became fundamentally opposed to communism. worried by what he saw as the
corrosion of christian culture—in which context Jews were often blamed for
their association with finance and business—he also feared ‘Jewish bolshevism’.
naturally an authoritarian character and dismayed by the increasing forces of
european secularism which he believed threatened to engulf the church, and
which he denounced in encyclicals such as ‘Quas primas’ in 1925, in his early pon-
tificate Pius xi was prepared to see Fascism as a vehicle for the re-christianization
of europe. He was not alone. in the 1930s italian catholics more generally thought
they could make use of Fascism as a bulwark against communism. an ambitious
Mussolini, himself an atheist but realizing that he needed the support of the
church to increase the Fascist vote, played on this fear.
Yet, despite his naturally right-wing leanings, Pius xi showed independence
of spirit. He suppressed charles Maurras’s Action Française, an extreme far-right
movement in France, and in 1927 excommunicated its supporters. as a result he
was accused of betraying the church and siding with radicals and Jews. nevertheless,
there is no doubt that he played with political forces he mistakenly thought he
could control. believing that the Fascists would support the church’s attempts to
bring back catholic moral teaching, family values, and social discipline, he even
disregarded the advice of cardinal Gasparri, a powerful diplomat at the papal curia
and camerlengo from 1916 to 1934, and spoke of Mussolini as ‘a man sent by
Providence’—which led italian clergy to encourage their congregations to vote
Fascist. believing that Vatican city was a vital base if the church was to remain an
effective missionary force, in 1929 he signed a concordat with Mussolini which
secured it for the papacy.