Jews and Judaism in World History

(Tuis.) #1

Soviet prison camp. Individuals such as Wallenberg and other well-known
rescuers such as Oskar Schindler were rare exceptions. Yet it is tragically tan-
talizing to ponder how many Jews even a few more Schindlers and
Wallenbergs could have rescued.
The individual who was in the best position to help Jews was undoubtedly
Pope Pius XII. For more than half a century, there has been an ongoing
debate as to the actions of the pope on behalf of the Jews, beginning with two
contradictory versions that appeared during the 1950s. One, articulated by
Israeli historian Pinchas Lapides, contended that “the Catholic Church under
the Pontificate of Pius XII was instrumental in saving at least 700,000 Jews,
but probably as many as 860,000.” Every defender of Pius XII has cited this
figure, most recently Pat Buchanan. The problem is, there is no factual basis
for this claim. A more negative appraisal of the pope appeared in a play writ-
ten by Rolf Hochhuth during the 1950s, The Deputy. This play described how
Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII, while serving as papal nuncio to
Germany during the 1930s, had come to love German culture and was thus
unwilling to oppose Hitler.
More recently, historians have looked beyond these two charged claims and
set the actions of the pope in the context of the war and the decline of the
papacy. Since the 1860s, the Vatican has been largely powerless, and depen-
dent on political authorities even for basic necessities such as water and
electricity. During the war, the pope’s fear of Stalin led him to turn to Hitler
as the only guarantor of the survival of the church in the face of the commu-
nist threat to destroy Catholicism. On the other hand, the heroic support of
Catholic clergy on behalf of Jews suggests that if the pope had given even the
slightest indication of opposition, there might have been a wellspring of
Catholic resistance to Nazism. In the absence of a clear policy from the
Vatican, the actions of Catholic clergy were mixed. Numerous German,
Hungarian, and Italian clergy, notably the Hungarians Angelo Rotta and
Sister Margit Schlachta, helped Jews. Croatian priests helped round up and
deport Jews. Most notoriously, Pius XII himself did nothing when the Jews
of Rome were deported literally under the window of the Vatican.
In the end, the impact of the Holocaust, as the destruction of European
Jewry came to be known at the end of the 1950s, left a profound imprint on
world Jewry. The killing of between 5 and 6 million Jews, and over a million
Jewish children, destroyed multiple generations, inflicting a demographic blow
from which world Jewry has still not recovered. Beyond physical destruction,
the destruction of the Jews of central and eastern Europe brought an end to a
Jewish civilization and culture that was on the verge of a cultural explosion.
Until the Second World War, the best rabbinic scholars came from Poland,
Germany, and Hungary, as did the best Jewish writers and political thinkers.
This event, moreover, had a profound impact on the understanding of
Jewish history. The Holocaust promoted a preexisting “lachrymose view” of
Jewish history that regarded the history of the Jews as a history of unending


From renewal to devastation, 1914–45 229
Free download pdf