Anti-Judaism or Antisemitism? Recent Historiography on Pope Pius XII Based on the Vatican Archives of 1922–39

In his recent book Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), Hubert Wolf argues that two 1928 articles by Jesuit Enrico Rosa, one appearing in Civilità Cattolica and the other in L’Avvenire d’Italia, mark the birth of a still-highly-problematic characterization of prejudice against Jewish peoples within church and scholarly circles today. In these two articles, Rosa distinguished between “evil, biologically motivated racial anti-Semitism,” rejected by the Church, and supposedly “good,” theologically motivated anti-Semitism (Wolf, Pope and Devil, 117). This debate becomes most highly charged in the context of scholarly discussions about the role of Catholicism and Christianity in the Holocaust. In my paper, I propose to describe the approaches taken to this most crucial question in recent historiography on the Catholic Church and the Holocaust, based on newly-available archival evidence including the documents for the papacy of Pope Pius XI (1922-1939). I will discuss the following five books: Thomas Brechenmacher, editor, Das Reichskonkordat 1933: Forschungsstand, Kontroversen, Dokumente (2007); Charles R. Gallagher, Vatican Secret Diplomacy: Joseph P. Hurley and Pope Pius XII (2008); Michael Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War (2008); Gerald Steinacher, Nazis auf der Flucht: Wie Kriegsverbrecher über Italien nach Übersee entkamen (2008); and Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil. For each book, I will touch on the newly-available or heretofore-ignored evidence each brings to the fore; the role the distinction between supposedly “good” and “bad” anti-Semitism played in each historical story; and the arguments advanced by these scholars on the utility of and motives for distinguishing between so-called “anti-Judaism” and “antisemitism.”