The Popes Against the Jews PDF Download

Author: David I. Kertzer
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307429210
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
In this meticulously researched, unflinching, and reasoned study, National Book Award finalist David I. Kertzer presents shocking revelations about the role played by the Vatican in the development of modern anti-Semitism. Working in long-sealed Vatican archives, Kertzer unearths startling evidence to undermine the Church’s argument that it played no direct role in the spread of modern anti-Semitism. In doing so, he challenges the Vatican’s recent official statement on the subject, We Remember. Kertzer tells an unsettling story that has stirred up controversy around the world and sheds a much-needed light on the past.

Author: Justus George Lawler
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 0802866298
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
How many people know that a modern pope publicly referred to Jews as "dogs;" that two other modern popes called the Jewish religion "Satan's synagogue"; that at the beginning of the twentieth century another pope refused to save the life of a Jew accused of ritual murder, even though the pope knew the man was innocent? Lastly, how many people know that only a decade before the rise of Hitler, another pope supported priests who called for the extermination of all the Jews in the world? The answer has to be "great numbers of people" since those accusations appeared in David I. Kertzer's The Popes Against the Jews (2001), a book which had been lauded in major journals and newspapers in the U.S. and the U.K., and which by 2006 had been translated into nine foreign languages, while Kertzer himself according to his Website, had become "America's foremost expert on the modern history of the Vatican's relations with the Jews." It is thus undeniable that very many people in very many countries have heard of the appalling misdeeds and misstatements mentioned above -- even though, in fact, not one of them was ever perpetrated by any pope. But Were the Popes Against the Jews? is not only about the disclosure of these shocking slanders, however fascinating and important such an expos is. In the broader perspective, it is about the power of ideology to subvert historical judgments, whether the latter concern the origins of anti-Semitism and the papacy, the distortion of documents to indict Pius XII, or the fabrication of Pius XI as "codependent collaborator" with Mussolini (the announced subject of Kertzer's next book). Justus George Lawler's confrontation with ideologues will gratify all who are seeking not triumph over opponents, but peace and justice for all.

Author: Gordon Thomas
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250013550
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This revelatory account of how the Vatican saved thousands of Jews during WWII shows why history must exonerate "Hitler's Pope" Accused of being "silent" during the Holocaust, Pope Pius XII and the Vatican of World War II are now exonerated in Gordon Thomas's newest investigative work, The Pope's Jews. Thomas's careful research into new, first-hand accounts reveal an underground network of priests, nuns and citizens that risked their lives daily to protect Roman Jews. Investigating assassination plots, conspiracies, and secret conversions, Thomas unveils faked documentation, quarantines, and more extraordinary actions taken by Catholics and the Vatican. The Pope's Jews finally answers the great moral question of the War: Why did Pope Pius XII refuse to condemn the genocide of Europe's Jews?

Author: David I. Kertzer
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679645535
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 593

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Book Description
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE From National Book Award finalist David I. Kertzer comes the gripping story of Pope Pius XI’s secret relations with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. This groundbreaking work, based on seven years of research in the Vatican and Fascist archives, including reports from Mussolini’s spies inside the highest levels of the Church, will forever change our understanding of the Vatican’s role in the rise of Fascism in Europe. The Pope and Mussolini tells the story of two men who came to power in 1922, and together changed the course of twentieth-century history. In most respects, they could not have been more different. One was scholarly and devout, the other thuggish and profane. Yet Pius XI and “Il Duce” had many things in common. They shared a distrust of democracy and a visceral hatred of Communism. Both were prone to sudden fits of temper and were fiercely protective of the prerogatives of their office. (“We have many interests to protect,” the Pope declared, soon after Mussolini seized control of the government in 1922.) Each relied on the other to consolidate his power and achieve his political goals. In a challenge to the conventional history of this period, in which a heroic Church does battle with the Fascist regime, Kertzer shows how Pius XI played a crucial role in making Mussolini’s dictatorship possible and keeping him in power. In exchange for Vatican support, Mussolini restored many of the privileges the Church had lost and gave in to the pope’s demands that the police enforce Catholic morality. Yet in the last years of his life—as the Italian dictator grew ever closer to Hitler—the pontiff’s faith in this treacherous bargain started to waver. With his health failing, he began to lash out at the Duce and threatened to denounce Mussolini’s anti-Semitic racial laws before it was too late. Horrified by the threat to the Church-Fascist alliance, the Vatican’s inner circle, including the future Pope Pius XII, struggled to restrain the headstrong pope from destroying a partnership that had served both the Church and the dictator for many years. The Pope and Mussolini brims with memorable portraits of the men who helped enable the reign of Fascism in Italy: Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi, Pius’s personal emissary to the dictator, a wily anti-Semite known as Mussolini’s Rasputin; Victor Emmanuel III, the king of Italy, an object of widespread derision who lacked the stature—literally and figuratively—to stand up to the domineering Duce; and Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, whose political skills and ambition made him Mussolini’s most powerful ally inside the Vatican, and positioned him to succeed the pontiff as the controversial Pius XII, whose actions during World War II would be subject for debate for decades to come. With the recent opening of the Vatican archives covering Pius XI’s papacy, the full story of the Pope’s complex relationship with his Fascist partner can finally be told. Vivid, dramatic, with surprises at every turn, The Pope and Mussolini is history writ large and with the lightning hand of truth.

Author: Jerzy Kluger
Publisher: Orbis Books
ISBN: 160833130X
Category : Jews
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
At first blush, a pope and a Holocaust survivor might not seem to have much in common. But this remarkable volume finds common ground in what may appear to be unlikely territory. Karol Lolek Wojtyla, a young Pole, and Jerzy Jurek Kluger, another young Pole, formed a friendship in grade school in the Polish town of Wadowice. Then their paths went separate waysKluger survived the horrors of the Holocaust while Wojtyla would become the future John Paul IIbut despite their differences and the years apart, they remained friends. (Kluger caught up with the then Archbishop Wojtyla in Rome during Vatican II.) Given the friendship, it is perhaps not terribly surprising that John Paul II earned a reputation as a friend of Judaism: the first pope since Saint Peter to visit and pray with Jews in the Great Synagogue of Rome, the first to visit Auschwitz, and the first to make a personal pilgrimage as well as an official state visit to Israel. This often touching memoir should be of interest to Catholics and Jews and, really, anyone interested in a remarkable friendship.

Author: John Cornwell
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101202491
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
The “explosive” (The New York Times) bestseller that “redefined the history of the twentieth century” (The Washington Post ) This shocking book was the first account to tell the whole truth about Pope Pius XII's actions during World War II, and it remains the definitive account of that era. It sparked a firestorm of controversy both inside and outside the Catholic Church. Award-winning journalist John Cornwell has also included in this seminal work of history an introduction that both answers his critics and reaffirms his overall thesis that Pius XII fatally weakened the Catholic Church with his endorsement of Hitler—and sealed the fate of the Jews in Europe.

Author: Rebecca Rist
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198717989
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Rebecca Rist explores the nature and scope of the relationship of the medieval papacy to the Jews of western Europe in the context of the substantial and on-going social, political, and economic changes of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries.

Author: Frank J. Coppa
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813214491
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
This work not only examines Rome's reaction during the fascist period but delves into the broader historical development and the impact of theological anti-Judaism

Author: David I. Kertzer
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307486710
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Soon to be a major motion picture from Steven Spielberg. A National Book Award Finalist The extraordinary story of how the vatican's imprisonment of a six-year-old Jewish boy in 1858 helped to bring about the collapse of the popes' worldly power in Italy. Bologna: nightfall, June 1858. A knock sounds at the door of the Jewish merchant Momolo Mortara. Two officers of the Inquisition bust inside and seize Mortara's six-year-old son, Edgardo. As the boy is wrenched from his father's arms, his mother collapses. The reason for his abduction: the boy had been secretly "baptized" by a family servant. According to papal law, the child is therefore a Catholic who can be taken from his family and delivered to a special monastery where his conversion will be completed. With this terrifying scene, prize-winning historian David I. Kertzer begins the true story of how one boy's kidnapping became a pivotal event in the collapse of the Vatican as a secular power. The book evokes the anguish of a modest merchant's family, the rhythms of daily life in a Jewish ghetto, and also explores, through the revolutionary campaigns of Mazzini and Garibaldi and such personages as Napoleon III, the emergence of Italy as a modern national state. Moving and informative, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara reads as both a historical thriller and an authoritative analysis of how a single human tragedy changed the course of history.

Author: Susan Zuccotti
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300093100
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
What did Pius XII do to aid Jews during World War II? This is an examination of efforts on behalf of Jews in Italy, the country where the pope was in a position to be most helpful. It finds that despite a persistent myth to the contrary, Pius and his assistants at the Vatican did very little.