The Pope’s Jews, by Sam Waagenaar; The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators, 1922-1945, by Anthony Rhodes

The Church & the Jews
The Pope's Jews. 
by Sam Waagenaar. 
Library Press. 487 pp. $9.95.
The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators, 1922-1945. 
by Anthony Rhodes. 
Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 383 pp. $12.50.
One of the more neglected facts concerning Italian Fascism is that 10 per cent of the country's Jews joined the party, attracted by the same strident nationalism that attracted other Italians. In the first decade of his rule, Mussolini did not intend to encourage anti-Semitism, but by 1937, in part out of deference to Hitler's ripening designs in Germany, the Duce and his followers began to develop an anti-Semitic program which impelled Robert Farinacci, the secretary of the Fascist party, to write in his book, The Church and the Jews: “We cannot, in the course of a few weeks, renounce the anti-Semitic conscience that has been formed by the Church through thousands of years.”
As Sam Waagenaar informs us in The Pope's Jews, the history of the Jews of Rome began at the outset of the Empire in the second century B.C.E. when Judah Maccabee sent two messengers to the Senate. Gradually the number of settlers grew until the Jews became such conspicuous citizens that the historian Suetonius mentioned their wailing at the funeral of Julius Caesar and Cicero grumbled that the Jews crowded the courts. But despite their vigorous communal life under the Emperors, the history of Rome's Jews essentially reflects the ruinous succession of Popes who ruled the city for thirteen centuries.
By virtue of being the oldest continuous Jewish community in the Diaspora, the Jewish community in Rome holds the distinction for the longest history of uninterrupted persecution at the hands of its Gentile neighbors. In 1215, at the urging of Innocent III, the Fourth Lateran Council compelled the Jews of Rome to wear a red domino over their clothing. Other Popes encouraged the burning of the Talmud or purposely changed the Roman market day from Wednesday to Saturday. Pius IV instituted the Roman ghetto and required that the Jews pay for the construction of its wall. Until the middle of the 17th century, during the carnival season preceding Lent, a group of Jews was forced to race down the Corso and suffer the jeers and kicks of the crowd.
A Pope, however, could improve the condition of his Jewish subjects if he cared to. Martin V excused them from forced baptism. In 1585, Sixtus even allowed them to live outside their quarter without wearing a distinctive piece of clothing, although shortly after his death another Pope returned the Jews to the ghetto.
While Waagenaar attempts to construct a vivid narrative, his effort is undermined by a shallow approach to history which is only partly suggested by his cliché-riddled style: “Before long Napoleon was out, the Pope was in, the ghetto doors were up, and the Jews were down.” Several times Waagenaar falls into crude historical speculation as, for example, when he wonders if a Pope's Jewish doctor exerted influence in the Vatican or whether Mussolini would have appointed his daughter's Jewish fiancé to a cabinet position had she actually married him. (She didn't.) Conjectures like these abound and make his historical account superficial and repetitive.
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Still, near the end of the book Waagenaar does clarify a significant historical incident which took place during World War II. Three weeks after occupying Rome, the German commander demanded fifty kilograms of gold from the Jewish community, threatening otherwise to “resettle” two hundred Jews. The leaders of the community, believing they could not secure the amount, approached the Vatican for assistance and were guaranteed a maximum loan of fifteen kilograms. Although the Jews finally collected the gold without having to borrow from the Vatican, most scholars, and notably Raul Hilberg, have believed that the Vatican did contribute the fifteen kilograms. By interviewing the people who actually weighed and delivered the gold, Waagenaar shows a vigorous regard for truth—in contrast to Anthony Rhodes who, in The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators, completely misrepresents what happened. Rhodes contends it was fifty-five kilograms of gold and “three hundred hostages” and that the Vatican “immediately” contributed fifteen kilograms. Although he mentions the incident only in a footnote and the misstated figures are, after all, trivial, his version of this affair reflects the inaccurate and apologetic character of his entire book.
Rhodes presents a less than convincing account of the political behavior of Pope Pius XI and his successor Pius XII toward the governments that sprang up in Europe in the decades between the two world wars. Some of these governments were dictatorships but some were not. In France and Czechoslovakia, in Mexico, for a time even in Germany and Spain, the Vatican had to contend with elected governments that opposed the ubiquitous influence of the Church. Naturally, the Vatican wanted to maintain its prerogatives, especially over education and property. But by the third decade of the 20th century the Vatican was still confusing liberal democracy with atheistic Communism and refusing to reconsider its own role in European society.
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Rhodes's chapter on Spain particularly suffers from a kind of negligence that is common to his entire work. He describes the atrocities committed by the anarchists, the murder of thousands of priests, and the gutting of monasteries and convents. As these attacks increased during the Civil War, “the sympathies of the Vatican inevitably inclined toward their opponents.” Rhodes, however, does not explore why such murderous resentment of the Church should have erupted in a country like Spain, with its overwhelmingly Catholic population and culture. When the Vatican newspaper announced in 1937 that “the Church does not belong to any political or social camp . . . that it stands above the conflict,” Rhodes blithely presents the quotation; by the bottom of the same page he is reminding us that the Vatican's sympathies “inevitably inclined” against the Spanish Republic, and neglecting to wonder if the Vatican's statement was duplicitous.
In a later chapter on Anton Pavelitch, the wartime dictator of Croatia, Rhodes again ignores a dilemma his own narrative points out. During the war the Croats, who were Roman Catholics, violently harassed the Orthodox Serbian minority under their control: whoever refused to convert was murdered. Rhodes informs us that 700,000 Serbs were killed while more accepted conversion. Near the end of the chapter he wonders “why the Holy Father did not condemn Pavelitch for such inhumanity” (the dictator was a devout Roman Catholic priest) and naively admits that “the question is certainly pertinent.” But he never answers his own question, although his account makes the conclusion clear. In the process of saving souls, in gaining adherents to the faith, the Church acquiesced in the destruction of lives. As the Pope neglected to condemn the persecution of Christians in a country directly bordering Italy, his indifference to events in far-away Poland assumes for us now n cruel plausibility.
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While Rhodes bases most of his conclusions on diplomatic messages, the curious omission of one essential document suggests a deliberate attempt to conceal what he knows actually occurred. Five weeks after the Germans entered Rome, over a thousand Jews were deported to Auschwitz. Even Bishop Hudal, the rector of the German Church in Rome, protested the round-up, fearing it would provoke the Holy Father “to take an open stand.” The Pope, however, remained silent. Ten days later the German Ambassador to the Holy See sent a letter by courier to Berlin. Rhodes fails to mention this letter but it appears in almost every serious account of the Holocaust and contains the most profound implications. In it the Ambassador, Ernest von Weizsaecker, wrote:
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The Pope, although he is said to be under pressure from various sides, has not allowed himself to be forced into any demonstrative statement against the deportation of the Jews from Rome. . . . He has done all he could in this delicate question to avoid straining relations with the German government. . . . [In an official communiqué] the Pope bestows his fatherly care on all men, irrespective of nationality and race. . . . There is less reason to raise objections to this announcement since the wording . . . will be taken by few people as referring specifically to the Jewish question.
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