Over the past four decades, the attitude of the Catholic Church toward Judaism and the Jews has undergone a sea change. On the theological level, the decisive event was the Second Vatican Council, which in 1965 finally lifted the collective charge of deicide against the Jewish people, reversing the longstanding Augustinian view that the Jews would eternally bear the mark of Cain. But of no less importance has been the current Pope’s personal commitment to reconciliation. Since his election in 1978, John Paul II has repeatedly broken new ground in relations with the Jewish community, becoming the first bishop of Rome to visit a synagogue in the Eternal City, establishing diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the state of Israel, and emphatically denouncing anti-Semitism.

Indeed, no other Pope has had so direct an experience of Jewish life and suffering. As a youth growing up in the small Polish town of Wadowice, Karol Wojtyla (as John Paul II was then named) counted Jews among his closest friends and came to know the rhythms of Jewish observance and family life. He would later witness firsthand the Nazi murder of Poland’s Jews. Speaking of his hometown in 1994, John Paul II remarked that it was “from there that I have this attitude of community, of communal feelings about the Jews.” These recollections inform his repeated reminder to Catholics that Europe’s Jews were exterminated “only for the reason that they were Jews”—a bitter and sorrowful truth that seems to have become part of his most intimate credo.

Against this record of institutional progress and personal sympathy, however, must be set the Church’s less than felicitous handling of a range of issues related to the Holocaust. The death camp at Auschwitz has been a particular source of contentiousness, first with the establishment there of a Carmelite convent in the 1980’s and more recently with the proliferation on its grounds of memorial crosses erected by militant local Catholics. Both episodes have been seen as efforts to reorder historical truth—comparatively few Catholics were killed at the camp—and, perhaps worse, to appropriate the millions of Jewish dead into the sacred drama of Christian martyrdom. Similarly controversial was John Paul II’s canonization of Father Maximillian Kolbe, a Polish Catholic priest who had opposed the Nazis but was also the founder of a viciously anti-Semitic newspaper in prewar Poland. Nor were matters helped by the Pope’s canonization last October of Edith Stein, a German Jewish intellectual who converted to Catholicism and became a nun but was nonetheless consigned by the Nazis as a Jew to Auschwitz, where she perished in the gas chamber.

If these incidents seemed to reveal a lack of sensitivity to Jewish feelings, let alone to the separate integrity of Jewish history, no less disappointing has been the Church’s effort to come to terms with its own actions during the Holocaust. The Vatican’s first authoritative statement on this subject, a fourteen-page document that had been over a decade in the making, was issued a little over a year ago under the title We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah. Clearly to the dismay of Church authorities, however, it was greeted with only lukewarm appreciation by Jewish organizations, which, while hailing the Church’s genuine desire for self-examination and repentance, faulted its unwillingness to confront unpleasant truths.

Although this episode has attracted its share of attention in the general press, We Remember itself has so far received relatively little in the way of sustained analysis. But both the document and the response to it—as well as the ongoing response to the response—offer a good barometer of the Church’s evolving relationship with the Jewish people.

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Making its sympathies clear from the start, We Remember refers to the murder of European Jewry as the Shoah—the Hebrew word meaning “catastrophe.” The event, declares the Vatican statement, was an “unspeakable tragedy,” one that “can never be forgotten.” Moreover, the document continues, although the obligation to recall and understand the Shoah falls upon everyone, it is felt with particular urgency by the Church, not only because of its “very close bonds of spiritual kinship with the Jewish people” but also because of its “remembrance of the injustices of the past.”

With respect to those injustices, We Remember is forthright. The Shoah took place, it acknowledges, “in countries of longstanding Christian civilization,” countries where anti-Jewish sentiment and practices were common. Over the centuries, the Jews of Europe had faced “generalized discrimination,” expulsions, forced conversions, and scapegoating that at times resulted in “violence, looting, even massacres.” Nor was this hostility somehow accidental to Christianity. Behind much of it, the Vatican statement observes, were “erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament” concerning the “alleged culpability” of the Jews for the death of Jesus.

But then, during the 19th century, things changed. The anti-Jewish animus, formerly based in religion, mutated, according to the Vatican statement, into a set of prejudices whose origins were sociological or political, springing from “a false and exacerbated nationalism” and from anxiety about Jewish “influence.” Emerging at roughly the same time, and of particular importance for later developments, were certain “pseudoscientific” ideas about superior and inferior peoples, ideas that “denied the unity of the human race.”

What Nazism added to this virulent mix, We Remember continues, was a totalitarian ideology that assigned an “absolute status” to the German state and people. Refusing “to acknowledge any transcendent reality as the . . . criterion of moral good,” the Nazis saw fit not only to attempt to destroy the Jews—witnesses “to the one God and the Law of the Covenant”—but also to reject Christianity and the Church. The Shoah, in short, “was the work of a thoroughly modern neopagan regime” whose racist anti-Semitism must be sharply distinguished from the anti-Judaism “of which, unfortunately, Christians also have been guilty.”

Indeed, in order to emphasize the saliency during the Shoah itself of the Church’s “constant teaching” concerning the “equal dignity of all races and peoples,” We Remember cites several Church leaders for their acts of resistance and rescue. Three German churchmen are singled out for their opposition to National Socialism, as are Pius XI and Pius XII, the two Popes who held office during the Nazi era. Pius XII in particular is praised for what he did “personally or through his representatives to save hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives.”

At the same time, We Remember also concedes that many members of the Church in Nazi-occupied Europe did not do everything in their power to help the persecuted Jews. “The spiritual resistance and concrete action of other Christians,” it laments, “was not that which might have been expected from Christ’s followers.” Appalled though these ordinary Catholics may have been by the assault on their Jewish neighbors, they “were not strong enough to raise their voices in protest.” For the “errors and failures” of its “sons and daughters,” the Church proclaims its deep regret, describing its present statement, in another echo of Hebrew sources, as an act of teshuvah—repentance.

Finally, looking to the future of Jewish-Christian relations, We Remember concludes by urging Catholics to attend both to the “Hebrew roots of their faith” and to the “salutary warning” of the Shoah: that “the spoiled seeds of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism must never again be allowed to take root in any human heart.”

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Whatever one’s final judgment of this mea culpa, one cannot but commend both its tone and its basic aims. Throughout, the long history of Christian persecution of the Jews is discussed with candor and in a spirit of contrition. As for the Shoah itself, it is evoked in terms that leave no doubt as to the Church’s recognition of its horror, as well as its repudiation of any effort to deny or trivialize the event. (In the United States, Patrick J. Buchanan may be the best-known Catholic guilty of this relativizing tendency.) Nor is there any mistaking the sincerity of John Paul II when in a letter accompanying We Remember he declares his hope that the statement will help to avert any future recurrence of “the unspeakable iniquity of the Shoah.”

But there is a good deal more to be said about the moral and historical worth of We Remember—and much of it, unfortunately, is not especially flattering to the Church’s declared aspirations.

To begin at the most general level, it is impossible to accept the Vatican’s effort to distinguish as sharply as this document does between Christian anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism. While it is true that the factors cited in We Remember—from nationalism to race “science” to inflated ideas of Jewish influence—did play an important role in the emergence of anti-Semitic ideologies in the 19th century, these ideologies presupposed a cultural framework that had been fashioned by centuries of medieval Christian theology, ecclesiastical policy, and popular religious myth.

A partial list of the relevant precedents—none of which makes an appearance in We Remember—would include the demonization of the Jews by the early Church fathers; the vast library of medieval polemical literature known as “against the Jews” (adversus judaeos); and the endlessly promulgated images of the Jew as Satan, anti-Christ, Judas, or Ahasuerus, the “Wandering Jew” condemned to eternal exile for his deadly sins. A number of the Holy See’s legislative actions against the Jews have also echoed fatefully down the ages. One thinks in particular of the order issued by Pope Innocent III and the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) requiring Jews to wear distinctive garb and yellow badges, and of the decision by a succession of 16th-century Popes to confine the Jews of Rome and the papal states to ghettos.

There is, of course, some validity to We Remember’s claim that Nazism, by virtue of its “neopaganism,” stood outside the Christian tradition. Hitler was contemptuous of the “effeminate pity-ethics” of Judeo-Christianity, which he saw as completely antithetical to the Nazi movement’s “heroic belief in God in nature, God in our people, in our destiny, in our blood.” Surveying the Third Reich, one easily finds evidence of this primitivistic cult of vitality and struggle: in Nazi art and architecture, in the ideology of the Hitler Youth, in the determination of Heinrich Himmler to cultivate a perfect warrior-race of blonde, blue-eyed Germanic heroes, and in the work of völkisch sectarians like Alfred Rosenberg, who dreamed of a new Germanic religion.

Pagans though they may have been, however, the Nazis did not hesitate to draw upon Christian rhetoric and symbolism to bolster their new political religion—and nowhere more so than in their war against the Jews. Christian motifs abound in a typical anti-Semitic rag like Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer. One finds there the crucifixion (“Golgotha has not yet been revenged”), the image of the eternally cursed people, the usurious Jew squeezing the poor peasant dry, the Jew as the “devil in human disguise” and as the ritual murderer of Christian children. Nazism radicalized these popular stereotypes drawn from the Christian Middle Ages, but it did not invent them.¹

The Vatican document is by no means mistaken to argue that the ideology of the Third Reich was profoundly anti-Christian; nor is it wrong to draw a distinction between Christian and Nazi anti-Semitism. But the difference is hardly absolute. It is, rather, as Milton Himmelfarb once observed, like that between an uncomfortable fever and a lethal one—they are two variants of the same sickness.

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Still more troubling is We Remember’s account of the Church’s own behavior during the Shoah. By the document’s lights, the Catholic hierarchy, from the Holy See on down, answered the Nazi war against the Jews with principled and consistent opposition.

There were in fact a number of brave churchmen who set radiant personal examples amid the general darkness. One can point to Archbishop Saliège of Toulouse, Cardinal Gerlier of Lyon, and Bishop Pierre-Marie Théas of Montauban, whose statements against the deportation of France’s Jews helped to turn public opinion against the collaborationist policies of the Vichy regime. There were, in addition, Angelo Rotta, the indefatigable papal nuncio in Budapest, who ceaselessly prodded the Primate of Hungary to intervene on behalf of his country’s Jewry, and Archbishop Sheptytskyi of Lviv in the Ukraine, who courageously denounced Germans and Ukrainians alike for massacring the city’s Jews. Still another Catholic hero was Bern-hard Lichtenberg, the provost of Berlin Cathedral, who died on his way to Dachau after having offered public prayers on behalf of the Jews.

Of these exemplars, however, only Lichtenberg is cited by name in We Remember, and he is mentioned in the company of two leaders of the German Catholic hierarchy whose actions during the Shoah were at once more problematic and more typical.

The first of these, Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich, is commended in the Vatican document for a series of sermons given during the winter of 1933 that “clearly expressed rejection of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda.” These speeches, delivered before overflow crowds in St. Michael’s Church, did indeed defend the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish origins of Christianity against völkisch racists. Yet, for all the courage this must have taken just months after Hitler was named Reich Chancellor, Faulhaber also made it clear in his pronouncements that God’s covenant with the Jews had been revoked after the appearance of Jesus. Furthermore, he insisted that the indispensability to Christianity of the Hebrew Bible had no bearing on “antagonism to the Jews of today,” which he did not oppose. In 1934 he would indignantly deny suggestions made abroad that his sermons constituted a defense of German Jews or a criticism of Nazi policy.

The second churchman cited by We Remember was Cardinal Bertram of Breslau, the ranking prelate in German Catholicism throughout the period of the Third Reich. As the document states, he condemned National Socialism in print in 1931. But after Hitler rose to power, his objections became increasingly timid and inaudible. Never did Cardinal Bertram speak out from the pulpit against the anti-Jewish policies of the regime. To the contrary, in 1939 he sent a congratulatory telegram on the occasion of the Führer’s 50th birthday, a greeting he repeated the following year. Even more astonishing, in May 1945 he celebrated a solemn requiem mass for Hitler shortly after the Nazi leader’s suicide.

The elevation of these two men is accompanied in We Remember by utter silence about the German Church’s acquiescence and, at times, complicity in the Shoah. As the examples of Cardinals Faulhaber and Bertram suggest, the hierarchy’s warnings about Nazi ideology, such as they were, faded rapidly once the Nazis were in authority. Unlike their counterparts in France, Belgium, Italy, and Holland, leaders of the German Catholic Church, rather than attempting to guide their flock, tamely chose to follow it. They accepted the Nuremberg race laws, which—in defiance of Catholic doctrine—forbade intermarriage with baptized Jews, and they offered virtually no protest in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. Worse still, the Catholic Church in Germany collaborated with the Nazis by helping to establish who in the Third Reich was of Jewish descent—an act that had fatal consequences for many.

What explains this shameful record? Above all, no doubt, the belief among German Catholic churchmen that cooperation with Hitler would lead him to honor his Concordat with the Vatican, guaranteeing the Church’s rights, and that the Nazis were committed ultimately to upholding Christian morality, especially against Bolshevik atheism. No less self-serving, if slightly more defensible, was the view within the German Church that the Nazis could be swayed more effectively through private appeals and protests than through public dissent.

In all of this, however, Catholic leaders in the Third Reich, like their Protestant counterparts, were at best disastrously naive. They were slow to grasp not only the basic totalitarian dynamic of National Socialism but also its more specific hostility to Christianity. They failed to see what became increasingly clear with each passing year of Nazi rule: that only determined public opposition and popular unrest stood a chance of diverting the regime from its monstrous aims. And at worst, as in the case of Cardinal Bertram, they lent their moral authority to the Nazi regime and thereby became complicit to a degree in its crimes.

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And what of the Vatican itself? Did its actions during the Shoah redeem those of its German brethren? It is this question that has generated the most heated controversy over We Remember.

Pope Pius XI, whose death in 1939 preceded the implementation of the Final Solution, has largely been spared in the debate. While it is true that in 1933 he praised Hitler and spoke of their common struggle against Russian Communism, the Vatican document, not unreasonably, praises his 1937 encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge (“With Deep Anxiety”), a sharp condemnation of Nazi racism and, as it would turn out, the only serious public criticism of National Socialism that the Vatican ever ventured. Noteworthy too—and cited in We Remember—was Pius XI’s remark to Belgian pilgrims in 1938 that “anti-Semitism is unacceptable. Spiritually, we are all Semites.”

But what is shocking is the document’s presentation of Pius XI’s successor, Pius XII, as an active opponent of Nazi anti-Semitism. In this, it seems to be self-consciously trying to refute a longstanding public impression that can be traced back to the early 1960’s, when the wartime Pope appeared as the central character in a polemical, semi-documentary play by Rolf Hochhuth titled The Deputy; this stage work, a huge sensation at the time, depicted Pius XII as a man of almost criminal weakness and indifference in the face of Hitler’s war against the Jews.

Subsequent historical works—by Guenther Lewy, Saul Friedländer, Friedrich Heer, Carlo Falcone, John Morley, and others—have elaborated on this profile, describing a Vicar of Christ who followed the dictates not of conscience but of realpolitik, who preferred Nazism to Bolshevism, who was ready to accommodate any regime so long as it respected Church property, who did not regard the war Hitler unleashed in Europe as unjust, and who did not think it advisable to declare the truth about the slaughter of European Jewry. From these books there has emerged a picture of the Vatican serenely going about its business while the moral and spiritual collapse of Europe proceeded apace.

That these criticisms rankle deeply was made abundantly clear in the aftermath of last year’s release of We Remember, when they were again aired in rebuttal to the document’s claims for Pius XII. In his syndicated column, Patrick J. Buchanan denounced all such critiques of the Pope as motivated by anti-Catholicism and moral blackmail; like the Vatican document itself, he cited grateful tributes paid by Jewish leaders themselves immediately after the war for the Pope’s efforts to rescue their co-religionists. Writing in Newsweek, Kenneth Woodward branded as “monstrous calumnies” the charges that Pius XII had been pro-German, silent during the Shoah, or of little help to the Jews. Even the Vatican entered the fray. In a generally conciliatory appearance two months after the publication of We Remember, Edward Cassidy, the Cardinal responsible for the document, nevertheless protested that the memory of the wartime Pope had been “unjustly denigrated.”

As it happens, some aspects of the more critical picture of Pius XII do need to be modified. It would certainly be wrong to present him as approving of Nazism or racist anti-Semitism. As secretary of state to Pius XI during the early years of the Third Reich, the future Pope was known to have contributed to formulating Mit Brennender Sorge and to share its anti-Nazi views. When Pius XII took office in 1939, moreover, the Germans assumed he was of one mind with his predecessor—a fact quickly confirmed by his first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, which, as We Remember notes, warned against “the deification of the state” and theories denying “the unity of the human race.”

During the Shoah itself, in those Catholic countries where Pius XII had some leverage, he tried to intervene at times to halt the deportation and mass killing of Jews by Nazi puppet governments. In Slovakia, he ordered bishops to intercede with President Jozef Tiso and other high officials. In fascist Croatia, the papal representative, along with the Croatian Archbishop Stepinac, worked behind the scenes to deter the savage Ustashe regime of Ante Pavelic from committing further murders. To Admiral Nicholas Horthy, the regent of Hungary, Pius XII sent an open letter asking that he do everything in his power to “save as many unfortunate people as possible from further pain and sorrow.” In addition, when the Nazis occupied Rome in October 1943 and began deporting the city’s Jews to Auschwitz, the Pope quietly opened buildings within Vatican City to offer refuge to those who managed to escape the manhunt.

What cannot be sustained, however, is the unconvincing and inflated claim in We Remember that Pius XII and his representatives saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives. In no instance did the Pope’s intervention result in much more than a temporary respite in the killing. On even the most favorable reading of the historical record, his actions over the course of the Shoah were prudent to a fault. We may never know exactly how many Jewish lives he was responsible for saving, but the number is almost certainly far smaller than that implied by the Vatican.

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At issue here is not some threshold figure by which to judge whether the papacy met its moral obligations. Rather, the question is whether Pius XII did in fact do everything he might have done to resist a genocidal campaign whose full dimensions, according to Vatican documents, were known to him no later than the middle of 1942. The answer, clearly, is that he did not.

The most obvious failing of Pius XII’s policy was the extreme discretion with which it was communicated. Though dealing with brutal fascist regimes, the Holy See showed itself time and again to be more concerned with upholding the rules of diplomatic etiquette than with expressing its strong disapproval.

Perhaps the most revealing instance was Pius XII’s one public reference to the Shoah, a statement that, although unmentioned in We Remember, has often been cited by the Pope’s apologists to demonstrate that he was not “silent.” Of what does it consist? A single sentence in his Christmas message of 1942 deploring the fact that “hundreds of thousands of people, through no fault of their own and solely because of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction.” With all due allowance for the compressed, abstract style of papal pronouncements, this is a protest that lasted for the duration of a breath and that mentioned neither Jews, nor Nazis, nor any Nazi ally.

Still more disturbing are the various instances in which the Vatican undermined its own appeals on behalf of the Jews by showing deference to their persecutors. Though the Pope met on several occasions with the leaders of Croatia’s Ustashe regime—a regime viewed by the Church as a defender of Catholicism and the West against both Communist and Orthodox Christian heresy—there is no evidence that he ever voiced disapproval of its atrocities against Croatian Jewry (or, for that matter, against hundreds of thousands of the country’s Orthodox Christian Serbs). And in Rome, as the Nazis undertook their Aktion against the oldest Jewish community in Europe, not only were no words of anger heard from the Holy See, but Cardinal Maglione, Pius XII’s secretary of state, assured the German ambassador that the Vatican did not want “to give to the German people the impression that it has done or wished to do the least thing against Germany during this terrible war.”

There was a notable exception to this policy of quiescence and nonresistance. Unfortunately, it, too, suggests that, in confronting the Shoah, Pius XII’s chief concern was less with the ongoing annihilation of the Jews than with the interests of the Church. The exception was this: the Pope demanded that the Nazis and their puppet regimes recognize baptized Jews as Catholics, and he instructed papal nuncios to intervene accordingly against discriminatory laws and orders of deportation. As it happens, these protests had a very limited effect; but it is no accident that of the born Jews whom Pius XII did manage to save, most had severed their ties to the very Jewish communities that were then in the process of being exterminated.

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Defenders of Pius XII usually concede that his response to the Shoah was extremely restrained. But they insist there was good reason for this: public denunciations of atrocities against the Jews would have served no purpose, and may well have worsened their condition (difficult though it may be to imagine a worse plight). A case in point would be the public protest of Catholic bishops in Holland, who, following instructions from the Vatican, condemned the deportation of Dutch Jews to death camps in the East. In retaliation, the Nazis added the country’s baptized Jews (including Edith Stein), a group they had previously left untouched, to the deportation lists. This experience is said to have dissuaded Pius XII from further confrontations.

Whether this was really so must remain an unresolved question, at least until the Vatican archives are opened to independent investigation. But less charitable motives cannot be ruled out. There seems little doubt that, as late as 1943, Pius XII hoped for a German victory against the Russians, his assumption being that Roman Catholicism would have a place in the “New Order” of the Nazis but stood no chance of one under Soviet Communism. When one adds to this the Pope’s passionate love of German culture and Germany—he had been papal nuncio there during the Weimar era—his reluctance to speak out for the Jews becomes more comprehensible, though hardly more edifying.

Considering the obvious ambiguity of Pius XII’s record during the Shoah, it is curious that the Vatican and a substantial part of Catholic opinion should feel the need to defend him at all costs. After all, no one is blaming the wartime Pope or the Catholic Church for the destruction of European Jewry, or even suggesting that Pius XII could have done much to stop the slaughter. Nor can one reasonably object to his quiet diplomacy where it did actually save the lives of Jews and other victims of the Nazis. But what is undeniable is the paucity of moral courage displayed by the Vatican when it came to the fate of the Jews.

Would it have made a difference if Pius XII had taken a firm stand? Any answer is necessarily speculative, and must be tempered by an awareness of the limits on the Vatican’s influence. Yet Catholics constituted over 40 percent of the population of the Greater German Reich, and an overwhelming majority of citizens in France, Belgium, Italy, Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Croatia. What would have been the effect had Pius XII issued an unequivocal public denunciation of the Nazi war against the Jews, or instructed Catholics not to carry out “criminal orders,” or excommunicated the devoutly Catholic leaders of fascist Slovakia and Croatia or even Hitler himself? Perhaps very little. If nothing else, however, such actions would certainly have curbed some of the craven behavior of the German bishops. More, they would have encouraged, and endowed with the highest religious sanction, the efforts of those Catholics in occupied countries like France, Belgium, and Holland who did oppose or even resist the deportation of the Jews, or those in Poland and Italy who sought to hide Jews regardless of the danger of German reprisals.

Indeed, the inaction of the Church hierarchy highlights, by stark contrast, the physical and moral heroism of those ordinary Catholics (and Protestants) who hid, rescued, or saved Jews at great personal risk. The present Pope has paid tribute on a number of occasions to such people, who deserve to be remembered and honored for all time. It is therefore all the more bizarre that We Remember, a self-described declaration of repentance, should insist that the Church as an institution was blameless during the Shoah while ordinary Christians committed sins of omission or worse. Are rank-and-file Catholics to be held to a more stringent standard than those who set the policy of the Church? Do the “errors and failures” belong only to the flock and not to the shepherd? It is disheartening to think that so benighted a view should be the Church’s final word on the subject.

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As many parts of We Remember amply demonstrate, Catholic-Jewish relations have changed dramatically for the better over the last several generations. The traditional anti-Judaism of the Catholic Church—one of the background factors that made the Shoah possible—has been greatly eroded. To put the matter positively, Jews are no longer regarded as enemies to be subjugated or denigrated but rather as respected representatives of an authentic, living religion with whom discussion and cooperation are a vital Catholic interest.

As for the views of the present Pope, it must remain a matter of conjecture how far they are fully and adequately reflected in the Vatican document, or to what extent they may have been diluted by the internal politics of the vast institution that he heads. Whatever the case, it is well worth registering at the end of this bloodstained century just how much John Paul II has already accomplished in the Church’s relations with the Jewish people. One might even argue that in the last twenty years this son of Poland, a country with its own unmastered past with regard to the Jews, has done more to advance understanding between the two communities than did all his predecessors in the course of almost two millennia.

But that is precisely why the imperfections of We Remember—especially as compared with the more candid statements on the Shoah issued in recent years by the bishops of Germany and France—are a matter of great concern. After centuries of prejudice and hostility, culminating in the murder of European Jewry, the prospect has tantalizingly appeared of a day when anti-Semitism will no longer hold a place in Christian hearts. The arrival of that day depends not only on repentance and a generalized will to change but, ultimately, on an honest reckoning with the past.

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¹ For more on this point, see Jacob Katz, “Accounting for Anti-Semitism,” COMMENTARY, June 1991.

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