The Church and anti-Semitism in Italy
SENIGALLIA, SILVIO F.
ROME'S RABBI SPEAKS OUT The Church and anti-Semitism in Italy By Silvio F. Senigallia Rome Anti-Semttism is once again a front-page issue in Italy. Following the April firebombing of a...
...It included the following items: • A republication of the infamous forgery "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" by the monthly Chiesa Nuova (New Church), alongside an article critical of Israel's occupation policy that declared: "While it is obvious that we are not anti-Semitic, we do say that the Jews deploy unquestionable intellectual assets in serving evil...
...Moreover, Mussolini's orphans, as the Right's nostalgic lunatic fringe is sometimes referred to, are few, toothless and discredited...
...Moreover, the attacks cannot have escaped the notice of the Vatican, and therefore may fairly be seen as having its tacit consent...
...Rabbi Toaff's file also contained accounts of unprovoked expressions of animosity toward Jews...
...Some have asserted that because the Jews of the diaspora identify completely with Israel, they cry antiSemitism whenever the Jewish State is censured by international opinion...
...The upsurge in anti-Semitism here is especially painful to those who recall how during the years 1938-45 the Italian people gave virtually no support to the Fascist Black Shirts and the Gestapo...
...Rome's Leftist daily, Paese Sera, termed the CEI statement Pilate-like...
...This is true even though its slant has over the past few years become markedly pro-Arab and anti-Israel...
...An editorial entitled "The Lobby of the Synagogue" in the popular weekly IlSabato—published by Comunione e Liberazione, a powerful political-religious movement connected with the Christian Democrats—that decried an international Jewish plot" maneuvered by American millionaires, Israeli hawks and Soviet opportunists.' • Clippings from Famiglia Cristiana (Christian Family), Italy's largest circulation weekly, annotated by readers with remarks such as "We must send the Jews back to the gas ovens...
...Second, there is the extreme Right's suspiciousness of Jews for their supposed international ties and Socialist inclinations...
...In the days following Rabbi Toaff's interview, two developments indicated that Italian politicians are following suit: Parliament gave virtually unanimous de facto recognition to the Palestine Liberation Organization...
...Two weeks after Rabbi Toaff's disclosures, as the debate on anti-Semitism was reaching its highest pitch, the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) issued a statement of "profound concern" over the situation...
...In any case, the bishops failed to mention, let alone address, the charges raised by Rabbi Toaff...
...Following the April firebombing of a Jewish bookstore and other acts and threats of violence against Italian Jews, Rome's Chief Rabbi Elio Toaff gave an interview to the Israeli daily Yediot Achronoton May 9 in whichhe denounced several Catholic journals and magazines for fanning hostility toward Jews...
...In late 19th-century France the Dreyfus affair explosively illustrated this set of prejudices...
...First, there is the notion once harbored within the Catholic Church that Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Christ...
...The week after his interview appeared Rabbi Toaff furnished Italian and foreign journalists with a voluminous file of materials documenting his complaint...
...The Movimento Sociale Italiano, a party that is neo-Fascist only in the sense that its leaders have refused to condemn Mussolini's dictatorship, is comparatively clean on the Jewish issue...
...It is therefore not surprising that Rabbi Toaff imputes the recent hostile actions against Italian Jews to a combination of religious and political factors originating within the Catholic Church...
...Rabbi Toaff's lamentation has mostly fallen on deaf ears...
...Catholic media, he submits, aim to exploit "the old substratum of anti-Semitism" in order to "demonize Israel, Zionism and Judaism...
...Although the controversy has since cooled down somewhat, the Rabbi's accusations have yet to be adequately answered...
...Indeed, it has been consistently and strongly pro-Israel (unwelcome company though it may be), most probably in reaction to Moscow's anti-Zionism...
...Normally modest and soft-spoken, the Rabbi is quite blunt on this painful subject...
...But if Italy is relatively resistant to this virus, it is not altogether immune...
...The Catholic publications he implicated and other influential Church sources have simply insisted that antiSemitism had nothing to do with their condemnation of Israel's policies in Palestine...
...Among these were the spiteful snatching of a small chain bearing a Star of David from the neck of a schoolboy, and a doctor's question to an elderly Jewish hospital patient with an Auschwitz number tattooed on his arm: "How many Palestinians did you kill today in your extermination camps...
...Third, there is the Left's view of Jews as heartless capitalists, greedy merchants, usurers, pitiless landlords, and so on...
...On the Left, the Communists are, to be sure, staunch Arab partisans...
...Yet they are unlikely to be interested in fostering anti-Semitic activity at the very moment the Soviets under Mikhail S. Gorbachev are toning down their antagonism toward Israel, as evidenced by the June 9 meeting at the UN between Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze and Israel's Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir...
...It is difficult to see how Italy's current episode of anti-Semitism can be laid to either the hard Right or the hard Left...
...Silvio F. Senigalua reports regularly for The New Leader on Italian affairs...
...Thus their words have done little to dispel the feeling that a Catholic anti-Semitism continues to exist and is at least tolerated by the Church hierarchy...
...The bishops emphasized the difference between "our love for our Jewish brethren" and adverse judgments about how the Israelis were treating the Palestinians...
...With respect to the former, Italy has no military caste or landed aristocracy like Dreyfus' France...
...Granted, the articles cited by Rabbi Toaff were probably not inspired by the Pope himself...
...On the one hand the bishops maintained that anti-Semitism was a marginal phenomenon in Italian society, while on the other they cautioned that the recent enmity directed at Jews and Jewish institutions may cause painful civil wounds...
...At the risk of oversimplifying, one can trace outbreaks of anti-Semitism here over the years to three main sources...
...and Italian Socialist Party leader Bettino Craxi, at the Madrid meeting of the Socialist International, declared that "Israel's policy in the occupied territories violates international law and human rights...
...In the last 30 years or so Left-wing antiSemitism has been compounded by anti-Zionism, a development that reflects the foreign policy guidelines of the Soviet Union...
...He added that while the Vatican itself refrains from directly condemning Israel, it effectively abets the editorial policy of the offending periodicals...
...A commentary in Catholic Action's weekly Segno Sette characterizing "what Israel is inflicting upon the Palestinian people" as "genocide...
...At a time when the repression in Palestine makes Israel particularly vulnerable," he has remarked, "the voice of the Church is...
...Italy's secular press, in contrast to its religious counterpart, has managed to keep its coverage of the Palestinian uprising unsullied by anti-Semitic appeals, open or veiled...
...raised to proclaim that the victims of the Holocaust were not so innocent after all in view of what the survivors are accused of doing...
...Toaff charged that the Catholic publications in question had featured "poisonous articles" about the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that made no distinction between Israelis and Jews, and that likened Israeli treatment of the Palestinians to the Holocaust...
...Yet despite all the protests to the contrary, the Catholic media's vilification of Israel has so exceeded the limits of purely political criticism that it can only be construed as reflecting some animus against the Jewish people and not merely the policies of the Shamir government...
...The statement in the official Jesuit biweekly La Civilta Cattolica that "faced by Israel's methods [in suppressing the uprising], our thoughts cannot help going back to more horrendous crimes, the very crimes perpetrated on the Jewish people in the direst days of their persecution when they seemed destined to disappear, destined to the Final Solution...
...No antiSemitic campaign by the Catholic press has been orchestrated or authorized by the Holy See," said a document issued by the Catholic Workers' Union...
...The suggestion of Vatican involvement has also been rebuffed...
...Though Toaff does not regret having met and embraced the Pope in 1986—an event regarded by the Italian press at that time as a momentous step toward reconciliation between Jews and the Vatican—he does not spare John Paul II from criticism: The Pontiff knows what is going on, Toaff says, but keeps silent...
...Perfidious Jews" they were called in the Easter liturgy, until those words were deleted two decades ago by the Second Vatican Council...
...They claim their articles and editorials were similar to those carried by the American press, and were in no way vituperative...
Vol. 71 • June 1988 • No. 11
