A Provocative Polemic

...Yet it is a quantum and ahistorical leap from an aggressive and hostile worldview to an act of genocide...

...The Nazis, by contrast, had no interest in preserving the lives or saving the souls of Jews, including those who fought for the fatherland in World War 1. Racial antiSemitism sought the solution to the "Jewish problem" by their removal from society, culminating in their physical destruction when wartime conditions allowed an unprecedented mass-scale extermination...

...author, "Making Sense of War" Addressing a crowd of followers in Munich on December 18, 1926, Adolf Hitler declared that "Christmas is significant for National-Socialists, because Christ was the greatest precursor in the struggle against the Jewish world enemy...

...in 1943 they halted the deportation of Berlin's remaining Jews following demonstrations by Aryan spouses against the expulsion of their Jewish mates...

...Adding insult to injury, the Vatican also maintained a long postwar silence, occasionally broken by the manipulative publication of selective documents concerning its wartime conduct that carefully danced around the darker aspects of its posture...

...The task that Christ started, [I] will fulfill...

...The Catholic Church has a great deal to account for, and it has been moving on this front very slowly...

...It is a tirade that seems designed to perpetuate enmities and bring out the worst in some of its critics-which in turn will be held up as confirmation of the author's views...

...Most recently, Pope John Paul II's We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, while recognized as an important step toward the improvement of Jewish-Catholic relations, was equally condemned as timid and logically challenged...

...But what is good for a sales-oriented publisher and personally gratifying for an author is not necessarily constructive when it comes to tackling the sensitive and painful theme that this book addresses...

...Despite the repeated assertion that he does distinguish between different members of the Church and their reactions to the Nazi genocide, Goldhagen's underlying premise is that the Church is a monolith...

...Similarly, one cannot in good faith advocate that the Church purge the New Testament of all negative references to the Jews and abandon its proselytizing mission...

...Continuing the pattern he developed in Hiller's Willing Executioners (1996), Goldhagen spreads a very wide net: By now it is not only German eliminationist anti-Semitism that begot Auschwitz, but the larger Catholic Church as well that paved the way to the genocide...

...Goldhagen rightly points out that religious leaders in Nazi-occupied Europe who protested the persecution of the Jews were not harmed by the Germans...

...Before Goldhagen takes on other denominations and nations, he may want to pause and reflect on the distinctive pseudoscientific pretenses of racial antiSemitism, and its contention that the characteristics of the Jews were irreversible...

...But h is main example-the courageous rescue of Denmark's Jewish community-took place in a unique environment that is hardly applicable to the rest of wartime Europe...

...For millennia the teaching of Christ was fundamental in the fight against the Jew as the enemy of humanity...

...The centuries of hostility were instead enhanced by associating the Jews with the rising Bolshevik menace...

...Finally, the beatification of Pius IX, an avowed anti-Jewish Pope, and initial moves to do the same with none other than Pius XII have been perceived as insensitive affronts to Jews, casting doubt on the sincerity of the Holy See's intentions...

...The thousands of young Ukrainian nationalists to whom he addressed his call were busy cleansing Jews and other "foreign elements" from Ukrainian soil in the name of a racial-biological and often anticlerical ideology that meant more to them, and to millions of other young Europeans at the time, than the Church's teachings...

...Jews were condemned to a humiliating existence as living symbols of the people who rejected God's son and his teachings...

...Anyone who genuinely desires reconciliation, though, has to recognize that a key to the Catholic Church's amazing endurance has been its resistance to sharp turns, particularly those that might give the impression of bowing before external pressure...

...Regrettably, A Moral Reckoning seeks only indictment, confession and repentance...

...During the War, Sheptytsikyi sheltered hundreds of Jews, issued a call to Ukrainians to refrain from shedding Jewish blood, and even protested to Heinrich Himmler about the persecution of the Jews...

...If the Church bore eliminationist tendencies, it reserved them for the true heretics like the small Albigensian and Cathar Christian sects...

...The leap could not have taken place without multiple causes and agencies, essentially the crushing of the old order and the rise of a movement intent on executing its ideology of extermination...

...Indeed, the close relationship between traditional religious anti-Judaism and modern racial antiSemitism formed the core of Saul Friedlander's authoritative Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939, Volume I (1997...

...The Church provided the Nazis with the identity and images of their prime enemy...

...But other recommendations, such as decentralizing the Church and discarding the doctrine of papal infallibility, have little if anything to do with antiSemitism and amount to advocating the Protestantization of the Catholic Church...

...Goldhagen's overall remedy for Catholic anti-Semitism, like his historical treatise, is partially laudable and partially ludicrous...

...Admittedly the road to reconciliation is paved with centuries-old distrust, frustration and self-righteousness...

...For instance, Hans Mommsen and Hans-Ulrich Wehler are here scandalously described as "the Nazi historians' faithful and most prominent students" and charged with "unprincipled writings...

...ALL THIS IS a familiar and largely indisputable story...

...Daniel Goldhagen may not be familiar with this particular diatribe, but his new book, A Moral Reckoning, leaves little doubt that for him the Nazi assault on the Jews was the logical outcome of millennia of venomous Christian antiSemitism...

...But as Goldhagen himself concedes toward the end of his book, people's actions often do not adhere to the spirit and context of the very texts they cherish...

...Although it is doubtful that anything other than total military defeat would have stopped the Nazis, it is equally true that they did pay attention to their public image and to popular sensibilities, especially in Germany and Western Europe...

...But Goldhagen has nevertheless managed to make A Moral Reckoning very disagreeable...

...In the current political and intellectual environment it will undoubtedly receive enormous publicity...

...That brings me to the most troubling aspect of A Moral Reckoning...

...Thus the Church chose to protest the euthanasia of the mentally retarded and to battle atheistic Communism, which it perceived as more menacing to its institutional existence than the Nazi genocide of the Jews, who, no one denied, were the children of God too...

...This sorry state of affairs has not been helped by the Church's present footdragging in granting historians full access to the Vatican wartime archives, fueling the already existing suspicion that it has a great deal to hide...

...While many will contest Hitler's peculiar view of Christ, few will disagree with Goldhagen that throughout the centuries leading to the Holocaust the Catholic Church produced an impressive systemic arsenal of acidic anti-Jewish rhetoric and images, complemented by an array of humiliating and violent practices...

...and Christopher Browning is derided for "faulty [and confused] conclusions...

...That cannot excuse his shallow historical analysis, however, or his hurling insults and innuendoes at critics of his previous controversial work...

...There is another major problem with Goldhagen's approach: It is a cruel-and by this point, one suspects, not unintended-irony that a book claiming to focus on the worst criminal event in human history ultimately blurs the role of the actual perpetrators and the deep hostility they harbored for the Church...

...The Nazis borrowed from the old arsenal of prejudices, but were unparalleled qualitatively in terms of goals and means, and the will to carry them out...

...Often they delayed or curtailed more visible acts of violence...

...True, history has shown again and again the power of texts, especially those perceived as sacred covenants, to inspire horrific acts...

...Reviewed by Amir Weiner Associate professor of history, Stanford...

...What the Danish Lutheran Church and Crown did could only be done in a country left to run its own affairs with almost no interference...

...Jews would not respond well either if the Church demanded that they remove from the Passover Haggadah the plea to God to "pour His wrath on the Gentiles...

...Demonized as the Devil's sons, conspiratorial, bloodthirsty, money grabbing, dishonest, and cruel, Jews were forced to live as second-class citizens at best, or as social and political pariahs subject to periodic deportations and pogroms...

...Few would object to urging an unmitigated rejection of antiSemitism and a candid discussion of the past...

...Faced with criticism, some Vatican representatives countered with anti-Jewish slurs that went uncensored by the Holy See...

...Without disavowing their core beliefs or sacred texts, Jews and Christians have embarked on a historic dialogue since the Holocaust...

...You will not learn in his pages about, say, Metropolitan Sheptytsikyi, head of the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church in Eastern Galicia...

...He styles it a moral treatise, and it should be taken as such...

...With the genocide under way the Vatican's silence grew deafening, leaving one to wonder how many lives would have been saved had it protested publicly and supported the individual rescue operations by bishops, priests and monasteries...

...The occupation authorities turned a blind eye to the rescue operation, which they could easily have squashed at any moment if they chose to...

...Christ was not the apostle of peace that the Church afterward made of him, but rather the greatest fighting personality that ever lived...

...The harsh reality was that in these matters the authority of the revered religious leader was limited to the monasteries under his direct jurisdiction...

...In the process, Goldhagen lashes out at those who dared to criticize his first book...

...The Nazis, after all, did not try to exterminate the Swedes or the Norwegians...

...National-Socialism is nothing but a practical fulfillment of the teaching of Christ...

...Later the Church leadership would endorse the growing persecution of Jews by fascist regimes seeking to reverse 200 years of emancipation and assimilation...

...These were times of choices and the Popes responded by putting the interest of the Church as an institution above the universal, human mission it has espoused since its creation...

...But progress will not be made through indictments and name-calling, no matter how aggrieved one feels...

...Raul Hilberg is accused of advancing a "quasiracist idea...

...When Church authorities did bring themselves to condemn the unfolding tragedy in Pius XI's consecutive encyclicals of 1937 and 1938, they did so in such a sheepish manner that their protests were barely heard...

...That the Church and other Christian regimes occasionally flirted with doctrines of blood lineage-as evidenced during the Spanish Inquisition, to cite only one example-does not alter the fact that the core concern of the Church was the conversion of Jews, not their elimination...

...Members of the Church and outsiders both have the right to push this formidable institution toward speedier and more resolute action...