by a vision of material domination and gain, the Israelites lost what they themselves had sought. A few chosen souls, among whom were the disciples and followers of Our Lord, the early Jewish Christians, and, through the centuries, a few members of the Jewish people, were an exception to this general rule. By their acceptance of Christ's teaching and their incorporation into His Church, they shared in the inheritance of His glory, but they remained and still remain an exception. "What Israel was seeking after, that it has not obtained; but the chosen have obtained it, and the rest have been blinded" (Romans 11:7). The text argues that By a mysterious Providence of God, this unhappy people, destroyers of their own nation, whose misguided leaders had called down upon their own heads a Divine malediction, doomed, as it were, to perpetually wander over the face of the earth, were nonetheless never allowed to perish, but have been preserved through the ages into our own time. No natural reason appears to be forthcoming to explain this age-long persistence, this indestructible coherence of the Jewish people. Reaction of Pope Pius XII According to the authors, Pius XII was not aware of the text before the death of his predecessor. He chose not to publish its specific statements regarding Judaism and regarding persecution of Jews. However, his first encyclical Summi Pontificatus (On the Supreme Pontificate, October 12, 1939), published after the beginning of World War II, has an echo of the previous title in its title: On the Unity of Human Society and uses many of the general arguments of the text. Summi Pontificatus sees Christianity as universalized and opposed to every form of racial hostility and every claim of racial superiority. There are no real racial differences: the human race forms a unity, because "one ancestor [God] made all nations to inhabit the whole earth". What a wonderful vision, which makes us contemplate the human race in the unity of its origin in God... in the unity of its nature, composed equally in all men of a material body and a spiritual soul; in the unity of its immediate end and its mission in the world; in the unity of its dwelling, the earth, whose benefits all men, by right of nature, may use to sustain and develop life; in the unity of its supernatural end: God himself, to whom all ought