title: The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism
author:  David I. Kertzer 
description: The Vatican's 1998 report "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah" purportedly exonerated the Church of complicity in the Holocaust. In <i>The Popes Against the Jews</i>, David I. Kertzer argues that the report is "not the product of a Church that wants to confront its history." Kertzer's book refutes the Church's thesis that the Holocaust grew out of "an anti-Judaism that was essentially more sociological and political than religious." In fact, Kertzer asserts, those dimensions of European anti-Semitism developed "in no small part due to the efforts of the Roman Catholic Church itself." The racial laws of fascist Italy and the Nuremberg Laws of 1930s Germany, for example, were directly modeled on the Church's own rules governing treatment of Jews: until the collapse of the Papal States in the late 19th century, Jews living in these territories were forced to wear yellow badges and live in ghettos. Kertzer's arguments make for compelling reading because they're presented in story form, based on the actions of the popes themselves. Access to long-sealed Church archives allowed Kertzer to reconstruct some of the most shocking, secret conversations that occurred in the Vatican in the decades leading up to World War II. <i>--Michael Joseph Gross</i>
zlib_text: TH E ROOTS OF ANTI-SEM ITISM IN M EDIEVAL
  VISUAL IMAG ERY:  AN OVERVIEW
  PAM ELA BERGER
  Boston College
  P
  ope John Paul II has undertaken for the Church a level of introspection
  vis-à-vis the events of the Holocaust that is truly extraordinary. He
  appointed a Vatican commission that worked for twelve years investigating
  the Church’s role in the history of European anti-Semitism. On March 12,
  1998 the commission released the The Papal Document on the Shoah in
  which the Pope called on the Church to examine the responsibility that
  Christianity has for “. . . the unspeakable iniquity of the Shoah.” This essay
  is a response to the Pope’s call. Uncovering the roots of hostility toward
  Jews is an important step toward understanding the suspicion and fear that
  erupted in the Holocaust.
  The experience of the Holocaust puts before scholars and clergy a new
  set of questions. Those questions invite medieval art historians to scrutinize
  all the more carefully the pictorial documents from the Middle A