In 2004, Marc Saperstein, a professor of Jewish Studies at George Washington University, offered a thoughtful review of The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, written by David Kertzer, a professor at Brown University. Saperstein praised Kertzer’s recounting of oppression endured by Jews in papal territories during the first two-thirds of the 19th century, but went on to powerfully challenge Kertzer’s claims about the Vatican’s role in constructing the “Antechamber to the Holocaust.”
By coincidence, both professors Saperstein and Kertzer had rabbi fathers who served as U.S. Army chaplains in Europe during the Second World War. By further coincidence, testimony from Rabbi Harold Saperstein provides a good starting point for consideration of David Kertzer’s latest work, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler.
Standing before his Long Island congregation in 1964, Rabbi Harold Saperstein addressed the controversy surrounding “The Deputy,” which had introduced Broadway theater goers to a wartime pontiff more concerned with church assets than Jewish lives. Saperstein criticized Pope Pius XII for war crime denunciations deprived of “bite” by “diplomatic and theological verbiage.” Still, Saperstein insisted “from personal experience” as a U.S. Army chaplain that Pius XII himself be credited with church rescue of Roman Jews during the Nazis October 1943 round-up, recounting:
