Anti-Semitism means six million Jews on Hitler's list but only twelve hundred Jews on Schindler's list. This book is about anti-Semitism, not, however, in its latest European obscenity, but in its earliest Christian latency. It is about the historicity of the passion narratives, those terribly well-known stories about Jesus' arrest and trial, abuse and crucifixion, burial and resurrection. It is about the accuracy and honesty of Christian scholarship in its best reconstruction of those ancient yet ever-present events. Biblical exegesis and historical analysis may often seem but distant murmurs from an ivory tower. Why should ordinary people care about discussions and debates among scholars? Two examples, one very small and one very large, indicate why the historicity of the passion narratives is not a question just for scholars and experts but for anyone with a heart and a conscience.

In the gospel of Mark, Jesus is tried by both a Jewish and a Roman tribunal, and each juridical process concludes with physical abuse and mockery. After the Jewish trial in Mark 14:65, "some began to spit on him," mocking him as a pseudo-prophet. After the Roman trial in Mark 15:19, "the soldiers...spat upon him," mocking him as a pseudo-king. If you are being scourged and crucified, being spat upon or even slapped may seem a very minor indignity and hardly worth consideration then or now. But, as Father Raymond E. Brown, S.S., notes in his ... The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave --- A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels, those mockeries were recalled by "the Passiontide ceremony in the 9th-11th cents. in which a Jew was brought into the cathedral of Toulouse to be given a symbolic blow by the count --- an honor!" (575 note 7). No Roman, one notices, was accorded a like honor.

Brown insists that his "commentary will not ignore the ways in which guilt and punishment for the crucifixion of Jesus have been inflicted on Jews by Christians, not the least in our own times" (7). Yet, despite that statement and a long section on anti-Judaism (383-97), the best he can say about the historicity of those twin spittings is this: At the Jewish trial, "Such abuse is not at all implausible historically" (586). At the Roman trial, "There is no way of knowing whether this happened historically; at most one can discuss the issue of verisimilitude.... The content of what is described in the Gospels about the Roman mockery is not implausible, whether historical or not" (874, 877). Is that really the best that historical scholarship can offer?

It is not a question of certitude, a word that Brown uses regularly to avoid final decision: "there are severe limitations imposed by method and matter in our ability to acquire certitude about that history.... Certitude about the historicity of details is understandably infrequent" (22). Or again: "Absolute negative statements (e.g., the account has no historical basis) most often go beyond the kind of evidence available to biblical scholars" (1312). But historical scholarship is not called to absolutes or to certitudes but only to its own best reconstructions given accurately, honestly, and publicly. Even in our courts, with life and death in the balance, our best judgements are given "beyond a reasonable doubt." We seldom get to beyond any doubt. But, in the end, judgements must be made, and most historical reconstructions are based on "this is more plausible than that" rather than "this is absolutely certain" or "that is absolutely wrong." None of this allows us to hedge or to fudge or to hide behind double negatives like "not implausible" or "not impossible."

Who Killed Jesus? shows how we can get beyond that impasse by beginning, for example, with a biblical text like this:

I gave my back to those who struck me,
and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard;
I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.   (Isaiah 50:6)

Does the abuse of Jesus come from history remembered, or from prophecy historicized? Does it come from Christians investigating their sources to know what happened as historical event, or does it come from Christians searching their Scriptures to create what happened as prophetic fulfillment?

Consider that small spitting or slapping scene from Mark, and widen it into the following far more terrible scene:

When Pilate saw that he could do nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning,
he took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying,
"I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves."

Then the people as a whole answered,
"His blood be on us and on our children!"   (Matthew 27:24-25)

Brown is, once again, very aware of the latent anti-Semitism in that passage. "In commenting on this passage, one cannot ignore its tragic history in inflaming Christian hatred for Jews" (831), and he agrees (I presume) with a quotation that describes it as "'one of those phrases which have been responsible for oceans of human blood and a ceaseless stream of misery and desolation'" (831 note 22). Yet he can go on to describe it as "the most effective theater among the Synoptics, outclassed in that respect only by the Johannine masterpiece" (832), and his best historical judgement is that it is "a Matthean composition on the basis of a popular tradition reflecting on the theme of Jesus' innocent blood and the responsibility it created.... There may have been a small historical nucleus; but the detection of that nucleus with accuracy is beyond our grasp" (833). I ask, once again, is that the best we can do? Who Killed Jesus? proposes a flat alternative to Brown's The Death of the Messiah and argues that we can and must do much better. If, in my smaller example, we must assess the role of prophecy in creating history, we must, in this larger one, assess equally the role of apologetics and polemics in continuing and expanding that creation.

Here is the question at the heart of my book. Jesus stands before a Roman governor who declares him innocent and wants him released while a Jewish crowd declares him guilty and wants him crucified. The crowd wins. Is that scene Roman history, or Christian propaganda? When I am speaking of those first centuries, by the way, I use terms like Christians or Christianity exactly as I would use terms such as Essenes, Pharisees, Sadducees, or Zealots. These are groups with different and differing Jewish options about the best vision, program, and leadership for the Jewish future in a very dangerous age. History or propaganda, then, that is the question. It will take my entire book to answer it adequately, but, here to conclude the preface, I present two passages that appear later in the book to emphasize their importance:


For Christians the New Testament texts and the gospel accounts are inspired by God. But divine inspiration necessarily comes through a human heart and a mortal mind, through personal prejudice and communal interpretation, through fear, dislike, and hate as well as through faith, hope, and charity. It can also come as inspired propaganda, and inspiration does not make it any the less propaganda. In its origins and first moments, that Christian propaganda was fairly innocent. Those first Christians were relatively powerless Jews, and compared with them the Jewish authorities represented serious and threatening power. As long as Christians were the marginalized and disenfranchised ones, such passion fiction about Jewish responsibility and Roman innocence did nobody much harm. But, once the Roman Empire became Christian, that fiction turned lethal. In the light of later Christian anti-Judaism and eventually of genocidal anti-Semitism, it is no longer possible in retrospect to think of that passion fiction as relatively benign propaganda. However explicable its origins, defensible its invectives, and understandable its motives among Christians fighting for survival, its repetition has now become the longest lie, and, for our own integrity, we Christians must at last name it as such.

Externally, records of pagan contempt and records of pagan respect for Judaism started as soon as Greek culture and Roman power integrated the eastern Mediterranean into a somewhat unified whole. Internally, divergent groups within Judaism opposed one another in those same centuries with everything from armed opposition through rhetorical attack to nasty name calling. Read, for example, Josephus on any other Jews he dislikes, or read the Qumran Essenes of Dead Sea Scrolls fame on those other Jews they opposed. Christianity began as a sect within Judaism and, here slowly, there swiftly, separated itself to become eventually a distinct religion. If all this had stayed on the religious level, each side could have accused and denigrated the other quite safely forever. But, by the fourth century, Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire, and with the dawn of Christian Europe, anti-Judaism moved from theological debate to lethal possibility. Think, now, of those passion-resurrection stories as heard in a predominantly Christian world. Did those stories of ours send certain people out to kill?

THE BLOOD OF THE RIGHTEOUS
3-10-68   [3-17-68 is probable actual date sermon was delivered-dwd; see here for background]


We are speaking on this subject of the Blood of the Righteous crying out from the ground, and for our story we turn to the Book of Matthew for the tremendous indictment by Jesus against these deadly, and devilish people. Not only was Jesus creating by this indictment, Judgment, but He also said: 'Upon you shall come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth.' Hear this now .... what a tremendous indictment out of the lips of Christ. Matthew 23:25: 'Upon you shall come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth. From the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, son of Barachias whom ye slew between the Temple and the Altar.' 'Verily I say unto you, all these things shall come upon this generation.' The indictment that Christ had just declared, that all the righteous blood of all the children of the Most High, the children of His Spirit, the children of His progeny, that He had placed in the earth, and now referred to in the Scripture as The Righteous. In other places they were known as Saints... Therefore God said that all His believing offspring who would be murdered, put to death on the face of the earth, that He would require all of their blood at the hands of this certain people. A people that were bloodthirsty who would seek to kill and destroy.

We can go further back in the Book of Matthew where Jesus was talking to the False Pharisees .... But Jesus looked at the false Pharisees and He said in Matthew 23:24‑25., 'Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. Woe unto you scribes, and false Pharisees, ye hypocrites, for ye make clean the outside of the cup, and the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.' You see, they never change, they were doing all kinds of crooked things in those days as well. And this was the policy of Jewry then, and it continues unto this day .... He accused them of murder, and of secrecy, and even so He said:.. 'Outwardly ye appear righteous to men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity. Woe unto you scribes, and false Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchers of the righteous.

'And then you say: if we had lived in the days of our fathers we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the Prophets. By this ye are witness that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets.'

So you are not of Israel, you are not my household, but .... 'Ye bear witness unto yourself that ye are the children of those who killed the prophets, so fill ye up then the measure of your father. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of judgment and perdition? Wherefore I sent unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes, and some of them ye kill, and ye crucify some, and some of them ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city: that upon you shall come the righteous blood shed upon the earth.'

Thus Christ clearly identifies the chicanery and the utter evil of the children of this blood line which was organized Jewry.......

As the embodiment of God had been immaculately conceived by the Virgin Mary, and had emerged the embodiment of God, so also was Lucifer involved in this devil Judas of Iscariot whom Jesus had spoken of. And He said: ... 'I have chosen you 12 and one of you is a devil.' Then after that Jesus had to walk in Galilee because the Jews sought to kill Him. He couldn't walk in Judea because always they sought to kill Him, always they had blood upon their hands. Thus Jesus established that this was one of the great mysteries, that the Luciferians walked the earth and sought to kill Him.

....So Jesus turned to the Jews and said:.. you do the work of your father, and I am out of my father, and I do the work of my father. So what does this mean? Jesus said: ... I am out of the father, I am out of the fulfillment of God in the flesh, but you are out of the fulfillment of the devil. Hear this now ... you progeny, the offspring, the people of the devil. So Jesus who understood this thoroughly said: ... why do you seek to kill me just because I have told you the truth? He said, ye do the work of your father, and they said:.. we were not born of fornication, we have one father, even God. John 8:41. Even in the Talmud of today they tell you that they have one God who is Lucifer and that Jesus is the devil. We know that Jesus is the embodiment of God, and that they do lie .... Therefore Jesus called them the children of a murderer, and said that they also do the work of their father who was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth because there was not truth in him. When he speaks, he speaks a lie, and he speaks of his own. He is a liar and the father of it.

........Now God said:.. ye are a murdering race, but since I tell you the truth, then you believe me not. But which of you can convict me of transgression? Then the Jews said unto Jesus:.. you are a Samaritan, and a devil. But Jesus had already identified them as the children of the devil, and that the lusts of their father they would do.

.......We are dealing with a people whom Jesus said could not understand the truth, because their capacities were evil, they are the murderers, and were to blame for all the righteous blood shed upon the face of the earth....

......We turn then to the Book of Revelation and we are told that one of the great last situations will be the rise of Mystery Babylon the Great. This is an evil system, a political system, a religious system, and an economic system, that Jews control and use. This is Mystery Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots. This system controls crime, vice, and everything that is evil operates out of this system. Their mysterious design is to gain control of labor, of the money systems of the world, and to utilize this power in their hands. This is the design of Mystery Babylon and you can read about this in the 17th and 18th., chapters of Revelation, about their control over all these things listed. Then God speaks out about this Mystery Babylon, and God says: ... Mystery Babylon is now the inhabitation of all devils. And all Jews had their headquarters in the operation and philosophy of Mystery Babylon, and this is the hold of every foul spirit, and every hateful and unclean bird. For all nations have been made drunk with the wine of the wrath of her evil.

Now let me point this out to you, the Great Mystery of the Revelation of The Christ to John is about to be fulfilled, and God makes this revelation to John concerning who was this Mystery Babylon the Great as he said: ... 'Babylon is thy merchants, these great and powerful men of the earth, for by their sorceries were all nations of the earth deceived.' Revelation 18:23. In fact today we have the United Nations. It is actually a design of communism and socialism and a deceiver of all nations. It operates in violation of constitutions, and enslaves the freedom of the people of the Kingdom....

Now make no mistake about this:...when God says that Mystery Babylon with her system of world programs of socialism and world communism and economy that the conspiracy is going to be found to be guilty of all the blood of all righteous, the believing offspring, all the prophets, and all those that were slain upon the earth. Revelation 18:24. Here in this Book of Revelation The Christ proved to John that organized Jewry which He denounced in Matthew 23., and Mystery Babylon are one and the same. That Organized Jewry and its Priesthood control Mystery Babylon. That they are behind world communism, they are behind the International Monetary design to confiscate the money of the world. They are behind the complete conspiracy of utter evil, utter immorality, of other depravities, and their design is to destroy the nations of this world.

........Now an intelligent person who loves God and believes in Jesus the Christ are going to be against organized Jewry, but oh, how they look for the day when they are going to kill you. Remember here that they have been involved in every basic war which you have been in.... They are getting wealthy and fat off the great weapons you make to kill yourselves with.

I want to point out one of the great Mysteries behind the Vietnam war: did you know that the real power behind the scenes, and which is guiding the destiny of the U.S. is organized Jewry? It is the Rothchild's, it is the Isaacs, it is the Goldbergs, the Rockefellers that have been setting up the policies, and at the same time it is the Jewish manufacturers who are getting rich. Did you know that Saigon was a city of manufacturers? It is a city getting wealthy on war. And these people in all the major houses in Saigon are Jewish.

Now the other day a man connected with the government and who happens to be my friend, was in the Philippines and the Communist Newspapers as well as non‑Communist papers are published, and every Jewish House of it took in almost 80% of the houses in the area of Vietnam around Saigon, and these houses were advertising in the communist newspapers, and they showed how they are making the money, and were actually on the side of the reds, and doing some of their work with their profits to help encourage the reds so they would never give up. Here were these newspapers advertising in Manila while they are supposed to be on your side opposing the Viet Cong. But strangely they hire all kinds of Vietnamese to work for them in the day time, and then they fight with the Viet‑Cong at night against you. So then they say again.. Purim Festes 1968. And when they sing their Purim Festes songs this year they are singing because white Christian men are dying. The cauldron of this massive design is to destroy, and to...let...the blood of all of this white society. Your sons by the thousands are fighting and dying in an Asian war while those making all those profits are laughing as they are murdering your sons.

I think it is time that the Christians of the Kingdom wake up and listen to the words of Isaiah, and listen to the words of Jesus The Christ and listen to the Holy Scriptures, and stay away from every one of these murdering dogs. Separate them from our society, separate them from our government. We should un‑employ the powers of darkness seeking to kill our children.

.......In the face of all this we can show you much about Jewish Ritual Murder, however this is nothing compared with the murder of your sons which is going on today. If you want to fight a war against communism then bomb it, and destroy it, because you are eventually going to bring all the pagan powers before the throne of the Most High God. You are going to have to recognize that communism is the enemy of the Church. It has killed millions and millions of Christians, and one of these days as that blood which cries out from the ground, then organized Jewry is going to have to assume the responsibility of it....

Then in the Book of Revelations it says:... Mystery Babylon, the program of world communism, the economic conspiracy, the plot against your race and society ... all this which is wrong is Mystery Babylon, which Jesus had just identified as Organized Jewry. Oh! if the Church would only wake up, if it would get its eyes open wide, and challenge Christianity to make sure that these people were never elected to any responsible job in this country. These people were removed from the teaching positions of your schools where they have taken out the recognition of the Scripture, and prayer, and all that goes with it. Now they are totally in control of your foreign policy, and there will never be a victory in America, until all the Jews are removed from any control of your foreign policy and the destiny of your nation. When they said:.. 'His blood be upon us and upon our children,' they proved beyond a doubt that their utter hatred of all righteousness is great and even to the most righteous of all righteousness, the embodiment of God Himself.

Now if you go to Church they tell you, Oh my!, you have to bless these people, these devils. You have to call them the chosen people or trouble is going to come on you. Trouble is coming alright .. but what did the Most High have to say? Am I supposed to love the enemies of My God, or am I supposed to hate them? Yes.. I am supposed to hate the enemies of My God with a perfect hatred. And God said:.. I am going to pour out such a blessing on you of my house that you will dance in the streets, you will sing the glories of our God, as God delivers you from the powers of darkness, and wipes them off the face of the earth.

So as we see these situations let us open our eyes, let us see the mysteries hidden in the Scriptures and know that the sons of Lucifer are behind all the problems, and all the trouble of the world. And one of these times there won't be many of them around because 'tare' time will have been completed, and the 'tares' will have been destroyed.

The more fanatical Nazis among [German Protestants] organized in 1932 "The German Christians' Faith Movement" of which the most vehement leader was a certain Ludwig Mueller, army chaplain of the East Prussia Military District, a devoted follower of Hitler who had first brought the Fuehrer together with General von Blomberg when the latter commanded the district. The "German Christians" ardently supported the Nazi doctrines of race and the leadership principle and wanted them applied to a Reich Church which would bring all Protestants into one all-embracing body....

.... It is difficult to understand the behavior of most German Protestants in the first Nazi years unless one is aware of two things: their history and the influence of Martin Luther. The great founder of Protestantism was both a passionate anti-Semite and a ferocious believer in absolute obedience to political authority. He wanted Germany rid of the Jews and when they were sent away he advised that they be deprived of "All their cash and jewels and silver and gold" and, furthermore, "that their synagogues or schools be set on fire, that their houses be broken up and destroyed...and they be put under a roof or stable, like the gypsies...in misery and captivity as they incessantly lament and complain to God about us"...

In what was perhaps the only popular revolt in German history, the peasant uprising of 1525, Luther advised the princes to adopt the most ruthless measures against the "mad dogs," as he called the desperate, downtrodden peasants. Here, as in his utterances about the Jews, Luther employed a coarseness and brutality of language unequaled in German history until the Nazi time. The influence of this towering figure extended down the generations in Germany, especially among the Protestants. Among other results was the ease with which German Protestantism became the instrument of royal and princely absolutism from the sixteenth century until the kings and princes were overthrown in 1918. The hereditary monarchs and petty rulers became the supreme bishops of the Protestant Church in their lands.... In no country with the exception of Czarist Russia did the clergy become by tradition so completely servile to the political authority of the State. Its members, with few exceptions, stood solidly behind the King, the Junkers and the Army, and during the nineteenth century they dutifully opposed the rising liberal and democratic movements. Even the Weimar Republic was anathema to most Protestant pastors, not only because it had deposed the kings and princes but because it drew its main support from the Catholics and the Socialists. During the Reichstag elections one could not help but notice that the Protestant clergy -- Niemoller was typical -- quite openly supported the Nationalist and even the Nazi enemies of the Republic. Like Niemoller, most of the pastors welcomed the advent of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship in 1933.

.... In July 1933 representatives of the Protestant churches had written a constitution for a new "Reich Church," and it was formally recognized by the Reichstag on July 14. Immediately there broke out a heated struggle over the election of the first Reich Bishop. Hitler insisted that his friend, Chaplain Mueller, whom he had appointed his adviser on Protestant church affairs, be given this highest office. The leaders of the Church Federation proposed an eminent divine, Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh. But they were naive. The Nazi government intervened, dissolved a number of provincial church organizations, suspended from office several leading dignitaries of the Protestant churches, loosed the S.A. and the Gestapo on recalcitrant clergymen.... The intimidation was highly successful. Bodelschwingh in the meantime had been forced to withdraw his candidacy, and the "elections" returned a majority of "German Christians," who in September at the synod in Wittenberg, where Luther had first defied Rome, elected Mueller Reich Bishop.

But the new head of the Church, a heavy-handed man, was not able to establish a unified Church... On November 13, 1933, the day after the German people had overwhelmingly backed Hitler in a national plebiscite, the "German Christians" staged a massive rally in the Sportpalast in Berlin. A Dr. Reinhard Krause, the Berlin district leader of the sect, proposed the abandonment of the Old Testament, "with its tales of cattle merchants and pimps" and the revision of the New Testament with the teaching of Jesus "corresponding entirely with the demands of National Socialism." Resolutions were drawn up demanding "One People, One Reich, One Faith," requiring all pastors to take an oath of allegiance to Hitler and insisting that all churches institute the Aryan paragraph and exclude converted Jews. This was too much even for the timid Protestants who had declined to take any part in the church war, and Bishop Mueller was forced to suspend Dr. Krause and disavow him.

.... By the beginning of 1934, the disillusioned Pastor Niemoller had become the guiding spirit of the minority resistance in both the "Confessional Church" and the Pastors' Emergency League. At the General Synod in Barmen in May 1934, and at a special meeting in Niemoller's Church of Jesus Christ at Dahlem, a suburb of Berlin, in November, the "Confessional Church" declared itself to be the legitimate Protestant Church of Germany and set up a provisional church government. Thus there were now two groups -- Reich Bishop Mueller's and Niemoller's -- claiming to legally constitute the Church.

It was obvious that the former army chaplain, despite his closeness to Hitler, had failed to integrate the Protestant churches, and at the end of 1935, after the Gestapo had arrested seven hundred "Confessional Church" pastors, he resigned his office and faded out of the picture. Already, in July 1935, Hitler had appointed a Nazi lawyer friend, Dr. Hans Kerrl, to be Minister for Church Affairs, with instructions to make a second attempt to co-ordinate the Protestants. One of the milder Nazis and a somewhat cautious man, Kerrl at first had considerable success. He succeeded not only in winning over the conservative clergy, which constituted the majority, but in setting up a Church Committee headed by the venerable Dr. Zoellner, who was respected by all factions, to work out a general settlement. Though Niemoller's group co-operated with the committee, it still maintained that it was the only legitimate Church. When, in May 1936, it addressed a courteous but firm memorandum to Hitler protesting against the anti-Christian tendencies of the regime, denouncing the government's anti-Semitism and demanding an end to State interference in the churches, Frick, the Nazi Minister of the Interior, responded with ruthless action. Hundreds of "Confessional Church" pastors were arrested, one of the signers of the memorandum, Dr. Weissler, was murdered in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the funds of the "Confessional Church" were confiscated and it was forbidden to make collections.

On February 12, 1937, Dr. Zoellner resigned from the Church Committee -- he had been restrained by the Gestapo from visiting Luebeck, where nine Protestant pastors had been arrested -- complaining that his work had been sabotaged by the Church Minister. Dr. Kerrl replied the next day in a speech to a group of submissive churchmen. He accused the venerable Zoellner of failing to appreciate the Nazi doctrine of Race, Blood and Soil, and clearly revealed the government's hostility to both Protestant and Catholic churches.

The party [Kerrl said] stands on the basis of Positive Christianity, and Positive Christianity is National Socialism... National Socialism is the doing of God's will... God's will reveals itself in German blood... Dr. Zoellner and Count Galen [the Catholic bishop of Muenster] have tried to make clear to me that Christianity consists in faith in Christ as the Son of God. That makes me laugh... No, Christianity is not dependent upon the Apostle's Creed... True Christianity is represented by the party, and the German people are now called by the party and especially by the Fuehrer to a real Christianity... The Fuehrer is the herald of a new revelation.

At the start of [this Prologue] I asked this question, and I now repeat it: what is at stake in all of this? Why should the interested reader, as distinct from a scholarly specialist, care about how many sources we have for the passion-resurrection stories, whether they derive from prophecy or history...? The answer, which was already given in my preface earlier, involves the passion-resurrection stories as the matrix for Christian anti-Judaism and eventually for European anti-Semitism. I distinguish those two terms because anti-Semitism only arrives in history when anti-Judaism is combined with racism. Anti-Judaism is religious prejudice: a Jew can convert to avoid it. Anti-Semitism is racial prejudice: a Jew can do nothing to avoid it. They are equally despicable but differently so.    (John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus? pp. 31-32)



It is considered proper, these days, to emphasize that the theological anti-Judaism handed down by Christian tradition since the Patristic period has nothing in common with anti-Semitism. This dissociation generally serves to reduce to the status of simple spasms deriving from an ancient religious quarrel the episodic hostile excesses with regard to Jews that could be imputed to the Church as an institution.

On a theoretical level the distinction is perfectly justified. One is nonetheless led to question its pertinence as soon as one considers the particulars of any given historical situation. Particularly when one is examining the history of La Civilta' cattolica [the official journal of Italian Jesuits] up to the Second World War, the boundary seems very fluid between the "average" anti-Semitism of the period, on the one hand, and on the other the anti-Judaism constantly manifested by the editors of that review in all the battles in the course of their long-term war against what they considered to be the various political expressions of modernity: liberalism, Garibaldism, republicanism, Freemasonry, socialism, bolshevism, etc.......

On 12 October 1922, discussing the "worldwide revolution and the Jews," an anonymous writer [for the Jesuit journal] drew up the following clinical balance sheet of his period:

The world is sick. [...] Everywhere peoples are in the grip of inexplicable convulsions [...] and the filthy element, as uninterested in work as it is avid for money and unattainable pleasures, seems to be amusing itself in a frenetic and tragic dance of tumults and strikes, waiting to proclaim the communist republic tomorrow, while the politicians, the wise men of the nations, frightened, frantically search for a peace that is no more than a perpetual disillusion. Where are we going? [...] Who is leading? [...] Who is urging on this rabble of parties, leagues, and lodges, and guides this movement of universal revolution which is turning human society's head from one end of the world to the other? [...]

Who? The Synagogue, the author answers, after having "demonstrated" that in Russia, the source of world subversion, and in the communist International, all the levers of power were in the hands of "Jewish intruders."

In the same vein, on 25 September 1936, another anonymous writer formulated the "Jewish question" in the following terms:

Two facts that seem contradictory are both verified through the Jews dispersed in the modern world: their control of money and their preponderance in the socialism and communism [that] [sic] constitute a grave and permanent peril for society.

....The same theme reappeared...in May 1937, in a series of articles on the "Jewish Question" in relation to Zionism, conversions, and Catholic apostleship. In the first of these articles, the anonymous writer, basing himself especially on "the clear and illuminating exposition of the illustrious English Catholic writer" Hilaire Belloc, asserts at the outset that it is "an obvious fact that the Jews are a disruptive element because of their dominating spirit and their revolutionary tendency. Judaism is [...] a foreign body that irritates and provokes the reactions of the organism it has contaminated.

"The whole question consists in finding the most appropriate way of getting rid of the irritation and re-establishing, on a durable basis, the social organism's equilibrium and tranquility. There are only two possible solutions: elimination or segregation...."

(From Georges Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky, The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI. Translated from the French by Steven Rendall. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997, pp. 123-127.)