As we mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Wednesday, many will focus on the resurgence of anti-Semitism worldwide 76 years after the liberation of Auschwitz. This is more than appropriate: Though anti-Semitism in and of itself won’t lead to another genocide, we need reminders that the Holocaust would never have happened without the inculcation of anti-Semitic attitudes in Europe over many centuries.
At the same time, Holocaust remembrance should also take into account that things have improved since those dark days. The most overlooked change may be the transformation of the Catholic Church in its attitude toward the Jewish people.
If the Holocaust could not have happened without a culture of anti-Semitism, that anti-Semitism could never have reached the levels it did without the role of the Catholic Church. Through the centuries when the church was a dominant authority throughout Europe, church doctrine, literature and art presented the negative tropes about the Jews that would manifest as anti-Semitism: Jews as killers of Christ. Jews as evil. Jews as poisonously powerful. Jews as money hungry. Jews as disloyal.
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion couldn’t have been believed without this history of church teachings.
That is why the evolution of church teaching and attitudes has been so transformative in Christian (not just Catholic) attitudes toward Jews. Beginning in the 1960s with the Second Vatican Council’s declaration, known as Nostra Aetate, the church explicitly rejected Jewish collective responsibility for the death of Jesus. The significance of this statement in improving the condition of Jews in Western countries can hardly be exaggerated.
Read the article by Ken Jacobson, deputy national director of the ADL, in Sight Magazine.