From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965

Among scholars of modern Jewish-Catholic relations, John Connelly's book From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965 has rightly gained wide attention. Connelly, professor of History at the University of California Berkeley, drew on bulletins, journals, and books issued from the thirties to the sixties and sources stored in ar-chives at Seton Hall University (John Oesterreicher’s papers) and in Munich (Karl Thieme’s papers), Vienna, and Washing-ton. The book explores, through a chronological approach, the shift that occurred in Catholic attitudes toward the Jews and the move away from a long tradition of Catholic anti-Judaism and antisemitism toward new, more positive views. Connelly reconstructs this fundamental change, tracing an in-ternational network of protagonists who contributed, before and during the Second Vatican Council, to ideas that shaped the Council’s declaration Nostra Aetate on non-Christian religions (particularly chapter 4, on the Jews). He mainly focused on groups of Catholics who, since the thirties and in opposition to Nazism, had developed new reflections on Christian-Jewish relations in Europe and the United States. Among them, Connelly devoted his attention particularly to converts to Catholicism from Judaism and Protestantism (primarily Johannes M. [John] Oesterreicher, but also Gregory Baum, Leo Rudloff, and Paul Démann).

Connelly's thesis is precisely that without the contribution of these converts, the Church could not have arrived at a reconsideration of its position in relation to the Jewish world.Although the phenomenon of conversions is being considered with growing interest by scholars (not only those studying the modern age), many focus on biographies, and the historical narrative of networks connecting the converts, clergy, and intellectuals is still limited. One of the most convincing parts of the book is the analysis of the major role some converts played in pushing to change Catholic teachings about Jews and Judaism. Following this process, Connelly compellingly illustrates their contributions. He defines them as “border-crossers”: “The great majority of Catholics who wrote on the race question [about whether Jews were a race and not able to become Catholics] were Jewish converts, and virtually every figure of note in the Catholic battle against antisemitism was a convert....the irony of conversion, of crossing a border supposedly with no return, is that one never entirely leaves the point of origin. And the scandal of racism was that those expecting security in the new Catholic homes were told that they remained alien, ‘in fact’ ra Jewish” (pp. 63-64). This connotation of the converts as people living along cultural and religious borders between communities is thoroughly examined in the book.

The book begins with a stunning survey of the racist views of prominent early twentieth-century Catholics, among them leading theologians, many denying that even baptism could fully make Jews into Catholics. The author then analyzes some Christian voicesagainst first racism and then against Nazi persecution of the Jews. In particular, Connelly describes a memorandum prepared by Thieme, Oesterreicher, and Waldemar Gurian in 1937, in an effort to obtain an official pronouncement by the Holy See against antisemitism and in favor of the Jews.Approaching the decade before the Second Vatican Council, Connelly highlights the personal "journey" accomplished by some of these converts in a process of rediscovery of the Jewish origins of the Church (p. 189). Thisspirit inspired the foundation by Oesterreicher of the Institute for Judeo-Christian studies at Seton Hall University in 1953, and especially the influential Apeldoorn initiative beginning in 1958 to rethink Christian theologies of Judaism (and Christian read-ings of Scripture) before the Council. In the last chapter of the book, Connelly sums up some of the main revisions of the conversionist attitude that for centuries had marked the behavior of Catholic institutions and congregations toward Jews. Starting from a mission intended to get Jews to convert to Catholicism, Oesterreicher, Thieme, and others moved the Church toward a mission of self-redefinition and ressourcement, with new attitudes toward the Jews and to the Church’s own Jewish roots.

-- Maria Chiara Rioli Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations.

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While not academically trained, I've read my fair share of books on Jewish-Christian relations and Catholic-Jewish dialogue over the decade. None of them come close to the achievement of Connelly's, which I imagine will be a resource for years to come. Though published in , I'm happy to have discovered and to have read it.

When discussing Catholic resistance to National Socialism and protection of the Jews, it is my impression that Catholics tend to get particularly defensive, focusing their attention on notable figures who distinguished themselves by speaking out in defense of, or actively protecting, the Jewish people. The antagonists in their scenario tend to be the Nazis, depicted as chiefly secular, atheist, pagan or anti-Christian (which they were to a large extent). Lost in this perspective, however, is a clear and deserved recognition of just how deeply entrenched antisemitism -- both of a racial and religious variety -- was among parishioners and clergy within the Catholic Church itself (to be clear, the Catholic Church in Europe is the focus here). Under such circumstances, it is not at all suprising that those few who struggled to come to arrive at better relations with the Jewish people were often met with ecclesiastical roadblocks and outright opposition from the clergy on multiple levels within the Church. Connelly's intensive historical research into this era of the Church under National Socialism is worth the price of the volume alone as a reference resource.

Connelly makes a notable observation that

“From the 1840s until 1965, virtually every activist and thinker who worked for Catholic-Jewish reconciliation was not originally Catholic. Most were born Jewish. Without converts, the Catholic Church would not have found a new language to speak to the Jews after the Holocaust.”

Catholics are probably acquainted to some degree (even nominally) with Jacques Maritain and Deitrich von Hildebrand (both recognized as early opponents to anti-semitism, howbeit moving on to other matters post-war). This book does an IMMENSE service in featuring the intellectual biographies of Johannes (later John) Oesterreicher, a Jewish convert and priest, and Karl Thieme, a convert from Luthernism, and the instrumental roles both played in countering antisemitism within the Church during National Socialism and later, in laying the theological groundwork for the drafting of Vatican II's Nostra Aetate.

Expectedly, Connelly arrives at the hope and conclusion that the Catholic Church -- in embracing its "elder brothers and sisters" -- ought to categorically forsake its mission to convert the Jews as a people. This was the ultimate conclusion of Karl Thieme, and to a degree Osterreicher as well in the last years of his life (who while never turning away individual requests for baptism, admittedly did not have any great success in his early efforts to convert Jews in the United States). One can't help but observe the irony in that if Jews like Osterreicher had never been permitted to convert in the first place, it would be questionable whether the Church would have arrived at the place it occupies now in its relations with the Jewish people.

Reviews and Discussion

• Review: From Enemy to Brother. The revolution in Catholic teaching on the Jews 1933-1965 by John S. Conway. Contemporary Church History Quarterly 19:4 (December 2013).
• Catholics and Jews: The Great Change, by Garry Wills. The New York Review
• Jacob and Esau, by Nicholas J. Healy, Jr. First Things January 2013. I concur with Healy's observation:

  Connelly argues that Oesterreicher “abandoned his missionary approach . . . for ecumenism,” that "his goal at the beginning was the opposite of what became the end point." The end point is "not one of Jews becoming Christians, or anything but Jews."

  The irony of Connelly’s narrative is that it is only because of the gifts of converts that the Catholic Church has renounced (he believes) the missionary hope that others will enter the Church. But the final irony is more paradoxical. Connelly is writing as a historian and, for the most part, he seeks to avoid direct engagement with theological debates. It is, however, impossible to reflect on the histori>cal setting and the significance of Nostra Aetate without touching on one of the thorniest questions confronting the Church. How can we hold together the universality of Christ’s saving work and God’s perduring election of the Jewish people?" [read the rest]

• Building on "Nostra Aetate" - 50 Years of Christian-Jewish Dialogue, by Cardinal Kurt Koch. Address delivered by Cardinal Koch at the Angelicum University in Rome under the auspices of the John Paul II Center for Interreligious Dialogue. (05/06/12).
• ‘What Our Church Has Inflicted on Judaism’: An Exchange on Catholic-Jewish Dialogue, Stephen Englund. (Part of Getting Past Supersessionism: An Exchange on Catholic-Jewish Dialogue).Commonweal 02/10/14.
• Selected Works of John M. Oesterreicher Seton Hall University. [Archive] / see also co-authored theological articles.
• To Evangelize, or Not to Evangelize? Against The Grain 03/21/05.