The ‘New Nazis’ or the ‘People of our God’? Jews and Zionism in the Latin Church of Jerusalem, 1948–1962

Abstract

In the aftermath of the Holocaust the elaboration of Catholic perceptions of the Jewish people has been particularly problematic. The weight of a long tradition of Christian antisemitism and its influence on the Nazi extermination programme, as well as the revision of this attitude before and after the Shoah in various Catholic circles as a means of promoting a rapprochement, made it difficult to redefine the image of Jewish people in the Catholic imagination, and gave rise to different and conflicting interpretations. Some members of the Latin Catholic Church of Jerusalem began to argue for an analogy between Nazism and Zionism. This assertion took different forms as the political situation in Palestine evolved and in response to changing attitudes within the Church towards the Jews. This paper will reconstruct the ‘new Nazis’ paradigm in the Jerusalem Church, analysing three key periods: the 1947–9 Arab-Israeli war; the consolidation of the State of Israel in the 1950s; and the Eichmann trial of 1961–2.