Catholics, Jews Unite To Attack Scholar's Latest, Goldhagen Stirring Ire With Article on Pius XII

Participants in a troubled Jewish-Catholic dialogue found a rare point of agreement this week in their criticism of an article by historian Daniel Goldhagen that attacks the behavior of Pope Pius XII during World War II and raises the question of the church's responsibility for the Holocaust.

In a lengthy article, "What Would Jesus Have Done? Pope Pius XII, the Catholic Church and the Holocaust," published this week in The New Republic magazine, Mr. Goldhagen charges that Pope Pius XII was an anti-Semite and a collaborator with Nazi Germany. Moreover, he claims, there is an "obvious integral relationship" between the church's historical anti-Judaism and the genesis of the Holocaust. He also calls for examining the culpability of the church for the Holocaust.

"Anti-Semitism led to the Holocaust," wrote Mr. Goldhagen, a former Harvard professor and author of a controversial 1996 book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners." "Anti-Semitism has been integral to the Catholic Church. Surely the question of what the relationship is between the church's anti-Semitism and the Holocaust should be at the center of any general treatment of either of these subjects."

Eugene Fisher, associate director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, lashed out at Mr. Goldhagen.

"This is a remarkably uninformed piece," said Mr. Fisher, who has been involved for many years in Jewish-Catholic dialogue. "He lives in fantasy land and he is making this up. It's a sad case and he ought to see a psychiatrist."

Rabbi David Rosen, international director of inter-religious affairs at the American Jewish Committee, said that Mr. Goldhagen "has an unconcealed antagonism against the Catholic Church, and it shows."

Rabbi Rosen added that while the article was "fine on the past, it was woefully uninformed on the present efforts by the church to mend its ways." Several other scholars and members of the Jewish-Catholic dialogue interviewed for this article made the same point and were especially incensed that steps taken by Pope John Paul II were not acknowledged by Mr. Goldhagen. (See ForwardForum, Page 9.) While some agreed with Mr. Goldhagen's criticism of Pius XII, they criticized his sweeping indictment of the church. Mr. Goldhagen declined to comment on the reactions. He told the Forward that the article was the foundation for his upcoming book, "A Moral Reckoning, the Catholic Church During the Holocaust and Today," to be published in the fall.

His article comes at a time of renewed tensions between Jews and Catholics over the proposed beatification of Pius XII. For years, Jewish groups have protested the Vatican's intention to beatify a pope who, they claim, maintained a guilty silence during the Holocaust. Last summer, the work of a joint historical commission formed to study the wartime archives of the Vatican stalled over the refusal of Vatican officials to give historians full access to the archives, prompting acrimonious exchanges between Jewish and Catholic officials.

However, Seymour Reich, chairman of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations, the official Jewish liaison with the Vatican, praised the Goldhagen article as "very powerful" and believed it would have a "great impact."

"If the Catholic Church wants to defend itself against those charges, there is only one solution - open the wartime archives," said Mr. Reich, who has spent considerable time negotiating with the Vatican to open its archives and who expressed frustration after those efforts foundered last summer.

Mr. Goldhagen's piece is presented as a review essay of several books in the issue. But his personal thoughts are clearly on display and The New Republic presents his article as "an exhaustive investigation."

Mr. Goldhagen starts the article by denouncing the "exculpatory strategies" used by apologists of Pius XII and compares them to the ones used by those trying to exculpate ordinary Germans of their responsibility for, and participation in, the Holocaust. This is a direct reference to the thesis he defended in "Hitler's Willing Executioners," which prompted vivid criticism from some of his fellow historians for his broad denunciation of the German people.

In addition to a relatively consensual criticism of Pius XII's inaction to help Jews, Mr. Goldhagen also claims that the pope was an anti-Semite who collaborated with Nazi Germany - like Marshall Philippe Petain in France or Vidkun Quisling in Norway - most noticeably by signing a concordat agreement with Adolph Hitler in 1933.

But more crucially, Mr. Goldhagen argues that the focus over Pius XII's beatification deflects criticism over the church's past and the attitude of the Vatican and the national churches during the war. This leads him to the most devastating charges of the article, the link between the Church and the Holocaust.

Mr. Goldhagen writes that the "iron curtain" erected by the church between its theological anti- Judaism and Germany's anti-Semitism is a "fiction" that must be lifted.

"This inevitably leads to a consideration of the degree of the church's culpability not just for its reactions to the eliminationist onslaught, but also for the Holocaust itself," he wrote.

He notes that the Catholic Church could find "common cause" with most of the declarations of anti-Semites in the 1930s and claims it makes "little difference" if "their litanies of hatred were not 100 percent congruent, but only a figurative 90 percent."

Mr. Goldhagen goes on to describe as insufficient efforts made by the church since the war, from the "tepid and deeply flawed" Vatican II Council in 1965, which officially recognized that the Jews did not kill Jesus, to the "half-heartedness and historical fabrications" of the 1998 "We Remember" declaration by the church on the Holocaust, which acknowledged the shortcomings of the church during the war.

"This is really the area where he shows lack of knowledge," said Rabbi Rosen of AJCommittee. "There are many other documents and efforts made that he seems not to know about and this is troubling."

I have read Finkelstein's book The Holocaust Industry. To say that he denies the Holocaust seems to me a grotesque distortion of his position. He does criticize the ways in which the concept of "the Holocaust" has been used, but the whole work presupposes that what is called the "Holocaust" really took place. This is clear from the first page of the book. A footnote says: "In this text, Nazi holocaust signals the actual historical event, The Holocaust its ideological representation." And the text on that page says: "In the pages that follow, I will argue that 'the Holocaust' is an ideological representation of the Nazi holocaust. Like most ideologies, it bears a connection, if tenuous, with reality." So Finkelstein is obviously critical of how the term "the Holocaust" has been used, but he equally obviously does not deny that what he calls "the Nazi holocaust" occurred. "Holocaust denier", as the term is used, is understood to mean someone who denies the fact that the Holocaust occurred, or at least someone who minimizes it. That is simply not an accurate description of Finkelstein.

Personally, I found his book quite moving. Finkelstein is obviously quite deeply affected by his parents' suffering, and is trying to be loyal to them in reacting to that suffering in what he regards as an ethical way.

As for Goldhagen, I think his latest screed unmasks him as an academic operator. His unbalanced thesis in his book -- making German nationalism the moral equivalent of Nazism, and average Germans the moral equivalent of Nazis -- was basically more false than true, but it was open to the explanation that Goldhagen was just doing his best to legitimize the state of Israel. It may have been bad history, but it could be understood as springing from basically creditable motives. His current attack on Catholicism, however, can do no good to Israel, and, as Andrew Sullivan observes, has the same problem of unbalance as his book: Goldhagen not only asserts, with some truth, that Catholicism helped to cause Nazism, but he makes Catholicism basically the moral equivalent of Nazism. That thesis is more false than true, it can only embitter Jewish-Christian relations, and, by weakening one of the chief Christian churches, it will weaken morality in the West and serve to empower the left.

Goldhagen is much more of an enemy to Western civilization than the basically honest Finkelstein.

New York Times Book Review-http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/08/06/reviews/000806.06bartovt.html:

August 6, 2000
A Tale of Two Holocausts
The first one had victims, Norman G. Finkelstein says; the second has opportunists.
By OMER BARTOV

THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY
Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.
By Norman G. Finkelstein.
150 pp. New York:
Verso. $23.

Norman G. Finkelstein first gained a national reputation with his essay, ''Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 'Crazy' Thesis,'' included in the book he wrote with Ruth Bettina Birn, ''A Nation on Trial.'' Much of the essay was a brilliant dissection of Goldhagen's book, ''Hitler's Willing Executioners.'' Its last section, however, revealed Finkelstein undergoing a bizarre metamorphosis, in which he employed the same dubious rhetoric and faulty logic he had identified in Goldhagen's work in order to propound his own, even ''crazier,'' thesis on the dark forces lurking, to his mind, behind his adversary's success.
Now Finkelstein is back, with a vengeance, a lone ranger with a holy mission -- to unmask an evil Judeo-Zionist conspiracy. The main argument in ''The Holocaust Industry'' is based on a simple distinction between two phenomena: the Nazi Holocaust and ''The Holocaust,'' which he defines as ''an ideological representation of the Nazi holocaust.'' The author has little interest in the former, though he readily acknowledges that it happened, since both his parents survived its horrors and since some of the few historians he respects, notably Raul Hilberg, have written on it.
But in one of those strange inversions that characterize his book, Finkelstein speaks of the historical event with the same kind of awe, and demands the same sort of silent incomprehension, that he ascribes to his main foe, Elie Wiesel. In order ''to truly learn from the Nazi holocaust,'' he asserts, ''its physical dimension must be reduced and its moral dimension expanded.'' Whatever that might mean, it comes as no surprise that his views about the origins, nature and implications of the genocide of the Jews are but a series of vague, undocumented and contradictory assertions. Thus, for instance, in one place he writes that the ''historical evidence for a murderous gentile impulse is nil,'' and rejects the notion that there might have been an ''abandonment of the Jews'' by the United States government. But in another place he charges that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ''mutes the Christian background to European anti-Semitism'' and ''downplays the discriminatory U.S. immigration quotas before the war,'' and then goes on to cite approvingly David S. Wyman's book, ''The Abandonment of the Jews.''
But what really interests Finkelstein is ''The Holocaust.'' The gist of his argument is simple: Had the Jews and the Zionists not had the Holocaust already, they would have had to invent it. Indeed, for all intents and purposes, this is precisely what they have done, in the form of ''The Holocaust,'' despite the distracting fact that, once upon a time, such an event actually took place. And why was ''The Holocaust'' fabricated? Because it legitimizes ''one of the world's most formidable military powers,'' Israel, allowing it to ''cast itself as a 'victim' state,'' and because it provides ''the most successful ethnic group in the United States,'' the Jews, with ''immunity to criticism,'' leading to ''the moral corruptions that typically attend'' such immunity.
Finkelstein views himself as innocent of any desire to exploit ''The Holocaust'' for his own ends, unlike his apparently countless enemies. The fact that his sensational ''revelations'' and outrageous accusations draw a great deal of public and media attention is no fault of his own. Nor is his vehement anti-Zionism and seething hatred of what he perceives as a corrupt Jewish leadership in the United States anything but a reflection of a reality that only he can perceive through the clouds of mystification and demagogy that have deceived thousands of lay persons, scholars, and intellectuals. From his Mount Sinai, everything is clear and obvious. It's just that his voice is too faint to be heard in the valley.
The main culprit, in the world according to Finkelstein, is ''the Holocaust industry,'' made up of Israeli officials and fat lawyers, Jewish agents well placed in American political circles and ruthless Zionists determined to subjugate the Palestinians. Here he combines an old-hat 1960's view of Israel as the outpost of American imperialism with a novel variation on the anti-Semitic forgery, ''The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,'' which warned of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Now, however, the Jewish conspiracy is intended to ''shake down'' (his favorite phrase) such innocent entities as Swiss banks, German corporations and East European owners of looted Jewish property, all in order to consolidate Jewish power and influence without giving the real survivors of the genocide anything but empty rhetoric.
Nowhere does Finkelstein mention that the main beneficiaries of compensation for forced labor will be elderly gentile men and women living their last days in poverty in Eastern Europe, or that German scholars like Ulrich Herbert, hardly an employee of ''Jewish interests,'' have been at the forefront of the struggle to gain compensation from corporations that for decades refused to admit their enormous gains from slave and forced labor. From the author's perspective, this is simply a case of organized American Jewry ''lording it over those least able to defend themselves,'' such as, presumably, the Swiss banks it was ''plotting'' to boycott, and ''the United States and its allies'' from whom it ''finagled another $70 million.''
Thus have the great powers of the world capitulated to what The Times of London called the ''Holocash'' campaign in the United States, according to Finkelstein. He reserves special contempt for the Claims Conference, an umbrella of Jewish organizations that distributes reparations funds to survivors, and quotes approvingly the right-wing Israeli Parliament member Michael Kleiner, who called the conference ''a Judenrat, carrying on the Nazis' work in different ways.'' Indeed, as Finkelstein says in another context, les extrmes se touchent: in denouncing the ''shakedown'' of German corporations, this left-wing anti-Zionist uses precisely the kind of rhetoric that Menachem Begin employed when he spoke out against taking ''blood money'' during the right-wing riots against the restitution agreement with West Germany in the early 1950's, which almost toppled the Israeli government.
There is something sad in this warping of intelligence, and in this perversion of moral indignation. There is also something indecent about it, something juvenile, self-righteous, arrogant and stupid. As was shown in Peter Novick's far more balanced (though not entirely satisfactory) book, ''The Holocaust in American Life,'' the changing perception of the Nazi genocide of the Jews has also opened the way for a variety of exploiters and small-time opportunists. Yet to make this into an international Jewish conspiracy verges on paranoia and would serve anti-Semites around the world much better than any lawyer's exorbitant fees for ''shaking down'' a German industrialist.
Finkelstein speaks of the ''Holocaust industry'' as ''cloaking itself in the sanctimonious mantle of 'needy Holocaust victims.' ''Yet he cloaks himself in that very same mantle, while at the same time showing little sympathy for the feelings of the survivors and enormous zeal in exposing the ''reckless and ruthless abandon'' of the ''Holocaust industry,'' which he calls ''the main fomenter of anti-Semitism in Europe.'' By its ''blackmailing of Swiss bankers and German industrialists,'' as well as of ''starving Polish peasants,'' the ''Holocaust industry'' seeks endlessly to augment that pile of gold, or ''Holocaust booty,'' on which Jewish and Zionist leaders are now allegedly sitting. ''The Holocaust,'' Finkelstein concludes, is possibly ''the greatest robbery in the history of mankind.''
What I find so striking about ''The Holocaust Industry'' is that it is almost an exact copy of the arguments it seeks to expose. It is filled with precisely the kind of shrill hyperbole that Finkelstein rightly deplores in much of the current media hype over the Holocaust; it is brimming with the same indifference to historical facts, inner contradictions, strident politics and dubious contextualizations; and it oozes with the same smug sense of moral and intellectual superiority.
This book is, in a word, an ideological fanatic's view of other people's opportunism, by a writer so reckless and ruthless in his attacks that he is prepared to defend his own enemies, the bastions of Western capitalism, and to warn that ''The Holocaust'' will stir up an anti-Semitism whose significance he otherwise discounts. Like any conspiracy theory, it contains several grains of truth; and like any such theory, it is both irrational and insidious. Finkelstein can now be said to have founded a Holocaust industry of his own.

Omer Bartov's most recent book is ''Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity.''

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Catholics, Jews Unite To Attack Scholar's Latest

Goldhagen Stirring Ire With Article on Pius XII

By MARC PERELMAN

August 6, 2000

By OMER BARTOV