Pope Pius XII has often been criticized for his silence during the extermination of European Jewry during World War II. In his defense, some have alleged that the pope was doing a great deal to help the Jews but that his efforts were necessarily behind the scenes.

This meticulous and balanced book, a winner of the 2000 National Jewish Book Award, examines exactly what the pope, his advisers, and his assistants at the Vatican Secretariat of State did to help the Jews of Italy. It finds that they did very little. The book discusses prewar Vatican and Jesuit publications, uncovering a prevalence of anti-Jewish sentiment.

Vatican protests against Italian anti-Jewish laws were limited to measures affecting converts and Jews in mixed marriages with Catholics, as was help with emigration, and interventions by diplomats of the Holy See for Jews threatened with deportation were rare and only polite. Zuccotti finds no evidence of a papal directive to church institutions to shelter Jews, and much to suggest that the pope remained uninvolved. "A convincing analysis of a tragic history 402 pages,

 Yale Univ Pr 0300084870 / 9780300084870
Cumberland, Rhode Island, 

Price: 17.15 USD