Language:
English
Year of publication:
2024
Titel der Quelle:
Antisemitism Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
8,1 (2024) 63-116
Keywords:
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Catholic Church
;
Christian converts from Judaism Legal status, laws, etc. 20th century
;
History
Abstract:
Not 3,000, but 300,000 visas were required to comply with all requests for emigration, Angelo Dell’Acqua, a member of the Roman Curia, said summarizing the so-called Brazilian Visa Project in 1940. Many people persecuted as Jews sought refuge in South America; thousands of them asked the pope and the Roman Curia for help with their emigration. The Brazilian government granted 3,000 visas on a singular basis. The new sources made accessible by the opening of the archival holdings pertaining to the pontificate of Pius XII allow us to reconstruct these cases in a detailed manner. Based on thousands of petitions written by Jewish people (which shall be published in a critical online edition at http://www.askingthepopeforhelp.de) as well as internal regulations, here analyzed for the first time, the inner-curial decision-making process is documented as a hermeneutic process reconstructing the fate of individuals, on the one hand, and providing answers to overarching questions on the other. The influence of antisemitic stereotypes about Jews and the behavior of the pope and the Curia during the Shoah are discussed. The focus of this article is on Catholics of Jewish origin, and on the question of their belonging to the Church, a subject that has been entirely underrepresented in research until today.
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