Sacred Betrayal: Church’s role in murder of 74,000 French Jews during Holocaust

Sacred Betrayal: How the French Catholic Church Broke Its Pledge to Protect Jews During the Holocaust

Author: Aliza Luft

ISBN-13: 978-0674251045

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Guideline Price: £29.95; 424pp

Recrimination for France’s role in the murder of an estimated 74,000 of its Jews during the Holocaust can be doled out to several sectors of wartime society. The Catholic Church, though by no means the chief culprit, bears its own responsibility, as Aliza Luft masterfully outlines in this expansive and impressively documented history.

The French church during the turbulent 1930s had been steadfast in its defence of the Jews against a resurgent anti-Semitism, particularly under the leadership of the Archbishop of Paris Jean Verdier, but, just as the church as a whole treated anti-Semitism with less urgency once Pius XII succeeded Pius XI, the French hierarchy was much more equivocal on the matter after Verdier died just two months before the Wehrmacht rolled over the Maginot Line.

Tragically, France’s Jewish leaders were slow to realise this, and put too much store in the cardinals to intercede on their behalf to blunt the effects of Vichy’s notorious Jewish Statutes and slow down deportations.

When the church finally appeared to stand up at the height of deportations in August 1942, it all of a sudden went silent again. This inaction had its roots in the church’s support for the Vichy regime, which was driven by anti-communism, the opportunity to roll back the 1905 separation of church and state, a meekness in the face of power (as was the case with Archbishop of Lyon Pierre Gerlier) and, in some cases, such as Verdier’s successor, Alfred Baudrillart, ideological anti-Semitism.

Having emphasised their service to la patrie, particularly military service, ever since the Dreyfus case, France’s Jews found they were far more committed to the country’s republican values than the Catholic Church was. The Jewish elite, however, also erred with a dismaying lack of solidarity with poor immigrant Jews who were in even greater danger than they were.

While the hierarchy was found wanting, ordinary clergy (and their Protestant counterparts) stood up, accomplishing heroic clandestine work to protect the Jews in their midst. Dozens paid with their lives for what they did. Luft, a sociologist by profession, is adept at forensically examining the processes by which French Catholics succeeded or failed in their civic duty. She has produced a history that, while being mainly of interest to the specialist, is likely to be regarded as a landmark text.