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Hitler’s favorite composer Richard Wagner found early inspiration in a Jewish artist’s music
BAYREUTH, GERMANY — Midway through the second act of the Bayreuth Festival’s new production of Rienzi, a miniature Richard Wagner takes command of the Festspielhaus. A child painted gold and wearing the composer’s familiar velvet cap and facial hair bursts onstage and presides over a manic pageant of the ten operas that have made up Bayreuth’s repertoire for the past 150 years. Minnesingers and Meistersingers collide; mythical and medieval heroes jostle for position; the medieval Wartburg castle of Tannhäuser turns into the boxy East German automobile that shared its name. The whole sequence, chaotic yet tightly choreographed, has a high-camp exuberance.
Over the past decades, Bayreuth has become surprisingly good at critiquing and even poking fun at itself. The Norwegian director Stefan Herheim’s landmark 2008 Parsifal turned Wagner’s mystical final opera into a galloping history of Germany and the festival that had grown up around it. Nine years later, Barrie Kosky, the first Jewish director to work on the Green Hill, set Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg partly inside Wagner’s own home and partly in the courtroom of the Nuremberg trials.
Founded by Wagner in 1876 as the ideal theater for his own works, Bayreuth is marking its 150th anniversary this summer with its very first staging of Rienzi. The festival had originally hoped to also perform its full repertoire of canonical Wagner works. Financial limitations forced it to abandon that plan.
Rienzi was Wagner’s third completed opera and his first great success when it premiered in Dresden in 1842, yet it belongs to the period of his career that Bayreuth has traditionally treated as the composer’s prehistory. The opera, a rarity nowadays, also feeds directly into several histories that the festival has spent decades learning how to discuss: Wagner’s enormous artistic debt to the German-Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer; Wagner’s rabid antisemitism; Adolf Hitler’s fascination with Wagner; and the Wagner family’s own embrace of German nationalism and Nazism.
Rienzi, der letzte der Tribunen (Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes) takes its story from an 1835 historical novel by the English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Its hero, Cola di Rienzo, was a 14th-century Roman notary and man of letters who tried to break the power of the city’s feuding aristocratic families and establish a republican government. During Wagner’s lifetime, Rienzi remained his most popular opera.
This summer on the Green Hill, the sparkling and rousingly triumphant music of Rienzi itself kept pointing away from Bayreuth and toward Paris. Giacomo Meyerbeer, born Jakob Liebmann Meyer Beer into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin in 1791, became the dominant composer of French grand opéra and one of the most internationally successful musicians of the 19th century. His Robert le diable and Les Huguenots showed what opera could achieve when intimate drama, huge public scenes, chorus, orchestra and stage technology were coordinated on an unprecedented scale. There is an old joke that Rienzi is Meyerbeer’s best opera. The young Wagner would not necessarily have taken that as an insult.
In 1837, the 24-year-old Wagner wrote to Meyerbeer that the older composer’s works had given his ideas about dramatic music a “new direction.” He praised Meyerbeer for mastering the strengths of the Italian and French schools and combining them into an art with international reach. “Goethe is dead — but he was no musician; there is nobody left but you,” Wagner wrote Meyerbeer in 1840. When the young composer arrived in Paris poor, obscure and desperately ambitious, Meyerbeer supported him, wrote recommendations on his behalf and praised music from Rienzi. In one letter, Wagner told Meyerbeer that he wept when he thought of “the man who is everything to me” and that working and striving “for you, and you alone” gave meaning to his efforts.
The musical indebtedness ran deeper than the patronage. Wagner later acknowledged that grand opéra, with its huge scenic and musical resources, had been his model for Rienzi. His ambition, he wrote, was “not simply to imitate it” but to surpass it through an extraordinary expenditure of means: five acts, five large finales, hymns, processions and what he called the “musical clash of arms.” Those techniques did not disappear when Wagner later repudiated grand opéra. He absorbed and transformed them in “mature” works like Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and Götterdämmerung, the final installment of the Ring cycle, which might be said to be the grand opéra par excellence.
That artistic debt increasingly tormented him. When Robert Schumann remarked in 1843 that Der fliegende Holländer “smacked of Meyerbeer,” Wagner responded with extraordinary defensiveness, insisting that the faintest Meyerbeerian odor would threaten his creative identity while conceding in the same letter that he remained personally indebted to the elder composer. After an attempt to staged Rienzi in Berlin in 1847 ran aground, Wagner’s resentment acquired a paranoid cast: he persuaded himself that the Jewish composer exercised secret control over the press and court circles that had disappointed him, despite the considerable evidence of Meyerbeer’s efforts to assist him.
The anxiety Wagner seemed to feel about Meyerbeer’s influence never fully disappeared. In 1872, eight years after Meyerbeer’s death, Wagner’s wife Cosima recorded a dream in which her husband was “walking arm in arm with Meyerbeer” and Meyerbeer had “smoothed for him the paths to fame.” She immediately connected it with another dream that repeatedly troubled Wagner: Money due to him had failed to arrive and he was unable to pay his rent.
Wagner’s antisemitism cannot be reduced to wounded professional vanity. It drew on larger currents of German nationalism and anti-Jewish thought and became, over the ensuing decades, one of the ugliest and most persistent elements in his worldview. Meyerbeer nevertheless became central to how Wagner articulated it. The cosmopolitan art Wagner had once admired could now be recoded as rootless; theatrical brilliance became superficiality; international success became commercial calculation. In the infamous 1850 essay “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (“Judaism in Music”), Wagner denied Jews the capacity for authentic artistic creation. In “Oper und Drama” (“Opera and Drama”), Meyerbeer became his supreme example of a composer who manufactured “effects without causes.”
The accusation is comically revealing when heard alongside Rienzi, one of the most unabashedly effect-hungry scores ever composed, especially in Bayreuth’s gargantuan performing version. This points to why Rienzi sits so uneasily inside the later Wagner myth: The prophet of a regenerated German art first made his name with a gigantic cosmopolitan entertainment modeled on a genre perfected in Paris by a Jewish composer.
Rienzi’s most consequential 20th-century admirer was Adolf Hitler. August Kubizek, a boyhood friend of Hitler’s, claimed in his memoir that Hitler emerged from a performance of Rienzi in 1905 in a state of near ecstasy and later told him, “In that hour it began,” retrospectively lending the performance in Linz a prophetic quality. What had begun that evening was a political vocation modeled on the populist tribune who rose from obscurity by promising national renewal.
Early on, Hitler adopted Rienzi’s rousing overture for his political meetings in Munich; it later became a ritual element of the Nazi Party rallies at Nuremberg. For his 50th birthday in 1939, Hitler received Wagner’s autographed manuscript of Rienzi. Now lost, it was presumably in the Führerbunker when Hitler committed suicide to escape capture from the advancing Soviet troops.
I don’t think one need describe any of this as an “abuse” of Wagner. Music does not arrive with instructions for use. The Nazi embrace of Rienzi belongs to the opera’s reception history just as Meyerbeer belongs to its compositional history. Hitler recognized something in Rienzi’s transformation of political aspiration into mass spectacle that answered to his own imagination. That does not make Wagner responsible for Hitler; nor does it require us to pretend that the attraction was based on a misunderstanding.
The connection between the Führer and the Wagner Festival, however, is a different story altogether. After Wagner’s death in 1883, his widow Cosima helped turn the festival into a center of völkisch nationalism and antisemitism. Winifred Wagner, the composer’s English-born daughter-in-law, directed the festival from 1930 to 1944 and became one of Hitler’s closest friends. The relationship between Nazism and Bayreuth was not a hostile takeover of an innocent artistic institution. As I wrote in these pages in 2013, Bayreuth supported Hitler before Hitler supported Bayreuth.
After World War II, the festival answered this inheritance principally through aesthetics. When Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner — the composer’s grandsons — reopened Bayreuth in 1951, Wieland’s stripped-down, abstract productions decisively broke with the representational style associated with the Nazi period. But the brothers also asked visitors to refrain from political discussion on the Festival Hill: “Here, art is what counts.”
The morning of this year’s Rienzi premiere, the German-Jewish public intellectual Michel Friedman stood inside the Festspielhaus and quoted that appeal in a speech devoted to Wagner’s antisemitism and Bayreuth’s history.
Before Friedman spoke, the Russian-Jewish maestro Semyon Bychkov conducted Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll” alongside chamber music by Gustav Mahler and Pavel Haas, the Czech Jewish composer murdered at Auschwitz. The festival has also made the open-air Silenced Voices memorial to Jewish artists excluded and persecuted at Bayreuth a permanent feature of the Green Hill. (First unveiled in 2012, it could definitely use a facelift.)
Bayreuth has approached this outlier with the characteristic fussiness of an institution that considers itself the standard bearer of Wagner. There is no definitive Rienzi and so the festival has assembled its own new performing version from the earliest available materials and later revisions. The result contains roughly four hours of music inside an evening that runs six hours with its two long intervals. Rienzi resembles its successors in sheer length, if in nothing else.
The last time I saw a live Rienzi was 16 years ago at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Back then, the director Philipp Stölzl compressed the opera to about three hours and presented Rienzi’s rise and fall as an explicit Hitler-Mussolini parable. As a commentary on the work’s reception history, it was anything but subtle.
Bayreuth’s production, directed by Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka, is less literal but also less involving. Their Rome is a gray contemporary or near-future political landscape dominated by election campaigns, polling, smartphones and screens. The production had a strong visual grammar and some remarkably assured tableaux (including the riotous act two ballet), but it didn’t seem particularly interested in telling a story.
Virtually nobody at Bayreuth or anywhere else can be expected to know the intricacies of this plot in advance, which made the festival’s refusal to provide surtitles unusually exasperating. With Tristan und Isolde or Parsifal, performed before an audience that often knows the texts intimately, dispensing with projected translations can enhance concentration. But Rienzi is an obscure opera being performed in an unfamiliar version, and the staging itself rarely clarified the action. Eventually I stopped worrying about it. Another chorus arrived, another political faction reversed itself, another steely declaration climbed toward a climax. Rienzi is prodigiously good at generating excitement and considerably less good at persuading you that one excitement necessarily leads to the next.
In interviews, Nathalie Stutzmann, the French conductor helming the production, has stressed Rienzi’s affinities with Bellini and the Italian bel canto tradition. The Festival Orchestra sounded phenomenal: brilliant without becoming merely blaring and surprisingly lyrical beneath all the military and ceremonial pomp.
The Festival Chorus, which bears much of the opera’s weight, produced one immense wave of sound after another. The Austrian heldentenor Andreas Schager sounded as though he were born to sing Rienzi, which is an insane thing to say about anyone. His seemingly inexhaustible voice and effortless buoyancy suited the character’s mixture of exhortation, certitude and growing desperation.
Their audience responded with the decorum of a mausoleum. This audience can sit through a climax that would bring almost any Italian or French opera house to its feet with the stillness of a congregation awaiting further instructions. (Whenever I tentatively tried to applaud an aria in the silence that followed a full cadence, I was immediately shushed.)
No one needs Rienzi to become a permanent Bayreuth fixture. 150 years since the first Bayreuth Festival, it’s enough that it has punched a hole in the repertory. The Salzburg Easter Festival, which is currently building a new Ring with Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic, plans to interrupt Wagner in 2028 with Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. Bayreuth might profit from similar encounters: With Meyerbeer and the other composers who fed Wagner’s imagination, or perhaps with composers whose music later found itself excluded from the German tradition in the name of ideas that flourished on the Green Hill. The sepulchral Festspielhaus could stand a little “luft von anderem Planeten” (“air from other planets”), to quote a Stefan George poem that Schoenberg set to music.
Listening to Rienzi at Bayreuth makes audible something the Wagner cult spent generations trying not to hear. Beneath the composer who would announce a new German art stands the cosmopolitan operatic world he learned from; behind the antisemite who made Meyerbeer a symbol of artistic falseness stands the desperate young composer who begged for Meyerbeer’s help and absorbed his example. 150 years after Bayreuth opened, their new Rienzi reminds us that Meyerbeer was inside Wagner’s music all along.
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Sen. Markey, a progressive critic of Israel, projected to win Massachusetts Democratic primary in a landslide
(JTA) — Massachusetts progressive Sen. Ed Markey, a sharp critic of Israel, is projected to beat the more moderate Rep. Seth Moulton by a wide margin on Tuesday, securing the Democratic nomination for the upcoming U.S. Senate race.
The Associated Press called the race just a half hour after polls closed, at 8:31pm, when Markey had secured 75.9% of votes to Moulton’s 24.1%, with 3% of ballots tallied.
“Tonight is a testament to the power of the progressive movement,” Markey said on Tuesday night. “It is a progressive movement fueled by young people demanding more from their leaders.”
Noting that he spoke to Moulton prior to taking the stage, Markey added that he looks forward to working together “to build a better future for everyone.”
Moulton, meanwhile, told his supporters that he had “called Sen. Markey to congratulate him on his victory tonight.” He conveyed his “full support” for his opponent as the Democratic nominee, stressing that they “must stand united this November to protect our democracy and defeat Donald Trump.”
Markey, 80, began serving in the U.S. House of Representatives 50 years ago and remained there until he was elected to fill the Senate seat of John Kerry, who was appointed U.S. Secretary of State in 2013. During Markey’s time in the House, he was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and in the Senate, he has supported multiple resolutions aimed at cutting military aid and munitions sales to Israel.
Moulton, 47, was born two years after Markey arrived on Capitol Hill. He has been serving in the U.S. House since 2015 and has opposed both the Democratic socialist agenda and the aging establishment, instead calling for “new energy, new ideas and leaders willing to put people over politics.”
“We ran a race that stood on principle, that wasn’t just about politics as usual, and that elevated the voices of Massachusetts citizens who have been left behind by the status quo in Washington,” Moulton said on Tuesday. “Challenging the establishment and calling for a new generation of leadership isn’t easy, but it is necessary,” he added.
But many political analysts have suggested that Moulton’s predominant focus on his youth and his opponent’s age may have been his primary downfall. Although in the weeks leading up the primary, polls had projected Markey’s win, the two candidates had been running neck-and-neck in the preceding months.
A New York Times piece recently described Moulton as a “rebel without a cause” who drifted with “the political winds” and focused on platforms he was fighting against rather than those he was supporting. In a case relevant to the American Jews, he declared in October that he was “returning AIPAC donations” and refusing new funds from the pro-Israel lobby.
“In recent years AIPAC has aligned itself too closely with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government,” Moulton posted at the time. “I’m a friend of Israel, but not of its current government.”
Track AIPAC, a group that documents political spending by pro-Israel lobbies, reported that such PACs have spent about $101,500 on Moulton over his career — a relatively modest amount for a six-term congressman.
“It is clearly the safe thing to do, if you are running for a nomination in the Democratic Party, to aggressively distance yourself from Israel,” Jeff Robbins, a Boston-based attorney and former Senate investigative counsel, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Robbins, who also served as delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission under President Bill Clinton, described the shift as “reflective of the reality that we have seen play out in spades over the last year.”
That situation involves Democratic candidates “running for the hills about AIPAC and treating it as a boogeyman,” added Robbins, who began organizing pro-Israel rallies in in 2012, while chairing the New England Board of the Anti-Defamation League.
“If you want to have a prayer of being elected in a Democratic primary in this country, you had better be able to say, ‘I don’t take money from AIPAC. In fact, I never heard of it before,’” he added.
On Tuesday night, however, neither candidate referred directly to AIPAC. Moulton spoke only briefly, while Markey primarily focused on domestic issues but did quickly mention the Middle East.
“We need to end the war in Iran, and stop the bombing in Gaza,” Markey said. “We need to slash the Pentagon budget.”
The senator stressed the need to protect the LGBTQ+ community and to prioritize affordability goals, such as achieving “a future with no copays, no surprise bills, no premiums, no deductibles, a future with Medicare for all.”
“Donald Trump is attacking the futures, the dreams, of every boy and every girl on every porch all across this country, cutting education, cutting healthcare, cutting protections against discrimination,” the senator said. “We are not backing down in Massachusetts: not now, not ever.”
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Queen Esther would want Jews to save humanity at their own expense, said Michigan’s attorney general. Would she?
Queen Esther has been name-checked not once, but twice in the last week by sitting politicians in New York and Michigan in addresses to Jewish constituents. The first reference passed largely without notice. The second caused a national Jewish uproar.
Promising better protections for the Jews of New York, Governor Kathy Hochul said Friday night during Shabbat services at Central Synagogue that she was willing to “be your Esther, every time you need me.” A bit ironic as Hochul, who is Catholic, invoked the story of a Jew in disguise, but the metaphor tracked: a leader going to bat for a vulnerable Jewish community. Central had been the site of an attack on a congregant and security guard two weeks prior.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel took a different tack — and paid a price. Nessel, who is Jewish, has voiced concerns about antisemitism in her party. But in a speech Sunday to Jewish Democrats, Nessel suggested they follow Esther’s path and “sacrifice the comfort, safety and security and even the very future of our own people in exchange for the opportunity to save the rest of humanity.”
“What good is defending the historic homeland of our ancestors and demanding that candidates acknowledge its right to exist,” Nessel reportedly said, “if the planet upon which it rests is no longer inhabitable?”
What followed was a borderline Ahaseurus-ian backlash as Jews around the country decried Nessel’s interpretation of the Megillah. Writing in the conservative publication Commentary, Seth Mandel said Nessel had “counseled servitude and suicidality.” Ron Halber, chief executive of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, called Nessel “an embarrassment.”
The comparison came as Michigan’s Jewish Democrats, including Nessel, navigate a tenuous political reality in the swing state following the party’s nomination of Abdul El-Sayed, a vocal critic of Israel, for Senate. Nessel had hoped both to reassure Jewish voters and rally their support in a meeting where El-Sayed also apologized for earlier comments about an attack on a Michigan synagogue.
Nessel made waves earlier last month when she said she would skip the state’s Democratic convention out of concern for her safety. Her comments Saturday seemed to cast those remarks in a new light: to many who read them, Nessel seemed to be saying that Jewish people should learn to hide, rather than rise to the occasion. (Nessel’s office did not respond to an inquiry Tuesday.)
That’s certainly not the story of the Megillah. For the uninitiated (or just forgetful): With the Jewish people in imminent danger, Queen Esther boldly (but carefully) reveals to the king her identity as a Jew, underscoring that the viceroy’s known genocidal plotting in fact affected her. As she does so, Esther repeatedly imperils herself — a standard some were eager to point out Nessel herself missed by sitting out the convention.
It’s easy to point to Nessel’s reading as an inversion of a story that seems to insist on a particularist reading. Or one could admire an ambitious attempt at universalizing the text: Maybe Nessel was saying that Esther put the needs of a nation — the Jewish nation — above her own safety, knowing that she could have lived the rest of her life in secret. The United States is the Jewish people in this analogy; Jewish Democrats, by subjugating their immediate security, are Esther. (Haman, the story’s villain, is the spectre of Republican control.)
Or maybe the Purim lesson Nessel was trying to invoke was even simpler: With great power — as Michigan’s Jewish Democrats may have in a close race — comes great responsibility. That’s Spiderman, but also Esther’s relative Mordechai, who famously helps her work up the nerve by suggesting her ability to intervene could be the very reason she was chosen for royalty in the first place.
Esther is often the subject of pop-culture fascination: 17th-century Dutch painters were obsessed, for example, including non-Jewish ones. Contemporary Christian playwrights seem to be, too, as do red-state school curriculums. Evangelicals once compared Trump to Esther — a fearless hero who would dismantle the deep state — and former Vice President Kamala Harris invoked Esther on the campaign trail in 2024.
The common thread in this history, more than anything else, is Esther’s reinvention to suit a self-serving political narrative. For the Dutch — at the time newly liberated from Spanish empire — Esther represented resilience in the face of persecution; for the Christian right, she is a flawed but valorous normie who fulfills a holy mission. For Hochul and Harris (and maybe Nessel, too), she’s a woman who meets the moment.
She’s also the title character of a helluva story — and a familiar one — which makes her as eminently useful to people today as she was to her famously insecure husband in the Megillah. If one thing seems assured, it’s that Esther will continue to feature in our own storytelling — and that she will continue to change with the times.
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She was elected the first Jewish president of the Catholic Biblical Association. Then came the hate.
When Amy-Jill Levine was elected president of the Catholic Biblical Association earlier this month, she faced vicious backlash.
Those who opposed her election couldn’t exactly point to a lack of qualifications. Levine has written dozens of books on the New Testament, taught a New Testament course at the prestigious Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, served on the editorial board of Catholic Biblical Quarterly and spoken privately with Pope Francis three times.
Instead, her critics fixated on one trait they apparently consider disqualifying: She’s Jewish.
“Your Zionist ass doesn’t belong in our religion. Keep yourself to the Talmud and keep eating babies. STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM CHRISTIANITY,” someone wrote in an email to Levine, which she shared with the Forward.
Levine’s Facebook page was bombarded with so much hate that she asked her daughter to moderate the comments. Online critics called Levine “anti-Christian,” denounced her as “Zionist,” and attacked her efforts to push back against antisemitic interpretations of the Bible.
On its face, a Jew at the helm of a professional association devoted to the study of Christian scripture might seem odd. After all, the Catholic Bible Association, unlike some other academic associations for the study of scripture, promotes study of the Bible “within a context of faith,” and most of the association’s presidents in its 90-year history have been priests. Levine attends an Orthodox Jewish synagogue.
Some more even-keeled critics of Levine’s presidency focused on this argument. “At some point, we have to ask: what is the word ‘Catholic’ actually doing?” Mark Lambert, co-host of the podcast Catholic Unscripted, posted to X.
Levine, meanwhile, argues that the Catholic Biblical Association is a professional society, not a church. People of all faiths are eligible for membership, as long as they hold an advanced degree in biblical studies.
“An academic society, like a hospital, museum or university, is not the same thing as being a member of the clergy,” Levine wrote in an email to the Forward.
In fact, while Levine is the first Jewish president of the Catholic Biblical Association, she is not the first non-Catholic. Several Protestants have served in the role, according to chair of the executive board Gregory Sterling.
Levine was nominated by a committee and then ran unopposed for the presidency, Sterling said. It is an unpaid, one-year position.
“She was not elected because she is Jewish, but because she is an exceptional scholar and has played a very important role in Catholic-Jewish dialogue,” Sterling and the association’s executive director, Archie Wright, wrote in a joint statement. “The vitriol of some of the comments only reinforces the need to address the problem of Anti-Semitism.”
Several Catholic clergy also wrote letters of support for Levine amid the pushback.
Levine, for her part, said she has “no interest in undermining the Church.” The 70-year-old grew up in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, in a predominantly Portuguese Roman Catholic neighborhood, where she would occasionally go to Mass with her friends.
She preferred Mass to synagogue because “there were snacks, except you got the snacks in the church during the service, and you got the snacks in synagogue after the service,” she joked in an August interview on Nashville Public Radio.
Levine recalled that when she was 7 years old, a classmate told her she had killed Jesus — an accusation the elementary schooler had picked up from her priest. Levine, confused, went to her mother, who assured her that “God was doing just fine.”
That incident inspired Levine to attend Catholic catechism classes as a child, in addition to Hebrew School.
She went on to get a PhD in religion from Duke University and teach at Vanderbilt University as a professor of both the New Testament and Jewish Studies. Much of her scholarly work revolves around the Jewish context of Jesus and dispelling what she sees as antisemitic misinterpretations of the Bible.
“We do not need to make Judaism look bad in order to make Jesus look good,” Levine posted on Facebook after she was elected.
Catholic-Jewish relations
Sixty years ago, Levine’s election “would have been an astonishing thought,” said Philip Cunningham, director of the Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.
Though the Catholic church has a long history of antisemitism— including violent conversion efforts and teaching the theological belief that Jews were condemned by God — that has all changed in recent decades.
In the 1960s, Pope John XXIII took on the task of modernizing the Church, convening the Second Vatican Council to produce a theological document reconsidering many teachings and practices. The resulting document, often referred to as Vatican II, is perhaps most famous for allowing priests to host Mass in the local vernacular language of their parish instead of Latin. But it also changed Catholicism’s teachings about Jews.
Nostra Aetate, the section of Vatican II most famously concerned with Jews, shifted Catholic teachings about other religions enormously; while still maintaining that the Catholic Church is the “one true religion,” it also affirmed that other religions contain a “ray of truth,” a massive theological shift from the belief that any non-Catholic religion was false or even harmful.
Nostra Aetate spends significant time on Jews, specifically, including rejecting the belief that Jews should be held collectively responsible for killing Jesus. The document calls out antisemitism both theologically and politically.
“What happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today,” it reads. “The Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.”
Since Vatican II, popes have continued to advance dialogue with Jews, and with members of other religions. And the Church has forcefully rejected antisemitism, continuing to change its teachings on Judaism and Jewishness. That includes removing the term “perfidious Jews” from a Good Friday prayer, updating Catholic school classes on Judaism and even releasing statements acknowledging the legitimacy of Judaism alongside Christianity, placing Jews into a special and elevated relationship with the Church.
“The council set in motion a process of rapprochement between Jews and Catholics that took root particularly effectively in the United States, because the world’s largest Jewish diaspora community lives here and frequently alongside Catholics in cities and suburbs,” Cunningham said.
Levine, too, highlighted the importance of Nostra Aetate to her career, writing in an email that the document’s acceptance of Jews “opened the door for me to work in New Testament studies.”
But not all Catholics embraced the teachings of Vatican II. A diffuse movement often referred to as traditionalist Catholics, or tradcaths, felt that the efforts toward modernization had gone too far. Some tradcath groups simply sought to preserve the rituals of Latin Mass.
Others, however, including the recently excommunicated Society of Saint Pius X, or SSPX, take issue with the council’s teachings, believing that acknowledging the freedom and legitimacy of other religions takes away from the centrality of the Catholic Church’s teachings. In short, if the Catholic Church’s teachings are true, they argue, then no other religion can be legitimate.
The French-language account of SPPX posted to X, calling Levine an “objectively scandalous choice” and denouncing her “relativist interpretation of the texts condemning homosexuality,” as well as the fact that “a person who refuses to recognize Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is placed at the head of an institution that claims to be Catholic.”
Despite the newer Catholic teachings about Judaism, some tradcath groups, as well as individual Catholic influencers such as Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens and Carrie Prejean Boller, have been endorsing antisemitic beliefs including supersessionism and deicide, as well as conspiracy theories about Jewish devil worship or government control. Though the Vatican has chastised these figures and repudiated their stances, they have continued to spread antisemitic dogma, including the belief that Jews hate and seek to oppress Christians and that Kabbalah endorses pedophilia. Many also endorse Christian nationalism, which the Vatican opposes.
This antisemitic subgroup within Catholicism is relatively small, but extremely visible thanks to influencers like Fuentes and Owens with millions of followers, and their understanding of Catholicism spreads to people both inside and outside the church. Their antisemitic version of Catholic ideology, as well as the conspiracy theories they spread, can be seen in some of the hate emails Levine received, such as references to eating babies, a version of the age-old blood libel that Jews used Christian children’s blood to make matzo.
Still, while the antisemitic fringe of the Catholic church is loud, the institutions are stalwart in their support for Vatican II’s acceptance of Judaism.
Levine’s election is an indication “that the changes that Vatican II sought to inspire have been happening,” Cunningham said. “That does not mean that all the issues between Jews and Catholics have been resolved — but at least amongst the much of the leadership in the Catholic community, the old stereotypes and caricatures are recognized for what they are.”
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