Sub-project: „Baptized Jews in Romania“

The petitions – the researchers in the project "Asking the Pope for Help" at the University of Münster are working on – come from both baptized and non-baptized people of Jewish origin from numerous European countries. However, the sacrament of baptism did not offer protection from persecution during the Shoah – except in Romania. Drawing on hitherto unknown Vatican sources, the theologian Lorena König will write her dissertation at the Cluster of Excellence on Romania’s special position, analyzing the processes that protected numerous Jews who converted to the Catholic faith from being deported to an extermination camp. The three-year position is funded by the Cluster of Excellence Religion and Politics at the University of Münster.

König already wrote in her master’s thesis on the baptism of Romanian Jews during the Shoah, showing that the same racial laws prevailed in Romania as in many other countries occupied by the National Socialists, but that Andrea Cassulo, the local papal nuncio, used clever arguments to place baptized Jews under the protection of the Catholic Church. Besides files on this issue, the newly available files of the Vatican Apostolic Archive also contain numerouspetitions from Jews to the nuncio, correspondence with state and church authorities, and some reports from the nunciature to the Vatican.

In the current research project, König will first catalogue the relevantpetitions, and investigate what then happened to their authors in order to explore the room for manoeuvre available to the nuncio, as well as the networks that he had. These letters will also be published in the online edition of the project “Asking the Pope for Help”. The project will also reveal any distinctions that were made in Romania or in the Vatican itself between baptized and non-baptized people of Jewish origin. In addition, it will explore hitherto unknown material on the fundamental debate that flared up in the Holy Office, the supreme religious authority, regarding the requirement that Jews undergo a one-year period of preparation before baptism.

• Lorena König
• Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics”

Sub-project: "Brasilienaktion"

Hundreds of thousands of people persecuted as Jews were forced to flee Europe during the Nazi regime in order to escape persecution and deportation by the National Socialists. Many of them asked Pope Pius XII and the Vatican for help in leaving the country of residence. For some, there was hope of finding refuge in Brazil from 1940 onwards, as the country had provided the Holy See with 3,000 visas for baptized people of Jewish origin. As part of the sub-project "Asking the Pope for Help. Pope Pius XII and Baptized Jews in Romania and Brazil", Dr. Alessandro Grazi will now reconstruct the exact procedure for issuing visas and research the possibilities and limits of this so-called Brazil campaign. The research position, which will initially run for two years, is being funded by the Cluster of Excellence Religion and Politics at the University of Münster.

Born in Cento, Italy, the historian completed his doctorate in 2012 with a thesis entitled "Patria ed Affetti. Jewish Identity and Risorgimento Nationalism in the Oeuvres of Samuel Luzzatto, Isaac Reggio, and David Levi". After several research stays, including in Jerusalem and Amsterdam, he was a research associate for digital Jewish studies at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz from 2018 to 2023. His research focuses on modern Jewish cultural history, in particular Jewish intellectual history in 19th and 20th century Italy.

In the Brazil sub-project, Alessandro Grazi will spend the next two years using the files on the pontificate of Pius XII in the Vatican archives, which have been accessible since March 2020, to study a group that could not be properly classified anywhere as "baptized Jews", "Jewish Catholics", "Catholic Jews" or "non-Aryan Catholics", not only from the point of view of contemporaries. To this day, the group of Catholics of Jewish origin and the issue of their affiliation has been massively underrepresented in research. On the basis of the new sources, a differentiated reconstruction is possible for the first time, which not only focuses on the individual fates of the petitioners, but also allows statements to be made about how Pius XII and the Roman Curia dealt with Catholics of Jewish origin.

• Dr. Alessandro Grazi
• Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics”