On December 16, 1938, the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain delivered the following remarks over WNYC (2:30 - 3:00 PM) under the auspices of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ). Maritain's radio talk came just two days after a similar address to the Cosmopolitan Club in New York and were taken from his forthcoming book, A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question.

Anti-Semitism was very much in the news at the time. WNYC aired Maritain’s talk only a few weeks after Father Charles Coughlin had broadcast particularly virulent anti-Semitic talks nationally from WJR in Detroit, which in turn followed the series of pogroms in Germany known as Kristallnacht.

The text of Maritain's WNYC broadcast remarks below were originally printed by the Leftist magazine New Masses the following May. But only ten days later, the contemporary Catholic magazine Commonweal claimed that New Masses had removed some of Maritain's disparaging references to communism and the Soviet Union, rhetorically pondering if the omission was due to space or ideological bias.[2]  We have, however, included two paragraphs of Maritain's radio address (in brackets) not found in New Masses but published in the January 1939 edition of The Catholic Worker. [3]

Display ad in The Tablet for Maritain's talk at the Cosmopolitan Club.

(WNYC Archive Collections)

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Never before in the history of the world were the Jews persecuted so univer­sally; and never has persecution at­tacked, as today, both Jews and Christians.

It is in Germany that the spectacle is most tragic. Everyone recalls the events echoed in the press of the world; but what the public knows less well is the depths of wickedness and contempt for the human person reached on the one side, and the sorrow and agony reached on the other.

As to the anti-Semitic excesses of the fall of 1938 in Germany, the barbarity rose there to such a degree of cynicism that even in an age accustomed to the worst there came an explosion of general indignation. Nowhere was this explosion stronger than in the United States; that is an honor to this country.

The energetic American protest seems to have curbed the most savage plans formed by the racist persecution.  It is fitting to hail the moves made by the United States and the efforts of civilized countries to come to the aid of the German Jews, to procure as rap­idly as possible the emigration of the greatest possible number, and to put on an interna­tional basis the question of the Jewish mi­nority in totalitarian countries.

FORMS OF  PERSECUTION

The historic age in which we live is a period of accumulated difficulties for the Jew­ish people. In the economic field the renun­ciation of free competition, the rise of autar­chical and state capitalist regimes, deals a body blow to Jewish economic pursuits. Recently published studies of the economic situation of world Jewry indicate the growing pauperiza­tion of the Jewish masses.

In the political and moral fields, the de­velopment of various types of totalitarianism, all of which regard the non-conformist as a biological enemy of the secular community, menaces the natural attachment of the Jews to independence and liberty.

In the spiritual field, the upsurge of un­precedentedly ferocious forms of paganism sig­nifies an inevitable conflict, already begun, with that people who, surrounded by the pagans of another age, knew how to pay heroic tribute to the sanctity of the personal and transcendent God.

In Germany the Hitler propaganda machine makes systematic use of the Protocols of Zion; you know that this is the most impudent of forgeries, as has been proved by all those who have seriously studied the question, and recently by the prominent Jesuit Father Pierre Charles. If there remain orators and pub­licists who still dare to call upon this forgery to spread anti-Semitic legends, one must believe that they have lost respect for their own intelligence and that of those who listen to them.

To charge the Jews with the sins of Bol­shevism, to identify Judaism and Communism, is a classic theme of Hitlerite propaganda, which sometimes throws in Catholicism for good measure. The theme is echoed with ad­mirable discipline by the anti-Semites of all lands.

[I do not believe that in general the Jewish spirit, which the same mighty brains reproach with bearing and anarchic fever for liberty easily adapts itself to Communist conformism. What is true is that in some countries a section of Jewish youth may find itself driven to revolutionary extremism by the force of persecution. Those primarily responsible, in such cases, are those who make their life unbearable.]

[Thus in a general way, those primarily responsible for supreme disorder, Jews and non-Jews, who, uniformly preferring injustice to disorder, base order on a fundamental, though at first concealed, disorder, thus offending the very principle of order and the author of all nature.] 

 ESCAPE FROM  TRUTH

We, as much or more than the anti-Semites whose fury generally vents itself only on poor Jews, detest the hegemony of banks and finance, whether Jewish or non-Jewish and no less the rule of money in any form.  And here it is the materialistic structure and spirit of the modern world which horrifies us, no matter who the individuals, Jews or non-Jews, who find themselves, generally without per­sonal fault, involved in this inhuman  struc­ture. We know, moreover, that the great mass of Jews is made up neither of bankers nor of financiers, but of a population struggling against every form of urban poverty.

We do not underestimate the gravity of the great economic difficulties of our epoch and of the general economic crisis of civili­zation. We say that it is not by hounding the Jews but by transforming the economic and social structures, which are the real cause of those difficulties and of that crisis, that we can effectively remedy them. Anti-Semitism diverts men from the real tasks confronting them.  It diverts them from the true causes of their woes-which lie simultaneously in our egoistic and hypocritical hearts and in the so­cial structures causally interrelated to our moral wretchedness; anti-Semitism diverts men from the true causes of their sufferings to throw them against an innocent multitude, like a worthless crew which, instead of combating the tempest, would throw overboard some of their companions, until finally, they all are at­ tempting to choke each other and set fire to the vessel on which humanity, lost in dreams, has taken passage.

If we now turn more particularly toward the Christians, who are themselves grafted onto the olive tree of Israel, they must look on the men involved in the Jewish tragedy with a brotherly eye and, as the apostle Paul teaches them, not without trembling for them­ selves. It is certainly possible for Christians to be anti-Semites since one observes the phe­nomenon frequently enough. But it is pos­sible for them only when they obey the spirit of the world rather than the spirit of Chris­tianity. He is our fellow creature, this wounded Jew lying half-dead on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho.

Strangely enough, certain  Christians are heard to say, "Has the world been moved by the massacre of so many Christians in Rus­sia, in Spain, and Mexico? We will be stirred by the Jewish persecutions when the world will be stirred by the sufferings of our own." When I hear this manner of reasoning, I wonder how it is that from one day to the next, and without even telling me anything about it, my religion has been changed. Does the Gospel teach that if a brother has sinned against me, by omission or otherwise, it is justifiable to sin against him in the same fash­ion? Jesus said: "These things you ought to have done, and not to leave those undone." Now it is said: "Because these things have been left undone, you ought not to do those." Because here certain people have been lacking in justice and in love, others must be simi­larly deficient.

It is well enough known that the Popes repeatedly defended the Jews, notably against the absurd charge of ritual murder, and that, all in all, the Jews were generally less unhappy and less badly treated in the papal states than elsewhere.

Today anti-Semitism is no longer one of those accidental blemishes of a secular Chris­tendom in which the evil was mixed with the good. It 'contaminates Christians like an error of the spirit.  I recall to your minds that, in a document of the Holy Office dated Sept. 25, 1928, the Catholic Church has explicitly con­demned this error. Racist errors were again condemned, April 13, 1938, in a pontifical document (the letter of the Sacred Congre­gation of Seminaries and Universities).

It is well known that in a recent address the Pope spoke out vigorously against the rac­ist campaign and racist measures inaugurated by the Italian government in imitation of the German government. To the concept and word race, figuring in the theories imported from Germany, he opposed magnificently the ancient Latin idea of gens and populus, the connotations of which belong much more to the moral than to the biological order.

"SPIRITUALLY WE ARE SEMITES"

The following passages of a discourse pro­nounced in September 1938 before Belgian pilgrims are also to be noted. Commenting upon the words of the Canon of the Mass, sacrificium Patriarchae nostri Abrahae, the sacrifice of our father Abraham, the Pope said: "Notice that Abraham is called our patri­arch, our ancestor. Anti-Semitism is incompatible with the thought and sublime reality expressed in this text. It is a movement in which we Christians can have no part what­soever. Anti-Semitism is unacceptable. Spiritu­ally we are Semites." Thus spoke the Pope.

Spiritually we are Semites. No stronger word has been spoken by a Christian against anti-Semitism, and this Christian is the suc­cessor of the apostle Peter.

It is no little matter, however, for a Chris­tian to hate or to despise or to wish to treat degradingly the race from which sprang his God and the Immaculate Mother of his God. That is why the bitter zeal of anti-Semitism always turns in the end into a bitter zeal against Christianity.

Scientifically, racism seems chiefly a sort of political misappropriation of anthropology, mobilized to furnish a practical criterion of the German national community.

Philosophically and religiously speaking, it is difficult not to see in this one of the worst materialistic mockeries of men. To claim, as was done at Nuremberg in 1933, that there is "a greater gap between the lowest forms which are still called human and our superior races, than between the lowest of men and the highest of monkeys," is not simply a philosoph­ical  absurdity.  It is also an insult to the Christian faith, which, in affirming the spirituality and the immortality of the human all races and all conditions, in teaching that Christ died for the salvation of all, affirms at the same time the natural unity of the human species, its essential distinction from other species of animals, and the equal claim of all men to the title of children of God.

IX HUMAN AND DESPERATE

It is sometimes said, and I have used the word myself, that racism is neo-paganism; this is an insult to the pagans, who never lapsed into such brutish materialism. From a social and cultural viewpoint, racism degrades and humiliates to an unimaginable degree reason, thought, science, and art, which are thenceforth subordinated to flesh and blood and divested of their natural "catholicity." It brings to man, among all the modes of bar­barism which threaten them today, a mode in itself, the most inhuman and the most desperate of all. For, as I have just observed, it rivets them to biological categories and fatal­ities from which no exercise of their freedom will enable them to escape.

When Jews and Christians think of the state of affairs in Germany before 1933, are they not led to ask whether here as in other lands, but with more immediately tragic consequences, there was not lacking in too many of them a certain humbly human compassion regarding those elementary realities whose terrible importance for our times has recently been indicated? Privileged in their re­spective ways, by divine adoption, did not both too tranquilly carry on their business, their business of earth and their business of heaven? Did they not fail to observe with sufficient sorrow the countenance of man and of the world degenerating before their very eyes, did they not fail to live close enough to the misery of men and of the world?

It is, after all, a new face, the somberly ardent face of pagan might, which is revealing ­itself in men. I do not wish to speak of these matters without paying tribute of admiration and brotherly love to the Chris­tians of Germany, Catholics and Protestants alike, who suffer persecution as the Jews do and who are defying all dangers to defend against blasphemous rage both the Gospel and the Old Testament. Perhaps it is not commonly known, but the fact is that a great many priests are now suffering and fright­fully in concentration camps. The bond of suffering in persecution has led both Chris­tians and Jews to a consciousness of the fun­damental bond uniting men, if not in their doctrine and rule of life, at least in that single origin which fashions them all in the image of God. The future will show what human history has gained from such an experience.

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[1] Maritain, Jacques, "An Answer to Antisemitism: Jacques Maritain, internationally famous Catholic philosopher, broadcasts to the American people his challenge to anti-Semitic barbarity," New Masses, May 2, 1939, Volume 31, No. 6, pgs. 6-7.

[2] "Old Truths in the New Masses," Commonweal Magazine, May 12, 1939, Volume 30, No. 3. pg. 60. 

[3] "Maritain Criticizes Anti-Semitism," The Catholic Worker, January 1939, pg. 2. 

Editor's final note: It may be worth noting that some of the actions and motivations of Pope Pius XII have been called into question by author John Cornwell in his book, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pope Pius XII.  Cornwell makes that argument that Pius was anti-Semitic and promoted policies favorable to the Nazi regime, all points which have been challenged.