"Our misery is also partly due to the fact that we have become Catholic. Holy Father, I write as it is! If we had remained Jews, the Jews would support us," this is the bitter observation made by Johanna Singer, who had escaped from Germany, in her letter to Pius XII1. Such and numerous other self-descriptions and attributions by others can be found in the petitions that Jewish people from all over Europe sent to the Pope and the Vatican during the Nazi regime.
With remarkable transparency, the petitioners describe their struggle for identity in the field of tension between religious, racial ideological and cultural affiliations. However, the question of different constructions of Jewish identity not only plays a central role in the petitions, but also in the corresponding Vatican documents. The unique collection of sources in the Vatican archives pertaining to Pius XII’s pontificate have been open to researchers since 2020.
The central concern of the ‘Belonging then and now’ project, which is funded by the Alfred Landecker Foundation, is to analyse the wide spectrum and complexity of Jewish belonging in the petitions. To this end, the documents are analysed using a category system based on content-related questions. The results are complemented by an analysis of the Vatican's internal process and perception of ‘Jewishness’, which addresses a variety of research questions on individual help for people of Jewish origin by the Vatican and the respective motives.
In face of growing antisemitism and a dwindling number of contemporary witnesses, there is a great need to apply these individual fates within the field of political education. Using digital educational programmes and biographical learning, the letters and life stories of those persecuted will be used to address questions of identity and belonging that are virulent today.
As there are major gaps in research regarding the impact of Holocaust education formats on young people, the effects of the material will be examined by evaluating the educational materials before and after their use. The measured attitudes and the increase in knowledge about the Shoah among the users of the material will provide information on whether and under what circumstances educational materials have an influence on topics such as the promotion of democracy, antisemitism, reflection on self-perception and the perception of others or remembrance of the Shoah.
The project ‘Belonging then and now’ is based on the research project ‘Asking the Pope for Help’ funded by the EVZ-foundation, in which a team led by church historian Prof Dr Hubert Wolf is recording the letters of petition in the Vatican archives, processing them and making them available to the public in a digital edition.
1 Archivio Apostolico Vaticano (AAV) – Vatikanstadt, Arch. Nunz. Svizzera / 82, fasc. 18, fol. 139r-140v