Popes From the Ghetto: A View of Medievel Christendom

by Joachim Prinz

Given the long history of anti-Semitic evil done by the Catholic Church over the centuries, who could have imagined that there was at least on family of (converted?) Jews who gave the world 3 roman popes! Prinz does his scholarly homework and combines it with great story telling to make a book that deserves a much bigger audience.

Genres: History, Christianity

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Prinz was born in the village of Bierdzany (near Oppeln), in the Prussian province of Silesia.

Prinz was born to a Jewish family. Early on, he became motivated by a charismatic rabbi and Prinz took an increasing interest in Judaism. His Jewish roots grew even stronger following his mother's death. By 1917, he had also joined Blau Weiss (Blue White), the Zionist youth movement.

At 21, Joachim Prinz received his Ph.D. in Philosophy, and had minored in Art History, at the University of Giessen. He was ordained as a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau. He married Lucie Horovitz, the daughter of the seminary's most prominent professor. She died in Berlin shortly after giving birth to their daughter Lucie.[3] Prinz married Hilde Goldschmidt in 1932. They had three children, Michael (born in Berlin), Jonathan and Deborah (both born in the United States)

As his prominence grew in Germany and his fears of Hitler's reign coming to fruition, he earned the sponsorship of Rabbi Stephen Wise who was a close adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt. In 1937, Prinz immigrated into the United States. He immediately began lecturing throughout the U.S. for the United Palestine Appeal, established in the 1920s as the fund raising arm in the United States for the Jewish Agency for Israel. It was, essentially, the precursor to what became the American Jewish support base for a nation state of Israel and the United Israel Appeal.[4][5]

Joachim Prinz settled in New Jersey as the spiritual leader of Temple B'Nai Abraham in Newark.

Reviews

[Keturah Hickman]

I thought this book would be about poor popes or something, but it's actually about three Jewish popes with monetary backing from a Jewish community (all converts to Catholicism). The book is certainly biased (the author seems to think anyone and everything was anti-semitic), but other than that it was an extremely interesting perspective on medieval Catholicism, and offered some insights on the schism of 1045 I hadn't previously known. It also talked a lot on how the church tried to separate itself from the state for many centuries. Until reading this book, I hadn't realized that the crusades were mostly in a 200-year span, and that most of them were secular based -- often but not always with a blessing from the pope.

[Judy]

This book has only one significant drawback or limitation in that a Jewish author is defining medieval Catholicism. He cannot give it justice. Aside from this bias, however it is a well-written interesting historical account of the period, with a focus on the Pieleoni family - a family of Jewish converts, wealthy bankers who lived in Trastevere. Three of them became popes.
"Nicea was just the beginning of a long process of alienation from the Jewish moorings of Christianity. The Jews in Christian lands lived a l'hombre de la croix and that shadow of the cross was a long one indeed. Events occurred in the darkness of that shadow that would have made Jesus shudder." p. 72

[Kathy]

The provocative title offers the author the opportunity to delve into some 11th century church history and the concurrent political shenanigans. Knowing little about this period, I appreciate the clear prose and the author's perspective. That is, he named no heroes and no thoroughly villainous figures but seemed to tell the story objectively -- well, almost.

[Bill Galen]

Popes from the ghetto; a view of medieval Christendom by Joachim Prinz (1968)