The Vatican and the Persecution of Jews in Europe Petitions Sent to the Pope and Their Passage through the Vatican Authorities A Digital Edition Evaluating a Corpus of Sources Not Accessible to the Public
Links to the project
Around 10,000 petitions sent to the Pope by persecuted Jewish people as well as associated internal Vatican documents dating from the time of the Shoah are being published and analysed in a digital edition.
Those asking for help came from all across Europe and belonged to various denominations and social classes. Their letters, written in 17 languages, therefore represent a very broad spectrum of “Jewishness”.
The project’s aim is to reconstruct the fates of the persecuted and to give them a voice and a profile again. Besides, the project makes a significant contribution to researching the stance of Pius XII (1939-1958) and his staff on the Shoah, as well as the complex decision-making processes within the Roman Curia.
Symbolic image of the Vatican and a petitionThe Vatican and the Persecution of Jews in Europe Petitions Sent to the Pope and Their Passage through the Vatican Authorities A Digital Edition Evaluating a Corpus of Sources Not Accessible to the Public
Host Academy
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts
Location and federal state
Berlin, Berlin; Munster, North Rhine-Westphalia
Type
Editions: Medieval and (Early) Modern History
Project number
II.D.50-1/-2
The holdings in the Vatican archives pertaining to the pontificate of Pope Pius XII have only been made accessible to researchers in 2020. Apart from the petitions, they comprise documents that reflect internal processes and reactions within the Curia – as far as is known today, well over 50,000 pages. National and international online sources are taken into consideration as well. The material is also evaluated with the help of state-of-the-art AI methods.
Transcriptions of the documents, data records for each person mentioned, and the reconstructed cases will be made available on a multilingual, user-friendly website as part of a critical digital edition – intended for academics as well as for the general public and, in particular, for those who were persecuted and their families.
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