This book compares the worldviews and factors that promoted or indeed opposed antisemitism amongst Catholics in Britain and Germany. It reviews the sources of attraction or rejection of fascism and National Socialism and the role antisemitism played in this context. It then highlights the hypernationalism in Europe that was further inflamed by the widespread fear of Russian Bolshevism and of indigenous socialist movements. Catholics moved, as well as the strength and density of a Catholic organisational infrastructure, to multiply or counter antisemitism. Furthermore, it argues that there was no universal Catholic antisemitism in Britain and Germany nor can Catholic views of Jews be reduced to a traditional religious prejudice. The Catholic and Jewish communities in Britain and Germany are then explored. The history of Jews both in Britain and in Germany is a story of economic success and social improvement.

This chapter describes how the ‘Jewish question’ and its ‘solution’ were defined in Catholic publications. The call to strengthen Christian values in the modern age and the call to convert the Jews were the most common solutions offered in English Catholic newspapers. The Tablet, the Catholic Times and the Catholic Herald did not change their view that the Jews brought their fate upon themselves, despite anger at the brutality of the pogrom. The Gelben Hefte did not share the self-restraint that the papers of political Catholicism tried to practise. National Socialism could tap into a stream of antisemitic stereotypes that were popular and common since the First World War. Most literature on Catholic antisemitism asserts that racial antisemitism was firmly rejected by Catholics. Generally, this discussion shows the nature of anti-Jewish prejudices and times and occasions when the intensity of antisemitic articles was specifically high.

This chapter charts how the representation of the Bartholomean corpus has changed over the succeeding centuries to suit the times. The treatment of the farewell sermons in the three and a half centuries since their initial exposition shows that they have not simply spoken to their own time and space, but have often been made to speak to other times and other spaces. The chapter argues that while successive layers of interpretation of the farewell sermons can enrich our understanding of the corpus, they should also serve as a warning that it is all too easy to lose sight of the functioning of historical texts and artefacts in their original setting.

This chapter analyses the societal and religious identities of the Bartholomean clergy and explores their relationships within local communities, together with their fears and aspirations for a laity bereft of godly preaching, discussing the ministers' backgrounds and describing who and what they had come to represent by 1662. It argues that the nonconformists certainly possessed a sense of solidarity, which in the farewell sermons manifested itself in a hardening of religious resolve and a shared anticipation of persecution, but it did not inspire the formulation of a party agenda.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about Black Bartholomew's Day, the mass ejection of Puritan ministers from the Church of England in 1662, and which uses political language and the historic meaning of the farewell sermons of the departing ministers. The book considers these sermons in the context of Restoration nonconformity, the public circulation of the Bartholomean texts and the polemical responses to Bartholomean preaching.

This chapter aims to decode the rhetorical content of the farewell sermons of the Bartholomean clergy, describing how political comment was skilfully embedded in the exegesis and how the apocalyptic epistemology that underpinned so many texts could hardly fail to produce highly charged political polemic. The analysis reveals that most of the extant farewell sermons rely heavily on the New Testament. A number of themes featured consistently in the farewell sermons, including the eschatological significance of the ejection, memories of armed conflict, imminent persecution and the implications of civil death.

Catholic communities have never been interchangeable nor have they been monolithic. The example of the Catholic right showed that Catholicism as such was certainly not a bulwark against antisemitism or indeed fascism. The antisemitism of the Catholic right and its antiparliamentarianism fed on each other. Nationalism was a constituent part of the right's antisemitism, both in Germany and in England. The different responses to the antisemitism of the radical right were the result of differences in Catholic organisation. It is noted in this chapter that religious and modern anti-Jewish prejudices cannot be cleanly separated from each other, and neither were religious and racial concepts of the Jews an irreconcilable paradox. The Catholic defence against Alfred Rosenberg made clear that religious teaching did not necessarily transfer respect for ancient Jewry to modern Jewry.

The Catholic right has been a stepchild of historical research into German conservatism and its relationship to National Socialism. The antisemitism of the Catholic right was certainly the most virulent form of Jew-hatred amongst Catholics in Weimar Germany. The German National People's Party (DNVP) would express its hope for an ‘unconditional denominational peace’ and stress the need for Germany's rebirth in a Christian spirit, and for a German culture and economy based on a ‘true Christian-religious worldview’. The antisemitism expressed across the network of the Catholic right was an amalgam of Christian, cultural and Darwinian anti-Jewish sentiments and reflects their Catholic faith and their discontent with the political and economic changes in Germany. The organisations of the Rechtskatholiken and Distributism worked with similar methods for the same aim: Christian national re-education. Negative images of Jews remained an unfailing part of the public discourse in both Catholic communities.