D. Kertzer: My book was made possible by the access I was given to a number of different Vatican archives. Most dramatic was the archive of the central office of the Inquisition, or Holy Office, which was only first opened to researchers in early 1998. This archive is lodged in the Palace of the Holy Office, in the Vatican, the same building from which the Inquisitors conducted their business beginning in the sixteenth century. To gain access to it, I had to petition Cardinal Ratzinger, who is head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican body that succeeded the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Because there were only facilities for 12 scholars physically to work there, and because hundreds of scholars sought access, I felt privileged to be given permission.

Handling the documents prepared in the hands of cardinal Inquisitors was an exciting experience. And some of the documents I discovered-such as a long letter written in the early 1840s by Prince Metternich to Pope Gregory XVI, and the Pope's lengthy response-gave me a thrill that would be hard to match. However, a number of other Vatican archives were also crucial to the book, including the main historical archive of the Holy See, the Secret Vatican Archive, and the much less used archive of the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs. This last archive, of the Vatican group of cardinals headed by the Secretary of State which advised the pope on major diplomatic issues, is barely used at all. Buried deep in the Vatican, it probably has no more than a couple of dozen users all year.

R. Wilde: More importantly, what form did the records take? Were there files full of individual letters, or maybe even a roll format? D. Kertzer: In doing archival research the key is having a good index or inventory. Unfortunately, the inventory of materials in the main historical archive of the Vatican is complex and difficult to use, at least at the level of finding individual documents. Fortunately, however, the larger categorization scheme used by the Vatican archives allows effective research to be done.

As an example, one can locate the correspondence between the Vatican secretary of state and the papal nuncio to Paris, divided by year. However, for each year there may be several - sometimes many - boxes of documents and knowing in advance which documents are in which boxes is difficult and in some cases impossible. The problem here is that scholars are only allowed to consult three boxes, or files, of materials per day, so that if you happen to get boxes not containing the material you want, you can easily waste an entire day after discovering in fifteen minutes that the boxes in question are not helpful.

R. Wilde: Part One of Unholy War - 'Keeping Jews in Their Place' - is a masterful piece of historiography that calmly narrates the Vatican's treatment of Jews in the Papal States. Given the unpleasant subject matter, did you find it difficult to write in such a balanced and non-emotive style (for which I applaud you)?

D. Kertzer: Given my background in social anthropology, I seek to reconstruct the worldview of all the people whose lives I am trying to reconstruct. This is what I tried to do in my previous book, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, the story of the taking of a six-year-old Jewish boy in Bologna, in 1858, on orders of the Inquisitor who determined that the boy had been secretly baptized by a Christian maid. I wanted to understand things not only from the point of view of the parents whose child was taken, but also from the point of view of the Pope who became the boy's new father. I try to do the same thing in The Unholy War, although as your question implies, this was easier to do for the first part of the book than the second. In dealing with such topics of how the Vatican was promulgating the ritual murder charge against the Jews well into the twentieth century, finding a sympathetic way to portray the Vatican became, for me, more difficult.

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For Citation And Footnotes
Title: Unholy War: An Interview with David Kertzer
Author: Robert Wilde
Date: 2002