Was the principle of institutional and violent anti-semitism seriously advocated in Germany before the rise of Hitler?

by prof_woodcock
Domini_canes

I can only address one part of your question: the Pope's position over time on the subject.

In general, after 1870 the pontiffs consistently opposed racial discrimination against Jews and were more tolerant of the Jewish religion. There was consistent opposition to Catholics that advanced the idea of the Jewish “blood libel,” and there was also consistent Vatican action against The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and its many offshoots.

The book The Popes Against the Jews by David Kertzer attempts to address your question, but it is fairly heavily flawed. This review by Ronald Rychlak goes into a fair bit of detail about the flaws in Kertzer’s book. (Ignore the website in general, but Rychlak is a good historian. His book on the Pius XII controversy is one of a scant few that I don’t find to be deeply flawed, for example.) Another problematic book that touches on the subject is A Moral Reckoning by Daniel Goldhagen. Once again, I will rely on Rychlak’s review to address the problems in that book. (Again, feel free to ignore the website, but Rychlak is fairly reliable.)

Papal efforts against anti-Semitism continued throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. By 1937 racial discrimination was explicitly denounced in an encyclical that was published worldwide. Mit Brennender Sorge states in section 8 that

Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

That doesn't mean that many Catholics weren't anti-semetic. Sadly there were far too many that held such beliefs, but the trend was heading in the opposite direction.