An obvious, much remarked, yet near-impossible thing to remember thing about the Holocaust is that it did not announce itself, in brightly lit letters, as the Holocaust. There was no memo, issued in all the world’s languages, explaining that there would be death camps and the attempted elimination of all of Europe’s Jews. Apart from the architects of it themselves, everyone else—even participants in antisemitic violence—only knew what was possible to know at any given time. Jews were among those who couldn’t see into the future. As tempting as it is—from a Zionist perspective, or a North American exceptionalist one—to understand European Jewry as having been deluded in thinking they were really German, French, Italian, etc., the reality is that they were those things. The reader of a Holocaust history book knows what’s coming. The Jews they’re reading about do not. Even the most prescient can’t predict 1943 from 1933. French Jews, in particular, had been the first of Europe to be emancipated. Their interwar prime minister had been Léon Blum. They had separation of church and state, and an at least ostensibly antiracist national identity rooted in a Frenchness at least theoretically accessible to those of all backgrounds. And yet.

Listen to Phoebe’s conversation with Aliza Luft on this week’s episode of The Jewish Angle.

Aliza Luft, originally from Montreal, is a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her brilliant new book, Sacred Betrayal: How the French Catholic Church Broke its Pledge to Protect Jews During the Holocaust (Harvard University Press), examines “the role of nonstate institutions and their leaders” in genocide. Specifically, she studies interactions between the French Catholic Church and the Jewish sorry “Israelite” Consistory, prior to and during the Second World War.

Yes, confusingly for a 2026 reader not neck-deep in modern French Jewish history, “Israelite” did not mean Zionist and if anything, closer to the opposite. It was the term French Jews used for the acculturated and assimilated French Jews of multigenerational French origin, while “Jews” or “Juifs” were the new, often Yiddish-speaking, sometimes-pious-or-communist and yes, sometimes-Zionist arrivals from Eastern Europe. But Sacred Betrayal itself is neither confusing nor jargon-y. It is a well-paced narrative bolstered, never weighed down, by archival evidence.

Working at the intersection of sociology and history, Luft focuses on how Jews interpreted and negotiated with Church leaders when trying to survive, and at what was going on with cardinals and archbishops and the like: which choices they made, how they explained themselves. Underlying her project is a careful attentiveness to who knew what when.

The Catholic Church in France was not merely a moral institution representing most French people. It was also a group to which Jews—inherently, stubbornly—did not belong. Jews had a different status, as a minority, than did (other) racialized French people, plenty of whom were Catholic. So it might not seem all that surprising. when the Nazis and their many eager collaborators came for the Jews, a long-despised out-group. But the Church also has teachings in conflict with such things as rounding up and murdering fellow human beings. There were Catholics whose faith motivated them to defend Jews. Catholics, too, who saw Christianity’s Jewish origins as giving Christians a particular duty to stick up for Jews.

As Luft demonstrates, from the initial rise of Nazism until the 1940 German invasion of France, many Church leaders openly opposed Nazi racism and antisemitism. There were also Jewish converts to Catholicism—understood as “non-Aryan” and therefore Jewish by the Nazis, but as Catholics, at least ostensibly, by the Church—whose Catholicism depended on faith winning out over “race” as a way of categorizing humanity.

But then a few things happened at the same time. France’s rebuffing of the German invasion felt secure, but then again so did Hillary’s 2016 victory. Certain key figures in the Church, among them the pope, died, and their replacements were a bit more wishy-washy on the Resistance front. Pius XII was no Pius XI. The French nation and the Catholic Church entered self-preservation mode, each overestimating its own autonomy under Nazi rule (some “Free” Zone was Vichy).

So it’s not, as I’d always sort of thought of it (yes, despite a doctorate in a related area), that there was this almost natural Christian-conservative alliance, such that obviously the Catholic........

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