Support for “Asking the Pope for Help”

Cluster of Excellence funds research project on so-called “Brazilian Visa Project”

Funding from the Cluster of Excellence has enabled Italian-born historian Dr. Alessandro Grazi to join the “Asking the Pope for Help” project team led by church historian Prof. Dr. Hubert Wolf. Grazi’s sub-project is concerned with the so-called “Brazilian Visa Project”, which gave hope to some Jews during the Shoah of being able to flee to South America with the support of the Vatican. Brazil had provided the Holy See with 3,000 visas for baptized people of Jewish origin. Grazi will reconstruct the process by which visas were issued, and explore the possibilities and limits of this so-called “Brazilian Visa Project”.

Grazi completed his doctorate in 2012 with a thesis on “Patria ed Affetti: Jewish Identity and Risorgimento Nationalism in the Oeuvres of Samuel Luzzatto, Isaac Reggio, and David Levi”. After several research stays abroad, including in Jerusalem and Amsterdam, he was an affiliated scholar for digital Jewish studies at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz from 2018 to 2023. His research focuses on modern Jewish cultural and intellectual history, in particular the history of Jewish intellectuals in 19th- and 20th-century Italy.
In the Brazil sub-project, Grazi will spend the next two years going through the files in the Vatican archives on the pontificate of Pius XII that have been accessible since March 2020. This will allow him to examine a group variously categorized (and not only by contemporaries) as “baptized Jews”, “Jewish Catholics”, “Catholic Jews”, or “non-Aryan Catholics”. To this day, there has been very little research on the group of Catholics of Jewish origin and the issue of their affiliation. The new sources allow a nuanced reconstruction for the first time, one that not only focuses on the individual fates of the petitioners, but also enables researchers to comment on how Pius XII and the Roman Curia dealt with Catholics of Jewish origin.

The “Asking the Pope for Help” project

Thousands of Jewish people from all over Europe asked Pope Pius XII and the Vatican for help during the Shoah. Their petitions describe atrocities, persecution, and the fear of death. In the “Asking the Pope for Help” research project, church historian Prof. Dr. Hubert Wolf and his team at the University of Münster are collating these petitions that are stored in the Vatican archives, and preparing them for publication in an annotated digital edition. (exc/tec)