ABSTRACT
In this chapter I wish to propose an unusual, almost revolutionary approach to studying Catholic-Jewish relations in Poland: namely to treat the Polish Catholic Church as a theological institution, that is, a place producing ideas about religion, in particular, ideas about Jews. A central theme in these relations is of course hostility, yet it has been notoriously difficult to specify the relation between religiously based hostility and modern anti-semitism, the sort that led to the Holocaust. The Holocaust’s planners after all considered themselves anti-Christian. They regarded Christianity as a Jewish faith and they tried to weaken the Catholic Church as a prelude to its full destruction. If one looks at works on anti-semitism and the Polish Catholic Church, the focus tends to be ethnically based hostility, with few references made to religious ideas.
