WHEN Theodore Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, met Pope Pius X in 1904 and asked him to support Jewish aspirations for a homeland in Israel, the pontiff is said to have replied: “The Jews have not recognised our Lord, therefore we cannot recognise the Jewish people.”

A hundred years on, the road to reconciliation between Christians and Jews and between the Vatican and Israel is still strewn with obstacles. When the Jewish state was eventually founded, the Vatican refused to recognise it for almost 50 years.

Behind this stand-off lay mutual hostility stretching back to the origins of Christianity. The followers of Christ, like Jesus himself, were originally Jews. For centuries the Jews were blamed for aiding and abetting the Crucifixion by the Roman authorities in Palestine, a version of history enforced by some interpretations of the Gospel accounts.

Christian anti-Semitism, it is said, lay at the heart of the Inquisition, the herding of Jews into European ghettos and, arguably, the failure of some Catholics to come to the aid of Jews sent to Nazi death camps during the Second World War. Controversy still rages over whether Pius XII, the “wartime Pope”, turned a blind eye to the Holocaust.

Most recently, a dispute erupted in July when Israel summoned the papal nuncio in Jerusalem to complain that Benedict XVI had “deliberately failed” to include a suicide bus bombing in Netanya when he listed countries recently hit by terrorist attacks. The ensuing acrid exchange over the latest “papal silence” showed how suspicions still lie just beneath the surface.

Still, the forthcoming state visit to the Vatican by President Katzav bodes well for the future. It follows a “cordial and heartfelt” meeting last month between the Pope and Israel’s Ashkenazi and Sephardic chief rabbis, and the opening at the Israel Museum this week of an exhibition entitled “Rome to Jerusalem” containing the first manuscripts from the Vatican library to be displayed in Israel.

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