On Twitter, Guy Stair Sainty calls himself an “Art dealer, historian, parent, husband, equestrian, debater, polemicist, Catholic antidisestablishmentarianist, franco-hispano-italo-phile and monarchist.“. Sainty never studied history and therefore is not a historian. In fact, Sainty holds no academic degree at all. His claims are false. However, this does not hold him back from defaming real historian Professor Kertzer, arrogantly called “historian” by Sainty, implying Kertzer is a fake historian. The modus operandi is always the same. Looser Sainty attacking men of achievement, inspired by his working-class background and his jealously.
Below is the biography of a man who is labelled a fake historian by Sainty.
David Israel Kertzer (born February 20, 1948) is an American anthropologist, historian, and academic, specializing in the political, demographic, and religious history of Italy. He is the Paul Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology, and Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University. His book The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (2014) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. From July 1, 2006, to June 30, 2011, Kertzer served as Provost at Brown.
David Kertzer graduated from Brown University in 1969. He received his PhD in Anthropology from Brandeis University in 1974 and taught at Bowdoin College until 1992. That year he joined the faculty of Brown University as Professor of Anthropology and History.
Sponsored by the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission, in 1978 he was Senior Lecturer at the University of Catania and in 2000, Chair at the University of Bologna. In 2001, he relinquished his post at Brown as Professor of History and was appointed Professor of Italian Studies. In 2005, he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From July 1, 2006, to June 30, 2011, Kertzer served as Provost at Brown.
Kertzer is the author of numerous books and articles on politics and culture, European social history, anthropological demography, 19th-century Italian social history, contemporary Italian society and politics, and the history of Vatican relations with the Jews and the Italian state. His book, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, was a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction in 1997.
His The Popes Against the Jews, published in 2001, was subsequently described as “one of the most critically acclaimed and contentious books of its genre and generation.” The book analyzes the relation between the development of the Catholic Church and the growth of European anti-Semitism in the 19th and 20th centuries, arguing that the Vatican and several popes contributed actively to fertilizing the ideological ground that produced the Holocaust. The work produced intense discussion among scholars of European history and historians of the Catholic Church.
The follow-up work, The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (2014), examined documentary evidence from the Vatican archives, arguing that Pope Pius XI played a significant role in supporting the rise of Fascism and Benito Mussolini in Italy, but not of Nazi Germany. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in April 2015.
In 2020, after decades of pressure, the Vatican archives were finally opened, and David Kertzer was among the first historians to access them. At the time of the death of Pius XII, in 1958, all the documents of the pontificate were locked up: by preventing scholars from consulting them, many questions remained unanswered, making Eugenio Pacelli one of the most controversial popes in history. With the support of thousands of unpublished documents, in his 2022 book A Pope at War: the Secret History of Pius XII, Hitler, and Mussolini , Kertzer uncovered the existence of secret negotiations between Hitler and Pius XII already a few weeks after the end of the conclave. He also showed to what extent Mussolini relied on the Italian clergy and religious institutions to obtain popular support for entering the war, and how both Mussolini and Hitler managed to manipulate the Pontiff to their own advantage. Above all, Kertzer explains why, despite having irrefutable evidence of the ongoing extermination of the Jews, Pius XII never denounced the Nazi atrocities, as he preferred to leave the role of moral guide, rather than put at risk the power of the Church.
Debunking the fake hunters 