The late Fr Andrew Greeley, an American academic and popular novelist, used to say that anti-Catholicism was the anti-Semitism of American intellectuals, which seems a fairly accurate take on the ­secularism that dominates American ­academic life. But it also suggests a false parity of prejudice: to anti-Semites, Jews remain Jews, whatever their religious convictions. The ardent Catholicism of Simone Weil and Irène Némirovsky did nothing to save them from the Nazis.