Abstract
It was September 1946. One year had elapsed since Isaac had come to terms with the awful truth that he would never again in his life set eyes on his wife or daughter. His consolation was to be reunited with his elder son, Daniel, in the autumn of 1944, and with his younger son, Jean-Claude, in the spring of 1945. Isaac’s letter to Daniel-Rops, published in the July 1946 issue of Europe, had become the talk of French Catholic circles. In his letter Isaac had demolished Daniel-Rops’ attempt to insinuate that the Holocaust might be understandable on the theological grounds of Matthew 27:25: “Then the people as a whole answered, ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children!’” In this reading, the catastrophe of European Jewry was not even a moment of theodicy. It was the fulfillment of invited eternal punishment. Isaac wrote of the controversy, “[Stanislas Fumet] informs me that the note in Europe had made a noise and that it was much talked about.” “P. de Menasce had read it, and even as far as the first paragraph is concerned, had found nothing inconsistent with Catholic faith…Fumet is convinced that they will not be able to suppress [the publication of] my book and that it will have reverberations.”
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Notes
- 1.
It was at Christmas 1940 in Lyon that Stanislas Fumet, then editor of Temps présent, together with Louis Terrenoire of L’Aube, launched the weekly, Temps nouveau, whose object it was to defend the Christian position as confronted by Nazism and the influence of l’Action française. During France’s occupation by the Germans, Lyon became the locus of French resistance. The city was the largest in the southern (until November 1942, unoccupied) zone. It was also peopled by progressive Catholics. At the turn of the century, Lyon had boasted more Catholic Dreyfusards than any other city in France. Temps Nouveau was shut down by Darlan on 15 August 1941. In 1945, Fumet published an article in Bulletin du service central des déportés israélites entitled, “Les innocents à l’abbatoir” in which he denounced “Pétain’s crime, a crime of omission, and the silence kept about the deportations en masse of foreign Jews who had arrived in France seeking refuge from the Hitlerian menace.” “It is breathtaking,” continued Fumet, “that the Church did not rend its garments amidst wailing, and that it did not do public penance after having learned what happened at Auschwitz where God’s image was mocked, covered in refuse and spittle, molested and defigured. For in the last analysis, I listened attentively during the occupation and heard nothing. With few exceptions, Pétain had buttoned the lips of our highest clergy.”
- 2.
At pp. 129–30 of Les relations entre les Juifs et les Catholiques dans la France de l’après-guerre (Parole et Silence, 2009), Paule Berger Marx writes, “The père Calliste Lopinot would resign and be replaced in the chair of [Seelisberg] commission [III] by Jean de Menasce. The père Démann is down on record to this effect [cf. Sens, 1998 n° 10]. After giving effect to the change, the commission would be presided over by its vice-president.”
- 3.
Isaac, “Corréspondance inédite de Jules Isaac: Extraits de lettres à son médecin (1946–1948),” 2.
- 4.
Quoted in Cunningham, 143.
- 5.
Jacques Madaule, born on 11 October 1898 in Castelnaudary (Aude), historian by formation, essayist by vocation, published at least 30 works. His literary critique of Claudel confirmed Madaule in a disciplined, but progressive, Catholicism. Agrégé d’histoire et de géographie, he began his teaching career at Bizerte, then two years at l’Ecole française in Rome, and in 1935, was appointed to the lycée Michelet at Vanves. A member of the MRP, he worked with Francisque Gay when the latter served as président du Conseil (1945–46) and was mayor of Issy-les-Moulineaux from 1949 to 1953. Madaule succeeded Henri Marrou as president of l’Amitié judéo-chrétienne de France.
- 6.
P. Henri de Lubac was one of three Jesuit theologians who, together with P. Pierre Chaillet and P. Gaston Fessard, expressed the outraged Christian conscience through the medium of Les Cahiers du Témoignage chrétien, 15 issues in total of which were clandestinely published between November 1941 and July 1944. Jesuit theologian P. Joseph Bonsirven was a pioneer regarding Catholic-Jewish rapprochement in France. As early as 1927, in Les Études, Bonsirven began a chronique juives. In 1938, Bonsirven published through Grasset an essay titled, “Sur les ruines du Temple” in the Maurice Brillant-edited book, La vie chrétienne. In this essay, Bonsirven cautioned his Christian readers that the riches of Judaism were “encased in a messianism gone astray and a narrow particularism;” these observations were made with “a sadness, a respect and an empathy for the custodians of these inestimable riches” (quoted in Pierre Pierrard, Juifs et catholiques français, d’Edouard Drumont à Jacob Kaplan 1886–1994 (Paris: Cerf, 1997), 266). Although a progressive among French Catholics, Bonsirven, like Maritain, believed in mission to the Jews as elaborated in Juifs et Chrétiens, published in 1938. As anti-Jewish rhetoric in France was ramping up, from 10 February 1938 to 26 May 1938, P. Bonsirven inaugurated a series of public lectures Thursday nights on Judaism at the l’Institut catholique de Paris.
- 7.
Jules Isaac, “Lettres de Jules Isaac à Jacques Madaule,” Sens, revue de l’Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne de France, no. 12 (2005): Lettre I, 613.
- 8.
Jacques Madaule, “Jules Isaac tel que je l’ai connu,” Cahiers de l’Association des amis de Jules Isaac, no. 3 (1981): 58.
- 9.
Isaac, “Corréspondance inédite de Jules Isaac: Extraits de lettres à son médecin (1946–1948),” 3.
- 10.
Aimé Pallière (1875–1949), wishing to learn more about Judaism than could teach Lyon-based abbé Augustin Lémann, and scandalized by the suggestion of Dominican priest P. Henri, who regretted that all the Jews had not been burnt at the inquisition stake, made himself a pupil of the grand rabbi of Livorno, Eli Benamozegh, whose last work, Israël et l’humanité (Paris: Albin Michel/reprint 1961) was published posthumously by Pallière. The principal thesis of Israël et l’humanité has been adumbrated thus: Judaism addresses two messages to two constituencies—one a universalist message to all of humanity, the other a particularist message to the Jewish people. The universal message is comprised of the Noachide laws; the particularist in the mitzvoth by which Jews are bound. Since Noachism is a universalist revelation, there is no need for another. Palliere was greatly influenced by Benamozegh and at the age of 25, “converted” to Judaism and thereafter devoted his life to correct the misapprehension of his fellow Catholics that Judaism was but a nationalist, ethnic religion. See Pallière’s The Unknown Sanctuary: A Pilgrimage from Rome to Israel, trans. L. W. Wise (New York: Bloch, 1930/reprint 1985) with pref. by David Novak.
- 11.
Isaac, “Corréspondance inédite de Jules Isaac: Extraits de lettres à son médecin (1946–1948),” 3.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
Edmond Fleg (Flegenheimer) was born in 1874 in Geneva. His mother and paternal grandparents were Alsatian Jews. Fleg attended lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and received his agrégation in German from Ecole Normale Superieure. Rather than teach, he became a playwright, poet and author. Fleg was in attendance at the Third Zionist Congress in Basel in 1899, and joined the Ligue des Amis du Sionisme in 1917. During the interwar years, in 1934, he became president of the Eclaireurs Israélites de France which played a significant resistance role during World War II. Fleg, together with Jules Isaac, F. Jean Daniélou, Henri Marrou and Samy Lattès, was an original participant in the réunions à cinq, the first meeting of which was held on 4 May 1947 and whose object it was to purify Christian teaching of its anti-Jewish rhetoric. Fleg passed away in the same year as did Isaac—1963.
- 15.
Payré, 136.
- 16.
William W. Simpson, OBE, MA, was to serve as the other executive secretary. In 1938, Rev. Simpson became the first secretary of the newly established Christian Council for Refugees from Germany and Central Europe. In 1942, he was appointed as the first secretary of the British Council of Christians and Jews, a post which he held for more than 30 years.
- 17.
From 1945, Henri Irénée Marrou had held the chair of histoire ancienne du Christianisme at the Sorbonne.
- 18.
Isaac, “Corréspondance inédite de Jules Isaac: Extraits de lettres à son médecin (1946–1948),” 5.
- 19.
In correspondence dated 11 February 1949 to Maurice Vanikoff, Isaac referred to Visseur’s “chatter having no great import,” and in correspondence dated 21 February 1948 to Fadiey Lovsky, “Let’s leave the bla-bla-bla to Visseur.”
- 20.
Lyon-based Jesuit theologian P. Pierre Chaillet (1900–72), with fellow Jesuit theologians P. Gaston Fessard and Stanislas Fumet, launched the clandestine review Les Cahiers du Témoignages Chrétiens in 1941. With Pastor Roland de Pury, P. Chaillet founded l’Amitié chrétienne whose object it was to save Jews. In August 1942, P. Chaillet saved the children of Vénissieux and was named a Righteous among the Nations in 1999.
- 21.
Isaac, “Corréspondance inédite de Jules Isaac: Extraits de lettres à son médecin (1946–1948),” 6.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Ibid., 7.
- 24.
Lovsky, “Les Premières années de l’amitié judéo-chrétienne,” 261.
- 25.
Jules Isaac, “Soixante-Dix-Neuf lettres de Jules Isaac à F. Lovsky,” Sens, revue de l’Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne de France, no. 7/8/9 (1999): 293.
- 26.
Isaac, “Corréspondance inédite de Jules Isaac: Extraits de lettres à son médecin (1946–1948),” 7.
- 27.
Jules Isaac, Jésus et Israël (Paris: Albin Michel, 1948), 178.
- 28.
Ibid., 562.
- 29.
A dogmatic constitution is the most authoritative among the categories of pronouncements issued by a council, and an ecumenical council of Catholic bishops, in concert with the bishop of Rome, has the highest teaching authority.
- 30.
As reproduced at pp. 401–404 in the Appendix to the translated-into-English Jesus and Israel.
- 31.
Quoted in Isaac, Jésus et Israël, 157.
- 32.
Ibid., 165.
- 33.
Ibid., 167.
- 34.
Ibid., 158.
- 35.
International Council of Christians and Jews, “A Time for Recommitment (Preface to the Twelve Points of Berlin ),” (Berlin: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung e.V., 2009), 13.
- 36.
There were no orthodox Christians from the Soviet Union.
- 37.
There can be no passing reference to Jules-Géraud Saliège, archbishop of Toulouse, in whose cathedral in the eleventh century there had been a tradition of publicly slapping a Jew during Holy Week as a reminder of the slap received by Jesus (Baum, The Jews and the Gospel, 267 at note 16). There can be no passing reference to this Righteous prelate among the Nations, this Catholic for whom a memorial plaque is affixed to the wall of the oldest synagogue in Toulouse and whom De Gaulle perceived as his ecclesiastical beachhead in the fight against Pétain’s Vichy regime as early as May 1942. Laval had made a Faustian pact with the Germans to trade the lives of 85,000 Jewish French citizens in the occupied zone for the lives of 40,000 stateless Jews in the unoccupied zone. On 8, 10 and 24 August 1942, amidst scenes of Jewish mothers forcibly separated from their children, 1000 Jews were taken from Récébédou. In the midst of this horror and perhaps with foreknowledge of the first roundups (on 26 August 1942) in the unoccupied zone of Jewish men, women and children, on Sunday 23 August, Mgr. Saliege broke the silence of the French episcopate, nay the Vatican itself, with the following words in a pastoral letter read aloud without commentary by priests at masses in all churches and chapels in his diocese.
My very dearest brothers,
There is a Christian ethic. There is a human ethic that imposes obligations and recognizes rights. These obligations and these rights are the products of personhood. They are God-given. They may be violated. No mortal is empowered to suppress them…In our diocese, we have witnessed scenes of the most horrific nature in the camps of Noé and Récébédou [Haute-Garonne] Jews are men; Jewesses are women. They are untouchable, these men, these women, fathers and mothers. They are human beings. They are our brothers [and sisters], like any other. A Christian cannot forget this. France, our beloved country, France that bears in the conscience of all its children the tradition of respect for the human person, chivalrous and generous France, there is no doubt in my mind that you are not behind the perpetration of these atrocities.
As did many at the time, Saliège assumed (incorrectly) that Vichy was acting under German pressure. On the following Sunday 30 August 1942, Pierre-Marie Théas, bishop of Montauban, followed suit with a pastoral letter of his own; on 6 September, Lyon Cardinal Gerlier also denounced the arrests and deportations, the same Cardinal Gerlier who had told Vallat at a meeting not one year earlier, “Your law [statut des Juifs] is not unjust, …but it lacks justice and charity in its enforcement.” (Quoted in Marrus, Vichy France and the Jews, 200.) Of the 95 archbishops and bishops in France, at best six would denounce the antisemitic measures adopted by the Vichy regime and carried out by the French police.
- 38.
Undated, personal handwritten testimony of Jules Isaac, “L’assemblée judéo-chrétienne de Seelisberg,” La revue Sens, organe de l’amitié judéo-chrétienne de France, no. 7 (2004): 361.
- 39.
Paule Berger Marx, Les Relations entre les juifs et les catholiques dans la France de l’après-guerre: 1945–1965 (n/p: Parole et Silence, 2009), 129.
- 40.
Born in Geneva, Charles Journet studied at the seminary in Fribourg before being ordained to the priesthood on 15 July 1917. He did pastoral work in the Diocese of Fribourg until 1924, and taught at the seminary from 1924 to 1965. Journet was elevated to the rank of Cardinal on 22 February 1965.
- 41.
Pierrard, 345. Journet was unable to attend the full conference because of other commitments.
- 42.
Isaac, “L’assemblée judéo-chrétienne de Seelisberg,” 362–63.
- 43.
Ibid., 363.
- 44.
Jacob Taubes was on the Faculty at Columbia University in the 1960s.
- 45.
Isaac, “Corréspondance inédite de Jules Isaac: Extraits de lettres à son médecin (1946–1948),” 11.
- 46.
Archives, Jacques Maritain Center, 430 Geddes Hall, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana.
- 47.
As related by Charles Journet to Jacques Maritain in correspondence dated 2 August 1947 (Journet/Maritain, Correspondence, vol III, 1940–1949, Ed. Saint-Augustin, Parole et Silence, 1998), p.576. The book to which Isaac was referring was, of course, his own, to be published in April 1948.
- 48.
Isaac, Jésus et Israël, 572.
- 49.
Quoted in Yves Chevalier, “Des Dix-huit Propositions de Jules Isaac aux Dix Points de Seelisberg,” Foi & Vie XCVII, no. 1 (January 1998): 20. Ultimately, there were to be Ten Points.
- 50.
Letter dated 19 January 1948 in Isaac, “Soixante-Dix-Neuf lettres de Jules Isaac à F. Lovsky,” 301.
- 51.
Chevalier: as quoted at 22.
- 52.
Jules Isaac, “Du Redressement Nécessaire de L’enseignement Chrétien Concernant Israël ,” (1960), Annexe II. See also Rutishauer, “The 1947 Seelisberg Conference: The Foundation of the Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” at 41.
- 53.
Isaac, Jesus and Israel, reproduced in the Appendix at 404–05.
- 54.
Jesus was Jewish (Point 7); the first apostles were Jewish (Point 9) and to the last day, Jesus received the enthusiastic sympathies of the Jewish people (Point 10).
- 55.
Quoted in Isaac, Jésus et Israël, 37.
- 56.
Rom. 9:5.
- 57.
Mt. 1:1–17.
- 58.
Heb. 7:14.
- 59.
Isaac, Jesus and Israel, 22.
- 60.
Quoted in Connelly, 131.
- 61.
Isaac, Jesus and Israel, 15.
- 62.
Mk. 1:44; Mt. 5:23–24.
- 63.
Isaac, Jésus et Israël, 105.
- 64.
Cunningham.
- 65.
Ibid., 18.
- 66.
Ibid., 89.
- 67.
The consensus view among historians appears to be that the apostolic era unfolded not as if Jesus had mandated his disciples to go out and preach to the gentiles, but rather had he instructed them to restrict their mission to the House of Israel.
- 68.
Isaac notes in particular the correspondences between Mt. 6:6 and 2 Kings 4:33, Mt. 6:7–8 and Is. 1:15 and Eccles. 5:2–3 and Mt. 6:9–10 and Is. 63:16, Ps. 89:26, 146:10, the Kaddish and Talmud, Berakoth 29b “R. Eliezer says, ‘Do Your will in heaven above, and grant well-being to them that fear Thee below,’” and Mt. 6:11–13 and Prov. 30:8, Ecclus. 28:2 and Talmud, Berakoth 60b “bring me not into transgression, or into iniquity, or into temptation…And deliver me from evil.”
- 69.
Quoted in Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt, 77.
- 70.
See, for example, Marcel Simon’s Verus Israël, 2d, 1964. In the post-scriptum to the second edition (p.477), Simon writes, “Most particularly, to my knowledge, virtually no one has refuted the legitimacy of my central thesis: the Judaism [of the period 135 CE to 425 CE], far from having withdrawn into itself, was for Christianity for the whole of the period under study a real, vibrant and often successful competitor.”
- 71.
Karl Adam quoted in Isaac, Jésus et Israël, 75.
- 72.
Reproduced with sources in Paul Démann and R. Bloch, La Catéchèse chrétienne et le Peuple de la Bible (Paris: Cahiers sioniens, 1952).
- 73.
Quoted in Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt, 78.
- 74.
Quoted in ibid., 79.
- 75.
“Warn the faithful against certain stylistic tendencies in the Gospels, notably the frequent use in the fourth Gospel of the collective term “the Jews” in a restricted and pejorative sense—to mean Jesus’ enemies: chief priests, scribes and Pharisees—a procedure that results not only in distorting historic perspectives but in inspiring horror and contempt of the Jewish people as a whole, whereas in reality this people is in no way involved.”
- 76.
Last, not forget that the monstrous cry, “His blood be upon us and on our children!” (Mt. 27:25), could not prevail over the Word, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Lk. 23:34).
- 77.
Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” 15.
- 78.
”Take care not to strain the texts to find in them a universal reprobation of Israel or a curse which is nowhere explicitly expressed in the Gospels; take into account the fact that Jesus always showed feelings of compassion and love for the masses.”
- 79.
Quoted in Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt, 111–13.
- 80.
Isaac, Jésus et Israël, 515.
- 81.
Isaac, Jésus et Israël, New Revised Ed.
- 82.
Ibid., Note Complémentaire regarding p. 515 at 595.
- 83.
Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt, 122.
- 84.
It would take place from 21 July to 28 July 1948. Approximately 130 participants from over 17 countries would attend. The choice of venue was a function of its position on the railway axis between Lausanne and Bern. Charles Journet and Jules Isaac would address the delegates from the Catholic and Jewish points of view, respectively. Jules Isaac would pose two questions to those assembled. “What in our culture is worth saving? What can we do to save our culture?” His response was to point to the spiritual foundations of human culture: justice, freedom, human dignity and the quest for truth.
- 85.
Quoted in Uri Bialer, “Israel and Nostra Aetate: The View from Jerusalem,” in Nostra Aetate: Origins, Promulgation, Impact on Catholic-Jewish Relations: Proceedings of the International Conference Held in Jerusalem 30 October–1 November 2005, ed. Neville Lamdan and Alberto Melloni (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2007), 63–4. It has been suggested the Pope’s response was rooted in the Christian theological view that the loss of Jewish sovereignty over the land was a sure sign of transgression in the eyes of God and deserving of punishment. It has even been speculated that the failure of the Vatican to give open and public aid to the Jews during World War II was driven by a concern that the migration of Jewish refugees to Palestine might undermine the status of the Church in the Holy Land. Among the arguments made in an internal Vatican document authored by the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Luigi Maglione, in May 1943 in support of the Pope’s refusal to help rescue 2000 Jewish children from Slovakia were (i) the Vatican’s non-recognition of the Balfour Declaration and the British plan for establishment of a National Home for the Jews, (ii) concern that the sanctity of the Holy Places would be at risk by an influx of Jews into Palestine and (iii) the theological view that Palestine was holier to Christians than to Jews. It is therefore not surprising that Pius XII expressed strong opposition to Britain’s plan to withdraw from Palestine and leave the decision about its fate to the United Nations. The struggle in the United Nations which culminated with the vote on 29 November 1947 was marked by a flat refusal on the part of the papal representatives to support the Zionist cause and efforts on their part to lobby Latin American states to adopt the same position. One day before statehood would be proclaimed, L’Osservatore Romano, the semi-official daily newspaper of the Holy See, asserted that “modern Zionism is not the true heir of biblical Israel.[…] Therefore the Holy Land and its sacred sites belong to Christianity, which is the true Israel” (quoted in Bialer at p.65).
- 86.
Quoted in Marcel Goldenberg, “Chemin D’amitié Judéo-Chrétienne de Jules Isaac,” Sens, revue de l’Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne de France 380 (2013): 450.
- 87.
In an interview with L’Arche in October 1963, one month after the death of Jules Isaac, Daniel-Rops paid tribute to “the memory of the great Jewish historian …For Jules Isaac will go down as one of the most moving authors, among the witnesses, one of the most persuaded of the friendship between the Jews and the Christians. One might, on certain points, disagree with him; one could consider that certain Christian positions seemed to him to be closed, which led him to judge with a severity that was not always equitable: one never doubted for a moment the sincerity and the generosity of spirit that he invested in conducting that which he took to be an apostolate: the establishment between Jews and Christians of a climate of truth and of charity.” Kaspi, as quoted at 188.
- 88.
Quoted in Isaac, L’enseignement du mépris, 142.
- 89.
See Appendix “Table of Correspondences”.
- 90.
Payré, 139.
- 91.
Quoted in Goldenberg: 440.
- 92.
Armand Lunel, “Les Vingt-Cinq Ans de L’amitié judéo-chrétienne,” Cahiers de l’Association des amis de Jules Isaac, no. 2 (1974): 16.
- 93.
See Pierre Riche, Henri Irenee Marrou, Historien engagé (Cerf, Coll. Histoire/Biographie, 2003).
- 94.
Henri Irénée Marrou, “A Nos Lecteurs,” L’Amitie judéo-chrétienne, no. 1 (1948): 2.
- 95.
Jean-Marie Soutou, “Note Indedite de Monsieur Jean-Marie Soutou,” La revue Sens, organe de l’amitie judeo-chretienne de France, no. 11 (2003): 502–504.
- 96.
Quoted in Bruno Charmet, “Correspondence entre Emmanuel Levinas et Jules Isaac,” Sens, revue de l’Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne de France 401 (2015): 523.
- 97.
Quoted in ibid., 525.
- 98.
Lovsky, “Les Premières années de l’amitié judéo-chrétienne,” 266.
- 99.
Ibid., 263.
- 100.
Ibid., 264.
- 101.
Ibid., 263–66.
- 102.
Ibid., 265.
- 103.
Ibid.
- 104.
Isaac, “Corréspondance inédite de Jules Isaac: Extraits de lettres à son médecin (1946–1948),” 12.
- 105.
Ibid.
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Tobias, N.C. (2017). Gospel Reality. In: Jewish Conscience of the Church. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46925-6_6
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