Abstract
A representative measure of the first reactions elicited by Jésus et Israël is the 10 June 1948 debate that was radio-broadcast by the Tribune de Paris and of which we have the transcript. Paul Perronet chaired the session. Participants were Jules Isaac, Jesuit Father Jean Daniélou, Protestant Pastor Charles Westphal, Orthodox Church theologian Léon Zander, and Isaac supporters Jacques Madaule and Samy Lattès. Isaac led off with his conclusions.
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Notes
- 1.
Professor at the Orthodox Institute of Theology of the Russian Emigration Church.
- 2.
Jules Isaac, “Israël et la Chrétienté,” L’Amitié judéo-chrétienne, no. 1 (September 1948): 2.
- 3.
Gregory Baum, The Jews and the Gospel, 5.
- 4.
Jules Isaac, “Israël et la Chrétienté,” L’Amitié judéo-chrétienne, no. 1 (September 1948): 2. In the 14 July 1948 issue of Le Monde, Westphal referred to the book as an “ouvrage accusateur” which exposed an implicit theology with which the Gospel of John, the Book of Acts and the Epistles of Paul cannot be made to conform.
- 5.
Quoted in Colin Richmond, Campaigner against Antisemitism: The Reverend James Parkes, 1896–1981 (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2005), 15.
- 6.
Isaac, “Israël et la Chrétienté,” 3.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Reproduced in Jacques Madaule, “La Tragédie juive et le mystère d’Israël,” l’Amitié judéo-chrétienne, no. 1 (September 1948): 14.
- 11.
Paul Démann, “Aux sources chrétiennes de l’antisémitisme,” Cahiers sioniens, no. 5 (1949): 22.
- 12.
Jules Isaac, “Vingt-Quatres lettres de Jules Isaac à Paul Démann,” Sens, revue de l’Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne de France, no. 7–8 (2003): 341.
- 13.
Isaac, Jésus et Israël, 118–19.
- 14.
Reproduced in a footnote in Isaac, “Lettres de Jules Isaac à Jacques Madaule,” 618.
- 15.
By the close of 1930, the Reverend James Parkes, since 1928 Geneva-based cultural cooperation secretary for the International Student Service, had completed and published The Jew and His Neighbour: A Study of the Causes of Antisemitism. The catalyst for the book had been Parkes’ firsthand observations of the cultural and political questions that divided European students, most notably that of antisemitism. According to biographer Haim Chertok, Parkes’ next 22 books, including even his magnum opus, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue (1934), “may profitably be viewed as extended commentary on this maiden work” (Haim Chertok, “James Parkes: A Final Reckoning,” Covenant 2, no. 1 (May 2008): 2).
- 16.
Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue, 376.
- 17.
James Parkes, Judaism and Christianity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1948), 30–31.
- 18.
Ibid., 37–38.
- 19.
Isaac, Jésus et Israël, 358, footnote 1.
- 20.
Parkes, Judaism and Christianity, 25.
- 21.
Ibid., 105–106.
- 22.
Correspondence to the author dated 15 December 2014.
- 23.
Connelly, 287. Examples are Thieme, Oesterreicher, Gurian, Luckner, Démann, Baum, Rudloff, Bloy, Maritain, van Leer, von Hildebrand, Kraus, Vermes.
- 24.
Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue, vii.
- 25.
Parkes, The Jew and His Neighbour, 34–35.
- 26.
Isaac, Genèse de l’antisémitisme, 14.
- 27.
Marrou was using the word “apostille” to mean a marginal annotation or added recommendation.
- 28.
See Pierre Riche, Henri Irénée Marrou. Historien engagé (Cerf, 2003).
- 29.
Isaac, “Résonance de Jésus et Israël,” 207; see Jésus et Israël, pp. 292, 358–359, 570–571.
- 30.
Isaac, Genèse de l’antisémitisme, 144–145, 147.
- 31.
Reproduced as Jean Daniélou, “Jésus et Israel,” Cahiers de l’Association des amis de Jules Isaac, no. 9 – nouvelle série (2008): 20–21.
- 32.
In a book published by Daniélou in 1963 and titled Dialogue avec Israël (of which an English translation would follow in 1968), Daniélou would add that Isaac “goes too far when, in his desire to declare the Jewish people innocent, he wants to put the responsibility for it on the Romans and thus to reduce it to an episode in the political history of Judaism. The texts of the Gospel make this argument difficult. Isaac then becomes suspicious of its authenticity. Let us simply say that this is bad method, dependent on outdated exegesis” (p. 70).
- 33.
Reproduced as Jules Isaac, “Réponse” Cahiers de l’Association des amis de Jules Isaac, no. 9 – nouvelle série (2008): 22–23.
- 34.
Some 18 years later, in 1966, the young rabbinical student who had directed the network of resistance in the Auvergne, who had been charged with procuring false papers for the Isaacs, who had become a disciple of Isaac, would confront Father Daniélou in a dialogue. Jean Daniélou was by that time dean of the Faculty of Theology at the Catholic Institute of Paris. André Chouraqui was by that time a doctor of law and laureate of the Faculty of Law in Paris and former personal adviser to Ben-Gurion. Like a modern-day Joshua, Chouraqui would hear from the lips of Daniélou utterances that his mentor had not been privileged to hear, utterances such as the following:
“I come now to what is more important. Has not Christianity itself – Christian teaching and the presentation of the events in the life of Christ as given by Christians – been one of the sources of anti-Semitism? We are absolutely obliged to say that it has been, particularly because of the way the events of the life of Christ were presented, less by the great theologians and the great saints than by all the popular literature.” (Jean Danielou and Andre Chouraqui, The Jews: Views and Counterviews, (New York: Newman Press, 1967), p. 60).
- 35.
Wladimir Rabinovitch was writer, journalist and magistrat au tribunal de Briançon.
- 36.
Lovsky, “Les Premières années de l’amitié judéo-chrétienne,” 267.
- 37.
Ibid., 267–8.
- 38.
Echoes of Galatians 2:21 “for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.”
- 39.
Henri Irénée Marrou, “Lettre D’henri Irénée Marrou à Jules Isaac,” Sens, revue de l’Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne de France, no. 12 (2005): 626–627.
- 40.
Isaac, “Lettres de Jules Isaac à Jacques Madaule,” Isaac closes a letter to Madaule dated 5 November 1948 with “I vote for Jacques Madaule as president and shake his hand très amicalement (p. 619).”
- 41.
Lovsky, “Les Premières années de l’amitié judéo-chrétienne,” 269.
- 42.
Reproduced in Marrou: 628.
- 43.
Quoted in Isaac, Genèse de l’antisémitisme, 167.
- 44.
Reproduced in Marrou, “Trois Apostilles,” 629.
- 45.
Formgeschichte means “history of form.” Its English correlate is called “form criticism,” the method of analyzing a text and dividing it into its “original” subunits based on literary pattern. In this sense it is related to what is called “source criticism” in the study of the Hebrew Bible.
- 46.
Reproduced in Marrou, “Trois Apostilles,” 634.
- 47.
Reproduced in Jules Isaac, “Réponse aux “Apostilles” de Marrou,” Sens, revue de l’Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne de France, no. 12 (2005): 638–644 at 639.
- 48.
In correspondence to the author dated 14 January 2008, Gregory Baum wrote, “Most exegetes think that the divine status of the man Jesus was recognised by the disciples only after the resurrection. The recorded events in the life of Jesus are to a large extent what we call post-Easter projections, that is to say – the disciples, telling the life of Jesus after Easter, did not produce a biography of Jesus in the modern sense, but presented his life as already revealing his divine sonship. Hence they do not hold that the Jewish court condemned him because his claim contradicted their monotheistic belief.”
- 49.
Lovsky, “Les Premières années de l’amitié judéo-chrétienne,” 267.
- 50.
Parkes’ commentary to which Simon alludes on the two seemingly irreconcilable points of view on the significance of the law, as expanded by the rabbis, can be adumbrated as follows. There are two explanations for the mutual hostility between the Pharisees and Jesus. In the first place, neither Jesus’ discipleship nor Pharisaism was a closed order. The Pharisees desired to enhance observance within Israel. Jesus’ mission was aimed at the same constituency. Secondly, each of Jesus and the Pharisees “paid the other the compliment of considering them the most important alternative teachers to themselves… [Jesus] concerned Himself with the Pharisees because in His view, they were so nearly right. The Pharisees concerned themselves with Him because he was so obviously being successful in bringing a new reality of God and a new fellowship between men into the lives of ordinary people (p. 59).” Parkes contends that nowhere do the Pharisees charge Jesus with making new law (and therefore founding a new religion) although he concedes that Jesus’ prohibition of divorce was the unique instance of exactly that. His proscription of divorce aside, however, “It was not more or different Halachah that Jesus desired, but deeper spiritual insight…The conflict was not over two schools of Halachah. It was concerned with two methods of bringing men into contact with the living God (p. 60).”
- 51.
Marcel Simon, “Jésus et Israël,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuse, no. XXXI (1951): 366.
- 52.
Ibid., 366–67.
- 53.
Marcel Simon, Les Premiers Chrétiens, 3e ed., Que Sais-je? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967).
- 54.
Isaac, Jésus et Israël, 572.
- 55.
Simon, “Jésus et Israël,” 368–69.
- 56.
Lazare’s thesis, “however awkwardly framed and exaggerated,” according to Lovsky, was endorsed by the latter. However, Lovsky argued that antisemitism was a sui generis antipathy, related not to the temporal, but to the spiritual. “Antisemitism is not the hatred of just any minority, national or religious, but of Israel,” wrote Lovsky. “There is a connection between Israel’s mission in the world, taken so seriously by so many generations of Jews, and the world’s perception of the people who incarnate this precise vocation…For the virulent antisemite discerns in the Jews not psychologicial traits or the customs of a minority, but Israel’s vocation. How surprising it is, then, that those among [antisemites] who are most acutely aware of Israel’s mission are as vulnerable to the antisemitic impulse as the crowds ignorant of Israel’s destiny – lunacy for the atheists and scandalous for Christians themselves” (Lovsky, Antisémitisme et mystère d’Israël, 12–13).
- 57.
Bernard Lazare, Antisemitism, Its History and Causes (London: Britons Publishing Company, 1967), 8.
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Tobias, N.C. (2017). The Resonance of Jésus et Israël. In: Jewish Conscience of the Church. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46925-6_8
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