Imagining a New Jerusalem: Edmond Fleg and inter-war French ecumenism

Abstract

After the Great War, there was a Jewish cultural flowering in France. The poet, writer and playwright Edmond Fleg (1874–1963) was an important figure of this Jewish awakening. His inter-war writing was devoted to exploring encounters between Jewish and Christian texts through which he proposed an expansive notion of ecumenism. Imagining a reading community of both Christian and Jewish intellectuals, Fleg’s first published writing after the war, the poem La Mur des Pleurs (1919) expressed allegorically the horrors of total war concluding with the possibility of the reconciliation of the world’s people at the Communion Table. His play La Maison du Bon Dieu (1920) re-enacted the ecumenical spirit forged during the war and offered an alternative vision of a united France. As inter-war Europe became increasingly jingoistic, divisive and anti-Semitic, Fleg published Jésus Raconté par le Juif Errant (1933), in which he held up an image of Jesus that underscored his pacifism. Against the dominant ideological narratives that surrounded him—Catholic, Jewish, nationalist, communist—Fleg proposed a deep continuity among the world’s religions and national groups and the potential for reconciliation through hard work and common cause. He challenged the rigid division between universalism and diversity in France especially with regards to religion.