Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II by Karma Ben-Johanan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II by Karma Ben-Johanan Michael Skaggs Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II. By Karma Ben-Johanan. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2022. 352pp. $35.00. Among the more vivid anecdotes recalled by historians of Catholic-Jewish relations is the 1959 Good Friday liturgy celebrated in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, as relayed by Michael Phayer in The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965. When the prescribed prayer for the conversion of “the perfidious Jews” [perfidis Judaeis] was chanted, the pope halted the liturgy. He told the deacon to say the prayer again, without perfidis. Six years later, an ecumenical council proclaimed joyfully—specifically in regard to Jews—that “the Church awaits that day, known to God alone, on which all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and ‘serve him shoulder to shoulder’” (Nostra Aetate, 4). From one perspective, and as often reported in the secular media, the promulgation of Nostra Aetate heralded the end of Catholic-Jewish enmity. Yet accepting this neat bookend to centuries of antisemitism, argues Karma Ben-Johanan, requires overlooking an intricately nuanced development of thought among both Catholic and Jewish thinkers before the council and since. In Jacob’s Younger Brother, Ben-Johanan explores “the relation to the Other as a key component in the consolidation of religious identities in the second half of the twentieth century” (2). The book is not a narrative history of Christian-Jewish dialogue. Instead, Ben-Johanan focuses closely on internal dialogue within each tradition, about the other. Significantly, Ben-Johanan has not offered an uplifting story of ever-approaching unity: “this book is about the problems of rapprochement and not about its successes” (4). Finally, she restricts her well-argued analysis to the thinking and writing of the intellectual elite of each tradition, acknowledging that what she calls “unresolvable tensions” between the two are “confined to specific realms of writing and thinking, to the doctrinal and halakhic cores of the respective traditions” (8). My own work and that of others has demonstrated the [End Page 83] remarkably fraternal relations that have characterized Catholic-Jewish collaboration on several concrete, societal problems. While the book’s main contribution reveals the deeply problematic relationship between Catholicism and Judaism after Vatican II, which ostensibly put an end to the difficulties between Catholics and Jews, Ben-Johanan necessarily guides the reader through the histories of Catholic and Jewish thought. The book is helpfully divided into two main parts, “Judaism in Catholic Theology” and “Christianity in Orthodox Jewish Thought.” Ben-Johanan brilliantly synthesizes centuries of debate within Catholicism and Judaism while maintaining an ultimate focus on thinkers and leaders closer to our own day, including Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, as well as leading rabbinical authorities such as David Rosen of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel (sometimes mistakenly perceived as something like a “Jewish Vatican”) and Eugene Korn of the Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation. Ben-Johanan offers a lucid narrative of Catholicism and European Judaism metaphorically switching places: while the Catholic Church’s landmark statement on Jews in Nostra Aetate in 1965 appeared as the church’s influence on state power waned, the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 meant Judaism now held an amount of sovereign authority not seen for millennia. Pretensions to fraternity could be lowered in intra-Jewish (particularly intra-Orthodox) discussions of Christianity. In this way, Ben-Johanan argues, public, Orthodox rejections of Catholic-Jewish dialogue became possible precisely because of modern conceptions of religious liberty that the church itself had come to advance. An extreme example is Zvi Yehudah Kook’s full embrace of the charge of “deicide” that had been leveled at Jews for centuries: rather than ascribing the crucifixion of Jesus to the Romans, Kook cited Maimonides: “If it was a rabbinical court, then it was a rabbinical court! A Jewish court . . . not an instance of the gentiles” (203). Ben-Johanan describes Kook’s writing as a thoroughly modern stance for a Jew to take precisely because it rejects the need to placate a majority Christian society. Perhaps the single notable...