Les intellectuels chrétiens et le dialogue judéo-chrétien au Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française (1957-2000)

Abstract

After the attempt to exterminate Judaism during World War II, many Jewish thinkers developed in France an unprecedented intellectual experience, known as the School of Jewish Thought of Paris. With the School of Orsay, the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue francaise captured this defining experience of Jewish cultural life in France after the Holocaust. These high-level intellectual meetings were put forth by Jewish thinkers to address issues most often linked to the events of the day and to approach them through the lens of traditional Jewish texts and their questions. The relations between Jewish intellectuals and intellectuals from the Christian world were numerous, as per the intent of the preparatory Committee which organized these meetings. Amongst those intellectuals who participated in these meetings, many were focused on furthering the Judeo-Christian dialogue. The Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue francaise initiated a movement of reconciliation between the two groups as the Christian world ended up testifying to this evolution by growing closer to the religious, moral, cultural and political values of Judaism. In this current of Judeo-Christian civilization, the presence of Christian thinkers at these colloquia allowed the hitherto marginalized Jewish faith to integrate itself into the Western humanitarian tradition. The aliya of the Jewish thinkers chairing the preparatory Committee after the Six Days’ War, as well as the intellectual crisis which followed World War II, marked the beginning of the decline of the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue francaise in the late seventies. The colloquium had nonetheless given rise to a new type of intellectual : the religious thinker, whether Jewish or Christian.