Rebellion of the Righteous: Jesuit Partisanship for Jews

Abstract

This essay rescues the memory of Jesuit partisanship for Jews and Judaism from a widespread indifference, both scholarly and popular. This memory complicates a long history of Jesuit hostility to Jews and is at the source of a new inter-religious identity for Jesuits. Jesuit rescuers of Jews during the period of the Holocaust crossed traditional borders in embracing a reverence and respect for Jews and Judaism. Both German Jesuit and French Jesuit resistance to Nazism are examined. The Jesuit righteous and resisters formed a spiritual alliance with such important scholars as Augustin Cardinal Bea, Joseph Bonsirven and Henri de Lubac. The witness of the former and the scholarship of the latter prepared the way for the April 24, 1960 petition from the Jesuit Biblical Institute in Rome that requested a declaration on the Jewish People from the Vatican Council, the first institution to make such an appeal to the council fathers. The council’s adoption of Nostra aetate with its reshaping of the relationship between Catholics and Jews was one of the most significant outcomes of this rebellion of the righteous.