Être juif et chrétien

Abstract

During the troubled years between the Dreyfus Affair and the sudden demise of the Third Republic, the French Catholic Church was confronted by a wave of conversions of a number of Jewish intellectuals among them brilliant personalities such as Raïssa Maritain, the wife of the Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, the poet Max Jacob, and the Orientalist Jean de Menasce who joined a monastic order. However these men and women did not permanently abandon the religion of their fathers. On the contrary, the Jewish faith, once despised, became a sign of distinction within the Catholic Church. The converts proudly claimed their being “Jewish - Christians”. The late Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, who retained his Hebrew name of Aaron, is one such example. This double identity questions the nature of what “being Jewish” meant in France at the turn of the 20th century. It reveals the extent of the seductive power of Catholicism in the eyes of a community which had fashioned itself after the model of the religion of the majority as well as the persistence of a Jewish religious and ethnic identity which marks a Christian spiritual vocation with its influence.