It was February 1946. Eighteen months had elapsed since the liberation of Paris, twelve months since the liberation of Auschwitz; nine months since the unconditional surrender by the German armed forces in Reims and in Berlin; and six months since Marshall Pétain, the embodiment of L’Etat français, had been found guilty of treason by a special Haute Cour de Justice constituted in 1944 to try Vichy cabinet members. The scale of the crime that had been perpetrated upon European Jewry by the Nazis was only beginning to emerge—the murder of two-thirds of the Jews of Europe. In this context, the first international conference to be jointly sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews,1 and the Council of Christians and Jews,2 was soon to take place. It would be held at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, from 30 July 1946 to 6 August 1946. The conference would emphasize the themes of freedom, justice and responsibility and its fruits would take the form of two resolutions: “to create an international umbrella organization of Christian-Jewish councils of the whole world, as well as to convoke an emergency conference for dealing with anti-Semitism in Europe.”3 Both of these goals would be realized in Switzerland—the first in the form of an International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ) with an office at 10 rue de la Madeleine in Geneva and an address in London,4 and the second in the form of a conference to take place in the summer of 1947 in Seelisberg, Switzerland (canton of Uri). Christian and Jewish members of such joint bodies, as were then known to exist or to be in the process of formation, were invited to attend the conference at Oxford in their personal, not officially representative, capacities, apparently 150 in total. Berlin pastor Dean Gruber and Heidelberg pastor Herman Mass would be permitted entry into England to attend. Theresienstadt survivor and prominent German rabbi Leo Baeck would address the delegates. These 150 attendees would not include Jules Isaac, who, in the matter of Christian-Jewish relations, had yet to emerge into the public sphere as a combatant against antisemitism.
Eighteen months had elapsed since Isaac had emerged from clandestinity, then unaware that he did so bereft of a family life that had seemed of indestructible solidity, returned to a liberated Paris and been restored by de Gaulle to his pre-war function of Inspector General of Public Education for France. “[B]y the autumn of 1944,” he recalled in later life, “I was joyfully reunited with my elder son [Daniel], a commando officer in de Lattre’s army.”5 Isaac had retired from public service on 14 October 1944, still ignorant of the fate of other family members. His retirement was made retroactive to 18 November 1942, his 65th birthday. Formally, he would remain Inspector General of Public Education until 30 September 1945; thereafter, he would be Inspecteur général honoraire.6 “So enduring were my illusions,” he recollected, “that in May 1945 when Germany surrendered, I had not lost all hope, continuing to anxiously scrutinize the lists of returnees posted at l’hôtel Lutétia. [The Lutétia, which had housed the Abwehr offices during the Occupation, was chosen over the Gare d'Orsay to receive the survivors.]At last, of the four of mine who had been deported,7 one, the youngest, my younger son [Jean-Claude], returned, the only one, and by what miraculous good fortune, after Auschwitz and Dora, a deportee who survived; it was pure miracle. It was then, only then, but not through [Jean-Claude], that I learned the truth about Auschwitz, the monstrous truth.”8 Isaac’s wife’s last words to him, in a scribbled message smuggled out of the Drancy transit camp on the eve of her deportation to she knew not where, continued to echo in his mind: My dearest, take care for our sakes, be steadfast and finish your work for which the world is waiting. “I attended to [this sacred mission] desperately, with all my diminishing energy stretched to the extreme,” remembered Isaac, “a real race against the clock, for illness coupled with despair was biting at my heels. In my aixoise retreat, a precious helpmate, [Dr. Marie-Françoise Payré],9 most particularly allowed me to see to completion Jésus et Israël.”10 Isaac had retreated to “his dear Pergola where the hours silently flow, where the visible and the invisible ever coalesce,” in his words, “where distractions are rare, where my only neighbours are meadows and the familiar mother goat with her two leaping children, this very dear Pergola enclosed in its cypress hedges.”11 It was here, at la Pergola, that he had settled in to see to the completion of his sacred mission of fighting for a wounded Israel, for brotherhood against hatred, by immersing himself in the writing of Part IV, the final part, of that for which the world was waiting.
While browsing in a bookstore in Aix-en-Provence, Isaac’s attention was caught by the recently published 17th edition of Jésus en son temps, authored by Daniel-Rops, a Catholic destined for the Académie Française and the order of the Grand Cross of Saint Gregory from Pope Pius XII. “Until then,” Isaac would recollect, “we had had cordial relations which had become frayed further to a meeting of l’Union pour la Vérité where it had seemed to me [Charles] Péguy had been the object of unjustifiable calumny, and I had come to his defense.”12 Upon learning that Isaac’s wife, daughter and son-in-law had been murdered, Daniel-Rops had sent not one, but two, handwritten condolence notes, the first dated 22 September 1945, and the second, 19 October 1945, both expressing profound sadness over Isaac’s “grave loss.”13 But now, in February 1946, Isaac’s eyes fell upon Daniel-Rops’ commentary on Matthew 27:25: “Then the people as a whole answered, ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children!’”14 Isaac’s heart skipped a beat as he read, “Perhaps it was necessary for Israel to kill their God, whom they failed to recognize; but since blood mysteriously invokes blood, does it not perhaps belong to the charity of Christians to let the horrors of pogroms compensate, in the hidden balance of the divine intention, for the unbearable horrors of the crucifixion?”15 In implying that the murder of millions of Jews might be continuing divine retribution for the crucifixion, Daniel-Rops was drawing upon a Christian tradition dating, if not to the first three centuries,16 to the next succeeding fifteen, a tradition that “is not easy to find… in the Church’s official documents,”17 contends Gregory Baum.
Isaac returned home and penned a first draft of a letter to Daniel-Rops. On the night of Easter Sunday, he wrote a second draft which he posted. In the closing paragraph, Isaac drew upon the thoughts of his dear, departed friend, Charles Péguy, thoughts echoed in Part IV of Isaac’s yet-to-be-published manuscript of Jésus et Israël.
How can I explain what I felt in reading such turns of phrases, sagely balanced, perfidious in their form, deliberately abstruse! I find in them a sacrilegious stench. They express I don’t know what secret satisfaction, and a most odious perception of divine justice. Do you really think this God, one with Jesus, the God not only of justice, but also of love and mercy, would refuse to grant the wish of his Son: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’, but instead choose to grant the wish of the ‘Jewish rabble’: ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children!’, as if this wasn’t the same God who, six hundred years earlier, had spoken to his people through the mouth of the prophet Ezekiel: ‘The son will not bear the iniquity of the father and the father will not bear the iniquity of the son…I will judge each according to his ways, house of Israel…’Do you not see that you are repeating Pontius Pilate’s gesture, and that according to the psalmist’s formula, you are ‘keeping your hands clean from guilt’, from the guilt associated with the millions of Jewish martyrs, murdered at Auschwitz and other places of horror, fraternally united with the millions of Christian martyrs.I don’t hold Christianity responsible, far from it, but you, a certain Christian pharisaism that you do not have the courage to repudiate, you who are perpetuating a murderous tradition, yes murderous, I will tell you straight up: it leads to Auschwitz. You speak of Jewish responsibilities; the time has come to speak of Christian responsibilities, or that of pseudo-christians. The truth is that the Christian faith does not demand this inhuman doctrine, this barbaric conception of divine justice, this negation of the universal fruits of the mystery of the Cross and of Redemption…Jesus’s foes in Palestine were the very same encountered in all other countries, in all other times, the same always, amongst all peoples: the leaders, the illustrious, the ‘respectable.’ The Jewish people are nothing but a metaphor, a metaphor for humanity in its entirety. Péguy, this Péguy who you apparently as little understood as you do the Gospels, Péguy said, ‘It is not the Jews who crucified Jesus Christ, but the sins of all of us; the Jews, who were but the instrument, participate like others in the font of salvation.’This is how a true Christian speaks. It was Péguy who brought us together. It is Péguy who today splits us apart.Aix-en-ProvenceEaster Sunday, 21 April 1946.18
Isaac awaited a response. None was forthcoming. He decided to publish his letter to Daniel-Rops, “not out of animosity toward Daniel-Rops,” Isaac later explained, “but for two main reasons: the first was the risk that the resounding success of [the 17th edition of Jésus en son temps] would affect and intoxicate its readers by the tens, by the hundreds, by the thousands; the second was the nature of my critique which showed the work of reducing to a soft mass, of deforming, of a tendentious selection of scriptural passa...