Jules Isaac and the Roman Catholic Church: Advocate for Scriptural Truth

The dissertation/book manuscript is an Isaac-centric prehistory of the fourth paragraph of Nostra aetate. It is the backstory of how the Jewish Question came to be added to the agenda of Vatican II. The point of the dissertation is to demonstrate that, but for the thought and activism of this eminent French Jewish historian, the Jewish Question would not have been added to the agenda of Vatican II and the Council Fathers would not have had the opportunity to declare that the New Testament could no longer be read as if the Holocaust had not happened. The narrative speaks for itself regarding how and why Isaac was destined to play the catalytic role he did. The first two chapters track Isaac's life from his birth to the German invasion of France in May/June 1940 with special emphasis upon the loss of his parents in his fourteenth year, the influence of Charles Péguy, Isaac's staunch secular republicanism and his embrace of Péguy-esque socialism and of Dreyfusism. The chapter also deals with how Isaac's career as a lycée professor came to be subordinated to his authorship and editorial oversight of a multi-volume manuel d'histoire for French secondary students and closes with Isaac's appointment as Inspector General of Public Education for France shortly after Léon Blum took power in 1936. The third chapter deals with Vichy's ouster of Isaac from French civic life, wounding him as a Jew and provoking in him a question - to affirm his Judaism through observance or to convert to Christianity. Was it really scripturally true, he wondered, as Christianity had taught for nearly two millennia, that the Jewish people - his people - were responsible for the death of Jesus and have since remained so, that as a consequence, the Jews had forfeited their very relationship with God, or worse still, were the object of a divine curse? In addressing these questions, Isaac was to bring to bear the same rigour, intellectual integrity and methodologies that he had used as a historian, in particular in the interwar years in delving into the causes of the Great War. The fourth and fifth chapters chronicle the clandestine gestation of the first three Parts of Jésus et Israël amidst the personal tragedy that befell Isaac in 1943, its postwar completion and publication and Isaac's campaign, with the support of certain eminent French scholars and theologians, to purify Christian preaching and teaching of a secular tradition contemptuous of Jews and Judaism. The sixth chapter chronicles the events leading up to, and culminating with, the pivotal private audience on 13 June 1960 between Isaac and Pope John XXIII and ends with Isaac's death on 5 September 1963. This chapter also relates how a then young Augustinian priest, Gregory Baum, who would collaborate in the reformulation of official Church attitudes about Jew and Judaism, would come to be Isaac's correspondence partner, "pupil" and "follower," forever changed by Jésus et Israël. The seventh chapter takes up the trajectory of the conciliar statement on the Jews to its promulgation on 28 October 1965 and adumbrates the Pauline theology upon which the statement is grounded, as reinterpreted by the official Church. The Epilogue tracks the evolution in the theology of Gregory Baum, returns to the research question with the corroborative testimony of those in a position to know that but for Isaac, there never would have been a Jewish Question on the Vatican II agenda, notes the numerous correlations between the Guidelines and Notes on the one hand, and Isaac's thinking, on the other, addresses the enigma of Isaac's own personal faith and, in its closing paragraph, returns to Isaac in the context of the first papal visit to the Great Synagogue of Rome.

Advisor: Novak, David