Christianité Dans Ses Rapports Avec le Judaïsme

The first fact is that of a shared root. The movement of Jesus was rooted in Second Temple Judaism, reading the same Scriptures, frequenting the synagogue and the Temple of Jerusalem. As Mimouni demonstrates, the period running from the 6th century before our era to the 3rd century of our era saw Judaism recompose itself around new institutions after the destruction of the sanctuary, and it is within this ferment that the first groups of disciples of Jesus unfolded [Mimouni, 2012]. The rupture was neither immediate nor univocal. The destruction of the Temple by Titus in 70, then the revolt of Bar Kokhba (132–135), accelerated a double reconfiguration: Rabbinic Judaism organized itself around the Oral Torah and the house of study, while Christianity, opening itself increasingly to non-Jews, distanced itself from Mosaic Law. The very terms "Judaism" and "Christianity" crystallized in this moment of differentiation, each defining itself in part by what it refused of the other.

From the 2nd century onward, the young Church faces a daunting question: what to do with the Jewish heritage? Marcion of Sinope proposes a radical solution — reject the Old Testament and the God of Israel as foreign to the Gospel. The Church condemns him as a heretic and preserves the Hebrew Bible, but at the cost of a rereading that makes Jewish Scripture a mere announcement of Christ. This marks the birth of the so-called substitution theology: the Church, "verus Israel," presents itself as the legitimate heir to the promises, with the old Covenant deemed null and void. From Justin Martyr to Tertullian, from Origen to John Chrysostom, an entire polemical genre develops—the Adversus Judaeos literature—in which theological argumentation gradually shifts toward moral accusation. It is from this patristic foundation that what Jules Isaac would later call "the teaching of contempt" will be born — the idea that Israel's exile and misfortune would be the punishment of a guilty people [Isaac, 1962].

The Western Middle Ages established Jews in an ambiguous status: tolerated as witnesses to the Scriptures, yet kept apart and periodically persecuted. The Crusades opened cycles of violence against Rhineland communities from 1096 onwards. The Church furthermore organized public disputations designed to demonstrate Christian truth: the Disputation of Paris (1240) resulted in the condemnation and auto-da-fé of the Talmud, while the Disputation of Barcelona (1263) pitted the rabbi Moses Nahmanides against the convert Paul Christian before King James I of Aragon. To these doctrinal confrontations were added imaginary accusations — ritual murder, host desecration, well poisoning — that fueled pogroms and expulsions, until the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. The theology of substitution thus accompanied a legislation of exclusion: the wearing of a distinctive sign imposed by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, relegation to reserved quarters, professional prohibitions.

The Iberian Peninsula offers the tragic laboratory of forced conversion that became suspect. After the massacres of 1391 and the preachings of constraint, tens of thousands of Jews were baptized; they were named conversos or, with contempt, marranos. But baptism did not dissolve suspicion: the Spanish Inquisition, established in 1478, made it its mission to hunt down the "Judaizers," these new Christians accused of practicing in secret the rites of their ancestors. The statutes of "purity of blood" (limpieza de sangre) then transformed religious hostility into quasi-ethnic discrimination, prefiguring modern logics. This chapter pertains to the intersection between Memory and archive: tradition transmits the memory of families faithful to Judaism behind the Christian façade, while the inquisitorial trials, meticulously preserved, attest both to real practices and to fantasized denunciations. The Sephardic dispersion that resulted from it would spread from Amsterdam to the Ottoman Empire, and to the earliest communities of the New World studied by Laura Arnold Leibman [Leibman, 2020].

The Protestant Reformation reshuffles the cards without overturning them: Luther, initially favorable to rapprochement, publishes in 1543 a violent pamphlet against the Jews, while certain Calvinist currents and Christian Hebraism renew interest in the language and biblical sources of Israel. It is especially modernity that shifts the debate: the Enlightenment poses the question of Jewish citizenship, and the French Revolution grants emancipation in 1791. The relationship of Christianity to Judaism ceases to be exclusively theological and becomes political and social. But civil emancipation does not make hostility disappear: it secularizes into the racial antisemitism of the late nineteenth century, which nevertheless draws, often unknowingly, from the old fund of Christian demonization. In his Traversées du Judaïsme au regard des enjeux contemporains, David Encaoua reminds us how the modern Jewish condition remains marked by this long heritage of ambivalence between promised integration and persistent rejection [Encaoua, 2024].

The decisive break comes from catastrophe. After the Shoah, historian Jules Isaac undertook to demonstrate that modern antisemitism has its roots in a "teaching of contempt" distributed over centuries by Christian catechesis, in his works Jesus and Israel and then The Teaching of Contempt [Isaac, 1962]. Received by Pope John XXIII in 1960, he played a decisive role in preparing Vatican Council II. On October 28, 1965, the declaration Nostra Aetate brought about a doctrinal reversal: the Church rejected the collective accusation of deicide brought against the Jewish people, reaffirmed the spiritual bond uniting Christians and Jews, and condemned all forms of antisemitism. The text marked a shift hailed as foundational to contemporary Jewish-Christian dialogue; according to analyses published for its sixtieth anniversary, it inaugurates six decades of institutional rapprochement between the Catholic Church and Judaism. This movement was extended by the Holy See's recognition of the State of Israel in 1993 and by numerous gestures of repentance, even as persistent theological tensions over salvation and mission remained unresolved.

Marcion of Sinope (circa 85 – circa 160) — A theologian from Pontus, he proposed in the 2nd century to sever all ties between the Gospel and the Hebrew Bible, opposing the Creator God of the Old Testament to the Father revealed by Jesus. Excommunicated in Rome around 144, he was opposed as a heretic. His rejection paradoxically forced the Church to preserve the Old Testament and define its relationship to Israel, making him, by contrast, an involuntary architect of the Christian canon.

Tertullian (circa 155 – circa 220) — A Christian writer from Carthage and one of the earliest great Latin authors of the Church. His treatise Adversus Judaeos established arguments of anti-Jewish polemic: the obsolescence of the Covenant, the universality of the new Law. A rigorous theologian and brilliant polemicist, he helped forge the vocabulary of substitution theology that would weigh heavily on relations between the two traditions.

Moses Nahmanides (Ramban, 1194–1270) — Rabbi, exegete and physician from Girona, a major figure in medieval Judaism. Forced to publicly dispute in Barcelona in 1263 against the convert Paul Christian, he defended Judaism with remarkable freedom before the court of Aragon. Subsequently persecuted for his account of the controversy, he went into exile in the Holy Land, where he worked to revive the Jewish community of Jerusalem.

Martin Luther (1483–1546) — A German reformer and founder of Protestantism. Initially benevolent toward Jews whom he hoped to convert, he shifted to virulent hostility with his 1543 writings. His ambivalence illustrates the lasting difficulty of reformed Christianity in thinking through its relationship to Judaism, and his polemical legacy would be instrumentalized long after his death.

Jules Isaac (1877–1963) — A French historian, co-author of celebrated school textbooks, he lost loved ones during the Shoah. He devoted the postwar period to demonstrating the Christian roots of antisemitism in Jesus and Israel and The Teaching of Contempt [Isaac, 1962]. His audience with John XXIII in 1960 weighed directly on the genesis of Nostra Aetate, making him one of the secular fathers of Jewish-Christian dialogue.

John XXIII (Angelo Roncalli, 1881–1963) — Pope from 1958 to 1963, he convened the Second Vatican Council and had an expression judged offensive to Jews removed from the liturgy of Good Friday. Sensitized by Jules Isaac, he opened the way to the doctrinal revision that Nostra Aetate would consecrate after his death, embodying the conciliar turn toward reconciliation.

The history of relations between Christianity and Judaism traces a curve running from shared origins to rupture, from rupture to polemic, from polemic to persecution, and then, emerging from the abyss, to a work of mutual recognition. What strikes us is the persistence of the bond: even in the most violent rejection, Christianity could never think itself without reference to Israel, from which it retained Scripture, messianic hope, and the one God. The turning point of Nostra Aetate did not abolish theological differences, but it substituted dialogue for anathema. As the work of David Encaoua on the contemporary stakes of Judaism suggests, this relationship remains living, demanding, never closed [Encaoua, 2024]. Writing its history means refusing both the forgetting of wounds and the renunciation of hope for a recovered brotherhood.