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Catholics and Jews. A commentary on the notes for catechists and preachers
Michel Remaud

Immediately following the publication of the Notes for Catechists and Preachers, Michel Remaud produced on September 20, 1985 a theological commentary entitled: Catholiques et Juifs: 1.1n Nouveau Regard. Note de la Commission pour les Relations Religieuses avec le Judaisme. Texte Complet, Presentation et Commentaires, published by Cooperative de l'Enseignement Religieux de Paris, 8 rue de la Vile l'Eveque, 75384 Paris Cedex 08.
With the very kind permission of both the author and the publisher, the SIDIC Center has translated chapters 7, 2, 3 and 6 for this issue in the impossibility, unfortunately, of including the complete text for lack of space. We understand that the author is considering the publication of a complete English translation in the near future. We shall keep our readers informed, as we consider it an indispensable aid to a full understanding of the Notes.

The Church and the Jewish people: a unique relationship
Jesus was and always remained a Jew (n. 12)9" Of all the affirmations contained in the text, this is perhaps the one most fraught with consequences, and must therefore he placed at the beginning of this commentary. This statement sheds light on the basis of this unique and singular relationship -which links the Church with the people of Israel.+1

To say that Jesus is a Jew does in fact express far more than just his ethnic origins. Although in many ways a people like any other, the Jewish people has been singled out from its very beginnings and given a unique destiny: it is the people founded by God and chosen to be the bearer of his Revelation and the partner in his Covenant. By revealing himself to them, God showed at the same time what he expected of each one whose vocation is to he conformed to the image of God: You shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy (Lev 19:12). The Jew, if he chooses to respond to the call addressed to him by God within his own people, is thus someone who commits himself to live according to the Word of God, and by so doing, to fulfil God's plan for the human race. In this sense Jesus is. for us, not simply one Jew among many; he is the one in whom is fulfilled the expectations of God for his people. Therefore, to say Jesus is a Jew takes us far beyond documentary evidence of his place of birth and his mother-tongue, however important these things may be. it is rather to specify the forms taken, within a particular people, by his personality and his mission. For him, Jewish ness was not something accidental, but a fundamental characteristic of his very being.

This is why the text affirms that Jesus always remained a law. First and foremost this means that Jesus is not a convert. He never abjured his Judaism, nor did he in any way disown his origins or his past. But this also means that the Risen Jesus remains a Jew. Far from destroying what he had been, the Resurrection glorifies it and makes it eternal. Resurrection is certainly a liberation, which frees a person from all that imprisons him; it delivers him from all limitations and all constrictions. Nevertheless it does not abolish the particular characteristics (particularity must not be confused with particularism) which define a personality. After resurrection the person is still there with all his/her constituent parts. The risen Jesus remains a man, whom the Church recognizes as her Bridegroom. Ile remains a corporeal being, even if our imagination must refrain from all speculation on the properties of a spiritual body (I Cor 15:44). This is even more true of his Jewish being in that this term not only expresses his human roots but also his place in the plan of God. Louis Bouyer does not hesitate to write:
The Church (...) is- the Body of Christ, hut this Body into which, through every Eucharistic celebration, each Christian enters ever more deeply, is the Body of a Jew..(2)

Thus the Church finds herself linked, by her very nature and for all eternity, to Jesus the Jew and through him to all his people. It is from a Jew, in whom she sees the plan of God fulfilled, that she receives her own life in perpetuity. It is thus in the very person of the Risen Jesus that she encounters Judaism, and this is why the document makes its own the affirmation of John-Paul II, according to which the Church and Israel are linked together at the very level of their identity (1:2). For his part, Cardinal Etchegaray writes:
The perpetuity of the Jewish people does not only carry, for the Church, a problem about external relations which need improving, but an internal problem which touches on its own
definition(3).
Such statements are in direct line with the conciliar document Nostra Aetate. In this declaration on the relations of the Church with nun-Christian religions, the paragraph on the Jews begins with these words:
Sounding the depths of the mystery which is the Church, the sacred Council remembers the spiritual ties which link the people of the New Covenant to the stock of Abraham.

It is in reflecting on her own identity, and not in looking at things extraneous to herself, that the Church encounters Judaism. Her relations with the Jewish people thus contain a unique element which is not found in her contact with any other religion. The common biblical and liturgical heritage, on which the text rightly insists, cannot fully take into account this privileged relationship of which it is only the consequence. The link with the people of Israel is found written into the very identity of Christianity. This is why the (Roman) Commission for Religious Relations with Judaism wrote in 1974:
The problem of Jewish-Christian relations concerns the Church as such, since it is, "when pondering her own mystery", that she encounters the mystery of Israel. Therefore, even in areas where no Jewish communities exist, this remains an important problem.(4)

Today the same commission takes up this statement and draws the conclusion:
Because of the unique relations which exist between Christianity and Judaism "linked together at the very level of their identity", relations "founded on the design of the God of the Covenant", the Jews and Judaism should not occupy an occasional and marginal place in catechesis: their presence there is essential and should be organically integrated (I, 2).

Here it is question of pastoral concern (L3), because knowledge of living Judaism can greatly help us to understand better certain aspects of the life of the Church (ibid).

Old and New
Some explanation of the terms Old and New is needed; they often give rise to misunderstanding when used in the context of relations with Judaism.(5)

New Covenant
The expression New Covenant is to be found in the Old Testament(6). Through the prophet Jeremiah (31:31) God announces to his people, who had known the trial of exile. that he will restore them by pardoning their infidelities. The covenant he will make with the house of Israel and the house of Jude would have the same content as the one which had been sealed on
Sinai. It would be new insofar as the law of God would be inscribed on the heart of man. For his part. the prophet Ezekiel (36:26-27) announces that God will purify his people, taking away man's heart of stone in order to give him a heart of flesh, and endowing him with his own spirit to make him capable of observing God's law. God will thus renew from within this people to whom he had pledged his word irrevocably, in order to make them capable of exercising fidelity.

In the Passover of Christ the Church has recognized the accomplishment of these promises. The New Covenant is sealed in the blood of Jesus (Lk 22:20; I Car 11:25) and the Spirit of God is poured forth at Pentecost. For the first Christians, who were Jews, it was question of an event internal to the people of Israel, by which God kept the word he had given to his people. In no way was it question of the establishment of a new religion.

As far as these first Christians were concerned, history unfolded in a totally unexpected way; the Jewish people as a whole did not accept the Gospel, while the Jewish core in the Church was submerged by an influx of pagan converts. Very soon both the Jewish people and a Church made up almost entirely of non-Jews were facing each other. In a very short space of time this situation led the latter to strengthen their own position by an erroneous reading of the texts already quoted: God had replaced a first covenant made with Israel, and to which the Jews had been unfaithful, by a second, definitive one, made with another people, the Church, which had taken the place of Israel. This is to falsify completely the meaning of Scripture, for which the expression new covenant means, on the contrary, that God is faithful and cannot take back the word which he has given to his people once and for all.

One can well understand that such a reading could have disastrous consequences for our comprehension of relations with the Jews, who in this way could be taken for representatives of an order which had been rendered null and void. It also falsifies in a serious manner our concept of the Church, which now appears as a new people replacing (7) the old. For if it is true that the Church and the Jewish people have become two socially distinct groups, nevertheless the Church has no legitimacy unless she maintains herself, through Christ, in the continuity of the one people of God. Finally, this reading can only impoverish our understanding of Revelation.

New Testament
The expression New Testament transcribes rather than translates the Latin Novum Testamentum. Of itself, the expression simply means New Covenant.(8) At the same time it is customary in French/English to use the terms Old Testament, New Testament to designate the two ',arts of the Christian Bible. Thus New Testament means not so much the Christ-event as the written text (gospels, epistles etc.) which grew out of the apostolic preaching and its development. This is the meaning it will he given here. Nevertheless it must always he kept in mind that the covenant and the testament are present in each other.

Not a few Christians today consider themselves dispensed from reading the Old Testament on the plea that the new covenant has replaced the old one. This is a point of view very far from what is said in the New Testament itself. Jesus fulfilled the promises made to the Fathers (Lk 1:54-55), and it is Jesus himself who, after his resurrection, explains Moses, the Prophets and the Writings to his disciples (Lk 24:27). The Jesus-event in fact takes place within a plan of God of which Scripture gives the meaning (Acts 2). For the first Christians who did not, for good reasons, have the New Testament in their hands, Jesus and Scripture shed light on each other, The New Testament is very largely witness to this constant re-reading of Scripture in the light of the Resurrection. It appears much less as an autonomous piece of literature as a guide to reading the Old Testament, without which it is largely unintelligible. To claim that the Old Testament is null and void therefore betrays a serious misunderstanding of the New.

The Christian who knows how to give himself to the reading of the Old Testament quickly realizes that the whole Bible has an internal dynamism of perpetual renewal. In a history where failure and even sin arc occasions for a progressively deeper discovery of God, mankind never ceases to renew itself and to find, or rediscover, life in a Word, the sense and import of which is never fully exhausted by any one interpretation or event. Biblical revelation draws strength ceaselessly from the past in order to turn towards the future.(9) The Old Testament is not simply promise; it also contains numerous fulfilments (if not, how could Old Testament man speak with such assurance of the fidelity of God?). And the New Testament is also promise. Thus one is false to the spirit of Scripture when the Old and the New are made into two successive dispensations, with the second abolishing the first. The entirety of Revelation is a permanent transition from old to new.

This movement also characterises the Jewish reading of Scripture, which is an unending search (midrash+) for the meaning of the Word of God, This is an eye-opener for many Christians who imagine, wrongly, that Jews read the Bible literally. Initially, this discovery can be discouraging for the Christian. Bewildered by a reading which at first glance scents very strange, he has the ini press ion that the common ground upon which he hoped to meet the Jew has been cut from under his feet(10) The first astonishment over, and not wishing to diminish the distance between us that is the result of faith in Christ, he begins to realize that the spirit underlying both Jewish and Christian reading of Scripture is closer than appeared at first glance. Common to both Jews and Christians is this untiring search for the meaning of a Word which never Fully yields up its significance or its power, because it is the Word of God.

Chosen People
What has been said already about the relationship between Old and New can help towards a better under standing of the reservations in the document concerning the use of typology. The text reminds us that typology,
"the teaching and practice of which we have received from the Liturgy and from the Fathers of the Church" (n. 4) "consists in reading the Old Testament as preparation and, in certain aspects, outline and foreshadowing of the New" (n. 5).

For the authors of the New Testament (I Cor 10:111, etc.) typological reading means that in Jesus, God revealed the content of a Word which, in itself, is always open to the future. Because it is divine, the Word of God can never refer exclusively to the past. No event can fulfil it in such a way that the hope it bears within it is extinguished. It should be kept in mind that the transition from Old to New is a dynamic which is characteristic already of the Old Testament. The spirit of this transition is therefore betrayed if it is seen only as a rupture (n. 4).

Once again, on is unfaithful to the spirit of Revelation if typology becomes a systematic, quasi-mechanical transposition of an Old Testament (looked upon simply as a repertoire of images and prefigurations) into a New Testament which is seen as the only vehicle of reality. If this were the case, the Christian need only refer directly to the reality itself, without making a detour by way of a prefiguration which often seems strange and which, far from helping him to a better understanding of the New Testament, generally seems even more obscure to him or her..

To connect old and new in this way is to forget something that the text emphasizes, namely, that biblical revelation has its own inner meaning. It is not an allegory but a very real history of the eventful relationship between man and his God. By his baptism, the Christian finds himself caught up into this main stream of events. Consequently. the New Covenant Certainly does not mean that the believer has nothing else for which to wait! On the contrary, it introduces him into a movement of growth (Eph 4,11-16; cf. n. 8) and allows him to share in the hope of the Kingdom (Mt 6,10) together with al/ the people of God (n. 10-11).

If on the one hand the excessive use of typology gives rise to important reservations, on the other, the people of Israel as people can be considered as a type (or, if you wish, a frame of reference for humanity). The history of the Jewish people is that of the perennial encounter between man and God, and in it all the typical situations find a meeting place: spiritual combat, sanctity, cowardice, heroism, flight from God, trust, hope, mercy. The people is a type therefore, and not meant to be taken as a model. The Bible is not a collection of edifying stories but a portrait of the human being at grips with himself and with God. Because this story is enlightened by the Word of God, it gives to every believer the ability to recognize himself in it and to decypher his own experience.

If the Jewish people has been set apart (Num 23:9), it is for the benefit of humanity. Election is not a privilege; it does not bestow rights but imposes duties: to show what God expects from the human race, and to hold on to a firm hope in his promises. A demanding call if ever there was one! The manner in which the Church and Christians have responded to their vocation must deter them from passing judgment on the way in which the Jewish people responds to theirs! Rather than indulge in such comparisons, the document invites us to ask ourselves how we can face up to our common responsibility (n. 11).

Judaism and Christianity in history
We must remember how the balance of relations between Jews and Christians over two thousand years has been negative (n. 25).

It does not often happen that a Roman directive recommends that one of the collective responsibilities weighing most heavily on the conscience of the Christian world should be highlighted in preaching and catechesis. This fact in itself must he stressed, not out of a morbid taste for self-accusation, but to emphasize both that the fault is not a strictly personal affair, and that the Christian community as such can experience repentance and mercy.

Having said that, it is impossible to draw up a balance sheet of two millenia of history in a few pages. If one is simply satisfied with justifying the conclusion by showing that the total adds up to a deficit, then no mention is made of times and places when Christians and Jews lived in good accord with each other. There is also the risk of not taking into account many individual cases, to he found in every age, which show that communication had never been completely broken. Finally, one is unjust to those Christians who, in moments of crisis, knew how to take their stand firmly on the side of the Jews. It is not doing a work of reconciliation when a real search for the truth is replaced by the mere repetition of some oversimplifications, which can only act as tranquillizers. Therefore there can be no question of attempting herr what would only be a resume of this history, but rather of establishing certain landmarks, referring readers to historians for a deeper study (11)
— the breaks between the Church and the Synagogue (the first of these landmarks) and their reciprocal alienation in the ancient world;
— the expulsion of Christians from the Synagogue alongside the progressive disappearance of a Jewish presence in a Church where Jews had quickly become a minority group;
— the polemic between Church and Synagogue which was embittered by missionary competition among the pagan populations;
— the increasingly precarious lot of Jews in an Empire which had become Christian;
— in the West, a savage deterioration in the situation of the Jews at the end of the eleventh century, with the start of the Crusades, marked by massacres of the Jews;
— accusations of ritual murder or profanation of the Host, accompanied by mob violence;
— persecution by the Spanish Inquisition of converted Jews who had returned to Jewish practices in secret;
— expulsion of Jews by Christian monarchs, accompanied by confiscation of their property;
— pogroms in Central Europe and Russia;
— the twentieth century paroxysm above all, which was simply an attempt to wipe out the Jewish people altogether.

It is true that this last episode is not exactly in line with what had gone before. In its inspiration, Nazism was as much anti-Christian as it was anti-Jewish. But the majority of Nazis were baptized,(12) the attempt at genocide was perpetrated in Christian Europe. It was only able to happen because of the passivity of Christians and, at times, because of their active complicity.

This past, both distant and more recent, must not be forgotten, and this for various reasons which directly concern Christian faith.

There is no value in showing that this history is in direct opposition to the ideal of charity which should characterize the Christian. Nevertheless, this contradiction must be examined more closely. In actual fact, by showing arrogance in their dealings with the Jews, Christians became guilty, very precisely, of the very thing with which they had reproached the Jews since the New Testament: namely, to use what they have received from God without any Merit of their own, in order to puff themselves up before God to the detriment of others. To despise the Jew in the name of the gospel is a perversion of Christ's message. The gospel is a call to interior conversion; Christian antisemitism consists in designating the other as the one in need of conversion.

Christian antisemitism feeds on theological argument. Christianity did not give birth to antisemi tism,(13) but indisputably it has supported it and made it worse. Very early on, Christian theology summed up the state of the Jewish people in two words: rejection and substitution. God has rejected his first people and put in their place a second one, the Church. Such ideas could not but salve the antisemitic consciences of Christians among whom the Jews suffered.

Christian antisemitism is a set-back imposed by Christians on the work of redemption accomplished by Christ. The New Testament telIs us that Jesus has broken down the wall which separated Israel and the nations (Eph 2:14). It is Christians who have rebuilt the wall in the name of evidence supposedly drawn from the gospel. In so doing they have sanctioned the image of a divisive Christ, and have made the cross a symbol of love's antithesis.

The paroxysm which Was the Nazi attempt at extermination must be part and parcel of the stock. taking which the document invites us to make. If the responsibility cannot be laid directly at the door of Christianity as such, it is at least a sign of a setback. Nineteen centuries of preaching the Gospel did not prevent the greatest wave of hatred which has ever broken over the Jewish people from rising in the very heart of the Christian world.

All this means that the question of relations between the Church and Judaism is neither minor nor marginal. On the contrary. it brings us hack to the very centre of the Church's mystery, the work of reconciliation accomplished in Christ and celebrated in every Eucharist. If it has to be recalled, it is not in order to shut ourselves up in guilt, hut to open ourselves out to grace. Finally, the movement towards the recognition of Judaism by the Churches, which shows they consider it beneficial for the whole Christian community, was unleashed hugely by the events tatting place in recent decades and their direct consequences. It is certainly not a matter of chance!

Brief vocabulary
ISRAEL
I) Name given by God to Jacob (Gen. 32:29).
2) Name of the descendants of Jacob: [he people of Israel. This is the sense in which it is generally used in the Bible, and it is used in the same way here. unless specified otherwise.
3) In 983 BCE, all the northern part of the Kingdom of David and Solomon seceded from the tribe of Judah and the Davidic dynasty (whose capital remained at Jerusalem). This northern kingdom was then known as Israel, with Samaria as its capital. The kingdom of Israel ceased to exist in 721 BCE.
4) Since 1948 the name Israel also designates the modern state of Israel, created by ONO in 1947.
N.B. Do not confuse Israelite (= Jew) with Israeli (= citizen of the stare of Israel, whether Jewish or not).

JEW
Literally: a Judean e.g. of the tribe of Judah. After the disappearance of :he northern kingdom (see Israel), :he Judeans were the only representatives of the people
of Israel. Thus the term Jew came to designate all Israelites, whether or not they lived in Judea (e.g. Jesus is a Galilean Jew).

MIDRASH
In Judaism, Scripture is completed by the Oral Law i.e. the living Tradition by which the community of believers receives, transmits, assimilates, interprets and applies the Word of God. The term midrash (from the verb meaning to seek) designates that part of tradition which is concerned with the commentary of Scripture. In fact the term covers different types of literature which vary greatly both in style and the period at which they were committed to writing.



Notes
* Michel Remaud is Assistant Priest of St. Louis d'Antin of the Diocese of Paris. He has been engaged in Jewish-Christian Dialogue for several years after having studied Judaism at the University of Jerusalem. Ile is a lecturer at the Ratisbonne Center, Jerusalem —a Christian Center for Jewish Studies under the academic direction of the Institut Catholique of Paris.
** Cf. Note 1, p. 5.
1+ Words marked in this way are explained briefly at the end of the text.
2. Louis Bouyer: l'Eglise de Dieu — Cerf, 1970, p. 644 (in the French ed.).
3. Intervention in the Roman Synod on Reconciliation 4-10-83.
4. Guidelines and Suggestions for Implementing the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate (No. 4).
In: Stepping Stones to Further Jewish-Christian Relations. An unabridged collection of Christian documents. Compiled by Helga Croner. Stimulus Books. London/New York, 1977.

5. The author of this commentary has written at greater length on this point, and others which are touched upon here, in his book: Chretiens devant Israel, Serviteur de Dieu (Cerf, 1983).
6. The expression Old Testament, as such, is found only in the New Testament (2 Cor 3-14).
7. The expression New Israel is not found anywhere in the New Testament.
8. It is in this sense that it is still used in the official text (Latin) of the Roman liturgy. In Latin as in Greek, the same word means Covenant in Lk 22:20 and I Cor 11-25 and Testament in 2 Cot 3-14.
9. Cf. Pss 78, 106 etc.
10. Only habit, or ignorance, can prevent us from seeing that the Christian reading of the Bible is no less disconcerting for the non-believer than :he Jewish reading; its spirit and methods have been directly inspired by the latter, cf. Hos 11:1 and Mt 2:15; Ex 12:46 and In 19:37.

11. Leon Poliakov: Histoire de l'antisemitisme (4 vols.), Calmann-Levy, 1955, 1961, 1968, 1977. Abridged edition in 2 vols. (1981). F. Lovsky: L'antisemitisme chrétien (Ed. du Cerf, 1970).
12. More than one Christian may protest when he hears Jews number Hitler among the Christians. For the interest of dialogue, it is as well to know that the term Christian does not mean exactly the same for Jews and ourselves. For us itmeans primarily a religious option and designates someone who adheres to the Christian faith (there are quite a few baptized persons who, in good faith, call themselves non-Christians). Many Jews see it primarily (though not exclusively) as designating membership of a social group (in our countries Christian is then broadly synonymous with non-Jew, or non-Moslem). The Christian, rather than being roused to indignation by this simplification (without neglecting to explain one's point of view), might ask how history has given rise to it,
13. In the last (abridged) edition of his Histoire de l’antisemitisme Leon Poliakov corrects what his first edition says on this point (Calmann-Levy, 1981, T. I, P. 7).