Background
JULES ISAAC was born into an assimilated family in Rennes, on November 18, 1877.
JULES ISAAC was born into an assimilated family in Rennes, on November 18, 1877.
His professional careeras a historian was abruptly j ended by the Nazi occupation of France. His wife and daughter were deported to the death camps, i Prior to their departure, his wife succeeded in sending clandestinely a note to her husband, saying, “Save yourself for your work; the world is waiting for it.”
In hiding during the war, Isaac devoted himself to studying the problem of anti-Semitism, which, he believed, was rooted in the Christian teaching of contempt for the Jews and Judaism. After the war he also formulated an eighteen-point plan for the purification of Christian teaching regarding Jews.
He played a major role at the 1947 Christian-Jewish-Conference at Seeligsberg, Switzerland, during which the Christian participants published a ten-point plan that became the basis for subsequent dialogue between the two faiths. Isaac was invited to an audience by Pope Pius XII and told him that Nazi anti-Semitism was a secular radicali-zation of the anti-Jewish impulses of historic Christianity. The pope was moved to delete an anti-Jewish phrase from the Good Friday liturgy. Isaac also played an important role in persuading Pope John XXIII to propose that the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) pass a declaration on Judaism that reworked the traditional accusation that the Jews of all time had been guilty of deicide, and opened a new era in Catholic-Jewish relations.