Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II, published in 2022 by Harvard University Press, offers a history of contemporary Jewish-Christian relations. A new chapter in these relations opened in the second half of the twentieth century when the Second Vatican Council exonerated Jews from the accusation of deicide and declared that the Jewish people had never been rejected by God. In a few carefully phrased statements, two millennia of deep hostility were swept into the trash heap of history.

But old animosities die hard. While Catholic and Jewish leaders publicly promoted interfaith dialogue, doubts remained behind closed doors. Catholic officials and theologians soon found that changing their attitude toward Jews could threaten the foundations of Christian tradition. For their part, many Jews perceived the new Catholic line as a Church effort to shore up support amid atheist and secular advances. Drawing on extensive research in contemporary rabbinical literature, Karma Ben-Johanan shows that Jewish leaders welcomed the Catholic condemnation of antisemitism but were less enthusiastic about the Church’s sudden urge to claim their friendship. Catholic theologians hoped Vatican II would turn the page on an embarrassing history, hence the assertion that the Church had not reformed but rather had always loved Jews, or at least should have. Orthodox rabbis, in contrast, believed they were finally free to say what they thought of Christianity.

Jacob’s Younger Brother pulls back the veil of interfaith dialogue to reveal how Orthodox rabbis and Catholic leaders spoke about each other when outsiders were not in the room. There one finds Jews reluctant to accept the latest whims of a Church that had unilaterally dictated the terms of Jewish-Christian relations for centuries.

Through its close examination of two vast corpora of religious literature: Roman Catholic theological literature written after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and Jewish Orthodox halakha and theological works written after the founding of the State of Israel, the book proposes an analysis of the exegetical and rhetorical strategies with which religious agents anchor their reforms in tradition and merge the new with the old.

 

Azrieli Project: The “Mission” Debate and the Question of Catholic Modernity

The project addresses the intra-Catholic controversy regarding the meaning of Christian universality and the legitimacy and purpose of Christian mission. It explores the cultural and political rifts within the post-conciliar Catholic community, as these rifts are mapped onto a diversity of Catholic theories concerning the relationship between religion and culture. In light of processes of decolonization and postcolonial theories, it is evident that religion and culture can no longer be separated from one another. Yet, on the other hand, is it at all possible to de-Westernize Latin Christianity without compromising its Catholicity? The project engages with the vibrant intellectual discourse surrounding these issues among theologians and church officials.