The Righteous Then and Now

When the Germans occupied France in World War II, historian Jules Isaac was fired from his post as France’s Inspector General of Education. Isaac had been a fixture of French intellectual society for decades. His seven-volume Cours d’ histoire served as the standard history text in most French high schools and universities. Isaac was also a deco-rated World War I veteran and patriotic Frenchman. While Jules Isaac never denied his Jewish identity, he did not define himself by it. As the Nazis implemented their “final solution” in France, Isaac turned his historian’s mind to the question of anti-Semitism. How, he thought, could the Holocaust be happening in societies that have been Christian for nearly two thou-sand years? At first, Isaac managed to maintain his characteristic academic detachment from his subject. But his subject refused to maintain its detachment from Isaac. While he was away from home one day in 1943, the Gestapo arrested Isaac’s wife, daughter, son, and son-in-law. Of the four, only his son would return home from the death camps. Before being deported from France, Madame Isaac managed to send a note to her husband exhorting him to, “Save yourself for your work; the world is waiting for it.”(1) On the run and in hiding, Jules Isaac devoted himself to fulfilling his wife’s last wish. Isaac’s writing became to him a “cry of an outraged conscience, of a lacerated heart.”(2) By the war’s end, he had completed a six-hundred-page manuscript titled Jesus and Israel. In wrestling with the question of how the Holocaust could happen in a Christian Europe, Isaac had reached an unexpected conclusion. While German soldiers serving a neo-pagan Nazi ideology were the ones who carried away his family, Jules Isaac pointed the finger of ultimate blame not at the Nazis, but at the Christian church. He wrote that while the German responsibility for the Holocaust was “overwhelming,” it was only a “derivative responsibility.”(3) The real culprit, Isaac asserted, was the centuries-old tradition of Christian anti-Semitism. In his words: