Shall we look for the deepest impulse toward that monstrosity—Christians who are anti-Semites? They are seeking an alibi for their innermost sense of guilt, for the death of Christ of which they want to clear themselves: but if Christ did not die for their sins, then they flee from the mercy of Christ! In reality they want not to be redeemed. Here is the most secret and vicious root by virtue of which anti-Semitism dechristianizes Christians, and leads them to paganism.

—Jacques Maritain

Anti-Israelism is no better than anti-Semitism. —Jacques Maritain

In these days of rampant atheism and relativism among critical elites in Western societies, of genteel nihilism and "liberal irony" a la Richard Rorty, it is not difficult to see that both Judaism and Christianity are being slated for disappearance by a number of our most "advanced" thinkers. Moreover, along with Christianity and Judaism, the Jewish people itself, as well as the State of Israel, are being subjected once again to special pressures and dangers. This is a moment in history, then, when it is particularly appropriate to be reminded of the thought of the extraordinary French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973).

Maritain understood what we in our time have come to see so vividly: that liberal rationalism and something that must be seen as Judaism/Christianity are in a fateful confrontation. Not long before his death, in a work entitled On the Church of Christ (1970), he wrote: "It seems to me, very significant that these two events of such great bearing—on the Jewish side the return of a portion of the people to the Promised Land, on the Christian side the Second Council of the Vatican—took place at almost the same time, the first in 1948, the second in 1962-1965. They mark, each in its own way, a reorientation of history." These are, if you think about them, stunning words, a pivoting of all of human history on its axis. "What is more important," he went on, "than the insistence of the Council upon the friendship to be developed and to be consolidated between Jews and Christians?"

Further, he viewed the history of Judaism as a mystery linked to the fate of the entire world. For Judaism in his eyes is linked to the eternal love of God for His chosen people, a love unrepented of and faithful to the end of time. Maritain read all of history in the light of this mystery—including, in his later writings, the existence of the new state of Israel. As he wrote in Le Mystere d?Israel (1965) and repeated later in On the Church of Christ, it is a strange paradox to see in dispute "the sole territory to which, considering the entire spectacle of human history, it is absolutely, divinely certain that a people has incontestably a right: for the people of Israel is the sole people in the world to whom a land, the land of Canaan, was given by the true God, the unique and transcendent God, creator of the universe and of the human race. And what God has given once is given forever."

While he believed that Israel is not a state by divine right—rather, "only a State like all others"— in the later book he said:

The return of a portion of the Jewish people and its regroupment in the Holy Land (of which the existence of this State is the sign and the guarantee)—this is the reaccomplishment, under our eyes, of the divine promise which is without repentance. In short, I remembered [in my first writings on this subject] what was said to Abraham, to Jacob, and to Moses, and what Ezechiel announced: not that I regarded the founding of the State of Israel as a kind of preface to the realization of this prophecy (about this I know absolutely nothing, though it is possible); but in order to keep in my mind respect for the ways of God.

?The mystery of Israel?— this was one of Maritain?s favorite themes, to which he returned in at least three essays of varying length.

In 1938, driven by the urgency of Hitler?s virulent anti-Semitism, he had written a short book, a manifesto really, entitled A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question (1939). He later devoted a number of chapters and essays to such themes as: "The Destiny of the Jewish People" (in On the Philosophy of History, 1957); "Judaism" and "The Iniquitous Lot Inflicted on Jews in Christendom" (in On the Church of Christ); and "The Christian Meaning of the Story of the Crucifixion" (Jewish Frontier, 1944, reprinted in The Range of Reason, 1952).* He often expressed his joy that there were many strong and powerful friendships forged in France between Catholics such as Leon Bloy, Charles Peguy, Yves Simon, Paul Claudel, Georges Rouault, and Sigmund Undset with Jewish writers and artists such as Henri Bergson, Paul Landsberg, Manu and Babet Jacob, Benjamin Fondane, and many others.

Maritain held that Jews are "not only a people, but a people endowed with a mystery which pertain[s] to the very order of the redemption of mankind." The Jews form, "analogically, a kind of Mystical Body." In his view, after its lapse in not recognizing Jesus as the Messiah, Judaism no longer had an ecclesial mission as the church of all humankind. But "its mission continues . . . because it cannot help being the chosen people, for the gifts of God are without repentance, and the Jews are still beloved because of their fathers." To the Catholic Church has been assigned the task of the "supernatural and supra-temporal saving of the world." To Israel, on the other hand, is assigned, "in the order of temporal history and its own finalities, the work of the earthly leavening of the world." He continues: "Israel is here ... to irritate the world, to prod it, to move it. It teaches the world to be dissatisfied and restless so long as it has not God, so long as it has not justice on earth. Its indestructible hope stimulates the live forces of history." The continued vitality of Judaism is necessary to the vitality of the world. Maritain gave the lecture that later became the book A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question at the Theatre des Ambassadeurs in Paris on February 5, 1938, and then in English at the Cosmopolitan Club in New York City on December 14, 1938, under the auspices of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. This book was published in Paris and in New York in 1939, just as the firing started in Poland. Soon thereafter, France fell. Maritain was unwilling to live in Vichy France. He was then moved to try to plumb the depths of anti-Semitism, beginning with the obvious:

"The Jews"—it is very natural for a man, especially some literary man or businessman on whom one or two Jews have played a shabby trick, or who has noticed among the large number of questionable personalities which life has placed upon his path, a few with Semitic profiles among the many unclassifiable—it is so natural for a man to say, not "a Jew," or "three Jews," or "ten Jews" with whom I have had dealings are this or that, but "the Jews" (of whom there are 16 million in the world), "the Jews" are this or that. It is so natural—but it is hardly rational.

Maritain wrote scathingly of the anti-Semitic lies spreading through Europe in 1938, denouncing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as the "most impudent of forgeries" and examining the exposed and precarious condition of the Jewish population in each of the several countries of Europe.

Israel, Maritain held, intending by this name not the present state of Israel but the Jewish people as a whole, is "a witness to the Scriptures," holding the Bible before the eyes of the world. More than that, this Israel

is to be found at the very heart of the world?s structure, stimulating it, exasperating it, moving it. Like an alien body, like an activating ferment injected into the mass, it gives the world no peace, it ba