The book Jésus et Israël, by Jules Isaac, and the declaration Nostra Aetate: a bakhtinian dialogue between the responsible and responsive act

Abstract

Historian and educator Jules Isaac is a Jew who was born and lived in France between the end of the 19th century and part of the 20th century, a period involving the First and Second World Wars, where he developed broad and in-depth research on the antisemitism. Isaac proposed changing the Catholic Church's anti-Jewish catechesis as one of the ways to combat it. At the end of his research, he wrote the book Jésus et Israel, which was published in 1948, containing twenty-one propositions for reformulating this catechesis. Another text, which points to the alteration of this anti-Jewish catechesis of the Church as a fight against anti-Semitism, is Nostra Aetate, a declaration of the Catholic Church that is part of the final documents of the Second Vatican Council that took place between 1962 and 1965. This declaration is seen as revolutionary because it was the Church, for sixteen centuries, who developed and propagated this anti-Jewish catechesis. Based on linguistic theoretical assumptions of language philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, about responsible act and responsive act involving discourses, we aim, through this article, to establish a relationship between these two texts, identifying the book Jésus et Israel, by Jules Isaac, as responsible act in a network of interdiscourses; and the declaration Nostra Aetate, by the Catholic Church, as a responsive act to Jules Isaac's speech. We point out, as a result of our analysis, the book Jesus and Israel, as an element that provided the opportunity to create a space for narratives where the historic anti-Jewish discourse of the Church, existing in the conciliar documents, could be broken and the word dialogue was installed.