Jesus and Israel by Jules Isaac (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 179 Jesus and Israel. By JuLES IsAAc. Ed. Claire Huchet Bishop; trans. Sally Gran. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971. Pp. 405. $12.50. This book suffers from a sad flaw for which neither author, nor editor, nor translator are responsible. It will, I fear, not be read but, if read, not heeded by the very ones it challenges to a change of mind. Why, for God's sake, did I accept the editor's invitation to review it? At the risk of sounding immodest, I am doing it for just that-for God's sake. No honor is done to Jesus if he is seen as no more than the great antagonist of the rabbis of his time or of his kinsmen in general. One modern exegete, Ethelbert Stauffer, prides himself on having found the key to Jesus' message, life, and death by seeing him as Torahketzer, a " heretic rejecting the Torah." This is only an extreme example of the false picture painted of him by interpreters, great and small, professional or not. Before I go into greater detail, I should like to introduce the author, a renowned French historian. Prior to the Vichy government, he was " Inspector General of Education for France." When the German troops occupied the part of France he lived in, he fled south. Soon after the Gestapo, aided by the Vichy police, began to " round up " all the Jews they could find, Isaac's wife and daughter fell into the hands of these human bloodhounds and were later put to death. Even before this happened, Isaac had begun to explore the reasons for centuries of anti-Semitism. How could hatred of Jews have taken root, indeed waxed strong in nations that called themselves Christian, he asked. The result of his query is this "cry of an outraged conscience, of a lacerated heart." (p. xxiii) What makes the book unusual is the author's unique stance. He concludes the preface to the 1948 printing with this profession: " The reader may wonder to what religion the author belongs. This is easy for him to answer: none. But this whole book witnesses to the fervor that inspires and guides him, fervor for Israel, fervor for Jesus, son of Israel." (p. xxiv) Isaac's devotion to Jesus is made even clearer when, in another passage, he agrees with many modern exegetes that the probable span of Jesus' ministry was but one year and then continues: "That the one year, Jesus' single year, was enough to kindle a flame in the world which would never be extinguished thereafter is a miracle, there are none more convincing." (p. 97) These sentences permit us to look not only at Isaac the man but also at Isaac the author. He is an assimilated Jew who reasons as if he were a Christian. The New Testament is the anvil on which he hammers out his charges. This book, then, as well as other writings of the last twenty years of his life, are severe indictments of Christian teaching of contempt for Jews. Still, Isaac is quoted by the Editor as saying that he does not pretend " that in the old and bitter controversy between Israel and Chris- 180 BOOK REVIEWS tianity, the responsibility, the wrongs and failures are all on one side, the Christian side." This does not prevent him from going on: "In addressing Christians primarily, am I not justified in thinking that the Christian aspect of the problem, the Christian wrongs, Christian responsibility alone should count for them? Or would I be mistaken, then? Is the Sermon on the Mount not law for every Christian?" (p. xvii) This book is made up of twenty-one theses (or "propositions"), one of which stresses that Jesus, for Christians God-in-the-flesh, was "in his human lifetime a Jew, a humble Jewish artisan." (p. 11) Isaac quotes a few pertinent passages from the New Testament, among them Rom. 9:3-5, where strangely enough ton syggenon mou kata sarka is translated as " my kinsmen by race " [italics mine]. The English translator generally follows the Revised Standard Version, "except when other English renditions come nearer the French text." (p. iv) But...