In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

C H A P T E R 3 Building a New Tribe in the Gathering Storm Raïssa Maritain and the Complexity of Interwar Philo-Semitism (1923–39) Nearly every Sunday, from 1923 to 1939, men and women from all walks of life took the forty-five-minute train ride from Paris to attend the famous salon Jacques and Raïssa hosted at their home in Meudon, France. It had been seventeen years since their conversion, and Jacques was a full professor at the Institut catholique of Paris. At the start of their salon, Raïssa had spent much of her earliest intellectual energy aiding Jacques with the first writing projects that would establish his career. In 1921, she had completed her first large independent scholarly work: a translation of one of Thomas Aquinas’s lesser-known works, Des moeurs divines (The Ways of God). The following year their coauthored De la vie d’oraison appeared in pamphlet form. By 1923 the Maritains’ reputations were growing ; people flocked to Meudon to participate in the Maritains’ Sunday afternoon discussions and, if they were lucky, to be invited by Raïssa as one of the five or six asked to stay late for a private dinner and more intimate conversation.1 The salon was frequented by an unpredictable cast of artists and philosophers; exiled Russians, homosexuals, wavering 97 Catholics, clergy, Protestants, and Jews all took the train to Meudon in interwar France. “The Maritains,” one such pilgrim remembered, “had a tremendous power of attraction, and magnets draw everything.”2 Some of the Maritains’ guests included more or less active members of the Jewish faith, such as Benjamin Fondane and Marc and Bella Chagall , but many more of the émigrés in their circle were, like Raïssa, Jewish near converts or converts to Catholicism.3 This was no coincidence: the Maritains’ salon was for many Jews a key site of attraction to Christianity in the interwar period, and Frédéric Gugelot has argued that Jacques and Raïssa’s 1906 conversion laid a foundation for many of the interwar baptisms in Paris.4 As Jacques remembered, “The baptisms rained down” (Les baptêmes pleuvaient) in Meudon from 1923 to 1939.5 Some people in France even speculated that the Maritains were conspiring with the diocese to bring the faithless into the fold.6 A Jewish convert herself and eventually a writer on Jewish-Christian relations, Raïssa, by her presence and her intellectual work, made crucial contributions to this phenomenon. As one pilgrim remembered her, she was a “pioneer of Judeo-Christian relations” and an outspoken critic of anti-Semitism as early as 1931, but she also directly or indirectly ushered in countless Jewish conversions to the church.7 As with the whole of the French Catholic revival, deep ambivalences mark Raïssa Maritain’s thinking on Jews and Judaism. Here I analyze how Maritain and her interwar community of Jewish-Catholics and philo-Semites both inherited and transformed the classic multivalent features of modern French Catholic philo-Semitism established by Bloy and Péguy: the valorization of Jewish suffering and Bloy’s insistence on a unity dependent upon conversion. In particular, I analyze how Maritain’s interwar essay Histoire d’Abraham (1935) seeks to establish what she called the lien vivant, the living bond, between juifs and chrétiens. For Maritain, the bond emerged from the familiar terrain of souffrance, douleur, peine, and misère, but the ecstatic, joyful encounter with interiorized affliction of the early years (see chapter 2) began to fade from her work, and in the 1930s her conceptions of affliction became inextricably entangled with Europe’s darkening future. Finally, in considering the conversions more broadly, I diverge from those who see the widespread Jewish conversions around Meudon primarily in terms of self-loathing and the attempt to expel Judaism from 98 / S A C R E D D R E A D one’s identity. I argue that the sources reveal a more complicated story.8 By the interwar period, many of these intellectuals, Raïssa Maritain included , understood themselves as a community of “juifs chrétiens dans l’Église catholique,” Christians who still held on to their Jewish identities even after their baptism into the church. I argue that we may best understand the interwar Jewish attraction to Catholicism by situating it in multiple contexts: the role of Catholicism in furnishing critiques of secularism and laïcité, the draw of Catholicism as exotic, and, in...

Share