Jules Isaac

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Jules Isaac (* 1877 in Rennes ; † September 6, 1963 in Aix-en-Provence ) was a French historian .

Life

Jules Isaac was the son of Edouard Marx Isaac, a Jewish professional officer who had moved from Alsace to France after the Franco-Prussian War . After Jules lost both parents at the age of 13, he attended boarding school , where he met Charles Péguy , with whom he had a lifelong friendship. His high school philosophy teacher was Henri Bergson .

In 1902 he married the painter Laure Ettinghausen: From this marriage a daughter, Juliette (1903), and two sons, Daniel (1907) and Jean-Claude (1918) were born. After his habilitation , he taught in two grammar schools in Paris and worked on the editing and revision of a series of books by the Hachette publishing house for teaching history in high schools, known as Malet-Isaac : The books in this series were used in France up to the Used into the seventies. They were also translated into Spanish and reprinted in 1992. When author Albert Malet fell on the Artois front in 1915, Isaac followed as editor. Thus Jules Isaac became in the cultural memory of France the «history professor of the nation» (Fr. Nora). He also campaigned for an understanding with Germany at textbook level and founded an international conference for history teaching , which was active in 1932 and 1934.

During the First World War , Isaac served in the French army for four years and was injured in Verdun . As a committed anti-fascist , he campaigned for a better understanding between France and Germany and for a reform of school teaching after the war. Isaac was Inspector General of the Department of Education from 1936 to 1940, when he was removed from that position by the Vichy government and banned from teaching. That year he flees with the family to Aix-en-Provence and then to Clermont-Ferrand . After all the other members of his family, Isaac's wife was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943. Only the son Jean-Claude survived the concentration camp .

In 1945 Isaac was reassigned the position of Inspector General, this time as an honorary post .

plant

In addition to the handbooks for school teaching after World War II, Jules Isaac wrote several books on the question of the origin of hatred against the Jews. During the war, Isaac had already begun to question the previously accepted assumption that the Gospels were anti-Semitic , and had begun exegetical work on the Gospel texts. The book Jésus et Israël , which he wrote "from refuge to refuge" during the war, triggered hostile but also enthusiastic reactions after its publication in 1948. He was one of the initiators of the Seelisberg theses that were adopted at the Seelisberg conference .

The book Genesis of Antisemitism , written as a continuation of Jésus et Israël , analyzes on the basis of purely historical discussions the manifestations and effects of antisemitism in antiquity and in the Middle Ages in order to determine that of all varieties of anti-Semitism, Christian motivated all others "in terms of duration, structure of the system, harmful effect, scope and depth. "(J. Isaac, Genesis des Antisemitismus , p. 16.)

Jules Isaac was also involved within the Catholic community in France and founded several associations of "Jewish-Christian friendship" ( Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne ). He asked for a revision of the Good Friday Prayer for the Jews, submitted the Seelisberg theses and a document on the revision of Christian doctrine on Judaism during a private audience in 1960 Pope Johannes XXIII. who forwarded it to a working group founded by Cardinal Augustin Bea for the Church's relations with Judaism ( Commissione della Santa Sede per i Rapporti Religiosi con l'Ebraismo ). This commission developed the basis on which the Declaration Nostra Aetate came about in the framework of the Second Vatican Council in 1965 .

Works

  • Jésus et Israël , Albin Michel, Paris, 1948 (German: Jesus and Israel , Vienna, 1968)
  • Genèse de l'antisémitisme , Paris, 1956 (German: Genesis of Antisemitism , Vienna, 1969)
  • Experiences de ma vie , Calman-Lévy, Paris, 1959
  • L'Enseignement du mépris (1962), Grasset, Paris, 2004 ISBN 2-246-17182-2

literature

  • John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 .

See also

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Olivier Mentz, Marie-Luise Bühler: German-French Relations in a European Context: A Comparative Mosaic of School and University . LIT Verlag Münster, 2017, ISBN 978-3-643-13649-7 ( google.de [accessed on August 21, 2020]).
  2. ↑ Jules Isaac - a great humanist: Schweizerische Kirchenzeitung. Accessed August 21, 2020 .
  3. ^ Dave Schläpfer, University of Lucerne: SEELISBERG: The theses of the humanist Isaac. Accessed August 21, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Isaac, Jules
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French historian
DATE OF BIRTH 1877
PLACE OF BIRTH Rennes
DATE OF DEATH September 6, 1963
Place of death Aix-en-Provence