The article published by The cross July 22, titled “Talking about Judeo-Christian civilization is a deception”testifies to a regrettable ignorance of the cultural history of Europe. No, the notion of Judeo-Christian civilization is not a slogan forged in the 20th century to serve an identity agenda. It is the expression, certainly modern, of a complex and verifiable historical reality: that of an ancient and fruitful interpenetration between Jewish and Christian traditions, in particular in the fields of biblical commentary, handwritten transmission and theological development.
The Guyart Historical Bible of Moulins, which I have been attending for over thirty years, translated into French at the end of the 13th century from the‘History Scholastica of Pierre the eater is emblematic of this intellectual filiation. Guyart does not only translate the Bible: he enriches him with comments, derivative accounts, etymologies, historical digressions. And many of these additions are directly or indirectly from the Jewish tradition.
Jewish exegesis, Christian culture
A particularly speaking case is that of Moses Child, which is said to be saved from the torment of the pharaoh after seizing the royal crown. To verify that he did not understand what he was doing, the king’s advisers offered him a test: between ardent coals and precious stones, the child chooses the coals, carries them to his mouth and burns his tongue – which explains that he was then stamped. This story, absent from the biblical text, comes from the midrash. He circulates in the Jewish world long before being integrated by Christian authors like Comestor, then taken up in the Historical Bible.
Another example: the etymologies of the names of the patriarchs, so characteristic of Jewish exegesis, where each first name is a theological indication. In the historical Bible, these interpretation games are legion. We read that Isaac comes from smile (laughter), in connection with Sara’s laughter; that Israel means “strong against God”; that Esaus is associated with the word veil (seir); that Jacob is the one who “grasps by the heel”. These readings are inherited from the rabbinical tradition, in particular of Rachi, and pass through complex transmission chains, sometimes Latin, sometimes oral, sometimes school. They become commonplace of Christian culture, so much so that we often forget their origin.
Man in the Middle Ages actually lives in an Abrahamic world. He perceives him, sometimes confusedly, like a three -voice world: Jewish, Christian, Muslim. And even when he fights one or the other, he does so with the texts and doctrines. And Islam is not absent from this table. In her Life of Saint LouisJoinville describes the Bedouins met in the East. He distinguishes the law of Mohammed and that of Ali, mentions their customs and their belief in metempychosis. The man of the Middle Ages knows Islam, he thinks, he calls it, sometimes through his heterodoxies. But he often apprehends it with a concern mixed with admiration: it is a real but structured, and therefore disturbing otherness. This look is not that of ignorance: it is that of a world aware of its complexity.
The risk of exclusion
It is revealing that the main explicit criticisms of the concept of “Judeo-Christianity” do not come from historians or medieval theologians, but thinkers carrying radical ideological projects. Sophie Bessis, by denouncing the notion of “Judeo-Christian civilization” As a recent invention intended to exclude Islam, is part of a Saïdian parentage, well known in postcolonial circles: Edward Said, in Orientalism (1978), argued that the term “Judeo-Christian” had been mobilized to rewrite the history of the West by artificially reconciling Judaism and Christianity, in order to build a united European identity … against Islam. He saw it as an ideological operation, with very powerful geopolitical and symbolic effects.
But by rejecting this notion as a whole, the author of the article adopts – probably without his knowledge – a position structurally close to that of Édouard Drumont or Charles Maurras: the latter also refused the idea of a continuum between Judaism and Christianity, but for diametrically opposed reasons. Where Said criticizes Judeo-Christianity as a myth excluding Muslims, Maurras denounced it as a poison that would dilute Catholicism in Mosaic universalism. In both cases, the term is fought because it connects what must, according to them, remain separate: Jews and Christians on one side, Muslims and Western on the other.
In other words, to want to deconstruct the notion of Judeo-Christian civilization in the name of inclusion, there is a risk of making the bed of an old exclusion reflex. Because the only political forces to have historically challenged the Jewish share of the West are the radical anti -Semitic currents which, yesterday, denied the Jewish tradition any founding value.
Talking about Judeo-Christian civilization is therefore not proclaiming an artificial unity; It is to recall a story of transmissions, translations, controversies, glosses, reappropriations. A story that can still be read, with open book, in manuscripts.
