Project description
Christianity’s post-war reckoning with antisemitism
In the decades following the Second World War, European churches underwent a process of reckoning. The horrors of the Holocaust forced Christian institutions to confront the role that centuries of anti-Jewish teachings had played in fostering antisemitism. The ERC-funded Christosemitism project aims to explore how Catholic and Protestant institutions gradually rejected antisemitism through theological discussions, declarations, educational activities and dialogue with Jewish communities. The project’s focus is western Europe between 1945 and 2020. Its findings will shed light on how opposition to antisemitism became a part of the modern Christian identity. It will also provide insights into possible links with other changes in European Christianity, such as secularisation, globalisation, and debates about racism and colonialism.
Objective
This project sets out to study the history of the Roman-Catholic and the Protestant repudiation of antisemitism, which I call Christian anti-antisemitism, in Western Europe between 1945 and 2020. Through its expression in multiple ecclesial declarations, theological works, liturgical events, educational projects, and professional appointments, I argue that anti-antisemitism is a core component of contemporary European Christianity. As such, it is inherently tied to the reconfiguration of Western Christianity in late 20th and early 21st century in the context of the liberal secular society, to the creation of orthodoxies and heresies, and to processes of secularization, decolonization, and the globalization of Christianity.
To grasp the role of Christian anti-antisemitism within these processes, the project will explore three of its central aspects: First, the project will analyze the penetration of anti-antisemitism into the center of Christian European identity by examining its key theological concepts and historical development. Second, the project will explore Christian anti-antisemitism as it was consolidated and negotiated in interaction with Jewish interlocutors, and the dialectic combination between severe disagreements between Jews and Christians on the nature of
antisemitism and the role of Christians in facilitating and perpetuating it, and between fruitful anti-antisemitic collaborations that were also recruited for the cultivation of Europe’s postwar liberal ethos. Third, the project will study intra-Christian debates on antisemitism in ecumenical and global Christian settings, and investigate the place of anti-antisemitism within tensions between Western Christianity and World Christianity around racism and colonialism.
Based on its findings, Christosemitism will suggest a new theoretical paradigm through which to grasp Christianity’s role in contemporary Europe, as well as that of religious phenomena in the history of secular societies more broadly.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- humanities history and archaeology history
- social sciences sociology social issues social inequalities racial inequality
- social sciences other social sciences development studies development theories post-colonial theories
- humanities philosophy, ethics and religion religions christianity
- social sciences other social sciences development studies development theories global development studies globalization
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-STG
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91904 Jerusalem
Israel
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