Jacques Maritain's Jewish Problem

Jacques Maritain isn't exactly a household name, but it is the name of one of the most important Christian philosophers of the twentieth century. He was a man who was the guiding light of liberal Catholicism for most of his mid to later life counted among his pupils Pope Paul VI and is rightly regarded by both conservative and liberal Catholics alike as being one of the spiritual fathers of Vatican II.

The interesting thing about Jacques Maritain for us is really that he wrote two books on anti-Semitism and the jews: one in 1938 ('A Christian Look at the Jewish Question') (1) and the other in 1939 ('Anti-Semitism'). (2) It is also more importantly that Maritain was a fairly central figure in attempting to impose the 'Holocaust' theory onto the Vatican as well as removing anti-jewish doctrines from Catholic Orthodoxy.

Now before we look at what Maritain thought (which will be covered in the next article) in relation to the jews it is important to bring up and understand three separate issues. To wit:

In the first instance Maritain was not exactly a neutral party on the issue of the jewish question as his wife - who Maritain by all accounts was genuinely in love for all his life - was a Russian jewess named Raïssa Oumansoff. (3) Both Maritain and Oumansoff converted to Catholicism in 1906 two years after they met in 1904 and both were fairly well-known during their lives Maritain as a philosopher and Oumansoff as a writer and poet. (4)

This means for all practical purposes that Maritain's philo-Semitism is unlikely to ever have been disinterested and certainly had a direct relation to his marriage to a jewess who had converted to Christianity under his influence.

In the second instance Maritain seems to have seen socialist-cum-anarchist jews as 'role models' for his revolutionary brand of liberalizing Catholicism regardless of their religious sentiments such as the left-wing French jew named Saul Alinsky with whom he became good friends. (5)

This obviously - to reinforce my earlier point - means that Maritain's views on the jews are not those of a neutral observer, but rather a partisan with a specific stake in the cause that he espouses.

In the third instance one of Maritain's major intellectual influences was a French Catholic philosopher named Charles Maurras. You might ask why that is odd given that all thinkers have an intellectual ancestry so-to-speak, but add into the equation that Charles Maurras was the intellectual figurehead behind the 'Action Française' (6) and almost all of his writing espoused extreme nationalism (to the point where even the SS had to move to silence him because he was so nationalistic that he believed the NSDAP simply weren't radical enough [and were German to boot]) as well as one of the most extreme forms of intellectual anti-Semitism that has ever graced French literature (Maurras was fairly homicidal towards jews). (7)

Or to put it another way Maurras placed anti-Semitism at the core of French patriotism and nationalism as well as being a public intellectual par excellence (as Maritain was himself to become). (8)

That presents us with something of a contradiction: doesn't it?

The most philo-Semitic of French Catholic philosophers was heavily influenced by the most anti-Semitic of French Catholic philosophers. It is certainly a strange thing to happen, but not unprecedented at the time as one of the most philo-Semitic German experts on Judaism Hermann Strack was actually the intellectual mentor of one of the most anti-Semitic German experts on Judaism Erich Bischoff. (9)

Some jewish academics would have it that anti-Semitic (although we note not philo-Semitic) tout faces of this kind are the result of political circumstance, (10) but I would disagree on the grounds that this assumes that anti-jewish thought is ipso facto irrational. This - in spite of the many attempts to claim it is so - is patently absurd any more than it is to argue that anti-Islamic sentiment is ipso facto irrational because anybody could construct and detonate a suicide bomb not just Islamists.

Indeed, I would argue that what circumstance there is tends to be a mixture of intellectual conviction, intellectual fashion (which incorporates economic and cultural motivations) and personal circumstances. The interesting thing is that Maurras violently opposed secularism (11) and was also deeply interested in reconciling the differences between Plato and Aristotle, (12) which mirrors Maritain's own intellectual later interests in anti-secularism and a revolutionary form of Christian philosophy based on a synthesis of Plato and Aristotle using the medium of Saint Thomas Aquinas. (13)

It is also important to note that Maurras had begun writing only shortly before Maritain entered higher education and with Maritain having a voracious mind deeply interested in the problems of philosophy: it is not surprising that he found an intellectual kindred spirit in Maurras.

Indeed, if we take into account that Maritain was in higher education and university in France between 1898 and 1906: then it is not difficult to find the event that likely pushed him towards an interest in the jewish question outside of his attraction for Oumansoff. That event was very simply the Dreyfus Affair, which went on between 1894 and 1906. (14)

Maurras naturally was an anti-Dreyfusard and wrote anti-jewish polemics against the perfidy of Dreyfus and I find it difficult to imagine that Maritain would not have taken the side of Maurras during this early period especially as it was not until later that Dreyfus would be found innocent.

However by the time of his meeting with Oumansoff in 1904: Maritain's anti-jewish ideas - probably inherited from Maurras - were likely beginning to wane (with the fortunes of the anti-Dreysfusards) with his reading Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Catholic classics which emphasized conversion and the goodness that man can do as opposed to fighting the forces and influence of hell (which was more in tune with Maurras and his intellectual confrères).

We can reasonably suggest that it is the introduction and then continued presence of Oumansoff in Maritain's life that was the formative agent in his views on the jews combined with his increasingly differing reading of the purpose of and the challenges facing the Catholic Church in comparison to Maurras. In essence Oumansoff was Maritain's Esther - as in the principle figure in the book of Esther - where she by dint of her jewishness controls the Platonic philosopher-king (Maritian) by said king's love for her so that said king will use his power to destroy the enemies of the jews (in Maritain's case ranging himself against the French anti-jewish Catholic intellectuals such as Monsignor Jouin). (15)

This then means in effect that Maritain was not the neutral partisan on the jewish question that he is so often made out to be, (16) because he had a jewish wife - who was like him a convert to Catholicism - and also because he had close jewish friends who he wished to protect and nurture into 'accepting Christ'.

The reason Maritain's views on the jews have tended to be regarded as relatively neutral is precisely because he wrote in an unapologetically liberal tone - seeming reasonable while using actually using rather strange logic (even for a Thomist) - and that he wrote very little on the subject of the jews. Outside of the two books (and they are small ones even then) I can find only four articles in his papers explicitly to do with the jews, (17) he seems to have generally written little on the subject, but this doesn't mean - as is usually assumed - that because he wrote little that he was in anyway unbiased on the issue.

In reality it is probably because he wrote so little on the subject of the jews that his extremely philo-Semitic views on the jews (which I would without much equivocation style the irrational love of the jews or Judeophilia) were as well-regarded as they were, because he wasn't seen to obsess over the issue and instead focused on his philosophy and using his 'true humanism' to change the Catholic Church in order to suit both his liberal intellectual tastes and also make it a place that would unequivocally accept his jewish wife and jewish friends as Catholics like any other (as otherwise that wouldn't be 'his kind' of Church).

Was this not what the contemporary anti-jewish Catholic author Leon de Poncins foresaw happening? (18)

Indeed: it was.

References

(1) Jacques Maritain, 1938, 'A Christian Look at the Jewish Question', 1st Edition, Longmans and Green: New York

(2) Jacques Maritain, 1939, 'Anti-Semitism', 1st Edition, Geoffrey Bles: London

(3) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/maritain/ [Last Accessed: 14/05/2013]

(4) Ibid.

(5) Bernard Doering, 1986, 'Jacques Maritain and His Two “Authentic Revolutionaries”', pp. 93-96 (http://www.u.arizona.edu/~aversa/modernism/Maritain%20and%20His%20Two%20Authentic%20Revolutionaries%20(Thomistic%20Papers%20III.).pdf )

(6) Thomas Molnar, 'Charles Maurras, Shaper of an Age', Modern Age, Fall 1999, pp. 339-341

(7) Paula Hyman, 1998, 'The Jews of Modern France', 1st Edition, University of California Press: Berkeley, p. 146

(8) See Zeev Sternhall, David Maisel (Trans.), 1986, 'Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France', 1st Edition, University of California Press: Berkeley

(9) See the following article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/erich-bischoff-contra-hermann-strack

(10) For example this is implied by Moshe Zimmerman, 1986, 'Wilhelm Marr: Patriarch of Antisemitism', 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, pp. 96-111

(11) Pierre Birnbaum, Jane Marie Todd (Trans.), 1996, 'The Jews of the Republic: A Political History of State Jews in France from Gambetta to Vichy', 1st Edition, Stanford University Press: Stanford, p. 131

(12) Molner, Op. Cit., pp. 337-338

(13) Doering, Op. Cit, pp. 91-92

(14) For a good overview see Albert Lindemann, 1991, 'The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs: Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank, 1894-1915', 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, pp. 94-128

(15) On Jouin's fanatical hatred of and rather detailed research about the jews see Leon Poliakov, 2003, [1979], 'The History of Anti-Semitism', Vol. 4, 1st Edition, University of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia, pp. 282-283

(16) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/maritain/

(17) For details of the Maritain collected papers see: http://maritain.nd.edu/jmc/jm.htm

(18) Vicomte Leon de Poncins, Timothy Tindal-Robertson, 1967, 'Judaism and the Vatican: An Attempt at Spiritual Subversion', 1st Edition, Britons: London, pp. 167-174