The following essay is authored by Miriam Shah, a masters student of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Chicago and an up-and-coming young writer (see her blog here.)
“My anger is the effervescence of my pity.” So wrote the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French writer Léon Bloy in a letter to his most famous disciple, Jacques Maritain.[i] Indeed, it was this anger that brought him both praise and repudiation throughout his career, which began in 1882, when he started writing for the journal of the notorious Le Chat Noir cabaret, and lasted until his death in 1917. Over the course of these thirty-five years, he wrote thirty books, both novels and works of nonfiction. He was also a dedicated correspondent and kept a private diary that was published posthumously. Though his output was prodigious, he is deemed by even his most devoted biographers and scholars to be rather unknown in his own time, especially in contrast to giants of the age such as Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, and Maurice Barrès. Despite being one of the more active Decadent writers, Bloy would almost certainly attribute this asymmetry in renown to injustice—the world of letters, in his mind, was corrupt. Taken over by the scourge of atheist humanism, French literature and culture were plummeting towards a pessimistic vision which Bloy considered antithetical to the Catholic belief in the transcendent origin, end, and value of the human person. This attitude led him to dedicate his life to writing what he believed to be “prophetic” works, suffused with vivid and vituperative language denouncing an ascendant secularism.[ii]
Despite his famous inclination to explosive anger and fierce polemicism, Bloy succeeded in attracting a small community of great minds around him who were nothing less than his disciples. Their encounters with the man and his works even prompted many of them to convert to the Catholic faith. These devotees stayed in close contact with Bloy until the end of his life, and the circle created a fertile environment in which more than a few Bloyens became great writers and philosophers in their own right.
This essay focuses particularly on the relationship between Bloy’s work and the so-called Jewish question. Next to his novels, he considered his work Le Salut par les Juifs to be his magnum opus, and his most celebrated followers, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, converted largely because Bloy convinced them of the harmony between Christianity and Judaism.[iii] The Maritains counted Bloy among their most profound influences, and Jacques Maritain broke his vow of silence in his old age to defend the kind of simple, uncompromising, and anti-modernist faith he first learned from Bloy[iv] The legacy of Jacques Maritain, as well as his wife, who was always encouraging him, and a great inspiration to him, through her life and her outlook, is partly his commitment to religious pluralism.[v]
Bloy considered Le Salut par les Juifs to be the only book he would feel comfortable presenting to Christ. He declared that, “when one loves Le Salut, one is not only my friend, one is, by force, something more… this book… represents years of work, prayer and pain that have been, I believe, beyond measure.”[vi]
The title, Salux ex Judaeis est, is taken from the words of Jesus Christ in the fourth chapter of John’s gospel.[vii] The work has a fairly disordered structure, and is almost aphoristic, like many of Bloy’s works. Bloy considers himself to be writing in the quaestio argumentative style of St. Thomas Aquinas, and ultimately in the dialectical spirit of Socrates, in which he establishes a position through a systematic engagement with powerful objections as opposed to mere straw men.
In the beginning, Bloy skewers Edward Drumont, saying that he was obsessed merely with money, and that he failed to understand that “our Lord himself was a Jew par excellence.”[viii] Bloy then characterizes antisemitism as “blasphemy,” because of the common divine heritage between Christians and Jews, and he likens blaspheming Judaism to criticizing one’s parents with all their shortcomings. “Antisemitism is the most bloody and the most unforgivable,” he declares, which suggests that he certainly did not see himself as antisemitic.[ix]
However, Bloy then appears to contradict his staunch opposition to antisemitism, writing, “I must be little suspected of tender love for present day descendants [of the Jewish people].”[x] Bloy goes on to say, “Finding myself in Hamburg that year, I had.. the curiosity of visiting the Jewish market..the surprising abjection of that emporium of emphyleutic detritus is difficult to express..obsequious wails assaulted me..servile faces with the same redoubtable look.”[xi] Bloy then tries to temper this, declaring that Jews must be respected as instruments of the Redemption: “They were forced..supernaturally forced, by God to perform abominable and disgusting acts, which they need to do in order to accredit their dishonor as instruments of the Redemption.”[xii]Essentially, he writes Jews are flawed, but they have to be. Just like Pontius Pilate the Roman had to be wretched, and King Saul had to be weak, and the Virgin Mary had to be without sin. Love for the Jews, in other words, must be a matter of theologically grounded filial obligation, not a matter of empirically rooted sentiment.
Precisely because he believed he was prosecuting a theoretical line of argument, dialectically rather than sentimentally, Bloy believed he was simply putting forward the facts, without anger, and without rage: “Sympathy for the Jews is a sign of turpitude, that’s well understood. It is impossible to merit the esteem of a dog if one lacks the instinctive disgust of the Synagogue. That is expressed calmly, like an axiom of rectilinear geometry, without irony and without bitterness.”[xiii] Raïssa Maritain was particularly aggrieved by this, and she writes in her work, Les Grandes Amitiés, that statements like these were “grosses taches noires,” though she believed Bloy to be writing “without bitterness,” employing invective as a rhetorical and pedagogical tool. She argues that Bloy did not intend to be contemptuous when he said that Jews were “destined to suffer,” as he was deeply marked by the Pauline view that suffering can not only redeem sin, but be a sign of “election.”[xiv] In a French cultural climate that was increasingly and pervasively anti-Semitic, especially on the Right, perhaps Bloy was trying to go out of his way to emphasize that his view of the Jews was not based on emotional special pleading on their behalf. Like everything else for Bloy, his view of their status was strictly a function of their typological significance in his biblical conception of history.
Bloy ends with a paradox: “The Jews will not convert until Jesus descends from the cross, and Jesus cannot descend before the Jews convert,” suggesting the urgency of conversion, if one wanted to bring about the Second Coming.[xv]
Bloy later asks Jewish friends of his mentor, Barbey D’Aurevilly, the Hayems, for money, as well as asking them if they could facilitate his sponsorship by the Rothschilds. Perhaps he wanted these Jews to contribute to the long, great project of conversion, which he viewed simply as their inevitable destiny. They were people whom, in his eyes, ought to be converted, and maybe he thought their involvement in his oeuvre would secure their redemption.
Despite these “grosses tâches noires” described by Raïssa Maritain, Bloy’s influence on Nostra Aetate, the “Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions of the Second Vatican Council,” is considered by some scholars to be significant. Nostra Aetate was revolutionary because it was an official Church document that attempted to emphasize the relationship and “shared covenant” between Jews and Christians, and repudiates the problematic charge of “deicide” against Jews.[xvi] Scholars John Connelly and Richard Francis Crane both assert that “the path to Vatican II” begins with Léon Bloy’s work Le Salut par les Juifs. Connelly’s From Enemy to Brother, and Crane’s “The French Roots of Nostra Aetate,” both argue that the foundation for Nostra Aetate was built in Paris during the first two decades of the twentieth century with Le Salut par les Juifs, which they write was revolutionary in its assertion of a Judeo-Christian brotherhood, united in mystical suffering and a shared covenant, and that Jews paved the way for the redemption of mankind.[xvii] Connelly discusses how John Osterreicher, the man who drafted Nostra Aetate and a friend of Jacques Maritain’s, read and was inspired by Bloy’s Salut.[xviii]
On the other hand, Salut par les Juifs was censored for antisemitism as recently as 2013 by a judiciary tribunal in France. How can a person who has been censored for antisemitism have had a salutary effect on religious pluralism, as manifested in Nostra Aetate?
Romain Vaisserman, in the preface to the essay collection, “Quatre écrivains Catholiques sur la Question Juive de Bloy à Maritain,” asserts that Bloy’s writings on the Jewish question were “either detestable or sublime” (“soit détestables, soit sublimes”), and that ultimately his work was so full of contradictions it was impossible to truly uphold it as either anti- or philosemitic.[xix]
Scholar Henri Quantin is somewhat sympathetic but more critical, in his essay “Du fumier sur le figuier: Léon Bloy et les Juifs, ” he quotes Chateaubriand, who he considers a forerunner to Bloy: “The Jewish people are a symbolic encapsulation of the human race.” (“Le peuple juif est un abregé symbolique de la race humaine).”[xx] Même quand Bloy attaque la médiocrité ou la bêtise des Juifs, celle des Catholiques n’est jamais loin..”[xxi] Quantin acknowledges Bloy’s status as a product of his time, though he also makes the compelling point that Bloy could not be classed in the same category as Drumont, as “Bloy’s perspective is never political; it is always religious or theological. Bloy speaks of the Jews only in relation to Jesus, he speaks of Israel only in the perspective of the Salvation offered by Christ.” [xxii]
He highlights that Bloy writes in 1911, almost twenty years after publishing Le Salut, that he felt that the caricatures of Jews in his novels, the character Nathan in Le Desespéré, and Katz in La Femme Pauvre, were ‘youthful errors’. He feels this way, perhaps because of the Maritains and their friendship, and his growing affection for Raïssa Maritain. Quantin also quotes Bernard Lazare, considered to be the first Dreyfusard, who actually considered Bloy a philosemite, because he recognized the Jews as fit for a great destiny, rather than unfit for any destiny.
However, scholar C.A. Tsakiridou points out that though Bloy was better than most, including Maritain’s friend Charles Péguy, he is certainly not immune to criticism. C.A. Tsarkiridou claims that Maritain was unable to “see Bloy’s spirituality for what it really was,” describing Bloy as a “narcissist.”[xxiii] It is likely that many contemporary readers of Le Salut will share Tsakiridou’s dismissal of Bloy, as ultimately, Le Salut par les Juifs has not really stood the test of time, as the “grosses taches noires” make it difficult to appreciate Bloy’s finer and more insightful points, such as those that concern the shared Divine heritage of Christians and Jews. The unorthodoxy of Bloy’s education meant that he occasionally lacked the deftness and nuance of Sorbonne-trained Maritain, prone as he was, at times, to slip into the broad strokes and generalizations of a neophyte. Furthermore, excoriating, periphrastic pamphlets are not the best example of works where one can “take intention for fact,” without the extensive broader context of the author’s personality and confidence in their good will.
While there is evidence that Le Salut paved the way for more pluralist works like Nostra Aetate, its chief value now is its status as a milestone on the path to improving relations between Christians and Jews. One could argue that, in a flawed way, Bloy offered Maritain the idea that the Catholic mind saw Jews in a positive light, given that Jews and Christians both share in the covenant of God first given to the Jews. It is also important to recall that Maritain converted only after Bloy convinced him that Catholics viewed the Jews favorably. Maritain would go on to become ambassador to the Holy See, and appeal to the papal undersecretary Monsignor Montini, who re-convened Vatican II, to condemn antisemitism. [xxiv] Nearer to the end of his life, Maritain wrote, in a letter to French-Algerian-Israeli scholar André Chouraqui: “In waiting for [reconciliation] what is required above all is the development of an ever closer friendship. I do not mean true friendship, but truly fraternal and truly effective friendship.” [xxv]
Despite his paradoxical legacy, Bloy played a large role in the creation of a new spiritual community in the spirit of the Renewal through his reconciliation of the contemplative essence of the monastic ideal with the dialectical and argumentative nature of the Socratic forum. Many of those things are most repellent about Bloy, including his searing honesty, are the exact things that were crucial to his role as a prophet. His intensity of feeling, as well as his willingness to engage with both the sacred and profane, provided a solid foundation for an engaged Catholic tradition, attracting people who were actually interested in “being in the world,” and amending its social ills. Through utter devotion to his prophetic calling, he showed that belief in the need for solitude with God does not necessitate that one removes oneself from the world, rather, that the world is the very arena in which the struggles of the spirit must take place. In this way, he moved scholars such as Jacques Maritain to take on the mantle of a spiritually informed political involvement.
[i] Jacques Maritain, Quelques Pages sur Léon Bloy (Paris, Rue de Fleurus: Cahiers de la Quinzaine, N.D.), p. 16. “Ma colère est l’effervescence de ma pitié” **Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.**
[ii] Romain Deblue, “Léon Bloy ou L’Histoire au Miroir,” in Samuel Lair and Benoît Mérand, eds., Léon Bloy dans L’Histoire (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021), p. 52.
[iii] Joseph Anthony Amato, A French Catholic Understanding of the Modern World (Ypsilanti, MI: Sapientia Press, 2002).
[iv] Jean-Luc Barré, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven, translated by Bernard E. Doering (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).
[v] John Connelly. From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965 (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2012).
[vi] Raïssa Maritain, Les Grandes Amitiés, p. 308: “Quand on aime Le Salut, on n’est pas seulement mon ami, on est, par force, quelque chose de plus.. ce livre.. représente des années de travaux, de prières et de douleurs qui ont été, je crois, hors de mesure.”
[vii] John 4: 22.
[viii] Léon Bloy, “Le Salut par les Juifs” in Maxence Caron, ed., Léon Bloy Essais et Pamphlets (Éditions Robert Laffont, 2017), p. 972: “Le Juif par excellence de nature”.
[ix] Ibid, p. 987: “L’antisemitisme est le plus sanglant est le plus impardonnable.”
[x] Ibid, p. 973: “Je dois être peu soupçonnable d’amour tendre pour les descendants actuels de cette race fameuse.”
[xi] Ibid, p. 973; “Me trouvant à Hambourg, l’an passé, j’eus la curiosité de voir le Marché des Juifs. La surprenante abjection de cet emporium de détritus emphyteotiques est difficilement exprimable… les hurlements obséquieux m’accrochaient…toutes ces faces de lucre et de servitude avaient la même estampille redoutable”
[xii] Ibid, p. 979: “Ils sont forcés par Dieu, invinciblement et surnaturellement forcés, d’accomplir les abominables cochonneries dont ils ont besoin pour accréditer leur déshonneur d’instruments de la Rédemption.”
[xiii] Ibid, p. 980: “La sympathie pour les Juifs est un signe de turpitude, c’est bien entendu. Il est impossible de mériter l’estime d’un chien quand on n’a pas le dégoût instinctif de la Synagogue. Cela s’énonce tranquillement comme un axiome de géométrie rectiligne, sans ironie et sans amertume.”
[xiv] Raïssa Maritain, Les Grandes Amitiés, p. 117.
[xv] Léon Bloy, “Le Salut par les Juifs,” p. 995: “Les Juifs ne se convertiront que lorsque Jésus sera descendu de sa Croix, et précisément Jésus ne peut en descendre que lorsque les Juifs se seront convertis.”
[xvi] “Cum igitur adeo magnum sit patrimonium spirituale Christianis et Iudaeis commune, Sacra haec Synodus mutuam utriusque cognitionem et aestimationem, quae praesertim studiis biblicis et theologicis atque fraternis colloquiis obtinetur, fovere vult et commendare”. Paul VI. “Nostra Aetate.” Vatican Archive, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html.
[xvii] Connelly. From Enemy to Brother, p. 109; Crane, “Cracks in the Theology of Contempt: The French Roots of Nostra Aetate,” p. 11.
[xviii] Connelly. From Enemy to Brother, p. 132. Yes, it is true that many people inspired Vatican II, but the combination of Osterreicher’s friendship with Maritain and inspiration from Bloy as expressed by Connelly strongly suggests that Bloy had a non-negligible effect.
[xix] Romain Vaissermann and Julianne Unterberger, Quatre écrivains Catholiques Sur La Question Juive De Bloy À Maritain (Reims: Collection Histoire des Religions, 2017), p. 8.
[xx] Henri Quantin, “Du Fumier sur le figuier: Léon Bloy et les Juifs” in Quatre écrivains Catholiques Sur La Question Juive De Bloy À Maritain (Reims: Collection Histoire des Religions, 2017), p. 11.
[xxi] Ibid, p. 19.
[xxii] “.. tout de suite que la perspective de Bloy n’est jamais politique; elle est toujours religieuse ou théologique. Bloy ne parle des Juifs que par rapport a Jésus, il ne parle d’Israel que dans la perspective du Salut offert par Christ.” Ibid, p. 21.
[xxiii] Tsakiridou, p. 210.
[xxiv] Crane, “Cracks in the Theology of Contempt: The French Roots of Nostra Aetate,” pp. 11-13.
[xxv] Ibid, p. 20 “En attendant [reconciliation] ce qui est exigé de toute nécessité, c’est le développement d’une amitié de plus en plus étroit. Je ne dis pas amitié vraie, mais vraiment fraternelle et vraiment efficace.”