SB THE SEPHARDI BULLETIN
December 2007 - Book Review
LETTRE A UN FRERE, by Moïse Rahmani
Reviewed by Lyn Julius
Yehoshua ben Yosef has been deported to Auschwitz, together with his entire Judean family and friends. But Yehoshua is not just another Jew among six million – he is Jesus himself.
This is the scenario introducing Moise Rahmani's latest work: Lettre à un frère, It is an epistle begging the present Pope, Benedict XVI, to denounce the founding myth of Christian Jew-hatred: that the Jews killed God's only son (such theological anti-Semitism is alien to Islam, but the Arab and Muslim world has eagerly embraced that idea that the Jesus martyred by the Jews was a Palestinian).
But didn't the Vatican II resolution passed in 1965 under Pope John XXIII absolve the Jewish people of the charge of decide, once and for all? Yes, but not many people know the wording was changed in 1967 under Pope Paul VI. Even today the Latin liturgy contains a prayer for the conversion of the Jews.
The course of Jewish-Catholic relations never did run smooth. The wartime Pope, Pius XII, studiedly neutral towards the Nazis, did not publicly condemn (except at the very end of the war) their policy of extermination of the Jews. He did not lift a finger to prevent the deportation of the Jews of Rome. Sixty-two years on, the Vatican archives remain secret and Pius XII is being considered for sainthood.
So far Pope Benedict XVI's record towards the Jews and Israel does not look too promising. He has presided over the Christianisation of Auschwitz and has continued the tradition of Papal frostiness towards Israel, Indeed, no Pope has ever welcomed the return of the Jews to their ancestral homeland.
Moise Rahmani's energy and passion leap from the pages of this short book in French.
He fires volleys of Biblical quotations at the purported recipient of his letter to show Christianity's Jewish roots and their shared values. He marshals evidence of perfidy and inconsistency from recent press articles as well as from the works of respected interfaith scholars.
If Jesus had been born in 1910 instead of 2,000 years earlier, the Nazis would have not hesitated to send him, a Jew, to the gas chambers. If ever Benedict XVI gets to read the letter Moise has written him, this is the argument he should find most compelling.
Lettre à un frère by Moise Rahmani (Editions Institut Sepharade Européen, 2007), 18.- € plus postage, can be ordered at :
http://www.moise.sefarad.org/ouvrages/frere/commander.html
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