Wednesday 26 March 2025 at 20h
Prof. Dr. Karma Ben Johanan - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Bishop Prof. Fr. Etienne Vetö - Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome
Lecture in English, organized in cooperation with Prof. Dr. René Dausner (Universität Hildesheim).
Lecture in Hof van Liere, Prentenkabinet, Prinsstraat 13, 2000 Antwerpen.
The lecture will be followed by a reception.
Free entrance. To register, email to ijs@uantwerpen.be.
Over more than half a century, Jewish-Catholic relations have evolved in a way that was impossible to anticipate. Many of the old hostilities between them seem to have faded away, and a sense of closeness and affinity has taken their place. Dialogue has thrived, the academic study of the Jewish roots of Christianity has become extremely productive, and the Catholic Church has transformed its theological understanding of the Jewish people and developed it extensively.
These developments, however, have not come about in a vacuum, nor do they pertain purely to the realm of theology; to a great extent, it was the memory of a massive historical event, the Shoah, that facilitated the turning point in one of humanity’s most complex relationships.
Yet history continues to unfold, and it plays an ambivalent role in Jewish-Christian relations: The founding and continuous history of the State of Israel, the evolution of a new Jewish culture there, the globalization of Christianity, and the development of new spiritual and intellectual sensibilities that accompany it, as well as global far-reaching political and cultural crises—all have marked the renewed relationship and posed new challenges to Jewish-Christian dialogue. Most recently, the brutal attack by Hamas in the south of Israel on October 7, 2023, and the long and terrible war that followed have created a tension unprecedented since the renewal of the Jewish-Christian relationship after WWII. We believe that this tension has, in fact, exposed vulnerabilities that have already been present beneath the surface, but have now burst into our consciousness and demand that we address them.
In this event, we will explore points of friction between history, theology, and dialogue in Jewish-Christian relations. Will recent history continue to be a stumbling block or an opportunity to take a step forward in the midst of difficulty? At every step, the closer we are in fraternity, the better we understand the other, and at the same time, the more we realize all that we do not understand—also part of fraternity. Will we be able to talk together and walk together, even when, and especially when, we do not understand each other?
Karma Ben Johanan teaches in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before coming to Jerusalem, she served as the chair of Jewish-Christian relations at the Department of Theology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research focuses on the late-modern intellectual history of religion, on Jewish-Christian relations, secularization and antisemitim. She was awarded the Dan David Prize for the Study of the Past in 2023. Her book, Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), was awarded the Polonsky Prize, the Catholic Media Association Award, and the Shazar prize, and was a finalist of the Jewish National Book Award. Ben Johanan is currently leading an ERC project exploring the Christian repudiation of antisemitism in Europe after WWII, and the tension between religious and non-religious perceptions of antisemitism.
Etienne Vetö, a Franco-American of Hungarian descent, is Roman Catholic Auxiliary Bishop of Reims, France, and a member of the Chemin Neuf Community. He taught philosophy at the Jesuit Faculties of Paris and theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, where he was director of the Cardinal Bea Centre for Judaic Studies (2017-2023). He is a consultant to the Commission for Religious Relations with Judaism of the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity and a member of the International Theological Commission. He has written extensively on Trinitarian theology and Jewish-Christian Relations.