The notion associating Judaism and Christianity, born in the 19th century in the wake of the modern redefinition of Christian Europe, bears under its learned appearance the spectrum of repentant anti -Semitism and a rejection of Islam.
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History of a notion. With its “-ism” and its dash, Judeo -Christianism has something relentless. In addition to this learned pace, the term is sometimes the epithet of other big words, such as “morality” or “civilization”, and benefits from a regular media promotion: Michel Onfray was the subject of his decadence test . Life and death of Judeo-Christianity (Flammarion, 2017), while the deputy of the Alpes-Maritimes Eric Ciotti, then in the race for the primary of the Les Républicains of 2021 party, proposed to include “the Judeo-Christian roots” in the Constitution.
This obviousness, Judeo-Christianity derives it from a historical reality. Jesus and his apostles were Jews, and Christianity emerged from Judaism “as a fruit of the branch which wore him”, summed up the former honorary professor at the Collège de France Javier Teixidor (1930-2017). In Judeo-Christianity (Gallimard, 2006), this specialist in semitic antiquities identified in particular two moments of sustained interactions: at the origin of Christianity, when new converts continued to observe Jewish rites; then to the vi e
é> and vii e centuries, when civil power forced the conversion of the Jews to a Christianity that has become state religion.
But the evidence of Judeo-Christianism stops here: this notion born in the 19th e denth century is the fruit of a movement mixing modern civilizational issues. The paternity of the term is attributed to the theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860), who used it for the first time in 1831. Beyond this representative of the German biblical exegesis, it is with his claimed master Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) that the fundamental theoretical gesture takes place, notes the philosopher Mohamed Amer Meziane. Hegel produced the “origin of the structure” of this notion, by “affirming that Judaism is the beginning of the dynamics which leads from the history of religions to that of modernity via Christianity”, details this professor at the ‘Brown University, in the United States.
This movement is part of the secularization dynamics of Europe, a concept which was the subject of its first book, Empires under the ground (La Découverte, 2021), where he placed Hegel at the heart of his thesis. Mohamed Amer Meziane shows how secularization proceeds from this redefinition of Christianity as a modern religion capable of embracing emerging industrialization: “It is at this moment that the identification of European modernity and Christianity takes place, which did not go to oneself before. “
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