ERC Starting Grant Project Christosemitism

14/06/2026 | Na stronie od 15/06/2026

Christosemitism - logo

ERC PROJECT

About
Christosemitism is a multifaceted research project, sponsored by the European Research Council. Its aim is to analyze the role of Christian agents, ideas, and initiatives in the creation of an anti-antisemitic consensus in Europe and beyond between 1945 and 2020, and to explore the intersection between the question of antisemitism and the extensive processes which took place within the Christian world at the same time, including secularization, liberalization, and the globalization of Christianity.
Led by Prof. Karma Ben Johanan, our team of eight researchers, ranging from graduate students to post doctoral scholars, employs diverse methodologies from fields including religious studies, intellectual history, cultural studies, anthropology, and philosophy, as well as
archival research.

ERC Starting Grant Project

Christosemitism: A History of European Christian Anti-Antisemitism 1945-2020

The project studies the history of the Roman Catholic and Protestant repudiation of antisemitism, which I term Christian anti-antisemitism, in Western Europe between 1945 and 2020. I argue that through its expression in multiple ecclesiastical declarations, theological works, liturgical events, educational projects, and professional appointments, anti-antisemitism is a core component of contemporary European Christianity. As such, it is inherently tied to the reconfiguration of Western Christianity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries within the context of liberal secular society, to the creation of orthodoxies and heresies, and to processes of secularization, decolonization, and the globalization of Christianity.

To grasp the role of Christian anti-antisemitism within these processes, the project explores three of its central aspects: First, the project analyzes the penetration of anti-antisemitism into the core of Christian European identity by examining its key theological concepts and historical development. Second, the project explores Christian anti-antisemitism as it was consolidated and negotiated in interaction with Jewish interlocutors, focusing on the dialectic between the severe disagreements between Jews and Christians regarding the nature of antisemitism and the role of Christians in facilitating and perpetuating it, as well as fruitful anti-antisemitic collaborations that were also harnessed for the cultivation of Europe’s postwar liberal ethos. Third, the project studies intra-Christian debates on antisemitism in ecumenical and global Christian settings and investigates the place of anti-antisemitism within the tensions between Western Christianity and World Christianity around racism and colonialism.

Further inforamtion: European Christian Anti-Antisemitism 1945-2020

The question what antisemitism is and what are the appropriate means to fight it are definitely among the most contested questions of our time. Yet within these ongoing debates, revolving around history, society, and politics, the factor of religion is often pushed aside. Christosemitism sets out to fill this gap. An interdisciplinary research project sponsored by the European Research Council (ERC), Christosemitism studies the place of religion, and especially that of Christianity--the historical religion of Europe—in the fight against antisemitism in Western Europe between 1945 and 2020. We argue that the question what antisemitism is has been saturated with unacknowledged religious questions, such as what religion is, what is the right relationship between religion and secularism, and what should be the place of the Christian religion in the rebuilding of war-ridden Europe. Christosemitism ivestigates these connections, exploring, on the one hand, why and how anti-antisemitism became a core component of the way in which Christianity is lived, practiced, navigated and polemicized in a secularizing continent, and, on the other hand, how the concept of antisemitism functions across secular-religious, intra-religious and inter-cultural tensions within Europe and between Europe and the world.

Karma Ben Johanan

I am a historian of late-modern religion and religious ideas. My research focuses on Jewish-Christian relations on one hand, and on religious-secular and church-state relations on the other. My work explores how intellectual communities of established religious traditions mobilize their traditional sources to respond to expansive political, intellectual, and ethical transitions, as well as the implications of these responses for their perceptions of the Other. At the heart of my scholarly interests is how contemporary Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish communities cope with a series of interrelated challenges: secularization, liberalism—particularly the idea and practice of separating religion from politics—living alongside secular and religious others, and the influence of postcolonial criticism on both Jewish and Christian self-understandings.

At the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew Univerity, I teach the history of religions in modernity, contemporary Christianity, history and theory of secularism, and Jewish-Christian relations

BIO

Karma Ben Johanan teaches in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She previously served as a professor at the Faculty of Theology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she held the Chair of Jewish-Christian Relations. Ben Johanan studied at the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students at Tel Aviv University, where she also completed her PhD in the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies. She was a Fulbright postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Ben Johanan has taught courses at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and at the "Theologisches Studienjahr" at the Dormition Abbey, and she has conducted research stays at the Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose Giovanni XXIII in Bologna and the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg. Currently, Ben Johanan is heading an ERC funded project titled: “Christosemitism: European Christian Anti-antisemitism, 1945-2020”. She has been an elected member of the Young Israel Academy since 2025

Ben-Johanan was awarded the Dan David Prize for the Study of the Past in 2023, and the Mount zion Award for contribution to interreligious relations in 2025. Her book, Jacob's Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), was awarded the Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines and the Catholic Media Association Award for a book on interreligious relations. The book’s Hebrew version, A Pottage of Lentils: Mutual Perceptions of Christians and Jews in the Age of Reconciliation (Tel Aviv University Press, 2020), won the Shazar Prize for Research in Jewish History in 2021.

**Dan David Prize 2023

Finding a Common Language

Slightly more than a yearinto the project, this seems like a good moment to reflect on what we have achieved so far, and on the main challenges that still lie ahead. We now have an extraordinarily diverse team of scholars working on individual projects from very different disciplinary perspectives: critical theory, history, sociology, literature, cultural studies, religious studies, and theology. The scholars do not differ only in their methodologies and intellectual frameworks; they also work on radically different geographical locations and political contexts: Catholics in communist Poland, radical-right Evangelicals in contemporary Brazil, postliberal Christians in the United States, Catholic anti-totalitarian intellectuals in Cold War France, postsecular theory in contemporary Germany, and Christian ecumenism in the context of global Christianity.

What gradually emerged as our common ground is the question of how the discourse on antisemitism and anti-antisemitism intersects with the discourse on religion and politics, and how Jewish-Christian relations become entangled with The conference concluded with a keynote lecture by Massimo Faggioli (Trinity College Dublin), who offered a sobering and globally attentive reassessment of Nostra Aetate. He argued that the document was deeply embedded in a Western narrative—both in what it articulated and in what it left unsaid. Emerging from a predominantly European and North American context, it focused above all on Jewish–Christian relations, reflecting the centrality of that encounter in the postwar West. Today, however, this framework is increasingly challenged by the rise of postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, which often view documents rooted in Western intellectual and theological traditions with suspicion, if not outright rejection. At the same time, the global context of interreligious relations has shifted: the optimism of postconciliar dialogue has given way, in many regions, to encounters marked by tension and conflict. As the demographic center of the Catholic Church moves toward Africa and Asia, Catholics now live primarily alongside Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, while Judaism is often absent or present in very different forms. In this light, Faggioli suggested that Nostra Aetate resembles a “short blanket”—a text that cannot fully cover the complexity of contemporary realities. If the conference traced the fragility of that promise, it also gestured toward its quiet resilience. Selected papers from the conference will be published in an edited volume, ensuring that the conversations initiated in Jerusalem continue to shape scholarly and theological reflection in the years to come. In her closing remarks, HUJI Dean of Humanities Elisheva Baumgarten reflected on the tension between ideology and lived reality: at times, theology has been hostile while everyday relations remained humane; at other times, the reverse has been true. It is in these daily encounters, she suggested, that hope persists. Recalling her early morning runs through Jerusalem—where Jews, Christians, and Muslims cross paths in ordinary, unguarded ways—she offered a modest but powerful image: even in a city marked by trauma and violence, shared life continues. A Zoom meeting brought our research group together with Marianne Moyaert from KU Leuven and Gavin D’Costa from the Angelicum, along with Professor D’Costa’s students, for a wideranging discussion of Moyaert’s Christian Imaginations of the Religious Other. Moyart’s research, which offers a genealogy of the Christian imagination of the Other, and of Jews and Muslims in particular, intersects fruitfully with the questions at the heart of the Christosemitism project. Incorporating theology and historiography, her study traces interreligious and religioussecular Newsletter Issue 2 / June 2026 About Christosemitism is a multifaceted research project, sponsored by the European Research Council. Its aim is to analyze the role of Christian agents, ideas, and initiatives in the creation of an anti-antisemitic consensus in Europe and beyond between 1945 and 2020, and to explore the intersection between the question of antisemitism and the extensive processes which took place within the Christian world at the same time, including secularization, liberalization, and the globalization of Christianity. Led by Prof. Karma Ben Johanan, our team of eight researchers, ranging from graduate students to postdoctoral scholars, employs diverse methodologies from fields including religious studies, intellectual history, cultural studies, anthropology, and philosophy, as well as archivalresearch. Finding a Common Language From Vatican II to Today: The Ongoing Challenge of Dialogue. Report from the Conference “Nostra Aetate in Their Age and in Ours” Events, guests, and collaborations We heard a presentation from Itamar Ben Ami from Utrecht University, whose lecture addressed the question of what comes after “religion,” that is, what follows once the central concept in religious studies has been shown to be inadequate: too Western, too narrow, too misleading in relation to its object. The lecture considered how the critique of the concept of religion gave rise to broader imaginaries of religion, emerging from both critical and post-liberal directions. the major secular-religious divides of modernity. More specifically, we are beginning to discover a striking shared structure across otherwise dramatically different political and cultural settings: namely, that the discourse on antisemitism repeatedly becomes a constitutive element in the shaping of modern Christian identity, and in the ways Western Christianity seeks to redefine itselfin the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first — even when embedded within political, theological, and cultural projects that differ profoundly from one another. Thus, the first year of the project was, in many ways, about finding a common language. Each of us approaches history, religion, and politics from a different perspective, and each holds somewhat different assumptions regarding the meaning and function of antisemitism itself. Yet precisely through these differences, we have gradually learned to focus on the ways in which distinct intellectual traditions, theological commitments, and historical experiences shape the global discussion surrounding antisemitism and anti-antisemitism. Reading and listening to one another, we are discovering the surprising mobility of ideas beyond their original contexts, the ways in which they travel across countries and disciplines, and the manner in which they are continually reconfigured, producing unexpected affinities alongside deep tensions and disagreements.

The search for a shared intellectual center of gravity has often been difficult, especially as our own lives continue to be shaken by regional wars and political upheavals. And yet, from time to time, the project has also produced moments of genuine intellectual discovery: moments in which disciplinary boundaries become unexpectedly porous, and in which concepts that initially seemed confined to highly specific contexts suddenly illuminate much broader constellations of religion, politics, and modern identity. Alongside the challenges, we have also experienced the precious joy of participating in an intellectual community.

Karma Ben Johanan

Jewish-Christian Relations - more from history /red./:

Jewish-Christian Relations /International Council of Christians and Jews ICCJ/
(Since 1947 the ICCJ has been successfully engaged in the historic renewal of Jewish-Christian relations. We promote understanding and cooperation between Christians and Jews based on respect for each other's identity and integrity. In more recent years we increasingly engaged in the Abrahamic dialogue: the encounter between Jews, Christians and Muslims.)

Nostra aetate

  • DECLARATION ON THE RELATION OF THE CHURCH TO NON-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS NOSTRA AETATE
    PROCLAIMED BY HIS HOLINESS POPE PAUL VI ON OCTOBER 28, 1965

Church and Israel

  • Church and Israel: A Contribution from the Reformation Churches in Europe to the Relationship between Christians and Jews 23/06/2001 | Leuenberg Church Fellowship A Contribution from the Reformation Churches in Europe to the Relationship between Christians and Jews, 24 June 2001.

Dabru emet

  • Dabru Emet: A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity September 10, 2000

Sacred Obligation:

  • Sacred Obligation - Rethinking Christian Faith in Relation to Judaism and the Jewish People