History of a concept. With its “-ism” and its hyphen, Judeo-Christianity has something implacable about it. In addition to this scholarly look, the term is sometimes the epithet of other big words, such as “morality” or “civilization”, and benefits from regular media promotion: Michel Onfray was the subject of his essay. Decadence. 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 party of 2021, proposed to register “Judeo-Christian roots” in the Constitution.
This air of evidence, Judeo-Christianity draws it from a historical reality. Jesus and his apostles were Jews, and Christianity emerged from Judaism “like a fruit from the branch that bore it”, 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 interaction: at the origin of Christianity, when new converts continued to observe Jewish rites; then to VIe and VIIe centuries, when the civil power forced the conversion of the Jews to a Christianity that had become the state religion.
But the obviousness of Judeo-Christianity stops here: this notion born in the 19e century is the result of a movement combining modern civilizational issues. The authorship 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 current of German biblical exegesis, it is with its 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 concept, “affirming that Judaism is the beginning of the dynamic that leads from the history of religions to that of modernity via Christianity”details this professor at Brown University, in the United States.
This movement is part of the dynamics of secularization of Europe, a concept that was the subject of his 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 the nascent industrialization: “It is at this moment that the identification of European modernity and Christianity takes place, which was not self-evident before. »
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