This is a wonderful, most welcome article. I am one of those Jewish Catholics. I have never abandoned my Jewish identity. It’s not something one can abandon. I was born a Jew and will die a Jew, but one of Catholic Christian faith. I was ‘converted’ in the darkest hour of my life, when something pressed me to read St John’s gospel. The first few verses entered my soul like rays of light and I grasped the Christian faith whole and entire, in one moment. Before that moment I could never understand the worship of Jesus Christ. After that moment I got it. Deo gratias.
And why Catholicism? There was never any doubt in my mind that I would enter the Church that stood behind Western civilisation, that built the cathedrals I loved even during my Jewish life, and existed above and beyond nationalities and ethnic groups.

I have attended Christian Seder (Passover) meals, led by Jews who have also become Christians.
Such services are astonishing, so rich in both Jewish and Christian meaning and symbolism.
You see the original Jewish rituals in their historical context, but also see so clearly how they prophetically point to and reveal Jesus as Messiah, His sacrificial death as the lamb of God, and His ultimate victory over sin and death.
Almost all of the first Christians, including Jesus and his disciples, were Jews. Jewish Christians are the literal founders of Christianity, thus Christian persecution of the Jews was the greatest betrayal of Christ in history, something to be continually repented of.
Of todays Jewish Christians shown in the article, may their tribe increase!

The last supper celebrated yesterday is the final celebration of Jewish Passover by Christ. The story of his betrayal not just by Judas, his friend, for a trivial reward of thirty pieces of silver but in less crucial ways by his disciples that he predicts at that religious meal is a prologue to Christian betrayal of his own religious background as a Jew. Christian persecution of those of his earthly relatives who failed to acknowledge him to be the Messiah is merely another facet of that continued betrayal that Christians are bound to admit. It is a foolish Christian that does not acknowledge his continued state of sin. It is equally foolish of non-Christians to expect that Christians will be without sin. A Jew who becomes a Christian is merely one who sees Christianity as a continuation of the story of their faith by accepting Jesus to be the Messiah foretold in their book – a rather easier transition one would have thought than for a Buddhist or an Atheist. There is no need for the Jew to escape his roots when he converts it is natural for him to carry them with him.

It is extremely sinful for a Catholic to be anti- semitic. It is a scar on the Catholic Church that it encouraged pogroms against Jewish people. As a Catholic I often think that Catholic persecution of Jews made the Holocaust possible, maybe inevitable. I pray for the safety and happiness of the Jewish people, still targeted in this very day.

This movement called Christian Jews is, in my opinion, a huge misunderstanding. Before taking the decision to embrace another faith, no matter if it is related to some extent to Judaism, one has to deepen first of all the Jewish religion. In order to do this it is essential to have a very high knowledge of Ancient Hebrew, this helps understanding the Hebrew scriptures. This is a job for several lifetimes.
The Christian faith is based on the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible the so called the septuagint. But this translation was also meant for the Jewish community of Alexandria which was helenized and not able to read Hebrew anymore. And this brings us to the key issue: the exact translation of the Hebrew Bible into another language is an impossible task for the very simple reason that the WORDS have a different meaning and other languages cannot find the equivalents. Words derive from habits which are unique to every civilization.
Then before it is decided if the Messiah has arrived it is essential to study what are the conditions the Jews pose for his arrival. The concept of the Messiah is a Jewish invention so we better listen to them and understand what they mean by it.
It is true that some steps have been taken to improve the attitude towards Judaism but there is still a long way to go. Then as to the Issue of the Judas’ betrayal I will point out simply to the fact that the Romans were the real, ruthless, rulers of the land of Israel in those days. They did not understand the Jews and despized them.This should be enough to explain, if at all possible, what happened. What followed was a huge wave of destruction of the Jewish people.
Finally unless the phomenon of Marcionism is seriously marginalized a good portion of antisemitism will still remain. At the popular level Marcionism is alive and kicking and this is a source of a lot of prejudice.
The Jews are at the origin of an extraordianry construction of civilization but had to endure terrible consequences. The fact that they survived to these days is due to the unbelievable amount of wisdom which lies in their scriptures. Scriptures which Jews in the first place have to study before jumping to conclusions.

As a Roman Catholic, I feel a very close fraternity to and with my Jewish ” religious cousins” and Israel too: one only has to listen to the words spoken at every Mass and in most gospels and readings.

There are also converts to Judaism, among them Catholic priests whose reading of the Hebrew scriptures lead them to see things from the Judaic point of view.

Beautiful article. I am reminded of Pope Benedict reminding us that the Jews are ” our spiritual older brothers.” Beautiful. I worked most of my life with and among some wonderful Jewish men , women and children. Wonderful people. Indeed Catholics are in truth Messianic Jews. Warm greetings to my brothers and sisters.

Thank you for sharing this insight. I would like to think that over the last few decades we Christians (and even Catholics) have become more aware of and appreciative of our shared heritage. We have moved on from the AD/BC binary. We are making up for our past and becoming philo-semites. Time and necessity make great healers. Catholics and Protestants no longer kill each other, while respecting that divisions are caused by serious and important issues. Anyway, we end up in the same naughty corner of the secular world.
You have helped as well by seeing past conflicts as theological rather than racial. Many Catholics have seen this clearly, moving on from the paranoid Dreyfus world to Pius Xl’s ‘spiritually we are all semites’ amidst the suffering. The Nazis did draw on older tropes but were deeply anti-Christian as well as anti-Semitic. For all the horrors, there are also heartening accounts of Jews being rescued and sheltered at great cost, priests issuing fake baptismal certificates, enclosed convents providing refuge. Some good history to balance the bad.

Today’s article should have appeared during the six weeks of Lent, which ended yesterday, because that is when Catholics focus their attention on repentance. Instead, it appeared during the run-up to Easter, when Catholics focus their attention on the ultimate victory of Christ—and, by extension, of his church. But I see no need to elaborate on what the article and the comments on it have already said about Catholic repentance.
Although I think that Jews should be free to adopt or reject Christianity (or Judaism), I think also that adopting it can be naïve. That’s because people cannot be Christians (or Jews) except in the contexts of historical communities. The Catholic church has indeed changed the course of its own history by denouncing both antijudaism and antisemitism. And it has done so not only on moral grounds but also on theological grounds. Even so, history itself remains. I refer here not to something negative such as the history of Christian hostility toward Judaism or Jews. Rather, I refer to something positive: the history of blending and reconciling two very different civilizations, that of “Jerusalem,” as Tertullian famously put it, with that of “Athens.” Christianity is no longer a Jewish sect. Christians inherit not only the biblical scripture but also classical philosophy. That cultural marriage is not only the sine qua non of Christianity but also the foundation of Western civilization.
I can’t help wondering, therefore, about the extent to which Jews who join the church now actually become Catholics in any useful sense of that word. From reading Zenou’s article, from some of the comments on this blog and from sociological studies of Hebrew Christians, I get the impression that they are trying to restore the religious (and political) conditions of two thousand years ago, before the Christian community separated from the Jewish community (which probably occurred ca. 70, either just before or just after Rome destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem). In doing so, they soon became not only demographically Roman but also spiritually Roman.
For modern Jewish converts to Catholicism (or Protestantism), their choice depends heavily, even exclusively, on scriptural prophecies of a coming messiah—that is, Christian interpretations of those prophecies. At some point, the first Christians had to reinterpret the whole Jewish notion of a messiah. Many Jews had assumed that the messiah would be a royal but earthly hero, albeit with a divine mission to expel the Romans. Others had decided that the messiah would be a divine savior who would not only expel the Romans but also inaugurate a new kind of kingdom beyond time. Still others now argued that this divine figure was none other than Jesus.
These disputes were common among both Jews and Jewish Christians. It did not take long, for instance, for the latter to be afflicted by “cognitive dissonance.” Why did the expected return of Jesus not occur almost immediately and bring an end to history? Some proposed that Christ had already inaugurated the Kingdom of God, to be sure, but internally instead of externally. In that case, the community would have to settle down under Roman rule for the foreseeable future and establish its own institutions accordingly.
In short, it took many generations for the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus to become Christians, just as it had taken many generations for the ancient Israelites to become rabbinic Jews. There was no time when it all seemed simple. People had to keep making choices, and those choices entailed others.

I was raised in a mixed family. My dad’s stepfather was Jewish, but he married a Methodist Minister’s daughter, my grandmother. (Proudfoot is a pen name) When I was in grade school, my family used to say a Jewish prayer each night that ended in the Shema, said in Hebrew. On Sundays, we went to Protestant Church. We lived in Missoula, Montana. On Jewish holidays, including Seders, my dad’s Army buddy, who was Jewish, invited us to the Jewish gathering in the area. There was no Synagogue in Missoula then. So I grew up half and half, although I identified as Protestant, because I certainly wasn’t kosher enough to be Jewish. My upbringing did make me a closet Unitarian. “Here O Israel, the Lord our G_d, the Lord is One,” says the Shema.

When in later life I was teaching Sunday School in a Congregational Church in Suburban Chicago, I used to cover the differences between Jews and Protestants by putting my thumb in the page in the Bible between the end of the Old Testament and the start of the New Testament. I would tell my class, “We agree on this much,” showing the thickness of the Old Testament. “We disagree on this much,” showing the relative thinness of the New Testament. It was a good place to start the discussion.

Very interesting! Anybody can become Catholic actually, it’s not really surprising. But welcome!

Of course one should be careful not to overemphasise the Old Testament in Catholicism. Catholicism has absorbed a lot of pagan influences especially from Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia. And the gnostics. It makes it all very fascinating.

From an atheistic viewpoint, all this heart searching over which ancient book, doctrine or mythical deity to ascribe to is bemusing, but not surprising. Differences inevitably divide, so why shouldn’t similarities have the opposite effect?