Shifting Missions: Languages, Texts, and Experiences between Jews and Roman Catholics in Israel (1940s–1970s)

The discussion over the meaning of the concept of “mission” has marked historical relations between Christians and Jews in Palestine since the nineteenth century. The interpretation of the “mission of the Church to the Jews” and the “mission of the Jews within the Church” dominated the theological and pastoral reflections of the Catholic Church in late Ottoman and then Mandate Palestine, and, after 1948, in the State of Israel. At the same time, in the traumatic wake of the Holocaust, Jewish Israeli public opinion elaborated a vision of the Christian churches in Israel as essentially missionary enterprises devoted to conversionist attempts toward the Jews, so that in the press and in political debates the word “Churches” was often replaced with the term “the Mission” (ha-Misyon).