International Council of Christians and Jews

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The International Council of Christians and Jews exists because of what Christian teaching had, for centuries, allowed to be said about Jews, and because in the years after 1945 that history could no longer be treated as a private matter internal to either community. Delegates gathered in Oxford in August 1946, barely a year after the war's end, to build a standing international body for Jewish-Christian dialogue directly in response to the Holocaust. The founding conference was followed a year later by a second meeting at Seelisberg, Switzerland, which produced the Ten Points of Seelisberg, a statement naming and rejecting the specific strands of Christian preaching, that Jews bear collective guilt for the death of Christ chief among them, that historians and theologians came to call the teaching of contempt.

The organization the Oxford and Seelisberg conferences built has grown into an umbrella coordinating roughly three dozen national Jewish-Christian dialogue councils worldwide, headquartered in Heppenheim, Germany, fittingly in the former home of the philosopher Martin Buber, whose own work on dialogue between self and other shaped much of the field's vocabulary. In 1995 the Council extended its founding bilateral mission by establishing the Abrahamic Forum, bringing Muslim participants into a conversation that had begun, half a century earlier, as a reckoning between only two traditions.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The document that came out of the 1947 Seelisberg conference was short, ten propositions rather than a treatise, and it was addressed to Christians, not about Jews but to the Christian churches themselves, naming specific patterns in ordinary preaching and catechesis that the delegates concluded had helped make the Holocaust thinkable. It called on churches to remember that the Old and New Testaments both bear witness to the same God, to avoid distorting or minimizing Judaism in Christian teaching, to avoid using the word Jews in an exclusive sense for the enemies of Jesus, and, most pointedly, to avoid presenting the Passion in a way that laid the blame for Christ's death on all Jews or on Jews alone. It was, in effect, an early and specific catalogue of the theological habits later grouped together as the teaching of contempt.

The Ten Points did not by themselves change Christian teaching, but they set out, in 1947, a set of concerns that mainstream Christian bodies would spend the following two decades formally addressing. The Second Vatican Council's 1965 declaration Nostra Aetate, which explicitly rejected the charge of collective Jewish guilt for Christ's death, took up ground the Seelisberg conference had already staked out nearly two decades earlier, and the International Council of Christians and Jews the conference founded has continued pressing the same questions in the decades since.