ROME, February 24, 2010 – The first person he told that he had finished writing his book about Jesus was a Jewish rabbi, on the day after his visit to the synagogue of Rome, last January 18.
The rabbi is the American Jacob Neusner, and the author of the book is Benedict XVI.
The first volume of "Jesus of Nazareth" by pope Joseph Ratzinger was released three years ago. And now the second and concluding volume of the work, dedicated to the passion and resurrection of Jesus and to the infancy narratives, is ready for translation and printing.
Meanwhile, however, with significant coordination of timing, another important book about Jesus has been reprinted in recent days in Italy, entitled "Il Nazareno," written more than seventy years ago by a great Italian rabbi.
Not only that. A very positive review of this new edition of the book was published on February 20 in "L'Osservatore Romano," written by a famous scholar, Anna Foa, a Jewish professor of history at the University of Rome "La Sapienza."
And this review also marks an important new development. The author of the book, Israel Zoller, was chief rabbi of the Jewish community of Rome. And in 1945, he converted to the Catholic faith.
The stunning news of his conversion rocked the Roman and Italian Jewish community. And it responded with a silence that lasted for decades.
Anna Foa's review in "the pope's newspaper" has definitively broken this silence. Moreover, she has acknowledged that in that book, although it was written many years before its author's conversion, there already "seemed to appear between the lines a recognition of the messianic character of Christ."
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Israel Zoller was born in 1881 in Brodj, a village in Austro-Hungarian Galicia, now within the borders of Poland. At the age of six, he emigrated with his family to Stanislavia, now Ivano-Frankivsk, in Ukraine. He studied in L'viv and then in Florence. After settling in Italy, his surname was altered to Zolli. He was chief rabbi in Trieste and taught Jewish literature at the University of Padua. In Rome, he was elected as chief rabbi and as director of the rabbinical college. He resigned at the beginning of 1945, and in February asked to be baptized into the Catholic Church. He took the name of Eugenio, the same as that of the pope at the time, Pius XII. He died in 1956.
His autobiography, written in 1947 and reprinted in Italy six years ago, helps a great deal in understanding the journey and significance of his conversion to the Christian faith.
Ever since he was a child, for him, Jesus was present in all his mystery. In a world that recalls the paintings of Chagall, the Jewish painter who was born and lived in those same Eastern lands between Europe and Russia (see photo): the village, the synagogue, the corn fields covered with snow, the Jewish school with its severe teacher, the roosters on the rooftops... And all the airborne figures in the starry sky: the characters of the Bible.
But that's just it, Jesus is there too, right away. There's the crucifix in the home of his classmate:
"Why was He crucified? Why do we children become so different in His presence? No, no, He couldn't have been bad. Maybe He was and maybe He wasn't – who knows? – the Servant of God whose canticles we read in school. I don't know anything, but I'm sure of one thing: He was good, and so... and so, why did they crucify Him?"
Right away, there are the Gospels and the New Testament:
"All by myself, I read the Gospel, and experienced measureless delight. What a surprise I received in the middle of the green lawn: 'But I say to you: Love your enemies.' And from the height of the cross: 'Father, forgive them.' The New Testament really is a covenant... brand new! Everything in it seemed to me to have an extraordinary importance. Teachings like: 'Blessed are the pure of heart' and the prayer from the cross draw a line of demarcation between the world of ancient ideas and a new moral cosmos. Yes! Here there arises a new world. Here are delineated the sublime forms of the Kingdom of Heaven, of the persecuted who have not persecuted in return, but have loved."
Baptism would come many years later. And in the autobiography this appears as the natural messianic flowering of a Jewish branch that remains alive, laden with destiny from the beginning.
Israel Zoller later became Eugenio Zoller, prefiguring in his life the establishing of fraternal relations between Christianity and Judaism that today has risen to agenda of the Church's supreme leader.
A fraternal relationship that hinges entirely on the main difference between the two faiths: the recognition of Jesus as "my Lord and my God."
This is the same difference brought to light by Benedict XVI in the chapter on the Sermon on the Mount in the first volume of his "Jesus of Nazareth." In which his friend the rabbi Jacob Neusner is the emblem of the devout Jew who refuses to accept the divinity of Jesus, now as then.
But here it is, the review by the Jewish Foa of "Il Nazareno" by Rabbi Zolli, in the February 20, 2010 issue of "L'Osservatore Romano."