ERC Starting Grant Project Christosemitism

ERC PROJECT

About
Christosemitism is a multifaceted research project, sponsored by the European Research Council. Its aim is to analyze the role of Christian agents, ideas, and initiatives in the creation of an anti-antisemitic consensus in Europe and beyond between 1945 and 2020, and to explore the intersection between the question of antisemitism and the extensive processes which took place within the Christian world at the same time, including secularization, liberalization, and the globalization of Christianity.
Led by Prof. Karma Ben Johanan, our team of eight researchers, ranging from graduate students to post doctoral scholars, employs diverse methodologies from fields including religious studies, intellectual history, cultural studies, anthropology, and philosophy, as well as
archival research.

ERC Starting Grant Project

Christosemitism: A History of European Christian Anti-Antisemitism 1945-2020

The project studies the history of the Roman Catholic and Protestant repudiation of antisemitism, which I term Christian anti-antisemitism, in Western Europe between 1945 and 2020. I argue that through its expression in multiple ecclesiastical declarations, theological works, liturgical events, educational projects, and professional appointments, anti-antisemitism is a core component of contemporary European Christianity. As such, it is inherently tied to the reconfiguration of Western Christianity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries within the context of liberal secular society, to the creation of orthodoxies and heresies, and to processes of secularization, decolonization, and the globalization of Christianity.

To grasp the role of Christian anti-antisemitism within these processes, the project explores three of its central aspects: First, the project analyzes the penetration of anti-antisemitism into the core of Christian European identity by examining its key theological concepts and historical development. Second, the project explores Christian anti-antisemitism as it was consolidated and negotiated in interaction with Jewish interlocutors, focusing on the dialectic between the severe disagreements between Jews and Christians regarding the nature of antisemitism and the role of Christians in facilitating and perpetuating it, as well as fruitful anti-antisemitic collaborations that were also harnessed for the cultivation of Europe’s postwar liberal ethos. Third, the project studies intra-Christian debates on antisemitism in ecumenical and global Christian settings and investigates the place of anti-antisemitism within the tensions between Western Christianity and World Christianity around racism and colonialism.

Further inforamtion: European Christian Anti-Antisemitism 1945-2020

The question what antisemitism is and what are the appropriate means to fight it are definitely among the most contested questions of our time. Yet within these ongoing debates, revolving around history, society, and politics, the factor of religion is often pushed aside. Christosemitism sets out to fill this gap. An interdisciplinary research project sponsored by the European Research Council (ERC), Christosemitism studies the place of religion, and especially that of Christianity--the historical religion of Europe—in the fight against antisemitism in Western Europe between 1945 and 2020. We argue that the question what antisemitism is has been saturated with unacknowledged religious questions, such as what religion is, what is the right relationship between religion and secularism, and what should be the place of the Christian religion in the rebuilding of war-ridden Europe. Christosemitism ivestigates these connections, exploring, on the one hand, why and how anti-antisemitism became a core component of the way in which Christianity is lived, practiced, navigated and polemicized in a secularizing continent, and, on the other hand, how the concept of antisemitism functions across secular-religious, intra-religious and inter-cultural tensions within Europe and between Europe and the world.

Karma Ben Johanan

I am a historian of late-modern religion and religious ideas. My research focuses on Jewish-Christian relations on one hand, and on religious-secular and church-state relations on the other. My work explores how intellectual communities of established religious traditions mobilize their traditional sources to respond to expansive political, intellectual, and ethical transitions, as well as the implications of these responses for their perceptions of the Other. At the heart of my scholarly interests is how contemporary Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish communities cope with a series of interrelated challenges: secularization, liberalism—particularly the idea and practice of separating religion from politics—living alongside secular and religious others, and the influence of postcolonial criticism on both Jewish and Christian self-understandings.

At the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew Univerity, I teach the history of religions in modernity, contemporary Christianity, history and theory of secularism, and Jewish-Christian relations

BIO

Karma Ben Johanan teaches in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She previously served as a professor at the Faculty of Theology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she held the Chair of Jewish-Christian Relations. Ben Johanan studied at the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students at Tel Aviv University, where she also completed her PhD in the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies. She was a Fulbright postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Ben Johanan has taught courses at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and at the "Theologisches Studienjahr" at the Dormition Abbey, and she has conducted research stays at the Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose Giovanni XXIII in Bologna and the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg. Currently, Ben Johanan is heading an ERC funded project titled: “Christosemitism: European Christian Anti-antisemitism, 1945-2020”. She has been an elected member of the Young Israel Academy since 2025

Ben-Johanan was awarded the Dan David Prize for the Study of the Past in 2023, and the Mount zion Award for contribution to interreligious relations in 2025. Her book, Jacob's Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), was awarded the Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines and the Catholic Media Association Award for a book on interreligious relations. The book’s Hebrew version, A Pottage of Lentils: Mutual Perceptions of Christians and Jews in the Age of Reconciliation (Tel Aviv University Press, 2020), won the Shazar Prize for Research in Jewish History in 2021.

**Dan David Prize 2023