ABSTRACT
I We cannot say that we did not know. Jules Isaac published his Jesus et Israel in 1948, a work begun in 1943 after the arrest and murder of his wife and daughter and written in hiding and on the run.' In 1954 or 1955, when I first began my theological studies, my teacher Oscar Cullmann told me that it was a very important book that I must read. Later the last of Isaac's books on the subject but the first to be translated into English, The Teaching of Contempt, had a much broader effect.s It took some time to absorb how the long history of the church's "teaching of contempt" toward the Jewish people could lead to such monstrous results. It took some time for biblical exegetes to realize how their work contributed to such teaching and to begin to accept responsibility for it.
