Who was André Chouraqui?

Presentation for the Jewish Educational

Educational Manna series,
series , JCC, London
Monday, December 12, 2011

If I told you that someone had distinguished themselves in the fields of

literature and theology, drama and politics, international relations, philanthropy and
history, you might be curious to learn more about that person. If I said further that
this individual had served two terms as deputy mayor of Jerusalem during both the
1967 and 1973 wars, had been a cabinet minister, advisor and close personal friend
to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, had played a leading role in laying the
foundations for the Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel, had been
perhaps the only person in history to have personally translated the Holy Scriptures
of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths, had been honoured with numerous
honorary doctorates and awards, had been a consultant to three Popes, a source for
the work of the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus, and someone who been
nominated as President of Israel, I suspect your ears would perk up and you would
wonder who this mystery person was. In fact, you might be quite certain that such a
person would be well known, would be a name on the tip of many people’s tongues,
would be familiar to anyone with a good education, might even be the subject of a
few biographies and documentaries.
And yet, when I say the name Natân André Chouraqui to you—or to most
people, including many Israelis—what I get back is usually a stunned, confused look.
This man—a genuine Renaissance man who was one of the great political and
religious figures of our lifetimes—is today known only to a relatively small, and
aging, élite of people. A man whose accomplishments could easily have made him
the object of a Nobel Prize, and yet most people today are largely oblivious to his
remarkable contributions, and even more remarkable life. A man whose death in July
2007 was mourned by the likes of Shimon Peres and Nicolas Sarkozy, and yet even
whose passing slipped under the radar screens of most mainstream media in Europe
and North America. I doubt most of you had even heard of André Chouraqui before
this evening. But I also hope that, before this evening is over, you will both know
who he was, but also know why someone like me could be so enthusiastic about
him!
From the very beginning, there was much about André Chouraqui that made
him an extraordinary individual. On the level of his family life, Chouraqui was
something of an anomaly: a Sephardic Jew in predominantly Muslim colonial
Algeria. Chouraqui’s family, originally from Spain, had fled that country at the end
of the 14th century as tensions grew with the predominantly Catholic population,
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and travelled to North Africa, where they had lived and distinguished themselves
for more than 500 years. Chouraqui was, therefore, as he sometimes said, “as Arab as
the Arabs,” and indeed, Arabic was his native language. By the time of his birth in
1917, his family had been well known for centuries as prominent Jewish leaders and
legal experts, and both his father and grandfather were deeply immersed in the
Hebrew and Aramaic classics of Judaism—the ancient languages of his people, into
which the young André was himself initiated from a very early age. And in his
formal education, it was French that was the language of instruction in Algeria—at
the time a French overseas colony—where young André learned to see himself, no
longer as the descendant of a proud Middle Eastern people, but as a descendant of
the Gauls, and the heir to classical European civilization, the Enlightenment and its
tradition of rationalism. Indeed, the French educational system in which he studied
was aggressively secular, and by the time he had finished high school, André had
basically abandoned his religious upbringing, in favour of a more “sophisticated” and
“enlightened” approach, which saw religion as something antiquated and largely
rendered obsolete by modern science and philosophy.
The young and idealistic Chouraqui set out for France where he pursued a
degree in law at the Sorbonne, but the last years of his student days were
overshadowed by the rise of the Nazis in Germany, and the growing threat posed by
their anti-Semitic rhetoric and organizing. Chouraqui, who had largely ignored his
Jewishness during university, suddenly felt a desire to re-connect with his heritage.
As he wrote, “If Hitler wanted to kill me for being Jewish, I wanted to be sure that,
before I died, I at least understood what being Jewish meant”. He applied to France’s
Rabbinic Seminary as a lay student, to deepen his knowledge of Judaism and
rabbinic texts, and had just finished his third year there when the advance of the
Nazis closed the seminary and scattered its students and faculty. Chouraqui spent
the rest of the war on the run, as part of the French Resistance in the region of the
Haute-Loire, shuttling food and other supplies to homes that were housing refugees
and escapees. But those years were also tremendously productive years for him. A
number of his Jewish seminary professors were also in hiding nearby, and
Chouraqui and his classmates managed to gather a group of them together for
regular classes in Scripture and Talmud, held by firelight, in the dark of the forest, a
group he nicknamed “the School of the Prophets”. It was also during those years in
the Resistance that Chouraqui renewed his earlier friendship with his fellow
Algerian Albert Camus, and the two spent many evenings cooking Algerian cuisine
together, and discussing Biblical and religious ideas, including Chouraqui’s
considerable insights into Biblical plagues—which would form a key part of the
intellectual background of Camus’s famous 1947 novel The Plague.
When the war finally ended, Chouraqui continued his law studies,
eventually receiving his doctorate in international law, with a thesis that was almost
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certainly the first on the legal aspects of the establishment of the State of Israel in
1948, only months after that historic event. But despite success in his studies and his
legal career, André’s wartime experiences left him deeply disillusioned, with two
questions that gnawed continually at his mind and heart: firstly, how was it that so
many Christians—at least apparently Christians, hundreds of millions of them—had
either collaborated in the persecution and massacring of their Jewish neighbours, or
had at least stood silently by and refused to intervene to save their lives? And
secondly, why was it that, in the Resistance, no one had cared about his religious
affiliation, but they had all fought together for the same cause—Christians, Jews,
atheists, communists together? The war was barely over when Chouraqui got into
contact with the distinguished French Jewish historian Jules Isaac, who had himself
spent the war years studying Christianity and the New Testament, trying to
understand the roots of the anti-Semitic poison that had killed a number of his
family members, and 6 million other Jews. Beginning in the late 1940s, Isaac would
go on to be one of the great pioneers and protagonists of Jewish-Christian dialogue
in Europe, and Chouraqui was one of his protégés almost from Day 1. André realized
that it was only by reversing and uprooting the longstanding Christian
misrepresentations of Judaism that such destructive, murderous events could be
prevented in the future. Chouraqui and Isaac would be the founders of a number of
avant-garde Jewish-Christian friendship groups, which quickly spread throughout
France, and were the first formal associations of their kind—almost 25 years before
such interreligious camaraderie would become mainstream and sanctioned by either
religion.
The years after World War II saw André busy in Jewish cultural affairs, as an
international envoy of the Alliance Israélite, the main French Jewish representative
body, where he served as second in command to Dr. René Cassin, who would himself
go down in history as the principal author of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, a contribution for which Cassin received the 1968 Nobel Peace Prize. Cassin
and Chouraqui shared a common humanitarian vision and passion, and André
travelled the world as Cassin’s ambassador and right-hand man, visiting widely
separated Jewish communities, including those in the fledgling state of Israel, the
land of his ancestors, to which he felt an increasingly strong pull. He was already a
gifted social and political commentator, and now he began what was to become a
brilliant career as a literary translator. From his own multilingual childhood onward,
André had always been fascinated by languages—by their nuances, their similarities,
their differences—but also by the obvious challenge of translating from one language
into another. Even as a boy, he recalled comparing the Hebrew texts in his synagogue
prayerbooks with the French translations provided alongside them, and feeling that
they were woefully inadequate, that they lacked a real sensitivity to the poetic,
semantic and cultural subleties of the original Hebrew as he understood it. In the
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late 1940s, he first entered into the field of translation for himself, setting out to
translate the mediæval Judeo-Arabic mystical work The Duties of the Heart, by
Bachya ibn-Paquda. When his work was received extremely warmly by scholars, he
then undertook his own French translations of the book of Psalms and the Canticle
of Canticles, which were both published in the 1950s to rave reviews. Publishers
and colleagues encouraged him to go further—to prepare a similar translation of the
entire Bible, but Chouraqui felt that the time for such a project was not yet ripe. And
besides, he was a busy man!
Busy because, having married (for a second time) and moved to Jerusalem in
1958, Chouraqui quickly became the centre of a number of intellectual, cultural
and political circles in the infant Jewish state. As a Maghrebin, or North African,
Jew, he was one of a very small (and sometimes discriminated-against) minority in a
young nation that was largely made up of Ashkenazi, or Eastern European, Jews, but
whose Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, was both impressed by Chouraqui’s
intellectual gifts and intrigued by his cultural background. Quickly, Chouraqui
became part of Ben-Gurion’s inner circle, serving for almost 6 years as a cabinet
member responsible for integrating minority Jewish nationalities into the new
country. But—and this is a fact that relatively few people know—Ben-Gurion was
personally fascinated with the Bible, and regularly gathered the country’s top
Biblical scholars in his living room for evening discussions about the Hebrew
Scriptures; from the very beginning, André Chouraqui was one of those scholars,
and he and Ben-Gurion thus established a deep and lasting personal friendship.
Meanwhile, Chouraqui was working actively to build bridges with Israel’s Christian
and Muslim minorities, setting up local groups—more than 50 years ago—to bring
the three Abrahamic religions together in a spirit of openness and friendship.
In 1965, Chouraqui was attending the Second Vatican Council in Rome, as an
invited guest during its discussion of an official Catholic document on non-
Christian religions. Arriving back at his hotel, he found a series of urgent messages
from his good friend and political colleague Teddy Kollek, asking Chouraqui to join
him on the ballot, as a candidate for Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem in the upcoming
polls. Despite his initial misgivings, André agreed, and when Kollek won the October
municipal elections, Chouraqui became second in command in the city of
Jerusalem, responsible primarily for outreach to the city’s ethnic and religious
groups, to whom he was already a well-known and trusted figure. He was the first
to organize a formal summit meeting of the city’s religious leaders at Jerusalem’s
City Hall, a gathering that was somewhat uncomfortable for everyone present, but
that marked the beginning of a much more open and collaborative relationship. It
was as Deputy Mayor that Chouraqui lived through the violence of the 1967 and
1973 wars, and among his final political duties was to bring the city’s condolences
to the families of soldiers who had been killed in action. Exhausted and
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disheartened by so many years in the heart of tumultuous Middle Eastern politics,

Chouraqui stepped down from political life in 1973, to devote himself full-time to
his life-long dream of personally translating the Bible into French. Even Menachem
Begin’s offer to nominate him as President of Israel was not enough to lure him back
into politics. He was embarking on a new and remarkably fruitful phase of his life’s
work.
Chouraqui was now close to 60, and his ideas about language and translation
had been maturing in his mind for decades. Now, he dedicated himself to Biblical
translation with a vengeance, regularly retreating to the Israeli Catholic monastery
of Latroun for solitude in which to craft the wording of his new rendering. Certainly,
the translation of the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) would have been enough of a
major accomplishment for most people, but Chouraqui was determined not only to
translate the Jewish holy books, but the Christian ones as well, convinced that the
only way to really understand Christianity—and its similarities and differences with
Judaism—was “from the inside,” by personally grappling with the ancient Greek text.
As I highlighted in my thesis, this decision was a radical and thoroughly
revolutionary one for a faithful Jew, and attracted no little criticism from scholars
and colleagues. It also placed André Chouraqui in the company of a very, very select
group of Jews who, over the course of history, had translated the New Testament,
whole or in part. Generally, however, those earlier Jewish translations had been
made for defensive purposes, to enable Jews to knowledgeably defend themselves
against the claims and missionary pressures of Christianity, especially during the
period of public disputations during the Middle Ages. Chouraqui’s idea was just the
opposite: not to promote conversion between faiths, but to enable the Christian
Scriptures to become a bridge between those two faiths, to demonstrate the
essentially Jewish quality of much of the New Testament in a way that Christians
could discover it, many of them for the first time, and Jews might rediscover it, not as
a weapon used against them, but as part of the great heritage of Second Temple
Jewish religious literature. Chouraqui worked at a feverish pace, and the first
volume of La Bible Chouraqui, The Chouraqui Bible, was published in 1974. In
various forms and editions, it would continue to be updated and revised, with input
from the world’s top Biblical scholars, until its most recent edition in 2007. From its
first appearance, it was a major publishing phenomenon, its popularity largely due
to the rugged and deliberately non-literary style Chouraqui employed, focussing on
the base meanings of key Biblical terms, and trying hard to keep close to the rhythm
and structure of the Biblical languages, even at the expense of clunky French. Terms
such as angels, apostles, disciples and repentance were given dramatically new and
non-traditional translations, in an attempt to “dust off” their real meanings, which
Chouraqui believed had sometimes become clouded by centuries of theological
orthodoxy, to the degree that their original nuances had been lost or sidelined.
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Indeed, he invented new French nouns and verbs where he felt there was nothing in
the existing French vocabulary that could express what he wanted to say. Especially
in the wake of the late 1960s, such a translation—beholden to no religious
authorities, either Jewish or Christian, and attempting to present ancient religions in
a very new idiom—struck a chord with many French readers, and Chouraqui’s
volumes flew off the shelves, both in France and in other francophone countries.
Chouraqui was invited to lecture and write widely on his fresh new model of
Biblical translation. Meetings with religious leaders followed, including an audience
with the Pope, who was pleased to receive a full set of the Chouraqui Bible as a gift.
The French and Israeli governments publicly celebrated his work, and Chouraqui’s
scholarly colleagues began to acknowledge, although sometimes grudgingly, his
ground-breaking achievement, by honourary doctorates and academic awards at
major universities. And, in between interviews and lectures on his specifically
Biblical work, André Chouraqui continued, consistently, passionately and without
apology, to promote dialogue, friendship and respect between the three faiths which
claimed descent from Abraham, and all of whom laid claim to holy places in the
heart of Jerusalem’s Old City, close to which he lived, as a long-time resident of the
Ein-Rogel neighbourhood.
Chouraqui was under no illusions. Both during World War II and during the
wars for modern Israel’s survival, he had experienced first-hand the destruction that
could spring from longstanding religious and national hatreds. He was not oblivious
to the damage misdirected religion could cause—and yet he remained convinced that,
fundamentally, Judaism, Christianity and Islam were faiths that were directed to the
highest values of humanity, which promoted compassion and love, prayer and
generosity, peace and harmony. It was a vision he never let go of.
Having translated both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, it was perhaps
not surprising that in the late 1980s, he undertook what he considered the logical
“third pillar” of his religious translation endeavours—a translation of the Qur’an, the
holy book of the Islamic faith, written in the Arabic that was, from his childhood,
his native language; his translation, which he entitled “The Call,” was published in
1990, to widespread critical acclaim—and more than a few criticisms from those
who considered his translation unorthodox or unfaithful, or who felt that his
emphasis on Islam’s commonalities with Judaism and Christianity watered down the
specificity of the Muslim faith and its distinctive claims. As far as I have been able
to discover, André Chouraqui is the first and only person in history to have single-
handedly translated the Scriptures of the three Abrahamic faiths. That alone, I
believe, would make him more than worthy of our admiration and gratitude, and
would give him an honoured place in the annals of theology and world literature.
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Perhaps Chouraqui’s efforts at peace-making and understanding were best

captured by an event that had truly international significance, but that was little
known at the time, and even less so today. In the 1970s, there was effectively a wall
of silence, mutually imposed, between Israel and the Arab states of the Middle East.
In 1977, King Hassan II of Morocco relayed a message to Chouraqui, stating
confidentially that he was aware of several Arab nations whose leaders might be
open to peace treaties with Israel; would André—a North African himself—travel to
Morocco to meet with him and discuss the specifics? Many of Chouraqui’s political
peers were utterly against the idea, seeing it as some type of trap. However, with the
tacit approval of Israeli President Ephraim Katzir, Chouraqui and his wife flew to
Marrakesh—using their French passports—as the king’s guests for a week, during
which André and the king discussed the openness of several Arab leaders to settle
their differences with Israel, and asked him to communicate this information to the
Israeli government. The conversations went so well that, when the king asked if
there was any favour he could show the Chouraquis as they left Morocco, André
dared to ask the seemingly unthinkable: would the king authorize his Moroccan
customs authorities to stamp the Chouraquis’ Israeli passports as they left—a request
that the king granted without hesitation, making André and Annette Chouraqui
probably the first Israeli citizens to have their passports officially recognized by the
immigration authorities of any Arab nation.
Those conversations proved to be a vital catalyst at a crucial moment. The
Israeli government, acting on Chouraqui’s information, sent Moshe Dayan and other
high-ranking foreign-affairs officials on a series of top-secret diplomatic journeys to
neighbouring Arab capitals. Egypt in particular demonstrated an openness to talk,
and within months, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made his historic journey to
Israel in November 1977, to address a peace proposal to the Israeli Knesset—a peace
proposal that would lead directly to the 1978 Camp David Peace Accords under
President Jimmy Carter, for which Begin, Sadat and Carter would jointly win the
Nobel Peace Prize. But, as several journalists later pointed out, the foundations for
that momentous milestone in Middle Eastern history were laid, at least in large part,
by André Chouraqui, and his courageous willingness to be open to the possibility of
at least a limited Arab-Israeli peace, at a time when very few Israelis held out any
such hopes.
André Chouraqui was a truly remarkable man on so many different levels: a
religious and interreligious pioneer, decades before the concept was either popular or
widely accepted; an accomplished, sensitive and highly-praised translator of
foundational religious texts; a political leader who was not afraid to take risks and
attempt new things in an effort to bridge misunderstanding, tension and hatred; an
insightful legal expert; a chronicler of North African Jewry and its institutions; an
author whose writings in a wide range of subjects have been translated into nearly
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20 languages; a man of the world or, as many of his friends called him, “a man of
three worlds”—the worlds of Islam, Christianity and Judaism; the worlds of French,
Arabic and Hebrew; the worlds of Algeria, France and Israel. André Chouraqui was
truly a “citizen of the world,” and a Renaissance man who applied himself
wholeheartedly to the guiding passions of his life.
It was not, therefore, surprising that, when he died almost 3 years ago in
Jerusalem, at the age of 89, his death was mourned, not only by many of the world’s
most prominent politicians, but by Muslim and Christian leaders around the world,
who eulogized him as one of the greatest interreligious gurus and advocates of the
twentieth century, as a man of sweeping intellectual achievements, as a builder of
the modern State of Israel, and as an example of how personal commitment need
not exclude openmindedness and outreach toward those who were different, but
whose commonalities he never ceased to highlight. French President Nicolas Sarkozy
spoke of Chouraqui’s contribution to posterity as of primary importance, and spoke
of his biblical work as a treasure which would unquestionably attract the attention
of future generations. The French Minister of Culture, Christine Albanel, said that
he was “one of the great consciences of our century, and one of the pre-eminent
figures of Hebrew and French culture,” an “ambassador of the French language” who
“exalted spirituality, fraternity and peace among peoples”. He was all of that—and
much more.
A year and a half ago, I had the opportunity to travel to Jerusalem to teach a
month-long course at a Catholic school there, on the Jewish background of the
Christian Gospel of Matthew. It is impossible, I think, to teach a course like that,
especially in that city, and not feel that the ghost of André Chouraqui is hovering
happily over such an initiative. On that trip, I had the opportunity to bring a bound
copy of my thesis to Dr. Chouraqui’s widow, Annette, who told me that her husband
had been pleased to know that a new generation—including an anglophone Catholic
priest from Ontario—had discovered her husband’s work, and wanted to continue
his vision and his life’s work. It is, I believe, one of the sad ironies of our fast-paced
world that a man who left such a profound impression on the history and religion of
our time should today be so little known, and his contributions so little celebrated,
especially since his work, which seemed so “avant-garde” and controversial decades
ago, has taken on a new urgency and relevance in this 21st century. André
Chouraqui’s vision could not be more timely, or more necessary. He was, in many
ways, a man ahead of his time, but a man very much in tune with ours.
If I have something of the zeal of an evangelist for André Chouraqui and his
story, I hope you will forgive me. Discovering his story, and getting to know him
better these last few years through his writings, has been one of the great privileges
of my life, as a scholar, as a priest, and as a human being. As our world—and our
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country—and our city—become more globalized with each passing year, we must
make the decision: whether we will surrender to the vision of Samuel Huntington,
that of an inevitable “clash of civilizations,” characterized by fear, conflict,
polarization and hatred—or the vision of André Chouraqui, in which God’s children,
in all their diversity, will find ways to come together in peace and dignity, in respect
and wonderment, for a mutual enrichment that inspires and unites, and in the end,
offers hope to our troubled world, the hope of that shalom—salaam—that peace which
we so crave and daily pray for.
Thank you.

Father Murray Watson

St. Peter’s Seminary, London, ON