Jean de Menasce

[1] Jean de Menasce was born in Alexandria on 24 December 1902 into a well-established family in the Jewish community of Egypt.

His father, Baron Félix de Menasce, a banker with Austro-Hungarian links, was head of the Jewish community in Alexandria; he had been raised to the peerage by the Emperor of Austria.

After the local lycée français, Jean de Menasce remained in Cairo studying at its French School of Law.

In 1922 he made the French translation of a book by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, whom he knew as a fellow member of Lady Ottoline Morrell's salon at Oxford.

Then, while pursuing his interest in Zionism, Chaim Weizmann, a family friend and future President of Israel, appointed him secretary of the Zionist Bureau in Geneva.

[10] Returning to Paris, de Menasce entered a period of personal spiritual crisis, and painful growth.

He began his lifelong friendship with the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and his Jewish wife Raissa, both converts from agnosticism twenty years earlier.

It was, in a way, his farewell tribute to the religion of his ancestors, but one feels that he was able to make it only after he had rediscovered the God of Israel through the discovery of Jesus as Messiah.

"[23][24] The priest and professor exerted an important influence within the wide horizons of French Catholic intellectual life.

De Menasce was a close friend of the art critic fr:Stanislas Fumet, of the essayist Charles Du Bos, and of the ill-fated writer Maurice Sachs, in addition to the above philosopher Jacques Maritain.

This international religious gathering in Switzerland addressed the world of pain and grief left by the searing ideological conflict.

Sponsored by the International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ), it faced antisemitism, seeking to heal wounds and to bridge divides, recent and ancient.

He scrutinized the comparative theology of this polemical work, which consciously employs reason to criticize the monotheism of Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

With Henry Corbin and Gilbert Lazard he was a founder of the Association pour l'advancement de études iraniennes.

[35] De Menasce illustrated points of convergence between Zoroastrian theological reasoning and the Muslim philosophic school of Mu'tazila, whereby the deity Allah would be understood as divorced from "all cause" [toute causalité] of evil in the world.