The Remuh synagogue in Kazimierz, the ancient Jewish quarter of Cracow, has about it an air of silent dignity and tragic loss. The only functioning synagogue left in an area that in the 1930s boasted a population of some 60,000, its adjacent cemetery was desecrated by the Nazis at the height of the Shoah, the gravestones dug up and used to pave the streets. After the war the broken fragments were carefully collected by visitors and volunteers and crafted into the facing of the wall that encloses the cemetery. That wall forms a powerful reminder of Poland’s lost Jewish heritage. Other synagogues that survived the war have been turned into museums or venues for art exhibitions, concerts and poetry readings. Since the fall of communism Kazimierz has reinvented itself. In the squares and winding streets where once a lively Jewish community flourished, tourists get a taste of a world long vanished. Careful restoration and the foundation of centres dedicated to retrieving the past ensures that what remains is more than just a collection of relics. Here in the Remuh synagogue the Torah scrolls are still kept, a tangible sign of the survival of the life of prayer and study that once sustained the millions who died in the Shoah. Respectfully I take a yarmulke and sit at the back, behind a handful of silent Jewish visitors, their stillness made the more poignant by that terrible absence beyond the patched up walls.

For a Christian this is a disorientating yet strangely consoling place. If Auschwitz stands testimony to the banality of evil, this little synagogue is a sign of hope that hatred will never have the last word. When the Jewish historian Jules Isaac visited Pope John XXIII in the summer of 1960, his intervention in the lengthy process of preparation for the Second Vatican Council drew attention to the Christian roots of anti-Semitism. In a lecture given at the Sorbonne the previous year Isaac spoke about the ‘teaching of contempt’. Christian anti-Semitism, he said,

His words of warning began a process of reconciliation that, despite the inevitable setbacks, is now irreversible. Some four years later, the promulgation of Nostra Aetate changed forever the terms in which Christians regarded people of other faiths. At that point the section that Isaac inspired sat alongside references to Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. The text was prefaced by an introduction that owed much to another new and unexpected development, the Church’s engagement with the history and phenomenology of religion. As with so much of the Council’s work, the process of ressourcement and the hidden scholarly work of decades suddenly bore rich fruit. But it was what Tom Stransky called a Heshbon ha-Nefesh, a ‘reconsideration of the soul’, which most marked this remarkable moment in the Church’s history. Nostra Aetate, especially through its reception in both Christian and non-Christian worlds, was as much a religious event as a theological text. Without the determination to redress the wrongs caused by the ‘teaching of contempt’, nothing would have been said – and theology of religions might have lacked its deeply ethical motivating force.