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No public-domain English edition of this book exists. The original is free to read below, and our English edition is still to come.
Read the original ↗1892 · French original
Le Salut par les Juifs
by Léon Bloy
Bloy was raised by a Voltairean father and was irreligious into his twenties before a violent conversion turned him into the most uncompromising Catholic writer in France — poor by choice, furious by temperament, and impossible to place. Le Salut par les Juifs is his answer to the antisemitism of his own literary milieu, arguing from scripture that salvation comes through the Jews and that the church's debt to them is absolute.
The convert behind the argument
Bloy's father was an unbeliever and Bloy grew up with no faith; he was converted in his twenties under the influence of the writer Barbey d'Aurevilly and lived the rest of his life in deliberate, often desperate poverty, writing against the comfortable Catholicism of his day as fiercely as against unbelief.
Summary
The book was written against Édouard Drumont's antisemitic La France juive and the mood it fed, and Bloy's response is characteristically oblique: not a plea for tolerance but a theological argument that the Jewish people remain central to the whole Christian story, and that contempt for them is contempt for the source of salvation.
The manner is prophetic rather than systematic — dense with scriptural typology, deliberately violent in expression, and hard on almost everyone, including the Jews of his own day and, more so, the Christians who despised them. Its argument turns on the claim that the divine word is inexhaustible and that the church's reading of Israel has been shallow.
It is the work of Bloy's most often cited by later writers, including those who were repelled by his manner, precisely because of how isolated the position was in the France of the 1890s.
Who was Léon Bloy?
Léon Bloy (1846–1917) was a French novelist and essayist, the son of a freethinking father, who came to Catholicism in his twenties through the influence of Barbey d'Aurevilly. He lived in extreme poverty for most of his life, largely by choice, and wrote with a violence that kept him outside every establishment including the Catholic one.
He was godfather to Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, whose own conversion he influenced. Le Salut par les Juifs was published in 1892.
Common questions
- What is Le Salut par les Juifs about?
- It is Léon Bloy's theological answer to the antisemitism of 1890s France, arguing from scripture that salvation comes through the Jews and that Christian contempt for them is a contempt for the origin of Christianity itself.
- Is there an English edition?
- No public-domain English translation has been located. The French original of 1892 is free at Archive.org.
A note on the text. Le Salut par les Juifs is in the public domain. Its public-domain text is the Frenchoriginal — the English translations still in print are under copyright, so we can't reprint them. Our own English edition is still to be made. The original text is also available free here.