Le Salut par les Juifs

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.

The 1892 French edition is free at Archive.org. No public-domain English translation has been located; we have no English edition of this title and do not claim one.

This is an English translation of Léon Bloy's Le Salut par les Juifs, published in Paris in 1892. Bloy (1846–1917) was brought up by a Voltairean father and was irreligious into his twenties. His conversion made him the most uncompromising Catholic writer of his generation, and one of the poorest. He wrote this book against Édouard Drumont, whose La France juive had turned antisemitism into a mass movement, and he wrote it from inside the faith Drumont claimed to defend: salvation is from the Jews, and a Christian who despises them despises the flesh of his own Redeemer. The book cost him the readers Drumont had won him, and its publisher let it go out of sight for twelve years — a story Bloy tells in the first paragraph.

A note on the translation. It is an English translation of the French of 1892, which is in the public domain, and it is ours.

A note on how it was made, and checked. The first draft was machine translation, unit by unit, and it was not trustworthy. Checking it against the French found three kinds of fault that no reading of the English alone would reveal. It had inserted chapter-and-verse references — Rom. IX, 5 six times over, and others — that Bloy never wrote; he quotes Scripture constantly and cites it almost never, and a model that helpfully supplies the reference has put an editor's voice into an author's text. In one section it had recognised the Lamentations, thrown away Bloy's own French rendering of the Vulgate, and substituted the King James Version, complete with verse numbers. That section has been translated again from his French, because his rendering is his argument: the Mistress of nations, the Princess of provinces become a tributary, her virgins squalid. Every inserted reference has been removed, and each removal was checked against the French first — one of them turned out to be Bloy's own footnote, Ps. xi, 7, which the model had merely renumbered, and it has been put back in his form.

A note on the Latin. Bloy writes in Latin whenever the liturgy does, and his short tags stand here exactly as he left them: Salus ex Judæis, Exspectans exspectavi, In excelso. The one place we have not kept the Latin is the final section, where he sets out the whole of Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones from the Vulgate; a page of unglossed Latin is not a reading edition, so that chapter is in English. Everything else Latin is his.

The free scan of the French is linked from this book's page.