A convert to Judaism, and yet no apostate from his native Catholicism—it is in some such paradoxical terms that one is forced to describe Aimé Pallière, one of the most singular figures in modern religious history. Born in Lyons, France, in 1875, at the age of seventeen he ventured into a synagogue for the first time on Yom Kippur and underwent the decisive spiritual experience which he describes in the following essay. In a few years’ time Pallière’s ardent seeking led him to embrace Judaism. But on the advice of his spiritual counselor, Rabbi Elijah Benamozegh of Livorno, he embraced not the orthodox Judaism of the Law, but “Noachism,” beçoming a “proselyte of the gate.” In the words of Rabbi Benamozegh, “The religion of humanity is no other than Noachism, not that it was instituted by Noah,

but because it dates from the covenant made by God with humanity in the person of this just man. Here is the religion preserved by Israel to be transmitted to the Gentiles.” Palliere regarded Judaism as the truly catholic religion; Catholicism was not negated by Judaism, but subsumed under it.

After an active life of writing and lecturing on Judaism, Pallière died on December 24, 1949. He was the same in death as in life, for he asked for both the last rites of the church and the recitation of the Kaddish for him in the synagogue.

“Neilah” is a chapter from The Unknown Sanctuary (first published in France in 1926), Pallière’s spiritual autobiography. We are indebted to the Bloch Publishing Company for permission to reprint it.—Ed.

_____________

It Is difficult for me to conceive the state of mind of a young Israelite of our country. He is brought up with the basic notion that Judaism is, after all, a religion like all the others; even though it count but a limited number of adherents, it is nonetheless the most perfect, the only true religion. Yet practices that seem to him the very law of God are more and more abandoned, in any case incompletely observed and with so much difficulty even by the most faithful that they often find it needful to abandon them entirely. The whole edifice of worship which he sees crumbling, falling stone by stone, claims to be the temple of truth on earth; and at the same time this youth assimilates all the Western culture upon which Christianity has so strongly impressed itself. He studies our classics, he reads Bossuet, he visits our cathedrals where the believing heart of the Middle Ages still beats. Each day he finds himself face to face with the great fact—Christianity—which gives him no reasonable explanation, which overrules and crushes his little family tradition, with all the fullness, with all the magnificence, with all the authority conferred upon it by the veneration of many peoples. How then under such conditions can his faith remain unshakable? And, for the most part, one sees him forsake his own beliefs, without adopting those of the others.

For the young Christian, on the contrary, loyalty is put to a less severe test, above all, when one is brought up, as I was, in an environment where everything that might serve as pretext for objections was skillfully kept out of the way. . . .

Thus until my seventeenth year I never felt the slightest doubt about the divinity of the church as the only logical form of Christianity, considered to be the very expression of truth given here below. The desire which awoke within me at an early age to give to the holiness of Catholic doctrine the signature of my entire life grew stronger within me, without the need of anyone to urge me in that direction. The single allusion that a man of faintly mystic faith once permitted himself to make before me, vaunting the material advantages of a church career, would have turned me from it had I been less strongly attracted by the priesthood. But it was tacitly understood by my people that I was called to enter the seminary later on.

Renan has said that the true token of a calling is the utter incapacity to do anything else well. This observation is right, and I may say that I was indubitably destined for a religious ministry since anything I could do outside of that career was only for me a thing aside, temporary, or of secondary importance, to which I bent myself with difficulty. And if today I write these pages, it is without doubt with the secret purpose to preach to my friends, known and unknown, a sermon in my own way. I can only hope it may be less tiresome to them than many other sermons.

_____________

When I was seventeen years of age a strange incident occurred which came to exercise an influence over my whole life. I call the attention of my friendly readers to what I am about to relate to them. On a certain Thursday in the autumn when I was still on my vacation at Lyons, I was walking with a comrade on the Quai Tilsitt where the synagogue stands. We noticed that a number of shops had remained closed that day. My companion had heard that it was the great festival of the Jews and suggested to me that we enter the temple. I consented, not without hesitation. Alone I would never have done it, for the pious Catholic does not permit himself to enter any building belonging to another religion, and for strong reasons he must abstain from taking part in any ceremony. The synagogue was quite filled. All the votaries were standing and silent. I understood later that I had arrived at the moment of the prayer of neilah¹ on Yom Kippur.

I will seek to analyze the impression that I felt in contemplating what met my gaze. It was such that from that unique moment my life was to be shaped. This may seem inexplicable, and for me it is an unfathomable enigma, but all my plans for the future were to be upset and finally ended. I was to find myself unconsciously led in a direction which would have roused my indignant protestations if at that moment it had been revealed to me. There was not within me reflection or reasoning of any kind, and for a long time nothing was to manifest the change which was to come into my life, and nevertheless everything dates from then. . . .

Did I then feel on that memorable occasion an intense and decisive religious sensation? Not at all. Alphonse Ratisbonne, worldly and skeptic, remaining alone a few instants in the Church of St. Andrea delle Frattei in Rome, left it converted to Catholicism, following a mysterious inner vision. The Jewish musician Hermann, replacing a friend as organist at a Vesper Service in a church in Paris, is suddenly flung to his knees—and rises a Catholic and becomes Father Hermann. Here we have natural facts which we may discuss and which in any case are not conversions of Jews, but conversions of souls with unconscious religious needs unsatisfied; subjugated, enraptured, they abandon themselves completely to the first revelation offered them.

But for a religious nature, subject to a habitual rule of piety, similar emotions may be produced without leading to any results of this kind. I, myself, certainly experienced a most vivid impression the first time I was present at a Friday prayer in a great mosque. But this gave me no desire to become a Moslem, and, however great is the admiration which I profess for the great monotheistic religion of these good people, there is no likelihood that I shall ever embrace Islam.

Then, too, the Jewish cult does not generally produce a religious emotion in the Christian, but rather a feeling of strangeness. All is too new for him, too different in form from that to which he is accustomed, and which is bound up in his eyes with the idea of religion. Ordinarily he enjoys just the things borrowed from his own environment: the songs, the organ, the majesty of the service. That which is especially Jewish escapes him. In order to discover in the traditional Jewish service the element of adoration, the non-Jew requires an acquaintance, a veritable initiation, perhaps even the knowledge of Hebrew, which makes it possible to penetrate to the meaning of the prayers. It is therefore all the more interesting to discover what could possibly strike a young Catholic, suddenly introduced into a Jewish assembly on the Day of Atonement, and have so marked an effect on his spirit.

_____________

What revealed itself to me at that moment was not at all the Jewish religion. It was the Jewish people. The spectacle of the large number of men assembled, their shoulders covered by taleisim,² suddenly disclosed to my eyes a far-off past. The Hebrews of the Doré Bible were there on their feet before me. But two details struck me particularly while I looked all about me at the faithful bent over their ritual. At first on seeing the prayer shawls worn by all the participants in the service, I thought that in a way they were all officiating. Several of them robed in white shrouds were scattered about here and there in the crowd just like the priests who remained in the center of the sanctuary. In the second place, it seemed to me that this silent assembly was expecting something to happen. “What are they waiting for?” I asked my companion. This double aspect which Judaism disclosed to me held nothing that could trouble the faith of a young Christian such as I then was. But thus was revealed to me very clearly, so that I could understand what followed, two characteristic traits: the form of collective priesthood of which the Judaism of the Dispersion consisted, and the spirit of expectancy and of faith in the future which stamps its entire cult with a special seal.

In fact, in the synagogue service all Jews are equal, all are priests, all may participate in the holy functions, even officiate in the name of the entire community, when they have the required training. The dignity which distinguished the hakham, the doctor, the sage, is not a clerical degree but rather one of learning and of piety quickened through knowledge. The talis gave me an understanding of that peculiarity of Judaism which would have escaped me had my attention not been captured from the first by this spectacle so new to me of a multitude of men in white shawls at prayer. It is thus that rites and symbols often constitute a more expressive language than the best of discourses. The practices which have had the consecration of centuries come to us charged with the accumulated thoughts of believing generations. They preserve the poetry, the incomparable power of evocation. They may be suppressed, but not replaced.

A precious legacy of antiquity, and yet Judaism’s trend is not toward the past, but toward the future. An unconquerable faith in the final triumph of the good and the true has preserved it during the centuries and permeates it through and through. It awaits the Messiah. This attitude gives an unusual aspect to its secular points of view. Whenever the modern conscience busies itself with ideals of social regeneration, whenever it affirms its will to build the city of the future upon the ruins of wrongs and injustices, it is in communion with the soul of Judaism as it has not ceased to vibrate in the course of its long history. Later I was to understand how the aspirations of national resurrection complete and define in Israel this attitude of expectancy, so different from the conceptions of other religions, but from my first contact this spirit revealed itself to me in the silent amidah of the closing of Yom Kippur.

_____________

And this it was that made another impression upon me, which was less confused, and was to be more decisive. Imagine to yourself a young Christian, brought up in the naive conception that the Old Testament had no mission other than preparation for the New which was definitely to replace it, and that since the advent of Christianity the role of Israel had come to an end and the Jew lives on only as a blind and powerless witness to the truth of prophecies fulfilled to his hurt. Every Christian thinks of him as the Wandering Jew of the legend—“March, march, Ahasuerus; wandering and alone, thou bearest the stigma of hopeless condemnation.”

And now suddenly Israel appeared to me still living its own life, with nothing to indicate the foretold decreptitude. This Judaism of the Diaspora appeared to me a strongly organized collectivity, which for nineteen hundred years, in spite of the will to destroy that was conjured up against it, continued to exist for ends that I still did not grasp, but in which I felt that my Christianity was no longer directly interested. All my philosophy of history was confounded. The three years of the public life of Jesus no longer formed its central point, but became a simple episode in the whole. Thus in the teaching that I had received until that day, I discovered a lacuna, and the premise being false, the conclusions must be equally false. The legitimacy of the ancient protestation of Judaism against the Christian pretensions stood out at this first contact, certainly in a vague way as yet, but nevertheless in such a way that the impression could never be effaced. Israel has still the right to live. Israel lives.

This is what I realized on that day. In saying that it was not the Jewish religion, but the Jewish people, which revealed itself to me at that moment, I set down a fact that was perhaps only clear to me. In truth, for almost all the men in whose midst I then stood and who to my eyes were so visibly of different descent from my own, the idea of their raison d’être, of their historic role, of their powers of resistance and persistence, was doubtless very vague, almost non-existent. Nonetheless it emanated from the collective spirit of these assembled Jews. The breath of the race filled the synagogue and my own soul was penetrated by it.

Beloved and ancient race which holds so much of grandeur and of moral wealth side by side with so many defects, some day I shall know some of thy beautiful spirits, true Jews of Biblical times, still vibrant with ever renewed youth. I shall understand thee and love thee to the point of being able to say to thee with Ruth, “May the Lord do so to me and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.” But it was on this Day of Atonement that my eyes first beheld thee and that I knew that thou wast ever a people blessed by the Eternal!

_____________

When I was a child I was occasionally taken to visit a very old lady who had been an intrepid traveler. Thirty-three times she had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and on her mantlepiece she kept small frames brought from Palestine in which were enclosed fragments of olive wood and dried flowers. These precious frames were shown to me and I piously pressed them to my childish lips. I was not conscious then of the significance of a kiss upon the flowers of the Holy Land, but began to understand from my first visit to the synagogue. It was the homage unconsciously rendered to the Biblical treasures which come to us from this sacred soil, to the revelation of the holy “Torah,” to the piety of the Psalms, to the faith of the ancient prophets, to all that the Hebrew Scriptures contain that is vital to humanity.

And it was also the homage rendered to the people of the Bible toward whom the nations have shown themselves so ungrateful and whom they have overwhelmed with contempt and injustice without remembering that from them they have received the treasure of revelation; the people who despite all things resisted, survived, while other great people, Assyrians, Egyptians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans have disappeared from the face of the earth. Ground to dust among the nations, this people has nevertheless survived as a living entity—preserved for providential ends, and on that day my eyes beheld them.

Would the result have been the same for me if, instead of entering a synagogue, I had been present at some great manifestation of Jewish life—such as a Zionist Congress, for example? Possibly so; nevertheless, in the mood that I was then in, taking into account my education and my inclinations, it must be admitted that no other aspect of Judaism could have impressed me to a greater degree than its religious vitality, and there is certainly no other which interprets in more characteristic fashion the ancient genius and the role of Israel.

This was the revelation that came to me on that Thursday in October, in the synagogue of Lyons. And surely words are inadequate to express anything so confused, so mysterious to me at that moment; and for some time I could not formulate that impression in my thoughts, still less interpret it to the outside world. But with me, like a germ implanted by the neilah, this revelation was to affirm itself and grow stronger.

Near me, within reach of my hand, I noticed a book of prayer, left on a stall. I opened it. The unfamiliar characters had the effect upon me of notes of strange music, that I looked upon with curiosity. The next day I bought a Hebrew grammar on the Quai, and set myself to study Hebrew.

_____________

¹ “The closing of the gates,” the prayer at the close of the Day of Atonement.

² Shawls, worn by Orthodox Jews at prayer.