The second stage of the journey takes us to the post-Holocaust years when a French historian, Jules Isaac, who survived the war but lost his wife and daughter at Auschwitz, began to assemble the evidence of the long history of Christian anti-Jewish teachings that he called ‘the teachings of contempt’. His work came to the attention of Pope John XXIII, and the two met in 1961. This may have been one of the factors that led the pope and his successor Paul VI to institute the process that culminated in Vatican II in 1965, and the document Nostra Aetate that transformed the relationship between
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