Orthodox Christianity and Modern Jewish-Christian Relations: A History

Using unpublished archives from the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Geneva and the Orthodox Center of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Chambésy, this paper relates the history of Orthodox Christianity’s initial entrance into and ongoing place in Jewish-Christian dialogue. After briefly recounting the post-WWII origins of modern Jewish-Christian dialogue, from which Orthodox Christians were almost entirely absent, we examine the story of direct attempts by the WCC, primarily in the early 1970s, to fill the “Orthodox gap.” These attempts, however, generally failed, not because Orthodox representatives at the time were resistant to dialogue with Jews per se, but because they were resistant to pursuing such a dialogue with the same political and theological assumptions with which it had unfolded elsewhere. In fact, around the same time, Orthodox Christians, under the sponsorship of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, began their own bilateral relationship with Jews, outside of the auspices of the WCC. Surveying the history of these bilateral meetings, from their beginnings in 1976 to the most recent in 2022, this paper concludes with an analysis of what the “official” Orthodox Christian-Jewish bilateral relationship has thus far achieved and what it still lacks.