L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, has just published a special supplement in Italian on “The Jubilee Year and the Bible,” featuring as its lead essay “Holy Year and Its Origins in the Jewish Jubilee Year” by Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum of the American Jewish Committee.
Tanenbaum’s scholarly essay was originally published in 1975 by the Vatican Commission for the Holy Year, and was translated into English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portugese. In its present Italian form in the Vatican publication, the article occupies four full pages and is illustrated with a series of medieval religious paintings.
Tanenbaum wrote the article at the request of Vaticon authorities while he served as director of interreligious affairs of the American Jewish Committee. He is now AJC director of international relations.
BELIEVED TO BE A FIRST
This is believed to be the first time that the Vatican daily has featured such a full-length Jewish historical and theological essay by a Jewish author. When published in 1975 in a Vatican book on the Holy Year, the article was distributed by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to all the American Catholic bishops and Catholic seminaries as a resource document.
In his essay, Tanenbaum traces the origins of the Jubilee Year in Biblical Judaism, and describes its practice and meaning as it was developed and experienced in about 3,000 years of Jewish history.
“The Bible sets forth, ” he writes, “four-fold obligations, all of which focus on realizing liberation in the actual life of the People of God as basic preconditions, or corollaries, to their spiritual liberation: Human — liberation of slaves; Economic — the moralization of the use of property and material goods; Ecological — liberation of the land; Educational — the creation of a spiritual democracy by devoting the Jubilee Year to intensive education of all men, women, children, and ‘resident aliens’ in the teachings of the Torah.”
Copies of Tanenbaum’s essay are available from the American Jewish Committee, 165 East 56th St., New York, NY 10022.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
