Eugenio Zolli - Before the Dawn: Autobiographical Reflections by Eugenio Zolli, Former Chief Rabbi of Rome

Thewaters of Cape Horn at the tip of South America are among the most turbulentand treacherous in the world, for that is where two great bodies of water, theAtlantic and Pacific Oceans, meet in collision. This image provides an apt oneto characterize the life of Rabbi Israel (later Eugenio) Zolli, for the storyof his life unfolded in a time and place where not only one, but three opposingpairs of powerful conflicting spiritual forces met and collided.

He lived in a placeRome under the Nazi occupation where one ofthe most anti-Christian movements of all time, Hitlers Nazism, came face toface with the Vicar of Christ on earth, at the center of the Churchs presenceon earth. He lived in a time when the negative view of Judaism that dominatedthe Christian world for almost 2000 years the so-called teaching of contempt gave way to the current, farmore positive view, of Jews as elder brothers in the faith (in the words ofboth Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI). And in the Rabbis very own soul(not irrelevantly the soul of the Chief Rabbi of Rome) Judaism itself met, andwas conquered by, the love flowing from the heart of the Jewish Messiah Jesus,leading him into the Catholic Church. The story of his life is hence also thestory of these three great cosmic battles, and so provides profound spiritualinsight into the unfolding of salvation history.

In the battle with Nazism, Zolli was, with the help of Pope PiusXII, instrumental in saving the bulk of Romes Jewish community fromdeportation and death. In the battle of polemics between the Jewish andChristian communities, Zollis writings even before his conversion presented anoverwhelmingly positive view of Christ, to the point that an Archbishop said,about his 1938 book on Jesus The Nazarene, that as a bishop, I could sign my name to this book. And as auniversity professor teaching the Jewish scriptures, Zolli gave Catholics,including many clerics, a positive view of Judaism both before his conversion,at the University of Padua (1927-1938), and after it, at the PontificalBiblical Institute.

Finally, and most unspeakably beautifully, Judaism andChristianity met in his very soul, becoming one. The vision that led to hisconversion provides a perfect visual image of this. He had the vision as he wascelebrating Yom Kippur liturgy, the most solemn in all of Judaism. As theclosing prayers were being said, he saw Jesus standing in a bright meadow.Zollis soul was filled with the greatest interior peace, and he heard Jesussay to him, You are here for the last time. And so it wasa few weeks laterZolli was baptized and received into the Catholic Church, taking Pope PiusXIIs baptismal name, Eugenio, for his own to honor the Pope for all he haddone to save the Jews.

Thus the union between Judaism and the Catholic Church waseffected in the Rabbis soul, while an understanding of the intrinsic unitybetween the two, as the pre- and post- Messianic forms of one and the samereligion, permeated his understanding. For when asked why he had given up thesynagogue for the church, Zolli replied, I have not given it up. Christianityis the integration, completion or crown of the Synagogue. For the Synagogue wasa promise, and Christianity is the fulfillment of that promise. The Synagoguepointed to Christianity: Christianity presupposes the Synagogue. So you see,one cannot exist without the other. What I converted to was the livingChristianity.

Sothis account of the life of Rabbi Zolli is about much more than just the man.It is about the great battle between the forces of darkness and the CatholicChurch that dominated the middle of the twentieth century. It is about theheroism and philo-semitism of that hero of the Jews, Pope Pius XII, despiterecent false calumnies to the contrary. It is about the evolution of theChurchs attitudes toward Judaism, and of Judaisms attitudes toward theChurch. And ultimately it is about the greatest love story of all, the onebetween the great lover of every human soul, the Jewish Messiah Jesus, and howhis love, expressed through the grace of conversion, brings about the ultimateunity between Judaism and the Catholic Church.