Rituals of Reconciliation? How Consideration of Ritual can Inform Readings of Catholic-Jewish Dialogue after the Holocaust

Abstract

One advantage of investigating inter-religious exchange through the lens of ritual is that it permits attention to a range of extra-textual phenomena such as tone, gesture, pacing, costume, and locatedness, which are capable of adding nuance to, or even subverting, a textual tradition. In the case of post-Holocaust reconciliation, it is worth considering whether and to what degree a consideration of ritual alters the conclusions that can be drawn from the record of published documents. This chapter will explore particular practices which have emerged in the context of post-Holocaust Catholic-Jewish dialogue, reading them as instances of inter-rituality and analysing the extent to which their inter-riting advances the project of reconciliation.