Jean de Menasce

Jean de Menasce (1902–1973) was a French Catholic priest, of the Dominican Order, as well as an author and academic. He came from Jewish Egyptian and French parentage. Over his lifetime he mastered fifteen languages, including Hebrew, Syriac, and Pahlavi. He was in the Catholic contingent among Jewish and Protestant leaders at an important post-war interfaith conference. Menasce wrote as a theologian, and as a scholar of Middle Eastern studies, especially regarding Judaism, and the Zoroastrian religion.

Jean de Menasce was born in Alexandria on 24 December 1902 into a well-established family in the Jewish community of Egypt. His father, Baron Félix de Menasce, a banker with Austro-Hungarian links, was in fact the head of the Jewish community in Alexandria; he had been raised to the peerage by the Emperor of Austria. Jean's mother was French from a Spanish line. A cousin of Jean de Menasce was the writer and diplomat Georges Cattaui, six years his senior. A second cousin was the composer and pianist Jacques de Menasce.

After the local lycée français, Jean de Menasce remained in Cairo studying at its French School of Law. Thereafter he continued his education in Europe, at Oxford University and at the Sorbonne. During the course of his student years, de Menasce had left behind his religious beliefs.

At Oxford's Balliol College, he was a classmate of the future novelist Graham Greene, who also would convert to Catholicism in 1926. Menasce translated into French works of the English poet T. S. Eliot, a friend. ln 1922 he made the French translation of a book by the philosopher Bertrand Russel, whom he knew as a fellow member of Lady Ottoline Morrell's salon at Oxford. From the poetry of John Donne, the 17th-century Anglican priest, he had also made French versions. Thus he already enjoyed some recognition when in 1926 he became a convert to Catholicism.

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