BOSSUET, JACQUES BENIGNE°

BOSSUET, JACQUES BENIGNE ° (1627–1704), celebrated French preacher. Bossuet was canon in Metz (1652–56), bishop of Condom (1669), tutor to the dauphin (1670–81), and bishop of Meaux (1681). It was chiefly while living in Metz that he had the opportunity to take an interest in the Jews. Many of his sermons from this period of residence in Metz were intended to further missionary work among the Jews. In his sermon on "The Goodness and Severity of God toward Sinners," he emphasized the unhappy state of the Jews, from which, he considered, they could free themselves only by becoming converted to Christianity. He described them as a "monstrous people, without hearth or home, without a country and of every country; once the happiest in the world, now the laughing stock and object of hatred of the whole world; wretched, without being pitied for being so, in its misery become, by a certain curse, scorned even by the most moderate… we see before our eyes the remains of their shipwreck which God has thrown, as it were, at our doors." The only success of this missionary activity was the conversion of two young brothers: Charles-Marie de Veil, baptized in 1654, and Lewis Compiègne de *Veil, baptized in 1655.

bibliography:

Kahn, in: Revue Juive de Lorraine, 7 (1931), 241ff.; E.B. Weill, Weill – De Veil, a Genealogy, 1360–1956 (1957), 24; J. Truchet, Prédication de Bossuet, 2 (1960), 31ff.

[Bernhard Blumenkranz]