Alphonse Ratisbonne

Origins and early life

Alphonse Ratisbonne was born on 1 May 1814 in Strasbourg, the eleventh of thirteen children of the Ratisbonne family — the Jewish banking dynasty allied to the Cerfbeers, pillars of Alsatian Jewry since the eighteenth century.

Work and career

He figures in this directory by that Jewish birth, and this fiche states the rest plainly: a young lawyer and a fierce critic of his elder brother Théodore's conversion, he himself converted to Catholicism after an experience he described as a vision of the Virgin in the church of Sant'Andrea delle Fratte in Rome on 20 January 1842 — one of the most famous conversion narratives of nineteenth-century Catholicism, told here as fact of biography, not as judgment.

He became a Jesuit, then joined Théodore in founding, in 1843, the Congregation of Notre-Dame de Sion, devoted to the conversion of the Jews and later, after the Second Vatican Council, transformed into a religious family devoted to Jewish-Christian dialogue. In 1855 he went to Ottoman Palestine, where he built the Ecce Homo convent in Jerusalem and a monastery at Ein Karem. There he died on 6 May 1884.