Raïssa Maritain

Origins and early life

Raïssa Oumansoff was born at Rostov-on-Don on 12 September 1883 into an observant Russian Jewish family, the daughter of Ilia and Issia Oumansoff, and grew up in a household of prayer and study before the family emigrated to France in 1893 to escape the restrictions and the pogroms of the Russian empire.

Work and career

She entered the Sorbonne at sixteen, one of the very few women there, and met Jacques Maritain in a student protest over the treatment of Russian socialists; the two, unable to bear a philosophy that reduced the world to matter and denied that truth could be known, made a pact in the Jardin des Plantes to give themselves a year to find a reason to live, and to die together if they found none. Henri Bergson's lectures at the Collège de France gave them the first reprieve, and the writer Léon Bloy the second: this fiche states plainly that on 11 June 1906 Raïssa was baptized a Catholic together with Jacques and her sister Vera, with Bloy as godfather, and that she remained a Catholic and a contemplative for the rest of her life.

She never renounced her origin. In Les Grandes Amitiés, her memoirs written in exile in New York during the war, she set down her Jewish childhood with tenderness and defended the Jews of Europe as the Shoah was under way, while Jacques Maritain became one of the few Catholic thinkers of the period to denounce antisemitism as a heresy — a position his wife's presence and testimony shaped. She translated, wrote poetry, published a study of Chagall and a book on contemplation, and their house at Meudon was the meeting place of a generation of French Catholic intellectuals. She died in Paris on 4 November 1960.