Based on over 100 (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) archival collections, this paper re-examines the "Jewish origins" of Nostra Aetate. Surveying the recent literature, published since the last two council anniversary (>2005), it first outlines and then challenges how our current narrative has strongly entangled memory with history in the past decades. Going against the grain and back to archival collections, it elaborates a more nuanced, complex and pluralistic account of Vatican II, through the many immediate "non-Christian" perspectives, which have remained lost or largely unknown to a mainly Catholic scholarship on VaticanII.
As it tries to account for Jewish and Muslim voices on VaticanII in an emic perspective, decentering the narrative from its traditional historical and theological background, context and audience, the paper addresses 60 years of solid scholarship on VaticanII with a daring question: what remains indeed from VaticanII if we tell "what happened there", based on non-Christian sources only?