Trajectories of return or re-affiliation? Edmond Fleg and André Spire

I am a Jew because, born of Israel, and having lost it, I have felt it live again within me, more alive than myself. I am a Jew because, born of Israel and having found it again, I want it to live after me, more alive than within me. […] I am a Jew because the promise of Israel is the universal promise.¹

Drawn from the profession of faith declaimed by Edmond Fleg, in 1928, at the end of his work Pourquoi je suis juif (Why I Am a Jew), these incantatory words both complete his autobiographical narrative and figure as the point of arrival of a particular trajectory, followed by the writer in order to “find Israel again.” If they are addressed first of all to a “grandson not yet born,” they evidently appeal more broadly to the generations to come. Better still, they resound like a testament, written to give meaning to a collective Jewish future. With this book², Edmond Fleg organizes the transmission of the perpetuation of “the Jewish being” in dissonance with “tradition,” often oral, from father to son. By this, a transmutation operates in a private but publicly exposed manner: the writer speaks to a hypothetical grandson when his eldest son, Maurice, is twenty years old. Beyond the unprecedented character of this “public exposure,” notable for the period, the leap through time that this transgenerational approach shows bears within itself testimony to the distortions that the modernity of the early twentieth century entails for the Jews.

At the junction of the processes of secularization of European societies and emancipation of Jewish minorities, Western modernity is the bearer of mutations that favor crises. Whether one imputes the historical responsibility for this to the European Enlightenment³ or to the intrinsic development of this modernity of which the Jews are attentive actors, at the beginning of the twentieth century — owing to the dislocation of their traditional social structures — the Jews undergo a crisis of tradition. By capillary action, this translates into a crisis of transmission, which more profoundly reflects a crisis of identity.⁴ All the more so since the process of insertion into the nation undergoes evolutions: increased antisemitism, in its ideological form, constrains the Jews to rethink their place. Citizenship does not seem to protect them from new forms of exclusion, often more pernicious. It follows that they can no longer content themselves with doing but must also be. Here originates the question of identity. It meets with diverse fortunes, but remains nagging. In other words, in a context of social fragility, and perhaps even of a general crisis of identity, where the claim of a specificity goes against the current of a society tending toward indifferentiation (that is, culturally Catholic), the question of Jewish identity at the beginning of the twentieth century henceforth poses itself as a global reflection on being, on the relation to otherness, and as a passage between individuation and collectivity. It occasions a redefinition of the relations between social groups, between minority and majority. If the attempts at “return” exist, they are subsequent to this crisis of identity.

Crosswise voices of return

But granting that Judaism is not limited to a “confession,” to a religion, what is meant by “return”? First of all, an experience of loss. The “return” then takes note of a situation of dereliction founded on the idea that the headlong flight is already active, that “tradition,” owing to its “distancing,” has already “turned into the past.” Now the relation to tradition is precisely what suffers most from the destructuring of traditional Jewish societies in Western modernity. The means of decoding its signs henceforth escapes emancipated Jews.⁵

At the same time, the “return” opens onto the possibility of extracting oneself from the irreversible; precisely in that it suggests a taking of consciousness. It is established through a pause, a nostalgia and a regret. Fruit of individuation, it shows itself to be a reflection and an evaluation of the loss. It is then an attempt at recovery of the spaces not yet effaced, in order to reconnect with what one believed lost, but which was only lying dormant. The “return” here indeed has the sense of turning-around, as linguistic usage recalls.

Is this enough to say that in this first half of the twentieth century, the idea of a journey of return to Judaism is conceived under problematic auspices? The terms appear the same: “return,” “conversion.” One cannot, however, apply them to all situations. If, in the period considered, the religious crisis shown by the great conversions of intellectuals to the Catholicism of their childhood⁶ creates a play of mirrors, a transposition of meaning would be too quick, an identification, erroneous. Paul Claudel’s conversion is a return to faith, to practice, to dogma, to the Church. Whereas, if they exist, the “paths of return” of Jewish writers to their own mental universe can be elaborated only on far more composite contents (hence the prudence of the quotation marks). They are first of all, and above all, byways. For the trajectories do not tend linearly and solely toward “return.” They contain only certain forms of it and venture into it with circumscribed objectives. Whatever the writers’ own announcements may be. As soon as one scrutinizes their statements and the successive frameworks that give rise to their use of words, one is constrained to pose the questions of the meaning and the pertinence of the concepts to be applied in order to grasp what guides them. Thus, Edmond Fleg may well wish to express himself on a life metamorphosed according to two milestones, “Israel lost” and “Israel found again,” but nothing indicates that the path traveled is literally equivalent to a lived “conversion,” occurring around the year 1900. What is more, “finding Israel again” carries the assurance only of a feeling, buried then revealed, whose vitality is to be attested. If an enterprise of “return” is discernible, it cannot be wholly confused with this need for individual recollection out of fidelity to a “collective being.” Likewise, to what regime of intelligibility should one submit the words of André Spire, accounting — in 1928 as well⁷ and in an equally retrospective mode — for the shock he claims to have felt around 1904 on reading, by Israel Zangwill, the English “Jewish Dickens,” a story translated into French for Charles Péguy’s Cahiers de la Quinzaine? “… Chad Gadya played the role of a crystal thrown into a supersaturated liquid and, on certain sensitive minds, acted in the manner of a return, of a conversion: upheavals, a fit of weeping, and a life-direction suddenly changed.⁸” The statement gives the (deceptive) impression that these words would be written straight off to answer our initial question. In fact, like the litany-like words deposited by Edmond Fleg, it signifies a rupture. The motif of the story delivers the keys to it: a wholly assimilated young Venetian Jew returns to the family home during a celebration of the Jewish Passover led by his father. During the recitative “Chad Gadya,⁹” he is suddenly stamped with a heavy anguish and takes the measure of his rending between his two cultures, between East and West. The void of his life seizes him: he plans to kill himself, unable to bear living without God while calling for Him with his vows in death. Before sinking into the water of the canal, he recites the Shema Israel, the traditional Jewish prayer.

The effect on the French Jewish writers is one of total identification: it reveals the anxiety of disappearing as Jews and the necessity of acting to reverse the movement, nothing less. André Spire’s statement takes note of this identification that endures over time. It suggests a pre-existing awakening of consciousness which lacked the driving spark produced by Chad Gadya. It designates, so to speak, the present as a lure. And does it insinuate that the past would contain answers for the future? One may imagine so. If one continues the inquiry around the statement itself, one notes its redundancy, organized as a leitmotif by the writer from one work to the next (since 1909), as if to signal its seminal force. A meaning then surges forth, a different one: there is the necessity of a mythologization, of a fetishization even, of this writer’s memory, in order to reproduce the “spark moment” by recollecting it then transmitting it, and to state the elements of the rupture. Thus is announced the establishment of a space of innovation: literature as the voice of the turning-around. So true is it that, in a concomitant movement, the rupture inaugurates the search for the meaning of “the Jewish being,” notably by the literary path. Proof of this is that in 1959, after a final repetition of the fetish statement, the writer adds: “Had I found faith again? Not at all. My ancestors, my race, the Judaism of my early childhood. I had become a Jew again, with a capital J.¹⁰” Edmond Fleg states a similar reflection. In the midst of the Dreyfus affair, the shock of antisemitic violence is a substratum onto which another shock, literary this time, is grafted. There too the “Zangwill effect” operates fully. Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898) enthuses the young man: “This reading awakened in me all my inclinations to occupy myself with Judaism, to return through reflection, historical and philosophical study, to this proscribed race, beautiful despite its miseries […] to the study of this Jewish question in which it is cowardly to take no interest.¹¹” The power of animation of literature is such that it sets off the movement of rupture in order to pass from the shore of defensive action to the shore of dreaming-being. There where the violence of otherness projects nothing but a representation of the Jews in which the latter cannot recognize themselves — for antisemitism, at bottom, does not speak to them of themselves — literary identification is a renewal of resources. It dislodges them from the stupor occasioned by the rejection that seems to repeat itself from one century to the next.

The trajectories of Edmond Fleg and André Spire bear witness to a succession of shocks that render insistent a question summarized thus: in modernity, how is one to make the Jewish part of their being coexist with the part of rootedness in the nation where they live, of which they are citizens and whose culture they have incorporated?

The ingredients of integration

Sons of a Jewish bourgeoisie issued from the emancipatory logic which, throughout the nineteenth century, inserts itself among the “new strata” of the Third Republic, André Spire and Edmond Fleg are educated and trained in the lycées of the Republic. Recognizing themselves entirely in the values inherited from 1789, they have the conviction of being French like everyone else. That France is for Edmond Fleg only an adoptive homeland in no way alters this feeling of plenitude. He is born in 1874 in Geneva into a family that devotes a veritable cult to the France of 1789 and of 1848.¹² His paternal family is originally from Alsace, and his father Maurice Flegenheimer, a silk industrialist, married an Alsatian Jewess, Clara Nordmann. André Spire’s family, for its part, prides itself on an ancient rootedness, in Lorraine. Édouard Spire, André’s father, is first a lawyer then an industrialist when he goes into partnership with his father-in-law, who owns a shoe factory in Nancy.¹³ Issued from the generation of Jews benefiting from an indisputable integration, the two future writers are borne by a social imaginary vaster than that of their fathers and grandfathers. Holder of a degree in law, André Spire comes to Paris and enters the École des Sciences politiques in 1891. He prepares for the competitive examination of the Conseil d’État, where he is admitted as an auditeur in 1894. The better to devote himself to his poetic passion without material worry, he becomes a high civil servant, one of those “State Jews”¹⁴ of the Third Republic. Edmond Fleg, for his part, arrives in Paris in 1892, enters the lycée Louis-le-Grand in higher rhetoric and obtains a degree in philosophy. Admitted to the École normale supérieure of the rue d’Ulm in 1895, as a foreigner, he obtains the agrégation in German in 1900. After much hesitation, he launches into literature by writing plays.

Throughout their literary careers, the two authors work in numerous forms of expression: poetry, the tale, the short story, theater, the fictionalized biography, essays, militant articles and autobiographical writings. They share a profound attachment to the French language and literature. But Edmond Fleg remains faithful to classicism both in his dramatic writing and in his poetry rhymed in alexandrines. To be convinced of this, it suffices to consider Écoute Israël (Hear, O Israel), a “Jewish legend of the centuries”¹⁵ of which Charles Péguy publishes the first volume in 1913 in his Cahiers de la Quinzaine. For his part, André Spire considers poetry the spearhead of a literature of combat. Strong from his experience of prosodic research conducted, in 1903, in the laboratory of the abbé Rousselot at the Collège de France, he sets himself up as a renovator of poetic language and an apostle of a new free-verse-ism. To jolt traditional metrics means to equip oneself with a tool of expression in the service of modernity. His poetic researches take on a political meaning in a context where the aesthetic exigency is doubled by an intellectual exigency from which is elaborated a calling into question of the social foundations of the Third Republic.

Crisis of identities and searches for equilibrium

The political antisemitism that rages from the 1880s on seems to call into question the integration of the Jews. The antisemitic campaigns consequent upon the financial scandals (the crash of the Union Générale in 1882, then Panama ten years later), the publication of Édouard Drumont’s La France juive in 1886 and its great publishing success, furnish just grounds for concern. But these prodromes only unveil the fragility of integration without fundamentally shaking it. The Dreyfus affair alone provokes a crisis of conscience. This time, the republican principles waver on their foundations. In the first moments, however, the writers’ reactions translate a perception of antisemitism under the angle of personal attacks to be resolved in an individual manner.¹⁶ Dreyfusards they assuredly are; but, at the risk of surprise, perhaps less by reason of the antisemitic character of the Affair than of the feeling of injustice. The sources attesting to the formal commitment of André Spire — held to a duty of reserve as an auditeur at the Conseil d’État — are lacking. It is established, on the other hand, that, scandalized by Esterhazy’s acquittal and affected by the antisemitic virulence deployed by his friend Lucien Moreau¹⁷, Edmond Fleg signs the petition of November 1898 in favor of Colonel Picquart. In tune with the Dreyfusard atmosphere of the École normale, he thus becomes, by his own admission, a “social being.¹⁸” The Affair therefore engenders behavioral ruptures.¹⁹ It makes of these two authors jointly Jews and political actors. From then on, the perception of antisemitism also undergoes transformations. Identified as an ideology incarnated by the nationalist right, it is henceforth perceived in political terms and no longer only as an irrational movement of hatred, such as Christian anti-Judaism, up to Drumont’s vociferations, seemed to convey. This new gaze pushes the Jewish intellectuals to consider the European ramifications of the “Jewish question.” The Dreyfus affair triggered a process of sensitization to the persecutions suffered by the Jews in Tsarist Russia, notably during the Kishinev massacres of 1903, of which the French press had made itself the echo. And so it is truly by the yardstick of events posterior to the Affair that one can measure the durability of the moral crisis it provoked. All the more since it introduced a supplementary political dimension: the two writers acquire the conviction of the erroneous character of the conception according to which Judaism would be exclusively a religious confession on a par with any other. In the footsteps of a Bernard Lazare, equally marginal, they then arrive at the idea that the Jews form a nation²⁰, going totally against the emancipatory and assimilationist ideology of the nineteenth century.

“Jewish nationalism” comes to incarnate this idea, which draws its resources from a Jewish “collective being.” Yet, at the turn of the twentieth century, few are the writers who envisage it as a solution to counter antisemitism. Edmond Fleg quickly makes himself its bard, the provocative nationalism of Lucien Moreau being assuredly not foreign to this quest for national identification. Exalted and impassioned, he attends the Third Zionist Congress of Basel in August 1899 but returns from it disappointed. Feeling himself external, singular because French, he draws away from the movement until the Great War. Does not one of the difficulties Zionism encounters in implanting itself in France and in winning, if not the adherence of French Jews, at least their sympathy²¹, reside in their cult of the homeland, judged as irreconcilable with the practice of a political Zionism? From the first days of the war in 1914, Edmond Fleg enlists in the Foreign Legion. Because he does not yet have French citizenship, he measures how factitious his feeling of belonging may seem. By his combatant patriotism, he overshoots his fidelity to France. In 1929, writing on the figure of Joan of Arc, an eloquent subject from a patriotic point of view, he commits an interesting dating error. He says he has been a “French citizen […] since 1914,²²” whereas he in fact obtains his naturalization only in 1921. Unconscious error or literary convenience? What matters above all is to note that his commitment from the start of the war, at the age of 40, furnishes him the legitimacy of feeling French without fear of provoking the nationalist thunderbolts. Now these subside in the first moments of the “Union sacrée,” for the blood shed allows the Jews to prove that courage the antisemites deny them. André Spire moreover makes himself the apologist of “Jewish loyalism” in his essay Les Juifs et la guerre (The Jews and the War). He notably points out there the courage of Edmond Fleg, regretting that he could not join him.²³ But above all, he accounts for the situation of the persecuted Jews and prepares to make their voices heard for the peace negotiations. For if the Great War entails considerable changes on the geopolitical plane and that of international diplomacy, the Jewish question knows no lull. Now the years of war and post-war see the progress of political Zionism. André Spire had adhered to Israel Zangwill’s territorialism in 1905.²⁴ After the Balfour Declaration in November 1917, he rallies to official Zionism and from then on does not cease to work toward a sensitization of French opinion, non-Jewish and Jewish. At his initiative, a League of the Friends of Zionism is created²⁵ and he officially represents French Zionism at the Peace Conference in 1919. Because the anti-Zionist positions of the French Jewish institutions harden from this period on, the writers strive to present the analyses of the latter, at best²⁶, as errors of judgment.

What does Zionism represent for the two writers? The Palestine of the twenties in no way symbolizes the resurrection of ancient Jerusalem; mysticism therefore does not infiltrate their support. An ideology of the future, Jewish nationalism is not interpreted as a residue of tradition, even if it builds upon it. In fact, the writers see in it first of all a response to the “Jewish question”; then they accord particular attention to the emergence of something unprecedented: transformed into a farmer, speaking a renewed Hebrew, the Palestinian Jew represents the quintessence of the new Jew in that he is the fruit of a genuine “regeneration.²⁷” Had the emancipation of 1791 missed its mission? The surreptitious idea of a lure within the emancipatory promise sometimes brushes the writings.

Remaking a Jewish “soul”

André Spire avows it in 1928: Maurice Barrès’s exhortations to seek “the Jewish soul” did not remain a dead letter.²⁸ Since the Dreyfus affair, since it seemed to them they had discovered an “authentic” Judaism revealed by Zangwill, since the poor Jewish masses are reservoirs of reactivation (dreamed-of or not) of a fecund Jewishness, the writers do not cease to search for the marks of their identity. The study of Jewish culture and the Jewish past composes one stage of this. But Judaism as an encompassing totality is not their central aim, except to extract elements from it to construct something else. Their approach was for a time interpreted as areligious. The examination of complementary sources has allowed this reading to be nuanced, especially concerning Edmond Fleg. On the other hand, the certainty remains that they share an imperious need to find means of expressing a Jewish vision of modernity through a history and traditions hitherto greatly unknown, even despised. Judaism is therefore thought anew in order to serve a present reality; hence incursions into tradition and forms of reappropriation, essentially textual, so as to reinscribe themselves in a lineage. And so, from 1908 on, the works (André Spire’s Poèmes juifs, Edmond Fleg’s Écoute Israël) express a thematic teeming proper to the crystallization of a new Jewish consciousness or, more exactly, to the definition of a new Jewishness. There is thus discerned the primacy of Jewish memory, which shows as much the submission to the biblical injunction of remembrance²⁹ as the necessity for the writers to forge new values for themselves, far from a Judaism considered frozen. On the memory retained depends the edification of the new Jewishness; they therefore show themselves mindful of the passages: “our cult is that of our descendants.³⁰” Now to ensure transmission one must also, upstream of the chain, claim common ancestors. From this is affirmed a Jewish “atavism” that does not hesitate to refer to “Jewish blood,” to a “race” even: certain texts thus take on a biological coloration in the spirit of the times.³¹ However, the Jewish writers liken the notion of “race” more to that of “people” and “nation.” Less to subsume the Jews under a pseudo racial homogeneity than to attempt to define the feeling of uniqueness linking a population they know to be composite.

This chain of memory and transmission seems to secrete a “disquiet”: perceived by the writers as a major characteristic of “the Jewish soul,” it escorts their preoccupations with the divine and the messianic idea. The Russian pogroms of 1903–1905, the Great War and the development of Zionism in the twenties form the backdrop. As for the hero of Zangwill’s Chad Gadya, an existence without the divine seems to them to harbor an infinite void. Edmond Fleg sets himself to seek the God of the Jews, and that, in a biblical time; André Spire is more concerned with the vacuity and oscillates between interrogation and apostrophe to a God who does not declare Himself. From the twenties on, in a world bearing new hopes, a new image of God takes shape, taking on an anthropomorphic character: it is the Jewish God because the true and just God.³² This God found again could not be thought after the war of 1914 without messianism. The messianic conceptions revisited by Edmond Fleg and André Spire present analogies with those of nineteenth-century Jewish thinkers.³³ Messianism conceived under the angle of a mysticism harmoniously according with the republican virtues advocated by 1789 constitutes not the least part of this heritage. But their epoch poses problems of another nature: there where André Spire develops a humanist and secular messianism that plunges at once into his socialist ideas and into Zionism, in close correlation³⁴, Edmond Fleg elaborates a humanist and universalist conception, imbued with mysticism. Messianism would then be the sole path to becoming Jewish again and recovering a collective identity: it is a matter of realizing the union of the people that must prelude the messianic era.³⁵ But this eschatology, whose accents are undeniably religious, is rooted in modernity. This is why in 1919 the writer sees in Zionism the symbol of the harmony whose universal scope translates into peace and religious reconciliation.³⁶ Fleg’s originality consists in fashioning a Judeo-Christian syncretism, an alloy in the service of the new Jewishness, in order to accomplish the messianic ideal: the reconstruction of the Temple for the entire world.³⁷ He then introduces into his work a “literary agent” bearing this ideal, the Wandering Jew, a myth of the anti-Jewish legends, from which he removes the negative image to make of it the symbol of a humanist vocation.

Jewish humanism is moreover a component of the writers’ messianic conception. Understood as social justice rendered to the universal, it has all the more importance for the Jewishness elaborated by André Spire and Edmond Fleg in that they detect in it the paternity of the moral values lauded by Christianity for centuries: “No one among the great Christians dreams of refusing our race the honor of having invented, given to the world, this love of the poor which is the most profound cause of the success of Christianity,” Spire declares in 1912 to an audience of “young Jews.³⁸” In fact, at this stage of identity maturation, the recasting of Judaism also passes through the representation of Christianity³⁹, inspiring an ambivalent seduction. Will one be surprised at this? Despite the general decline of religious practices in all faiths, due to secularization, Christianity still strongly impregnates the ambient culture under the Third Republic, if only through its symbolic force. The presence of churches, the works of admired authors leave durable imprints.⁴⁰ But the most interesting thing in this representation is that it reflects, through a complex play of mirrors, that of Judaism.

The trajectories of André Spire and Edmond Fleg thus bring to light a quest for identity commanded by an exacting modernity. Literature procures for them a path of access to the experience of creation of being. More than a mediation, it is a terrain of equilibrium. To assume their responsibility as writers facing society and to be in accord with their search for a new path, it falls to them to create a textual space that renders possible the fact of being Jewish and of expressing it with a specific cultural sensibility, eminently French, linked to the language, to the territory and to the values shared with the rest of their fellow citizens. The two writers therefore fabricate for themselves, little by little, a double experience (Jewishness/Frenchness) by using what one might call a combinatory art: they interweave singularity and difference on the one hand, and, on the other hand, presence within them and outside them of a universalism working in cohesion with Jewish particularism. In so doing, they renew the discourse of integration and affirm a dual identity in which Jewishness reveals itself consubstantial with Frenchness, and inversely. They impel a new literature stretched by these efforts valorizing the equilibrium of experiences and, at least symbolically, the classic dichotomy of private/public finds itself pulverized. Thus there hatches, before the First World War, a French Jewish literary current whose principal characteristic is to express this new consciousness by destining its message — and this has its importance — to both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. This current engenders a vivacious, fecund, manifold flowering of works and reviews, which in the twenties is called the “Jewish literary renaissance.⁴¹” If in one way or another the quest for identity is in part a “quest for origins” and induces a reinscription in the Jewish past, the double experience that Edmond Fleg and André Spire effect presents above all modalities of re-affiliation to a culture and to a Jewish “nationality” decried since the emancipatory period. It is therefore not a “conversion” in the strict sense, nor a trajectory of “return” as an encompassing religious conception, illustrated by the Hebrew term teshuvah, would point to today. Their “return” is essentially a renewal of resources. It is a taking of consciousness, a reflective pause to elaborate an identity conscious of the double cultural richness, an identity refusing assignation. They contented themselves, so to speak, with seeking paths of innovation that pass through writing, literature then truly setting itself up as the axis of the turning-around, breathing in a new type of reflections on the place of the Jewish being in Western history, in an enacted modernity.

The traces of their voices seem to have dispersed in the course of time. One may nonetheless hear them, recognize them surfacing in the reflections of a few authors of the second half of the twentieth century on Jewish identity.⁴² The subject seemed to become topical again. Witness still the elaboration, in the sixties, of concepts proper to defining the type of identity that the writers of the turn of the century sought.⁴³ A specific terminology with which, strangely, innovators though they were, Edmond Fleg, André Spire and their successors did not think to equip themselves.

Notes

[*]: This article modifies a study already published: “Aux sources d’un renouveau identitaire: André Spire et Edmond Fleg,” Mil neuf cent, no. 13, 1995.