Reply: The dangers that lie in wait for us
by Elisabeth Badinter
I thank, of course, Humanist and Secular Judaism warmly for this distinction that you have conferred upon Robert and me — but really, why him and me? Robert, that went without saying, in my eyes, for the reasons that Violette Attal-Lefi evoked so well; but me, not at all! I am a very mediocre Jew, a deplorable militant of good causes; I reproach myself every day for my laziness and my poor involvement in the essential struggles, and God knows there is no shortage of them today.
Truly, I do not deserve to be associated with Robert in the honor that is paid to him today. So I ask myself: Might there not be, on the part of the organizers of this colloquium, a desire to mark their attachment to the equality of the sexes? And to show, in the course of this gathering, that a woman is fully the equal of a man, in the eyes of liberal Judaism? We all know the decisive action of Mme Simone Veil on behalf of women; I am thinking of the law she had passed on abortion. And nothing seems to me more legitimate than that she be honored, after Mr. Yaïr Tzaban, who was honored in the preceding days. But for Robert and me, the answer is less obvious. So I ask myself: Might I not be here in the name of that principle — detestable in my eyes, forgive me, Simone — of the necessity of quotas for women?
Every attempt to define human beings by their difference, whether it be sexual, religious or racial, seems to me to run counter to our common objective, which is universalist.
I imagine the organizers of this congress, holding their heads in both hands, trying, at all costs, to find as many women as men to take part in this colloquium, or indeed to be honored — and I did not know that Simone Veil would be here this evening. In which case, I would be here today less for my merits, which, I know, are frankly mediocre, than out of a concern for a sexual parity that I reject. It would be a rather mischievous thumbing of the nose, which I accept as a stroke of humor.
More seriously, every attempt to define human beings by their difference, whether it be sexual, religious or racial, seems to me to run counter to our common objective, which is universalist. Now, never, since the Second World War, have the values of liberal Judaism — namely the tolerance and the humanism that flow from a universalist vision — never have they been as threatened as they are today. The beautiful concept of humanity is shattering into pieces, attacked at once by religious fundamentalism, by racism and by the differentialism that engenders, directly or indirectly, the stigmatization and the rejection of the other, and that appear as much in the democratic countries as in those that are not. And yet, the idea of a common humanity is one of our most beautiful and most fragile acquisitions; the result of a very long apprenticeship and of a struggle that lasted centuries. Lévi-Strauss said that “the idea that all the peoples of the world form a single humanity is not at all consubstantial with the human race.” It is even, this idea of humanity, of very late appearance.
For vast fractions of the human species, and over tens of millennia, the notion of humanity seems totally absent. Humanity ends at the frontiers of the tribe, of the linguistic group; and for my part, I would add, at the frontiers of the community.
Never, since the Second World War, have the values of liberal Judaism — namely the tolerance and the humanism that flow from a universalist vision — been as threatened as they are today.
Alain Finkielkraut, who unfortunately is not present among us, recalled in a very beautiful book that he is publishing these days, and which is titled L’Humanité Perdue (Lost Humanity), that it is precisely the God of the Bible who declares: “You and the stranger, you shall be equal before the Eternal.” And Alain continues: “it is the one God who unveils to men the unity of the human race.” A message taken up, in its own way, by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which accentuated the idea of an essential resemblance among men, whatever their race, their culture, their religion, and, finally, their sex. The democratic man who is emerging would at last be capable of rediscovering the same in the other, were he his worst enemy. After twenty centuries of differentialism and of exacerbated communitarianism, which incited him to kill, to torture, to enslave, and to oppress in every manner; one could legitimately believe that Nazi barbarism had vaccinated us, forever, against all the temptations of particularism and of the exclusion that flows from it. Yet, one is forced to observe that, for good or for bad reasons, the old demons have reappeared. Whatever the causes — the economic crisis here and there, the feeling of insecurity, the fear of war in Israel, the loss of the sense of identity — the impression that dominates is that we have forgotten everything of the 1930s in the West, of the rise of Nazism, of the effects of racism and of the horrors that resulted from it. We may hold all the colloquia we like, we may commemorate and recount tirelessly to the rising generations the causes and the effects of the loss of the notion of humanity — we are as though swept away by a fearsome amnesia. As it is good to begin by sweeping before one’s own door, it is of Jews that I would like to speak today; for their case is at once the most paradoxical and the most exemplary. Indeed, if the first victims of Nazi barbarism are all just as amnesiac as the others and take up on their own account the ideologies of exclusion that murdered their parents, I really do not see why the others would escape the evil. I observe the emergence of two types of thinking, both just as menacing, within the Jewish community: First, the idea of a Jewish essence as it is theorized, today, by an American rabbi whom our American friends know perhaps better than we French — Arthur Hertzberg — who is soon to publish in the USA, if it has not been done these last few days, with Harper & Collins, who are most respectable publishers, a book that I judge dangerous, and which yet all the foreign countries are at this moment scrambling for. What is it about? In this book, which is titled Essential Jews, the aim is to show that since Abraham, all Jews — whatever the time, the space, the culture, the opinions, including those who have rejected every idea of Judaism — all Jews are united by eternal common traits. There would be an unalterable Jewish essence. In other words, in more precise terms, there would be a “Jewish race.” And who says this? The Nazis? Thank God, there are no more of them. A Le Pen? He has not yet dared. A Goy, quite simply? No. A respectable rabbi, who teaches at New York University and whom everyone hails as an estimable man. In the long presentation of this book sent to the foreign publishers, the agent of this rabbi Hertzberg rejoices at the polemic to come among Jews. This agent was right — it has just begun.
The second danger that lies in wait for us is the split, indeed the ideological war among Jews themselves. After the opposition, well maintained by Jews, between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, here is the far more fearsome rift, between the “good Jews” and “the bad Jews,” which erupted with the problem of peace in Israel and the Oslo accords. To see a young religious Jew assassinate Yitzhak Rabin on the grounds that he was a “bad Jew,” a traitor to the greater Israel of the Bible, has had — and will have still more tomorrow, in Israel and in the diaspora — tragic consequences.
One cannot fight effectively against the ideas of Mr. Le Pen if we do not first combat our own extremists.
We hear, here, in France, and not only in Israel, right-wing extremists, more and more numerous, speaking of the “good Jews,” who are the partisans of greater Israel, those who deny, in truth, to the Palestinians the right to have a State, as opposed to the “bad Jews,” partisans of the Oslo accords — and those Jews have the audacity to call us antisemitic Jews. Quite simply because those they call antisemitic Jews regard the enemies of forty years as human beings like themselves. That is to say that they cast a humanist gaze upon the Palestinians.
Am I to believe the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, when it reports this week that the representative of the Likud in France, a former member of Betar, dared, on the evening of Yom Kippur, to recite a Kaddish for Mr. Baruch Goldstein, the murderer of dozens of Palestinians, and not for Mr. Rabin? And that when an old lady was moved to protest to him about it, he is said to have replied “Go pray elsewhere”? Am I to believe that? We are all of us here antisemitic Jews by the criteria of Betar. It is enough to make one weep. The gravest thing in all this is not that we feel ourselves totally foreign to that kind of talk, but that we feel ourselves more and more foreign with respect to those who hold it. There is the concept of humanity regressing yet again. As for us, French Jews, one cannot fight effectively against the ideas of Mr. Le Pen if we do not first combat our own extremists. Which amounts to saying that Jews are no longer brought together by the same historical experience and the same values, as they had been for fifty years. I greatly fear that the solidarity of the diaspora toward Israel will suffer from it. For my part, I confess that it is the first time in my life that I have felt so foreign to the Israeli majority, this past week. Netanyahu seems to me wretched, and some of his supporters, criminal.
It is true that the State of Israel on the one hand, and the diaspora on the other, have always been divided between left-wing Jews and right-wing Jews. But this division had never appeared as a rupture; the extremists were so much in the minority. Since the assassination of Rabin, there is indeed a rupture, a chasm. And I do not quite see how we shall manage to bridge it before misfortune strikes. We can fight only with the weapons of speech, and despite our floods of words, we are not heard. I tell you frankly, I am anxious. As a French citizen, in a country where Le Pen has been able to proclaim the inequality of the races without any real revolt on the part of French society — and I am anxious as a Jew, who looks on, powerless, at the violence among Jews. Since I do not wish to end on this anguished note, I want to tell you how glad I am that there have been so many people who have come out over these two days, for this colloquium, since I am told that more than five hundred people have come. And I want to tell you, finally, that I want to believe that by mobilizing ourselves, we shall nonetheless manage to move the ever higher mountains of injustice. Thank you.
