When one looks at today’s Europe, one cannot but be struck by a series of contrasts: geographic, cultural, and political.
On one side, a Western Europe ready to enter the twenty-first century in terms of economy and technology; on the other, the Eastern Europe of the former Soviet bloc, certain of whose countries, such as Albania, still seem to be emerging from the Middle Ages.
On one side, countries seeking to develop their cooperation through all sorts of agreements and limited surrenders of sovereignty; on the other, peoples who, in order to assert their own, wage war on one another and slaughter one another, as in the former Yugoslavia.
Yet a sharper look at our Western Europe would suffice to make us anxious about our fate as Jews and as Europeans. We have the impression that in our countries too, we have not always emerged from the Middle Ages on the human plane, on the plane of fantasies and prejudices, and we see before us, or alongside us, European History once again stammering, hesitating over the direction to take.
Where do we stand? A recent excerpt from Turin’s La Stampa, reprinted by Le Monde, frames the alternative well:
“Today, as racism, provincialism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and anti-Europeanism spread, the idea of Europe ought above all to be ethical and, in a certain sense, prophylactic. Either Sarajevo or Maastricht. The ultimate choice, the true and healthy choice, if one looks at things in depth, lies there.”
For a Jew, to reflect on the question of the Jews and Europe is to enter immediately into a domain where ambivalence is sovereign, for he knows that Europe is like Aesop’s tongue, capable of the best things as of the worst; and we Jews have often had experience of the latter.
A hundred years ago, Simon Dubnov wrote that “the Jews, although having no territory of their own in Europe, are perhaps its oldest inhabitants.” Indeed, since Roman times we have been in Europe, and we have taken part in its history in what it has of the most positive: its culture, its universalism, its science. To it we owe our emancipation. But we have also endured the worst of what it has produced: the exclusions, the expulsions, the pogroms, and finally the genocide of the Shoah.
From the Spanish golden age and Maimonides, through the humanism of Montaigne (son of a Marrano mother), down to the birth of social democracy, the Jews have accompanied Europe in its accession to modernity. But we cannot forget the negation of our most elementary rights for hundreds of years in every part of Europe — a negation so often accompanied by diverse oppressions and massacres. For one cannot live, Europe cannot live, in oblivion, which is the source of all repetitions, of all negations. Let us recall that even today, after eighty years, Turkey denies the genocide committed against the Armenians. In that country, which wishes to enter the European Community, the oppression of minorities continues: it is still practically forbidden to speak the Kurdish language in public there.
One must therefore remember the past, on pain of seeing its most tragic aspects reborn. And one cannot but be alarmed by the surge of violence due to the far right in Europe: in France, the Front National and other lesser-known groups, all nostalgic for Vichy and the Collaboration, the multiplication of antisemitic graffiti and of desecrations of Jewish cemeteries, as well as of various incidents against immigrants. In Belgium, the birth of the Vlaams Blok and, around it or alongside it, of groups nostalgic for Nazism. In Italy, the appearance of dangerous phenomena, whether they have a directly antisemitic and fascist aspect or whether they more broadly endanger democracy, such as the birth of the Lombard League, a sign of the rich North’s withdrawal into itself in the face of the poor South.
Yet what is most alarming is the renewal of xenophobic and antisemitic violence in Germany. German reunification, carried out in haste, has brought old demons to light in the former GDR, where for 40 years communist “antifascism” manifested itself above all in a regimentation and a totalitarian organization of the population, and did not allow there any lucid examination of German responsibilities in the horrors of Nazism. The defeat of the latter was not followed there by a labor of reflection and education, the communist regime considering that it bore no responsibility for the past.
This hasty reunification engendered frustration and unemployment, bearers of violence and of dangers.
Since the events of Rostock, attacks on hostels for asylum seekers have become almost daily, but the violence has risen a degree with the racist murders. The violence is spreading to the West, which seemed protected by its standard of living. The government and the police, hitherto passive, are beginning to grow seriously concerned — essentially, alas, with the damage done to Germany’s image. This at last marked determination to protect democracy has already translated into the arrest of a certain number of the perpetrators of racist acts and the banning of neo-Nazi groupings. Here mention must be made of the courage and the breadth of vision of the German President Weizsäcker, who has not ceased to call Germans back to their particular responsibilities on account of Nazism and its crimes.
The list of current acts of violence in Europe is long: groups of skinheads in Poland, antisemitic appeals from the leader of a major political party in Hungary, lists of supposed Jewish ancestry concerning politicians in Czechoslovakia, and even the very recent appearance of a neo-Nazi group in Tirana, the capital of Albania.
One may legitimately fear that the recession and the economic crisis in Europe may mark the crisis of our Europe and may end by threatening democracy.
It is difficult to deny all legitimacy to national aspirations, but we must remember that as Jews our situation has always been precarious or unlivable under political regimes of inflamed nationalism, a source of collective paranoia always ready to seek a scapegoat for all of a society’s shortcomings — and we have often been that scapegoat.
By contrast, however self-evident it may seem, it is well to recall that we have always been at ease in states and societies open to others. As our ancient biblical name for the word “Hebrew” indicates — Ivri, the one who crosses over — we have at all times been crossers-over, intermediaries between cultures. And wherever cultures close in upon themselves, we are threatened. Wherever nationalisms are reborn and grow arrogant, tolerance toward the Other, toward the different, disappears. Secularism (laïcité), when it is not rigid, protects us, just as it protects the freedom of all, of all cultural minorities. Let us recall that where there is more democracy, more sharing, there is less frustration, more truth, less danger. It is not a matter, for us Jews, of merely taking sides for Europe, but of insistently posing the question of what this Europe will be.
We must therefore strongly demand that those who endanger truth — the forgers and the propagandists of hatred — as well as those who endanger democracy, be punished by law, for democracies must defend themselves.
As Jews we must be not only attentive to the situation of others, to the rights of minorities, but also in solidarity with their struggle to defend those rights, for xenophobia today, even if it does not always begin with the Jew, always ends with him.
And if we are for a united Europe, it is for a Europe in which different cultures, languages, and peoples can freely coexist, and not for a Europe in which the hegemony of one or two nation-states would settle the fate of all.
To conclude, I shall cite a sentence by the linguist Claude Hagège (Le Monde, 1 December 1992):
“The universal is, at first approach, at the antipodes of the particular, but at a deeper level, the universal passes by way of the particular. It is a meditated and re-grasped collection of particularities. Universality can be oppressive when it claims to impose a culture from the outside. When it is the lowest common multiple that emerges from a series of singularities, it is on the way to rallying a genuine consensus.”
(December 1992)