A radical humanist vision of the Bible: Erich Fromm
Who is God?: Yaakov Malkin
The Bible in Cinema: Annie Goldmann:
Studies
Why did the Allies not bomb Auschwitz?: David Horovitz
A constitution for Israel?: Claude Klein
Albert Memmi, a Judaism against the grain: Anny Dayan Rosenman
……….and other texts
Contents
Editorial:
Izio Rosenman: Memory, Violence and Vigilance………………………………………………………3
Dossier: Reading the Bible
Erich Fromm: a radical humanist vision of the Bible……………………………………………5
Avraham Wolfensohn: The relevance of the Bible in the education of our time.
A secular gaze on the biblical narrative…………………………………………………………………..13
Yaakov Malkin: Who is God?. A secular approach to the literature of the Bible, to God and to the other literary heroes of the biblical works…………………………………….19
Jacques Hassoun: Joseph, or the Misfortunes of Virtue………………………………………….30
Henri Raczymow: The Tale of the Prophet Jonah…………………………………………………………33
Annie Goldmann: The Bible in Cinema…………………………………………………………………35
Studies
David Horovitz: Why did the Allies not bomb Auschwitz………………………….41
Ernest Vinurel: The Final Solution: Jews and Gypsies……………………………………………..48
Claude Klein: A constitution for Israel?…………………………………………………………54
Anny Dayan Rosenman: Albert Memmi, a Judaism against the grain. ………………………58
Documents
The admission of the AJHL to the CRIF…………………………………………………………………………..62
What it means to be Jewish. Declaration of the International Federation . …………………………..66
Current Affairs
Violette Attal-Lefi: Secular Jew: impossible? …… …………………………………………………..68
Jean Liberman: The awakening of ex-Soviet Judaism………………………………………………71
Gérard Israël and Adam Loss: the CRIF and the evolution of the communities…………………………74
Contents of issues 1 to 3. …………………………………………………………………………..78
Subscription form………………………………………………………………………………………80
Membership form for the AJHL……………………………………………………………………………….81
The Foundation for the Audiovisual History of the Survivors of the Shoah………………………….82
Photos, illustrations …………………………………………………pages ……..12,40,61,65,77.
The texts engage only their authors.
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Contents
PLURIELLES
REVIEW OF THE A.J.H.L.
253 Avenue Daumesnil-75012 Paris
Tel. 40 19 99 70-Fax 43 07 05 10
Director of Publication:
Albert MEMMI
Editor-in-Chief:
Izio ROSENMAN
Editorial Committee:
Violette ATTAL-LEFI, Jacqueline
LONDON,
Rolland Doukhan
Title Registration No. 93/0031
Joint commission pending
ASSOCIATION FOR A HUMANIST AND SECULAR JUDAISM (A.J.H.L.)
253, Avenue Daumesnil, 75012 PARIS .Tel: 40 19 99 70. Fax: 43 07 05 10
Its purpose: to foster a secular and pluralist Judaism that respects the diversity of the dimensions of Jewish identity: morals, culture, religion, philosophy, history, memory, traditions. To propose a reflection, a contemporary Jewish identity project fully inscribed within global society.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS:
Albert Memmi (President), Violette Attal-Lefi (Vice-President), Elie Barenfeld, Renée David, Albert Gabrieleff, Maurice Jastrzeb, Jacqueline London, Izio Rosenman (Secretary General), Ernest Vinurel.
EDITORIAL.
MEMORY, VIOLENCE AND VIGILANCE.
We may question the silence that surrounded, in Europe for five years, the genocide of the Jews, and that — even more ignored — of the Gypsies, perpetrated by the Nazis and their local allies. To believe that after such a tragedy humanity would be immunized against racist violence was no doubt an illusion. An illusion shared by a great many, in particular by the Jews, and no doubt also by the resistance fighters who in numerous countries had risen up to combat Nazi oppression and horror.
“Never again,” they had sworn to themselves at the liberation of Auschwitz, fifty years ago, with the few thousand Jewish survivors.
Half a century after the Shoah, one must nevertheless note that violence and racism, both in Europe and elsewhere, have not disappeared, but have on the contrary recovered a strength unknown for a few dozen years.
The violence of those nostalgic for Nazism touches the Jews particularly through the desecration of their cemeteries. But far-right violence also translates, in Western Europe, into racist and xenophobic acts, going as far as assassination, as was the case for Turkish workers in Germany, or very recently in Austria for Gypsies. This violence also takes on the face of ethnic purification and massacres, in Bosnia or in Rwanda, or again in Sudan.
Another type of violence is that of the Islamist fundamentalist wave that surges over the Mediterranean basin, with its train of abductions and assassinations.
In Algeria, the dead already number in the tens of thousands. The Armed Islamic Groups there abduct and kill by preference all those who count in culture and creation: men and women of the theater, singers, journalists, writers, and intellectuals. If they are democrats and secularists, they are the all-too-designated victims of those who wish to return Algeria to obscurantism and barbarism.
In the Middle East, the murderous anti-Israeli attacks perpetrated by Palestinian Islamists have as their aim to derail the fragile reconciliation under way between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples.
In the face of this violence, what can we, humanist and secular Jews, do, if not precisely defend our values, which place man and his dignity at the center of every preoccupation.
To call for the struggle against intolerance. To call for respect for the plurality of cultures, and for pluralism, including within the Jewish community, where nationalist or fundamentalist temptations are also coming to light.
This is also why a present-day reflection on the Bible, on the history of the Jewish people in its diversity, can help us to remain vigilant and active in the face of the violence that tends to install itself as a system, after the death of the last of the great totalitarian systems, Soviet communism.
To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is also to remain vigilant today.
Izio Rosenman
ERICH FROMM
Erich Fromm (1900–1980), Jewish psychoanalyst and social philosopher, was born in Frankfurt, Germany, into a line of rabbis. He was raised in a religious family. After studies at German universities and training as a psychoanalyst at the Institute of Psychoanalysis of Berlin, he joined the Institute for Social Research of Frankfurt, directed by Max Horkheimer, founder of what is now called the Frankfurt School; an Institute where Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse also worked. After Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, he emigrated to New York with the other members of the School. He pursued in the USA his activities as a psychoanalyst as well as an essayist and philosopher. He oriented his reflection notably toward the meaning of freedom in modern society.
Very well versed in the Bible and the Talmud, he published several books testifying to a humanist and secular approach to the Bible and to the Jewish tradition. He was very much influenced by the German Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen.
Erich Fromm holds that there are two types of religion: authoritarian religion and humanist religion. He considers Judaism to be a non-authoritarian and “non-theistic” religion, whose central value is the love of life and the development of the individual. Fromm denounces all the idolatries of the contemporary world.
Works of Erich Fromm published in French:
The Forgotten Language, Paris, Payot, 1963. The Fear of Freedom, Paris, Buchet-Chastel, 1963. Man for Himself, Paris, Editions sociales, 1967. Psychoanalysis and Religion, Paris, Editions de l’Epi, 1968. The Art of Loving, Paris, Editions de l’Epi, 1968. The Sane Society; from capitalism to humanist socialism; psychoanalysis of contemporary society, Paris, Le courrier du Livre, 1971 Hope and Revolution, Paris, Stock, 1970. The Crisis of Psychoanalysis, essays on Freud, Marx and social psychology, Paris, Anthropos, 1971. Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, Paris, P.U.F., 1971. The Dogma of Christ, Brussels, Editions Complexe, 1975. The Art of Loving, Épi, Paris, 1969. Hope and Revolution, Stock, Paris, 1970. The Crisis of Psychoanalysis, Anthropos, Paris, 1971. You Shall Be as Gods, Les Editions Complexe, 1973
I.R.