ALBERT MEMMI: A JUDAISM AGAINST THE CURRENT.

By Anny DAYAN-ROSENMAN

Anny Dayan Rosenman teaches literature.

Against the current. The title of one of Albert Memmi’s most recent works seems to illustrate an approach, a trajectory, a choice that are profoundly his own, but that are also felt by many of us as an important dimension of Judaism: for the capacity to be against the current is often equivalent to the capacity to resist dogmatisms, explicit or implicit consensus, the irrefutable obviousness of majority truths, or again what Pascal called the force of prejudice.

Historically, this choice was that of Judaism, which has maintained itself against the current among the nations despite the seductive appeal of majority cultures or the brutal force with which it has so often been confronted. But this formulation also concerns our capacity to ensure, within Judaism, the permanence of those counter-currents, so bracing and so salutary in the face of the stiffening delights of group certainties, of intellectual fashions, and of political conformisms.

It is not easy to be against the current. For the approach of questioning from within the group sets in play complex and often painful phenomena, gives rise to a feeling of vague guilt, of transgression, a sort of irrepressible nostalgia for belonging. Nostalgia for a unity more often dreamed than real, and from which one would have excluded oneself.

And one may well know that this communion is also confinement, that this unity is often the result of submission to a majority and authoritarian point of view, that harmony is often obtained by imposing silence on the discordant voices — it remains nonetheless that in many people the desire for inclusion in the group prevails, especially when that group is a minority. So strong is this dependence, which Albert Memmi has been able to bring into relief, this dependence of the individual upon the group and its values.

But if the spirit of going against the current does not come from some masochistic bent, from an irresistible propensity to contradiction, or from a fierce desire for originality, it is because it too sets values in play.

It is perhaps, and first of all, fidelity to values.

Those who know how to be against the current are often those who have been able to initiate a certain number of others, who have been able to anticipate, through analysis and through an early understanding, phenomena that still remained opaque or poorly perceived. They have encouraged them by their positions and their commitments, even at the risk of submitting them a little later to the critical analysis without which there is no true freedom.

To cite only a few of the paths and the concepts that Albert Memmi has helped to clear: he sets out from a lived experience to present the portrait of the colonized and of the colonizer in situation, in their irreducible but complementary relationship. He publishes Portrait d’un Juif (Portrait of a Jew) in 1962, that is to say at a time when, by tacit agreement, this word resonated so little in the French public space. He forges the concept of judéité (Jewishness) which seems today so natural and so operative that some people perhaps think it has always existed and in any case forget to refer to its creator. He affirms the right of colonized countries to their independence — but at the same time he defends, against a left often dogmatic and Manichean, the right of Israel to exist.

Once the independence of the colonized countries was obtained, he does not hesitate to denounce their heterophobia, their difficulty in admitting difference, and the manner in which the promises of national liberation could be transformed into a sometimes narrow-minded nationalism. In his fiction there then takes shape a thematic which is that of Exile — an exile lived by a whole Jewish population that comes from North Africa, an exile that has no name, no status, and of which sometimes the exiles themselves have no clear consciousness.

In the same way, a little later, he does not hesitate to take his distance from a concept such as that of the right to difference, which he had nonetheless helped to promote, once it seems to him to entail risks of going off the rails on the ideological plane. “Being one of the first to be responsible for this promotion of difference, I should nonetheless like to dispel a misunderstanding. If I had to sum myself up, I would recall that it is not so much difference that is important as the meaning one gives to it; or else, by an irony of history, one ends up joining the very people one would wish to fight. When I began to reflect on these questions, difference had a bad press — I mean in our milieus, broadly speaking, anticolonialist and antiracist. On the contrary, it was prized and defended by the conservatives and the partisans of colonization. The reasons of the one side and of the other seemed clear. We judged the insistence on differences suspect, and with good reason: it preceded all the accusations and prepared all the iniquities…” It is interesting to follow the development of a thought, such as it unfolds over time, for there are inscribed in it a demand for lucidity, a wariness of all intellectual complacency, the awareness that, points of view and choices having their own dynamic, one may be led to modulate one’s positions, including on the same problem, and therefore logically to place oneself once again against the current (in the counter-current of the counter-current, if one may put it that way).

On the subject of the right to difference, Memmi will denounce what he calls the swing of the pendulum: “Carried away by its momentum, the pendulum generally goes well beyond… The affirmation of self sometimes takes on mythic proportions; to the destructive myths of the past, one opposes counter-myths just as deranged. The least of ancestors becomes a hero of legend and a folk dance the summit of art. But must one pass from self-refusal to one-upmanship? Overvalue oneself to excess because one has been devalued to excess? Does one not risk committing the same errors as the racist partisans of difference? Does one not risk soon affirming oneself against others?” ¹

This critical demand could be found again in many other domains:

While defending the existence of Israel, he takes a stand on the cultural problems that tear at its social fabric, at a moment when, in the diaspora, silence is the rule. Thus, in a text entitled Justice et Nation (Justice and Nation), he reacts vigorously to the famous interview given by Golda Meir to Le Monde, in which she spoke of the Orientals come out of caves, using their bathtubs as vegetable plots and their pajamas as flags — a text that he concludes thus: “Respect for the different ethnic groups, this struggle against the domination of one ethnic group by another, that too is called socialism.”

In the same text, he addresses the Palestinian problem. It is important to recall that this is a speech delivered in Israel at the Zionist Congress of Jerusalem in 1972: “Some Israelis have ended up thinking that they alone can decide, believing that things will eventually settle down with time: that is a grave error. Because there too, we are witnessing a national awakening. If one admits that the national

claims of our era are tenacious, as I believe and as I repeat, then one must not blind oneself to the meaning of the Palestinians’ agitation. Sooner or later, the national dimension of the Palestinians will have to be reckoned with.” Remarks completed by another text that appeared in the Israeli review Dispersion et Unité (Dispersion and Unity), again in 1972: In short, a homeland is needed for each of the two parties: Israel for the Jews, a Palestinian state for the Palestinians, with Jordan or alongside it — that remains to be examined.

However, while being a partisan of a dialogue and of a Judeo-Arab and Israeli-Palestinian coexistence — which earns him the hostility of a good number of French Jews and in particular of the Jewish communal bodies — he publishes, in the collection Juifs et Arabes (Jews and Arabs), texts that roughly handle the image of Judeo-Arab coexistence in the land of Islam — symbol and premise of a possible coexistence in the Middle East — and that present it as a pious image of Épinal [an idealized cliché]. Positions that earn him, at the very least, the incomprehension of the partisans of dialogue, who do not understand why he should publish these texts at that moment, giving so many arguments to the irreducible adversaries of any Israeli-Palestinian dialogue.

Just as certain Tunisian Jews did not understand why he needed to describe precisely the Hara [the Jewish quarter] and not the beautiful avenues of Tunis, so apt to provoke and sustain nostalgia.

Just as certain French Jewish readers wondered why he was painting so painful and so severe a portrait of the Jewish condition, why he was placing it under the footlights when precisely all seemed to be for the best in the best of all possible Frances, and when the custom was to wash one’s dirty linen within the family.

Just as certain leaders of Arab countries, just as certain Israeli leaders, just as certain communal bodies…

All having in common this conviction, strongly engraved, that not all truths are good to tell, and that whoever tells them is a spoilsport of dancing in circles, of thinking in circles.

Victims do not like one to show their scars. They are quite willing to have the crimes of their executioner denounced, but without saying that in which those crimes most essentially, most durably wounded them. And what Memmi has shown is also these traces. Former victims, like formerly colonized peoples, think they have acquired their status in an irremovable manner. Neither the one nor the other can bear having it called into question. They think that it preserves them magically from all danger of injustice, or in any case from all unfortunate judgment.

When he ventures onto this terrain, Memmi nonetheless knows that it is dangerous to touch dreams and myths, the image that peoples have of themselves: One has to be quite imprudent to venture into these zones where fear and hope intermingle, where the apparent constructions of reason rest on foundations that plunge into the collective unconscious and into history… That is nonetheless the only just path, the most worthy assuredly; every man enamored of truth must be a hunter of myths, whatever the dangers he confronts. One may, of course, say to oneself: what people is worthy of the truth? What people can bear it, and if people cannot bear it, why should I persist in speaking of it to them? But is that really to respect one’s people?²

Perhaps it is the analysis that Memmi makes of dependence that is the center of all the preceding approaches. He elaborates the concept of dependence, analyzing its manifestations in every domain of affective, political, and intellectual life — in short, in all the domains where Pascal, again, discovered Diversion at work. For if, in the picture of dependence and of dependences, he presents some that are

easily identifiable, like drugs or alcohol, he presents others that are more subtle, more difficult to perceive: it is not easy to distinguish between dependence upon the group, dependence upon institutions, and dependence upon values;

To be against the current, as Albert Memmi has been able to be, is doubtless to be

capable of taking a step back, of better parrying dependence upon values from the other dependences, and of defending sometimes, against the group, the essential values of that very group.

Michelangelo: The Fall of Man