We really cannot go on forever asking ourselves, “Who is a Jew?”, as though there existed some master template, on file somewhere, to which one could, one ought always to refer back, without ever quite getting there!
It is, moreover, a question characteristic of the minority member who, forever dreading drowning in the majority ocean, seeks to cling to some reed on the shore that might save him from the current — without seeing that the majority itself is forever changing too, though with less anguish, it is true.
“Who is a Jew?” “What is a Jew?”
I would like to approach the problem differently. Not only does this single template no longer exist, if it ever did, but change has become necessary and unavoidable; otherwise traditional Judaism will remain stuck in the Middle Ages where it still finds itself today. I have already proposed abandoning the question “Who is a Jew?” in favor of “What is a Jew?” — that is, the real Jew, living today.
What is the contemporary Jew becoming, what has he already become? How can we help him complete his transformation? How can we carry Judaism from the Middle Ages into modernity? Toward this end, I will set out three propositions:
The first is that we must become aware of this stagnation — and denounce it — in which specifically Jewish culture and institutions languish.
The second is that we must lead them out of it, unless we are willing to resign ourselves to this fossilization, if not this degeneration, of traditional Judaism.
The third is that we can: we already glimpse fairly clearly what the indispensable reforms must be.
These three propositions would constitute a kind of Copernican revolution, one that can certainly frighten and raise the feeling of confronting formidable taboos, but they are, it seems to me, the necessary conditions for the passage at last into modernity — that is, into a new fecundity of Judaism.1
That traditional Judaism languishes in a Middle Ages of the spirit and of practice is an indisputable fact, if it will only have the courage to admit it. The number of features of stagnation and obscurantism — features it shares, moreover, with other minority or dominated groups — is striking. For a very long time now, so-called specifically Jewish thought — that is, thought reduced to that of the rabbis (for one must not confuse the thought of Jews in general with rabbinic Judaism, to which we shall return) — has turned in on itself in a timid and sterile posture; wrinkled like an overripe fruit, inedible.
Thus scholasticism, long since consigned by Western thought to the rank of historical curiosities, pursues its course tirelessly among the adepts of rabbinic thought, as though nothing had changed since the redaction of the Talmuds. Hence an obsessional and purely rhetorical exegesis of the traditional texts. While most Christian theologians now agree that these texts have a history, within which they must be placed if one wishes to understand them correctly, the rabbis persist in considering them outside all historical and comparative reference. This reduction gives rise to a veritable interpretive delirium, served by a verbal ingenuity whose virtuosity one hesitates whether to admire or to smile at. Through these exercises in linguistic acrobatics — clever pairings of roots, or even of word fragments — they seem inescapably to confirm traditional thought and to prescribe imperatively some line of conduct. For this whole machine is neither gratuitous nor innocent: it pursues the same apologetic design, like all scholasticism. One never discovers anything in it; one feeds beliefs already established, one confirms conduct fixed since time immemorial, with the sovereign guarantee, reaffirmed once more, of the very word of God. The religious authorities hope thereby to maintain their takeover bid over the Jewish social body.2
For here is the most serious matter: this thought, or pseudo-thought, is consequently totalizing, totalitarian, and repressive. It always has been, it still is: has not the ever-astonishing Israeli chief rabbi and saber-rattler Goren just declared that the philosopher Leibovitch (who is not among my intellectual friendships, but whose concern for the Jewish destiny cannot after all be denied) was “anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist”!3 Even Maimonides, before being consecrated the greatest Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages, first had a quarrel with the orthodox of his day. Of course Baruch Spinoza could not be cited without horror, excommunicated as he was for being a partisan of rational exegesis; Freud would in no way be a Jewish thinker, despite his anguished remarks on antisemitism and his debatable but masterful study of Moses; nor would Einstein, who died a Zionist and who was offered the post of first president of the young state of Israel: he had dared to indulge in a few somersaults on the subject of God instead of devoting his life to exegesis, having probably better things to do; as for the socialist — and often Zionist — thinkers, Moses Hess, the visionary author of Rome and Jerusalem, the subtle Ahad Ha’am, or Gordon, the philosopher of Jewish labor, merit only disdainful allusions.
The mellah of Mogador: Mogador, built in the eighteenth century, very quickly attracted the Jews, who formed an important community there.
In short, anything that is not them, within the line of tradition as they understand it, does not exist. Of course such a philosophy, lagging and frightened, can survive only by closing in on itself. Consequently, whoever places himself outside it is condemned to symbolic death, since the era of institutional excommunications is happily over: “that’s not Jewish! That has no part in Jewish thought!”, and worse — what mere tolerance ought to forbid: “He is not a Jew!”, an accusation leveled not long ago by the chief rabbi of France against one of our young and brilliant writers; did not an exegete recently declare that “the notion of tolerance does not exist in Hebrew”, and since it does not exist in the Texts, it could not exist in the conduct of the contemporary Jew.
We must denounce here a most vicious circle: the orthodox define the Jew in their own way, abstract and narrow-minded, then measure against this yardstick anyone who manifests himself otherwise. It is the bed of Procrustes: they can thus exclude from the community and from Jewish History anyone who does not conform to their norms; it is indeed the herem that continues: these jugglers of words are too often also fanatics.4
The most curious thing about the affair is that a conception so scandalous, and so catastrophic for what it claims to save, provokes only periodic lukewarm revolts, if not a flabby complacency. We scarcely see today the equivalent of the Haskalah’s movement of emancipation; no contemporary Mendelssohn has taken a frank distance from the rabbis and from rabbinic doctrines. Which is surely a sign that the emancipation of Jewish thought and culture is far from complete. I have already shown, more generally with regard to dominated groups or to groups facing excessive historical difficulties, how they cling to their traditions, erected into a system of refuge-values and defense-institutions. We see a fresh illustration of this in what is happening in the lands of Islam. Which explains, without justifying it, why the pretexts for changing nothing are so numerous:
There are those who believe in neither God nor the devil but think it tactically shrewder to humor the religious. Such was the case of the great Ben Gurion, who was a partisan of a status quo, at least during the building of the Jewish State. A position inherited by Shimon Peres, who was his collaborator and who is said to have declared recently that “secularism is not in conformity with Jewish tradition.” Behind the cultural screen one glimpses electoral calculations and economic motives: many of the devout are to be found among the donors. One may wonder whether the price paid for these maneuvers is not exorbitant: Ben Gurion had to leave a large part of the educational system in the hands of the rabbinate! to concede to it the maintenance of personal status, that is, mastery over the private life even of unbelievers! We have seen once again, just recently, the disastrous consequences of this for Israeli politics.
Unanimism is the alibi of immobility — that is, of safeguarding the most reactionary.
There are those — a subcategory of the preceding — who advocate consensus on the grounds that any criticism would be harmful to the community, which must remain united before its enemies. But on what basis, this consensus? Why must it be an alignment with the most backward positions? Why not on the basis of secularism, today the common denominator of all Jews? (and indeed of all peoples). Leaving believers, of course, free to live their faith and their practices as they please. Unanimism is the alibi of immobility — that is, of safeguarding the most reactionary.
There are those who profess a perfectly positive mode of thought but who prudently concede the existence of “another domain” in which logic and reasoning would be inoperative. But why? Everything has shown us so far that thought is one and that the laws of nature are valid everywhere. Why this exception if not out of complaisance? What practitioner — a physician, for example — would consent to reason within the whole of his domain otherwise than according to common sense and clear logic? What chemist would admit that magic still governs some phenomenon?
There are those who note, rightly, that many of our behaviors are dictated by the more or less unconscious fear of affronting some taboo; they conclude that it is better not to upset people with overly unsettling analyses. This is a psychotherapeutic attitude, legitimate in a consulting room and before a disturbed individual; but is it really contributing to the collective health of a people? And what becomes of respect for the truth? Is it certain that this is the best policy?
Come now, these are nothing but paltry alibis for continuing to touch nothing at all! Must one then resign oneself, in order to remain a Jew, to pretending to take at face value the clerical fables, which were at first mere fables written by mere authors, before being chosen and promoted to sacralization by the priests? Must one believe that the pretty legend of the dry-shod crossing of the Red Sea is the account of an authentic miracle?5 Must one continue to let oneself be imprisoned in this tight web of superstitions and rites, often borrowed from neighboring peoples over the course of a history so long and so full of hazards?
Let no one here pull on us the trick of respect and the danger of change! Certainly, all change is costly; obstacles are not lacking on the path of this necessary evolution; but stagnation costs even more. I will cite only two examples, but striking ones:
First failure of rabbinic thought: to interpret the Shoah in the slightest degree.
The first is the failure — moving in a sense — of rabbinic thought to interpret the Shoah in the slightest degree, in which it saw only one more mystery; which is the traditional way of suggesting a powerlessness of explanation. It is true that certain secular people, distraught before the immensity of the disaster, reason in the same way, but one may wonder whether they are not themselves victims of rabbinic influence. In both cases, this sterility has disastrous consequences: one gives up the patient search for the real causes of Jewish oppression and misfortune; and worse: in preventing oneself from understanding, one gives up foreseeing. The rabbinate, it will be recalled, had already missed, for the same reasons, the other great contemporary Jewish event: the movement of national liberation, Zionism, and its concretization in the State of Israel. Before trying to recover it in theological form; in short, from one theology to another: the first combated Zionism in the name of God, the second claims it in the name of God.
Second failure of rabbinic thought and practice: mixed marriages.
The second failure of rabbinic thought and practice concerns mixed marriages. Although exogamy is not a phenomenon peculiar to Jews, this is not to deny its problems, individual and collective, specific to Jews. But, precisely, the importance of the debate that imposes itself today upon Jewishness makes the rabbinate’s attitude particularly derisory, and dangerous. Without entering into the detail of statistics by country and social milieu, it is not an exaggeration to say that, roughly speaking, half of contemporary young Jews contract a mixed marriage. What does the rabbinate say? It contents itself with condemning, placing itself once more outside History; which would not be so serious if this rigor did not, here again, have disastrous consequences. Refusing — sometimes with cruelty — to recognize the children of mixed marriages, the rabbinate deprives its people of a considerable contribution, at a time when it has such need of it after the enormous bloodletting of the last war. Into the trapdoor go the children of so many Russian, American, or French Jews!6 The devout frequently reproach the secular with a lesser concern for the Jewish destiny: but who, then, makes the better stewardship of it? Those who, clinging desperately to a frozen system, reject all those who no longer share the traditional beliefs? Or those who, partisans of openness, wish for the enrichment of the people by all its living forces? If one were permitted to jest on so grave a matter, the rabbinic solution, ever true to itself, can be summed up in this formula: “Be quiet and pray!”7
The problem is no longer whether we must change, but how we shall change, how we can contribute to this inescapable evolution.
Happily, here again, the tides of History regularly sweep away the clerical diktats! And the Jewish people is already no longer that fossil, helpless before its destiny, above all since the emergence of a Jewish State! The problem is no longer whether we must change, but how we shall change, how we can contribute to this inescapable evolution. No doubt we shall first have to refuse certain forms of blackmail, exorcising certain fears; then put forward a few positive suggestions.
The first of these forms of blackmail, with the fear that results from it, is emotional blackmail: “So you want to deprive us of our heritage! Of our rites!”. Of course not, not at all. No one has the right to deprive anyone of his emotional pleasures, source of small joys and of poetry, most often of infantile and parental origin. This is not the place to ask what the share of emotion is in the notions of roots or identity: it is enormous; but, except where it is here gravely naive and where, for another, a need is scarcely open to discussion. If you feel like celebrating rosh hashanah, hanukkah, or pesach, if you want to rejoice at purim or to commemorate gravely some funereal memory, private or public mourning such as the Destruction of the Temple, no one has the right to call you to account. All peoples, all groups, including minority ones, have rites — that is, in sum, shared manifestations and habits. But the religious authorities further demand that they be sacred, that is, ahistorical, absolute, and binding. The French collectively celebrate the Fourteenth of July, but if a Frenchman refuses to do so he incurs neither exclusion nor blame from his community; this is because the French, for their part, have on the whole left the Middle Ages. The same holds for symbols and myths. Of course, if one takes the trouble to interpret them, one can find in them some truths about their authors, individual or collective. But, precisely, one must interpret them, with the help of all the historical and linguistic disciplines, and above all not take them literally, nor seek in them some transcendent mystery. In any case, emotion must not turn into glue that paralyzes the freedom of judgment and conduct. These emotional attachments, as one observes every day, alas, lead sometimes to the worst political aberrations.
The second form of blackmail is that of the threat of cultural emptiness; it rests on a narrow and erroneous conception of culture: “If you reject rabbinic culture, what will be left?”. What will be left is… Jewish culture! Judaism in the making, the Jewish people, despite the denials and exclusions of the orthodox. Of course, here again, as with cultural habits, it is not a matter of refusing the achievements of the rabbinic sages, in matters of morality for example8; but rabbinism is obviously no longer — if it ever was — the totality of Judaism, far from it, quite the contrary. Let us dare to say it: it is in what is refused by the traditionalists that the most fertile is to be found. Can one doubt that Spinoza was the greatest Jewish philosopher of all time? The greatest Jewish historian of modern times, the most innovative, was a secular man, Graetz; another secular historian, Dubnow, framed the theory of the reborn Jewish nationalism. And it continues; there exist today a good number of Jewish historians for whom theology plays no role. The Nobel laureate in literature Isaac Bashevis Singer, who gave a masterful account of the life of the Jewish communities of Central Europe, also — beyond his nostalgias — denounced their superstitions and their low-grade mysticism. Albert Cohen, the most notable of the Jewish writers of the Mediterranean, Edmond Jabès, the finest of our contemporary poets, were agnostics. The same goes for the visual artists, Chagall or Soutine. To say nothing of all those who, without openly declaring their Jewishness, could be regarded as Jewish artists or thinkers; I have cited Freud — one would also have to mention many great names of psychoanalysis. One would have, in short, to hold of culture a conception other than that of the orthodox: a culture that expresses the totality of the Jewish condition and not the strict teachings of rabbinic tradition.9
Ghetto of Vilna: The street of the butcher shops, seen from the street of the Gaon of Vilna.
The third form of blackmail, finally, is the one that accuses of betrayal anyone who does not think and act, even partially, like his group; that demands an automatic and blind solidarity. What havoc it wreaks among every minority or threatened people! What a gnawing guilt among its clerks, which the orthodox know how to play upon skillfully! Demanding the coincidence between belonging to the group and strict exclusive allegiance to their conception of common values. Now, cultural creation, unable to accommodate itself to this corset, the Jewish artists and thinkers instinctively skirt the obstacle and prefer to deny their cumbersome Jewishness: another disaster of the rabbinic grip, which further heightens the impression of cultural emptiness.
How, at last, to pass from the Middle Ages to modernity?
I have given the impression of speaking only of another conception of culture, but this other culture obviously presupposes another politics. We shall indeed have to manage one day to break this alliance of the notables and the priests that governs the near-totality of our communities in the diaspora, and that has perpetuated itself in a complaisant cohabitation, in Israel itself, among all the successive governments, including the Labor ones and the religious ones, right into the administrative bodies. We shall indeed have to reconsider seriously the condition of women, education, and the school, imperatives common to all peoples today.
For one will have noted at last, I hope, that most of these reactive mechanisms are not peculiar to Jews. This is no accident; they characterize, in fact, comparable conditions, that of contemporary Arabs for example. Jews are not the only ones confronted with this grave problem: how to get out of a system of religious encystment that protected them and stifled them at one and the same time? that sterilized all search for a more open and therefore more fertile culture10? But this very generality confirms this analysis and the urgency, for all, of an adequate solution. How, at last, to pass from the Middle Ages to modernity?
To reconcile each heritage with the universal.
One glimpses the answer as well, precisely because it is valid for all peoples who suffer from the same deficiencies: one must at last set about reconciling each heritage with the universal. Neither escaping toward an abstract universalism that ignores the difficulties of one’s own community, nor clinging to a particularism so exclusive as no longer to see its relations — henceforth unavoidable — to the world. At the same stroke one will put an end to the schizophrenia of the contemporary Jewish clerk, forced to split himself between two well-separated domains: that of his activities as expert or technician in the city, and that of his traditional beliefs and taboos11; that of his Jewish belonging and that of his various belongings, majority and then universal. In short, one will at last see the modern Jew come into being.12
A.M.
NOTES:
“A new fecundity of Judaism”: I already noted in La libération du Juif (Gallimard, 1968) that only desacralization could restore some fecundity to Jewish culture. In short, a desacralization of thought and conduct would be needed, as well as a declericalization of the institutions.↩︎
The most amusing thing is the pedantry of the dogmatists, all the greater as their knowledge is narrow; and exclusive: they make more of an obscure rabbi from an obscure locality of Central Europe than of Descartes or Kant.↩︎
The same Goren issued a call for the assassination of Arafat; in sum a “fatwa” in the manner of Khomeini, which proves that when Jewish fundamentalists have the power and the opportunity, they hesitate no more than other fundamentalists to resort to violence. See again the drama of Hebron where, as one recalls, a Jewish fundamentalist discharged his weapon upon Muslim faithful at prayer.↩︎
“The jugglers of words”: See A.M., La question du sens, L’Arche, 1994, and À contre-courants, Le Nouvel objet, 1993.↩︎
Of course the legends and myths can and must be interpreted; one will often find in them interesting information about a people, above all about its imaginary; but no differently than for any literary work. Likewise for the symbols, much used to valorize at present. In sum, here again it is a matter of desacralizing the texts as well as the institutions.↩︎
A chief rabbi of Paris dared to qualify mixed marriages as a second Auschwitz.↩︎
“Be quiet and pray”: Not only did rabbinic doctrine never save a single Jew from the stake or from the Shoah, but it prevented action: the Yom Kippur war nearly carried off the State of Israel because the Israelis were intimately persuaded that no one would think of attacking them on the sacred day of Kippur. Already at Safed the Jewish population of the town had let itself be massacred rather than take up arms on a Saturday.↩︎
Let no one make against me here, for the umpteenth time, this bad case: I have never written that a cultural heritage was to be rejected wholesale (see in particular La libération du Juif, final part); it is in general the point of departure of cultural renewals, but it must be submitted to criticism.↩︎
“Another conception of culture.” It would be amusing to ask them, within so narrow a conception of culture, what they make of the Israeli writers, most often agnostics. The same for the superb Yiddish-language literature.↩︎
“Getting out of the Middle Ages.” It is for having separated the profane from the sacred — despite the tenacious resistance, still ongoing, of the churches — that Western civilization was able to leave the Middle Ages, that it benefited from so prodigious a flourishing of the sciences and techniques.↩︎
Has it been sufficiently remarked that these problems scarcely arise, or not at all, for the scientific and technical aspects of culture?↩︎
It is a matter, in sum, within our conception, of making of the Jews at last a people like the others — neither a scapegoat nor a people of exception, which is the exact reverse of the same.↩︎