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!
A characteristically minoritarian preoccupation, moreover — one that, forever fearing it will drown in the majority ocean, grasps at some reed on the shore that might save it from the current; without seeing that the majority itself changes ceaselessly, 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 unequivocal; failing which, traditional Judaism will remain in the Middle Ages where it still finds itself today. I have already proposed dropping 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 bring Judaism out of the Middle Ages and into modernity? To this end, I will put forward 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 if we do not wish to resign ourselves to this fossilization, or indeed to the degeneration of traditional Judaism.
The third is that we are able to: we already glimpse fairly clearly what the indispensable reforms must be.
These three propositions would constitute a kind of Copernican revolution, one that may certainly alarm, may stir the sense of confronting fearsome taboos, but they are, it seems to me, the obligatory conditions of the long-awaited passage into modernity — that is, into a new fecundity for Judaism.1
That traditional Judaism vegetates in a Middle Ages of the mind and of practices is an indisputable fact, if it will only have the courage to admit it. The number of features of stagnation and obscurantism — shared, moreover, with other minority or dominated groups — is striking. For a very long time now, so-called specifically Jewish thought, that is to say, thought reduced to that of the rabbis (for one must not confuse the thought of Jews in general with rabbinic Judaism — we shall return to this), has been turning in circles in a timorous and sterile posture; wrinkled like an overripe fruit, inedible.
Thus scholasticism, long ago 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. Whereas most Christian theologians now agree that these texts have a history, in which it is proper to situate them 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 either to admire or to smile at. By means of these exercises in linguistic acrobatics, of cunning juxtapositions of roots, or even of word-fragments,
the religious hope thereby to maintain their takeover bid over the Jewish social body. 2
For here is the gravest matter: this thought, or pseudo-thought, is consequently totalizing, totalitarian, and repressive. It always has been, it still is: has not the ever-astonishing Goren, Israel’s chief rabbi and saber-rattler, just declared that the philosopher Leibowitch (who is not among my intellectual friendships, but whose concern for the Jewish destiny cannot for all that be denied) was “anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist”! 3 Even Maimonides, before being consecrated the greatest Jewish thinker
The mellah of Mogador: Mogador, built in the eighteenth century, very quickly drew the Jews, who formed there a large community.
. 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 as any 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
of the Middle Ages, first had a falling-out with the orthodox of his own time. Of course one could not cite without horror Baruch de Spinoza, excommunicated because he was a partisan of rational exegesis; Freud would in no way be a Jewish thinker, despite his anguished notations on antisemitism and his study — debatable but masterful — of Moses; nor Einstein, who died a Zionist and to whom it was proposed that he become the first president of the young state of Israel:
he had dared to indulge in a few capers concerning 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 et Jérusalem (Rome and Jerusalem), the subtle Ahad Ha’am, or Gordon, the philosopher of Jewish labor, merit only disdainful allusions.
In short, everything that is not them, in the line of tradition as they understand it, does not exist. Of course, such a philosophy, laggard and fearful, 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 is not Jewish! It is not part of Jewish thought!”, and worse — what simple tolerance ought to forbid: “He is not a Jew!”, an accusation hurled not long ago by the chief rabbi of France against one of our young and brilliant writers; did not an exegete recently declare: “the notion of tolerance does not exist in Hebrew,” for 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, 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 meet their norms; it is indeed the herem [ban, excommunication] that continues: these jugglers of words are too often fanatics as well. 4
The strangest part of the affair is that a conception so scandalous, and so catastrophic for what it claims to save, raises only periodic lukewarm revolts, if not a soft complacency. We hardly see today the equivalent of the emancipation movement of the Haskalah [the Jewish Enlightenment]; no contemporary Mendelssohn has taken a frank distance from the rabbis and rabbinic doctrines. Which is surely the sign that the emancipation of Jewish thought and culture is far from complete. I have already shown, more generally, with respect to dominated groups or those facing excessive historical difficulties, how they cling to their traditions, erected into a system of refuge-values and defense-institutions. We see a new illustration of this in what is happening in the lands of Islam. Which explains, without justifying, why the pretexts for keeping everything unchanged are so numerous:
There are those who believe neither in God nor in the devil, but who think it tactically shrewder to humor the religious. Such was the case of the great Ben-Gurion, a partisan of the 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 to say, mastery over the private life of even the unbelievers! We have seen yet again, lately, the disastrous consequences of this for Israeli politics.
Unanimism is the alibi of immobilism, that is to say, of the safeguarding of all that is most reactionary.
There are those — a sub-category 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 on an
alignment with the most retrograde positions? Why not on the basis of secularism, today the common denominator of all Jews? (and indeed of all peoples). Leaving believers free, of course, to live their faith and their practices as they please. Unanimism is the alibi of immobilism, that is to say, of the safeguarding of all that is most reactionary.
There are those who profess a perfectly positive thought but who prudently concede the existence of “another domain,” where logic and reasoning would be inoperative. Why so? Everything has shown us thus 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 field, otherwise than according to good sense and clear logic? What chemist would admit that magic continued to govern some phenomenon?
There are those who observe, rightly, that many of our forms of conduct are dictated by the fear, more or less unconscious, of flouting some taboo; from this they conclude that it is better not to upset people with analyses too unsettling. This is a psychotherapeutic attitude, legitimate in a clinic and in the presence of a disturbed individual; but is this really contributing to the collective health of a people? And what becomes of respect for truth? Is it certain that this is the best policy?
Come now, these are nothing but paltry alibis for continuing to touch nothing! Must one then resign oneself, in order to remain Jewish, 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 of the danger of change! Certainly, all change is costly; obstacles do not lack along the path of this necessary evolution; but stagnation costs dearer still. I will cite only two examples, but glaring ones:
The first failure of rabbinic thought: to interpret the Shoah in even the slightest degree.
The first is the failure — moving, in a sense — of rabbinic thought to interpret the Shoah in even the slightest degree, in which it saw only one more mystery; which is the traditional way of suggesting an impotence of explanation. It is true that certain secular thinkers, distraught before the immensity of the disaster, reason in the same manner, but one may wonder whether they are not themselves victims of rabbinic influence. In both cases, this sterility has disastrous consequences: one renounces patiently seeking the real causes of Jewish oppression and misfortune; and worse: preventing oneself from understanding, one renounces foreseeing. The rabbinate, it will be recalled, had already missed, for the same reasons, the other great contemporary Jewish event: the national liberation movement, Zionism, and its concrete realization in the State of Israel. Before trying to recover it in theological form; in sum, from one theology to another: the first combated Zionism in the name of God, the second claims it in the name of God.
The 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, it is not a question of denying its problems, individual and collective, specific to Jews. But, precisely, the importance of the debate that imposes itself today upon Jewry renders the attitude of the rabbinate particularly derisory, and dangerous. Without entering into the detail of statistics according to country and social milieu, it is no 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 too have disastrous consequences. Refusing to recognize — cruelly at times — the children of mixed marriages, the rabbinate deprives its people of a considerable contribution, when it has such need of it after the enormous bloodletting of the last war. Down the trapdoor with 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, manages it best? Those who, clinging desperately to a frozen system, reject all who no longer share the traditional beliefs? Or those who, partisans of openness, wish the enrichment of the people by all its living forces? If one were permitted to jest in a domain so grave, the rabbinic solution, ever true to itself, may be summed up in this formula: “Be quiet and pray!”7
The problem is no longer whether we must change, but how we will change, how we can contribute to this ineluctable evolution.
Happily, here too, the floods of History regularly sweep away the clerical diktats! For 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 will change, how we can contribute to this ineluctable evolution. No doubt, we must first refuse a few forms of blackmail, exorcising a few 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 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 part emotion plays in the notions of roots or identity: it is enormous; but, except where it is here gravely naïve, and where, for another person, a need scarcely admits of 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 minorities, have rites — that is to say, in sum, common manifestations and habits. But the religious demand in addition that these be sacred, that is to say, ahistorical, absolute, and binding. The French collectively celebrate the 14th of July, but if a Frenchman refuses, 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 may find in them a few truths about their authors, individual or collective. But, precisely, one must interpret them, with the aid of all the historical and linguistic disciplines, and above all not take them at their word, nor seek in them some transcendent mystery. In any case, emotion must not
turn into glue, paralyzing the freedom of judgment and of conduct. These emotional attachments, as we observe every day alas, sometimes lead to the worst political aberrations.
The second blackmail is that of the threat of a cultural void; it rests on a cramped and erroneous conception of culture: “If you reject rabbinic culture, what will remain?” There will remain… Jewish culture! Judaism in the making, the Jewish people, despite the denials and exclusions of the orthodox. Of course, here too, as with the cultural habits, it is not a question of refusing the achievements of the rabbinic sages, in matters of morality for example 8; but rabbinism is obviously no longer, if it ever was, the totality of Judaism — far from it, on the contrary. Let us dare to say it: it is in what is refused by the traditionalists that the most fecund is to be found. Can one doubt that Spinoza was the greatest Jewish philosopher of all
Ghetto of Vilna: the street of the butcher shops, seen from the street of the Gaon of Vilna.
the Jewish culture that has never ceased to elaborate itself throughout all the History of time? The greatest Jewish historian of modern times, the most innovative, was a
layman, Graetz; another lay historian, Dubnow, framed the theory of the reborn Jewish nationalism. And this continues; there exist today a good number of Jewish historians in whom theology plays no role. The Nobel laureate in literature, Isaac Bashevis Singer, who masterfully rendered the life of the Jewish communities of Central Europe, also denounced — beyond his nostalgias — their superstitions and their second-rate mysticism. Albert Cohen, the most notable of the Jewish writers of the Mediterranean, Edmond Jabès, the best of our contemporary poets, were agnostics. Likewise for the visual artists, Chagall or Soutine. Not to mention all those who, without openly declaring their Jewishness, could be considered Jewish artists or thinkers; I have cited Freud — one would also have to mention many great names of psychoanalysis. One would finally have to hold of culture another conception than that of the orthodox: a culture that expresses the totality of the Jewish condition and not the strict teachings of rabbinic tradition. 9
The third blackmail, finally, is the one that accuses of treason anyone who does not think and act, even in part, as his group does; that demands an automatic and blind solidarity. What ravages it provokes in every minority or threatened people! What gnawing guilt in its clerics, on which the orthodox know how to play so skillfully! Who demand the coincidence between belonging to the group and the strict exclusivity of their conception of the common values. Now, cultural creation, being 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 increases the impression of a cultural void.
How, at last, to pass from the Middle Ages to modernity?
I have appeared to speak only of another conception of culture, but this other culture obviously presupposes another politics. We will 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 and the religious ones, even into the administrative bodies. We will 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 reactional mechanisms are not peculiar to Jews. This is no accident; they characterize, in effect, comparable conditions, that of contemporary Arabs for example. Jews are not the only ones confronted with this grave problem: how to emerge from a system of religious encystment, which protected and at the same time smothered them? Which sterilized all search for a more open and therefore more fecund culture 10? 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 patrimony with the universal.
One glimpses the answer too, precisely because it is valid for all the peoples who suffer from the same deficiencies: one must at last set oneself to reconciling each patrimony 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 henceforth unequivocal relations with the world. One will thereby put an end to the schizophrenia of the contemporary Jewish cleric,
forced to split himself according to two well-separated domains: that of his activities as an expert or technician in the city, and that of his traditional beliefs and taboos 11; that of his Jewish belonging and that of his various belongings, majoritarian and then universal. In short, one will at last see the modern Jew be born 12.
A.M.
NOTES:
“A new fecundity for Judaism”: I already noted, in La libération du Juif (The Liberation of the Jew), Gallimard, 1968, that desacralization alone could restore some fecundity to Jewish culture. In brief, what would be needed is a desacralization of thought and conduct, as well as a declericalization of institutions.↩︎
The most amusing thing is the pedantry of the dogmatists, all the greater for their knowledge being cramped 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 the other fundamentalists to resort to violence. See again the drama of Hebron where, it will be recalled, a Jewish fundamentalist discharged his weapon upon Muslim faithful at prayer.↩︎
“The jugglers of words”: See A.M., La question du sens (The Question of Meaning), L’Arche, 1994, and À contre-courants (Against the Currents), Le Nouvel Objet, 1993.↩︎
Of course 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 symbols, which are much valued 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 characterize mixed marriages as a second Auschwitz.↩︎
“Be quiet and pray”: Not only has rabbinic doctrine never saved a single Jew from the stake or from the Shoah, but it has prevented action: the Yom Kippur war nearly carried off the State of Israel because the Israelis were intimately persuaded that no one would think to attack 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.↩︎
“Another conception of culture.” It would be amusing to ask them, given so narrow a conception of culture, what they make of the Israeli writers, most often agnostics. The same for the superb literature in the Yiddish tongue.↩︎
Let no one bring against me here, for the nth time, this bad case: I have never written that a cultural heritage was to be rejected wholesale (see in particular La libération du Juif, last part); it is in general the point of departure of cultural renewals, but it must be submitted to criticism.↩︎
“Getting out of the Middle Ages.” It is by having separated the profane from the sacred — despite the tenacious resistance, still current, of the churches — that Western civilization was able to leave the Middle Ages, that it benefited from so prodigious a surge 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, in our conception, of at last making of the Jews a people like the others — neither a scapegoat nor a people of exception, which is its exact reverse.↩︎