Biology and the human sciences distinguish, between two populations of individuals, hereditary characteristics (for example, skin color, the morphology of the nose, lips, ears, etc.) and sociocultural characteristics (for example, customs, religion). The racist, who does not respect the line of demarcation between the scientific and the ideological, makes of these hereditary and sociocultural characteristics an indissociable whole, a “race.” The humanist, who respects the data of science in the search for truth, dissociates these characteristics and thus shatters the concept of “race.”
Certainly, if the very notion of race therefore has no scientific significance, racist attitudes and behaviors nonetheless persist. This is why racism must be combated, not only at the level of certain pseudo-scientific interpretations of biological or genetic facts, but also at the level of its manifestations in social and cultural life.
Racists evaluate “differences” as “inequalities,” creating a hierarchy between superior and inferior beings.
Racists evaluate “differences” as “inequalities,” create a hierarchy between superior and inferior beings, and justify the transmission of the social hierarchy, from generation to generation, by claiming that this hierarchization is “natural.” Now these “inequalities,” which are “real,” are not “natural.” These “inequalities” do not exist within man; they exist outside him, in society. These “inequalities” are of social origin. To struggle against racism is therefore above all to struggle against inequalities, and it is in the union between Jews and non-Jews that social justice and dignity are guaranteed. It is not, consequently, between Jews that resemblance is essential, but between members of one and the same social stratum: such is the lesson drawn, for example, from the History of a part of the Jews who immigrated from Central and Eastern Europe. At the end of the last century and in the first quarter of this one, thousands of Jews had fled the discriminations and pogroms that raged in Eastern Europe: they had chosen the France of Victor Hugo, of Zola, and of Anatole France, the only country in Europe that had granted the Jews freedom of worship in 1776 and the principle of civic equality in 1791. Numerous trades, notably in the clothing industry — such as tailors, furriers, bootmakers, leatherworkers — integrated themselves first into a social stratum with which they struggled against inequalities, against exploitation, thanks to the unions: the integration of the immigrant Jews thus passed through participation in the workers’ movement and made each of them the equal of the French citizen, even if many lived clandestinely, that is to say, without identity “papers.”
Sensitized by their own sufferings born of exile, of persecutions, of humiliations, of separations from loved ones, they aspired to a homeland, to a milieu where they would not be strangers, without for all that forgetting Yiddish culture. This adaptation to the country, thanks to solidarity with native-born French Jews and with non-Jews, explains both their struggle against racism within the “Mouvement national contre le racisme” (National Movement Against Racism), the M.N.C.R., and their commitment to the Popular Front or to the Spanish Republican Government, or their engagement in the two Great World Wars and notably in the Resistance. It was in April 1943 that the “Union des Juifs pour la Résistance et l’Entraide” (Union of Jews for Resistance and Mutual Aid), the U.J.R.E., was created, which achieved union with the non-Jewish movements of the Resistance. It also created the “Commissions de l’enfance” (Childhood Commissions), ensuring the safety of children. Before the Liberation, “La Commission Centrale de l’Enfance” (The Central Childhood Commission) was founded to secure the future of the children who had been able to be saved. On this occasion, allow me to congratulate the “Association des Amis de la Commission Centrale de l’Enfance” (Association of Friends of the Central Childhood Commission), which took the initiative of organizing this colloquium.
In this year 1995, the year commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the deportation camps, let us recall that Nazi barbarism cost humanity more than six million victims, of whom more than three million were European Jews. Among the 76,000 Jews deported from France, two-thirds of whom were immigrants, only 2,500 returned. The memory of this genocide must be a weapon against any recurrence. Our duty of memory is to transmit this historical truth from generation to generation. “When one forgets one’s past,” Goethe warns us, “one is condemned to relive it.”
From this brief historical reminder emerges the identity of the “progressive Jew of yesterday” who fought for social progress, against racism and against Nazism: this identity is, in the expression of Jacques Berque, the “historical reference” of the “progressive Jew of today and of tomorrow.” “Identity,” Berque explains, in his Entretiens avec Jean Sur (Conversations with Jean Sur), collected under the beautiful title of his book, “Il reste un avenir” (There Remains a Future), “is a historical notion, and amenable to collective psychology. It holds to the fact that, in the feeling one has, in the definition one gives of oneself and of one’s own, one refers to something: not necessarily a territory, nor a population, nor even a language, but perhaps the loss or absence of all that, and still more the search in common for an end. What counts, in any case, is not the referent of the reference. It is the fact of referring.”
One can share one’s identity all the better for having enriched it in contact with others.
The identities of native-born French Jews, or those from Eastern Europe or the Mediterranean, by birth or by one or several generations, are differentiated according to their respective “references” to History and to the milieu in which they live, but each can find the other again according to the meaning he gives to his life. To define identity thus, by historical and cultural heritage, does not strip away the dialectic of the singular and the universal: one can share one’s identity all the better for having enriched it in contact with others. The identity of each reflects the richness of “the multiple, undulating, and diverse being,” in its often contradictory unity and the transformation of his personality: “A man always gains by being known. He gains in mystery,” quipped Jean Paulhan, who thereby measured the difficulty of the task.
The notion of “race” having shattered, the notion of belonging to a “people” fading behind that of citizenship thanks to integration and assimilation, progressive Jews are not always among those who reduce Jewish identity to confessionalism. Some think, as convinced humanists, that “man bears the entire form of the human condition,” and reveal their identity by recalling Ilya Ehrenburg, who said: “I will say that I am a Jew as long as there
Dossier: Jewish Identities and Modernity is one antisemite on this earth.” Others think that there is “a certain something” that makes them say “I feel Jewish,” according to a subjectivism quite far removed from any scientific approach, but which translates profound feelings thanks to a “reference” revealing their identity: their authenticity being the lived fidelity to this reference.
Since the end of the Second World War, important events have modified the collective consciousness and transformed the identities of many Jews of this Country. The attitude of French Jews toward Israel has never been univocal: there has always been a progressive identity, in solidarity with that of the progressive Israelis, calling for a political solution toward the recognition of the two States, Israeli and Palestinian, within secure borders recognized by the international community. But many Jews did not adhere to this progressive sensibility, not only by reason of an exacerbation of a feeling of loyalty they felt toward Israel — often reinforced by the presence in that country of a loved one — but also by reason of the Zionist policy often in phase with Western policy. Following the collapse of the regimes of the Eastern countries and notably of the U.S.S.R., and by reason of the peace process currently underway, the progressive Jews of France, with their Israeli friends, confirm more than ever their pacifist identity in favor of a political solution, condemning the extremists, both Israeli and Palestinian.
Another event to take into account in the study of the collective consciousness and of Jewish identity is, in the 1960s, the arrival of Jews from North Africa, of French citizenship, with their religious, social, and political traditions and their Judeo-Arab culture, but with their will to integrate into French society in wanting to acquire the French way of life.
At present one observes, among these citizens, that an excess of religious tendencies bordering at times on a certain fundamentalism may, through its particularism, call into question the homogeneity of French society — all the more so as the France of today is confronted with a problem linked to the presence on its soil of a large number of foreigners. By reason of the worsening of the economic crisis and of unemployment, the path of integration, through the workers’ and trade-union movement, is perhaps more difficult for the immigrants of today than for the immigrant Jews of yesterday.
This bespeaks the common interest and the necessary solidarity of Jews and of the minorities issuing from immigration in the face of antisemitism and racism.
Integration is refused them because access to the labor market is blocked. This exclusion from work is perceived as a rejection founded on ethnic and racial criteria: hence the risk of the emergence of communitarian phenomena, with the danger of the formation of ghettos and of the loss of the sense of citizenship. This bespeaks the common interest and the necessary solidarity of Jews and of the minorities issuing from immigration in the face of antisemitism and of today’s anti-immigrant racism.
Identity, as an attachment to a traditional way of life and a belonging to a communal group, is compatible with citizenship. By contrast, all excess, in the form of nationalism or of religious fundamentalism for example, compromises citizenship. It is therefore by struggling against exclusion, for liberty, equality, and fraternity, that the progressive Jew of France, faithful to his memory and to his history, realizes his citizenship together with his identity conquered, lived, and to be transmitted.
F.G.
(This text was the subject of a paper presented at the Colloquium organized by the “Association des Amis de la Commission Centrale de l’Enfance”: “Yesterday, progressive Jews; today: Jews..? What secular Jewish identity is to be built?”.
Paris, La Sorbonne, 11–12 February 1995.)
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