Jews and Arabs, rhythms of integration.
by Izio Rosenman.
What can be the contribution of a secular Jew to this debate?
One may take support from the historical experience of the Jews, and in particular of the Jews of France, in order to attempt to draw out a certain number of questions.
Hannah Arendt said, in a study on Jewish History, that the task of the Jews in the modern world was to “weave the Jewish genius into the fabric of European culture.”
This phrase could thus characterize what might be, for Jews as for Muslims, the success of an integration into European society within the framework of an open laïcité [secularism, the strict separation of religion from public and state institutions]. What would be the conditions of such a weaving?
I would like first to underline a few aspects of laïcité and of the problems it raises in relation to the social.
Institutional laïcité, or the laïcité of the Republic, is the one formulated in laws. It translates the neutrality of the State in religious matters. It is the heritage of the law of 1904, separating State and Church — or rather Churches — and translates itself notably in matters of schooling. The contribution of this institutional framework need no longer be underlined, as is attested by the very great sensitivity of the whole population the moment one tries to touch it; but the events of recent years have also shown that this framework cannot always suffice.
There is also what I will call structural laïcité, or the laïcité of a society, which is in no law or codified text, and touches the very foundations of society, namely the secularization of societies in the modern world, that is to say the fact that religion has ceased to be the foundation of them. This fact manifests itself in many aspects of life in society, beginning with power, and notably in what touches education and family life, culture and, more generally, the nature of what constitutes social cohesion. Here it is no longer a question of a framework, but of a process; which recalls that one must take account of the time factor.
This legitimating power may enter into conflict with the laws of the State, or with the free choice of belonging made by the individual.
Finally, and depending on this second aspect, there is the question of legitimating power within groups, and this concerns, acutely, minority groups. It is here a question of the symbolic dimension, whose effect on the psychic life of individuals is essential. Power that institutes, or legitimates, the identity of individuals; power, therefore, to include or to exclude individuals within groups: a role that religion held, and still holds in certain cases. This dimension seems to me fundamental for minorities plunged into a majority culture, for in these groups, when they have no common linguistic base, religion still often constitutes the cement of unity. Indeed, religion is the most visible of what distinguishes them from the majority group. The struggles for the power of legitimating identity within groups are not only struggles for power, but also have strong consequences on the individual experience and the destiny of individuals.
This legitimating power, which therefore often still belongs to the religious, may enter into conflict with the laws of the State, or with the free choice of belonging made by the individual.
Finally, on a more global plane, and touching societies in transition toward modernity, but also minorities centered on religion insofar as it constitutes their difference, the central question is to know whether they will be capable of transforming the religious into culture, thus opening the way for individuals to find freely their place within the minority groups, without having to find themselves in the impossible situation of having to choose between an identity integrated into a collective dimension but closed, and an identity open but empty because having renounced its own past.
In the modern world the Jews, like the other peoples, have followed the process of the secularization of societies.
This problematic, which seems to me important in the modern world, I would like to illustrate through the Jewish historical experience, in showing that it inscribes itself in a history of societies and of mentalities; and to pose the question of whether it is still pertinent for Jews as for Muslims.
The Jewish historical experience, in its ancient structure, already in the Bible, knew a tripartition of power, a partition of power that is at the foundation of laïcité in modern Europe: division of power between that of the kings, of the priests, and of the prophets, powers that at times coexist and at times confront one another — the one being political power, the other purely religious power, and the last, that of the prophets, which one might call the power of ethical exigency, or the power of contestation of the established powers.
Concerning this period, an aside:
Perhaps one of the historical changes that have long affected Judaism and the Jews consists in the fact that for a long time they have lived as minorities within majorities, which stripped religion of its political power and of the potential violence associated with all uncontrolled power. This is what makes it so that the Herem [ban, excommunication], by which Spinoza was excluded from the Jewish community of Amsterdam — already at the time a very rare procedure — no longer exists. The experience of being a minority is perhaps still too recent for the Muslims, and the existence, in the Arab-Muslim countries, of authoritarian political regimes of Islamic inspiration too present, still allowing the fatwa to exist, for the end of this road toward secularization to be already visible.
In the modern world the Jews, like the other peoples, have followed the process of the secularization of societies which, in France, inscribes this power that legitimates the system of belonging within the republic, citizenship, and the nation.
This process of secularization began among the Jews from the Age of Enlightenment, before the French Revolution that would emancipate the Jews of France and often, in their wake, the Jews of Europe.
There was thus, from Mendelssohn on, the birth of the Haskalah, which corresponded to the opening of the ghettos, and opened Jewish societies onto the world, both from the economic and the cultural point of view, announcing a change in the unique role that religion held there as legitimating power and cement of unity. One may date the birth of a Jewish laïcité from this period, even if the term did not yet exist.
Dossier: Jewish Identities and Modernity
It developed from the nineteenth century, in France with the citizenship acquired by the Jews, which permitted them to participate fully in French political, social, economic, and cultural life, while their status as a group continued, since the Revolution and Napoleon, to define them as a religious group; that is to say, without collective rights other than religious rights; religion being, of course, considered a private affair. One need only recall the famous declaration of the Count of Clermont-Tonnerre: “everything to the Jews as individuals, nothing as a nation.” It is still officially under this regime that we live: the Consistory, and its Chief Rabbi of France, being considered by the public authorities as representing the Jews, who would be no more than a religious community of this country, whereas in reality the Jews in France are an extremely diversified community as regards their identity options, the CRIF doubtless reflecting far more the reality of things.
In Eastern Europe, where the major part of the Jewish people was gathered, the secularization of Jewish society came about through adherence to ideologies or to political movements such as the Bund, Zionism, and other revolutionary movements, and through the cultural production linked to them. And these phenomena considerably weakened the pivotal role that religion had until then held in Jewish identity.
In the contemporary world, Jewish identity is shattered into a very great diversity of modalities — religious, historical, linguistic, philosophical.
Yet while this secularization was weakened, and in part called into question by the Shoah, through a complex play of survivors’ guilts, the historical achievements of that secularization were inscribed in contemporary Jewish identity. In particular, a complex relation was elaborated between collective memory and the historically transmitted culture of the Jewish people. Indeed a large part of this was transmitted, for long centuries, in the form of religious culture. But over time this religious dimension changed into culture, and this is a process that is still underway.
Until the end of the nineteenth century the integration of the Jews of France thus came about under the banner of the Emancipation given by the French Revolution, which produced the French Israelite, a citizen abroad and a Jew at home. Things were going to change, as were the modalities of integration, with the arrival of the Jews from the East.
1. How did the integration of the Jews arriving in France come about?
One must see that for a century the majority of this immigration came in successive waves: before the Second World War, essentially from Poland, then from Russia, and from Romania, then from Germany, with the rise of Nazism. This immigration was in large part non-religious, and had at once an experience of political and collective identity-expression attached to the Yiddish language.
To propose to the Jews of France identity models alternative to the religious model; models in which identity takes root in Jewish history and culture.
Laïcité, thanks to the school, was a decisive factor in the integration of the Jews in France; far more so than the synagogue, which had doubtless played a certain role fifty years earlier for the French Israelites. Came the Spanish war, then the World War, and the Jews, in particular those originating from the East, engaged themselves massively both in the International Brigades and, in 1940, in the French Army; and from the birth of the Vichy regime and its collaborationist and anti-Jewish persecution policy, the Jews engaged themselves in the Resistance, forming for example the hard core of the FTP-MOI1, the political parties and the unions playing a powerful role in this integration.
This period saw the birth of the CRIF, the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (Representative Council of the Jewish Institutions of France), the first collective body of political representation that was secular, whose birth marked an important breach in the official definition that had been given of the Jews since the beginning of the nineteenth century, as a religious population, for the CRIF brought together religious Jews (the Consistory) and non-religious Jews issuing from the MOI.
While the integration of these prewar waves was being completed, the process of decolonization came to its end, producing in its turn the massive arrival of the Jews of North Africa, who profoundly modified the face of the Jewish community. For these Jews came from countries where religion — whether it was Judaism or Islam — still played an important role. This group manifests a new dynamism linked to a strong affirmation of identity.
To this secular leadership, embodied by the CRIF, there are resistances.
At this very moment one witnesses a forcing on the part of the Consistory to retake control of the collective and official expression of the Jewish community of France. In part in reaction to this phenomenon, in particular when it takes on the face of a certain rigorist fundamentalism, and in part for reasons of a desire for non-religious affirmation of identity, there have arisen in recent years these secular Jewish associations which — a new phenomenon — define themselves as such. These groups try to propose to the Jews of France identity models alternative to the religious model; models in which identity takes root in History and Jewish culture.
2. Communitarianism and fundamentalism.
The confrontation with fundamentalism, within the groups, evidently bears on the guilt of individuals, but also calls upon their capacity to hold a minority position within their own group, and to define their belonging by History or by culture in a voluntary movement, rather than by the religious, in a movement of submission.
A rupture that pushes the individual toward a communitarianism of the fundamentalist type.
Indeed, the destruction of the social bond such as it could manifest itself in the conviviality of the small closed societies of the past — societies of belonging that defined a rigid framework for the individual — through the development of modern industrial and post-industrial societies, has the effect of slowing the process of secularization itself. For this rupture pushes the individual toward a communitarianism of the fundamentalist type. The latter claims, on the basis of the rejection of the global society, to reestablish an order in which the bonds between individuals will be rewoven; but this will be, this time, under the yoke of a law (Sharia or Torah, applied to the letter) that no longer leaves much liberty or initiative to the individual defined as a member of this religious community.
Fundamentalism, which thus claims to liberate the individual from this society, in reality encloses him in an even greater straitjacket, where the individual loses all liberty of judgment, and thus not only abolishes two centuries of emancipation, but also reduces the chances of one day attaining personal liberty.
How far fundamentalism can lead, we see dramatic illustrations of it before our eyes: in Algeria, but also recently the massacre at Hebron, by a fanatic Jew, of several dozen Muslims at prayer; the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin (and I can only repeat here, as a Jew, how much such acts, perpetrated by Jews, revolt and wound me); and above all, of course, the dreadful series of attacks that have just bereaved our very soul.
3. The stakes of laïcité for Jews and for Muslims.
The stakes that laïcité represents in Europe for the twenty-first century are, it seems to me, those of the passage from the religious to the cultural, as the foundation of life in common, in France as in Europe; for there too a secularization of societies will make it possible to guarantee their coexistence and their diversity: in the former Yugoslavia the war and the interethnic hatreds are also accentuated by the saturation of societies with the religious model: the Serbs are Orthodox, the Croats Catholic, and the Bosnians Muslim, and the religious conflicts there are significant.
There is here, it seems to me, for the Muslims in France, a problem analogous to that which faced the Jews — and which still faces them: the secularization of religious culture, which makes it possible to ensure individual positions in tension with the communal ideas and traditions.
To take up again an idea I have already developed elsewhere2:
“In order that the renewed interest in religious questions should not translate into a simple regressive return to the religious, which would enclose access to the religious within the system of the compulsion to repeat and under the sign of the death instinct, one must practice a kind of subversive return to the founding texts and myths, which implies a true knowledge. Only a desacralized approach to culture and to religious traditions can make it so that they question us and still speak to us, to us secular ones.
It is here that one may interrogate oneself on the place of religion within culture, on the place and the identifying function of myths within it. Myths that mingle with other myths to which each of us refers in his various modes of belonging, even in a secular society such as contemporary French society. These myths then no longer function as norms of truth, but as supports of the social bond.
It is through this renewed approach that religion can take its place within a secular Judaism at once rooted in culture and creative of new contents.”
Laïcité will thus be able to be a powerful means of integration of society, and of integration of individuals into society, as it has been for the Jews of France for two hundred years.
But laïcité can be this guarantor only if it is itself open, so as to become plural, and to take into account the diversity of cultures in France; this is doubtless underway, for France has finally ceased to be Jacobin, after a few hundred years. It must respect the historical memory of the various groups that constitute it. It will thus be able to favor, through the birth of various intermediary groups, the creation of a new social fabric, in which the individual will find again his place and an identity that will not be abstract and therefore alienating: a collective identity that takes into account the various historical traditions, which has not always been the case in the past, where integration was often synonymous with assimilation, and with loss of roots.
I.R.
M.O.I.: “Main-d’œuvre immigrée” (Immigrant Labor), an organization of the P.C.F. [French Communist Party] during the occupation, which furnished numerous groups of resistance fighters formed of immigrants, Jews and non-Jews, including the famous Manouchian group (the Affiche Rouge / Red Poster).↩︎
“Culture et filiation : désacraliser le judaïsme” (Culture and Filiation: Desacralizing Judaism), Panoramiques No. 7, 4th Quarter 1992, Arléa-Corlet, publishers, Paris.↩︎