Reply: The dangers that lie in wait for us

I thank you, of course — let me be honored after Mr. Yaïr Tzaban, who [did] much, [for] Humanistic and Secular Judaism for this distinction you have conferred upon Robert and me; but, after all, why him and me? Robert, that went without saying, in my eyes, for the reasons Violette Attal-Lefi evoked so well; but me, not at all! I am a very mediocre Jew, a detestable militant for good causes; I reproach myself every day for my laziness and my paltry involvement in the essential struggles — and God knows there is no shortage of them today.

Truly, I do not deserve to be associated with Robert in the honor done to him today. So I wonder: might there not be, on the part of the organizers of this colloquium, a desire to mark their attachment to the equality of the sexes? And to show, in the course of this gathering, that a woman is fully the equal of a man, in the eyes of liberal Judaism? We all know Mme Simone Veil’s decisive action on behalf of women; I am thinking of the law she had passed on abortion. And nothing seems to me more legitimate than what she was during the preceding days. But for Robert and me, the answer is less obvious. So I wonder: might I not be here in the name of the principle — detestable in my eyes, forgive me, Simone — of the necessity of quotas for women?

Any attempt to define human beings by their difference, whether sexual, religious, or racial, seems to me to run counter to our common objective, which is universalist.

I imagine the organizers of this congress, holding their heads in both hands, to find, whatever the cost, as many women as men to take part in this colloquium, or even to be honored — and I did not know that Simone Veil would be here this evening. In which case, I would be here today less for my merits, which, I know, are frankly mediocre, than out of a concern for a parity of the sexes that I reject. It would be a rather mischievous thumbing of the nose, which I accept as a stroke of humor.

More seriously, any attempt to define human beings by their difference, whether sexual, religious, or racial, seems to me to run counter to our common objective, which is universalist. Now, never, since the Second World War, have the values of liberal Judaism — namely the tolerance and the humanism that flow from a universalist vision — never have they been as threatened as they are today. The beautiful concept of humanity is in the process of shattering, attacked at once by religious fundamentalism, by racism, and by the differentialism that engenders, directly or indirectly, the stigmatization and rejection of the other, and that appears in democratic countries as well as in those that are not. And yet the idea of a common humanity is one of our most beautiful and most fragile acquisitions — the result of a very long apprenticeship and of a struggle that lasted centuries. Lévi-Strauss said that “the idea that all the peoples of the world form a single humanity is not at all consubstantial with the human race.” This idea of humanity is, indeed, of very late appearance.

For vast fractions of the human species, and for tens of millennia, the notion of humanity appears to be totally absent. Humanity ceases at the frontiers of the tribe, of the linguistic group; and for my part, I would add, at the frontiers of the community.

Never, since the Second World War, have the values of liberal Judaism — namely the tolerance and the humanism that flow from a universalist vision — been as threatened as they are today.

Alain Finkielkraut, who unfortunately is not present among us, recalled, in a very fine book he has just published these last days, entitled L’Humanité Perdue (Lost Humanity), that it is precisely the God of the Bible who declares: “You and the stranger, you shall be equal before the Eternal.” And Alain continues: “It is the one God who reveals to men the unity of the human race.” A message taken up, in its own way, by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which accentuated the idea of an essential resemblance among men, whatever their race, their culture, their religion, and, lastly, their sex. Democratic man, as he emerges, would at last be capable of finding the same in the other, were that other his worst enemy. After twenty centuries of differentialism and exacerbated communitarianism, which incited him to kill, to torture, to enslave, and to oppress in every way, one could legitimately believe that the