Before coming to a few reflections on mixed marriages, I would first like to offer some general reflections on the first two terms of the subject that brings us together today, namely: secular societies and multicultural societies. At the risk of appearing definitively and incorrigibly universalist, I shall present a few general reflections that do not concern the Jewish world, before presenting reflections on the Jewish world that follow from these initial analyses.
This is a fundamental problem, a general problem of all societies, and one that was the subject of Lévi-Strauss’s second UNESCO lecture in 1971. One can state the problem in this way: an isolated culture is condemned to death. Cultures must be in relation, must be in exchange, must take from others, must give to others; if they are reduced to what was once imagined along the lines of Indian reservations, we now know they are condemned to death. But there is a contradiction in this necessity of exchange, which is that, in the course of exchanges, there is also the danger that a culture may lose its specificity, and that there may form, among all cultures, what one might call a “minimum income”—in short, a kind of minimal, common culture in which everything that makes for the value, the weight, the authenticity, the specificity of each culture is lost, yielding a sort of Pidgin English of the international institutions. Which is no longer true English, no longer true American, which is this kind of common culture through which one has the feeling, or the illusion, of communicating. And I am not sure that the internet so fundamentally changes the real exchanges among human beings and cultures.
So the problem arises: exchanges are needed, one cannot do without exchange, but one must also, within these exchanges, remain oneself, or preserve from one’s culture of origin what is essential, what constitutes the contribution of each culture, let us say to a human culture in general. This is not a simple problem; it is a continual tension and contradiction to which there is no simple solution, either on the theoretical or on the political plane. And the formulas of the international organizations that seem to resolve this contradiction, such as “remaining oneself while welcoming others,” are a way of resolving in words a real problem, which is how not to cease exchanging with others—which is at once a benefit and a necessity—while at the same time continuing to be oneself. So of course I have no answer to give, but I believe it is within this framework that one must pose the problem that concerns us today.
Second point in my argument: the multicultural society is nothing new. Every society has always been multicultural, in the sense that every society, every political organization makes men and women live together who refer to different cultures, religions, traditions, and pasts. Now, making men live together when they are different is not easy; when they are very close, it is even more difficult; I would say that, in a certain way, the closer they are, the harder it is to make them live together. It is not the multicultural society that grounds the problem that brings us together today; the problem of making men live together has always been a difficult problem. In liberal democratic societies, the way of making individuals and different groups live together is what is crudely called citizenship. Its principle was the separation of the public and the private; in the public order, one is equally a citizen, whatever one’s sex, social, ethnic, or “racial” origin, whatever the different economic conditions, one is equally a citizen. Today, the principle is that this public domain—where, quite fictively, quite abstractly, each is the equal of the other—is fundamentally separated from the private domain, that of the free exercise of choices, of preferences, of particular cultural references. Of course, this is a principle; it describes no particular society, but it is nonetheless, all at once, the principle, the idea, and the ideal by which democratic societies live. They do so, concretely, in entirely different ways, because citizenship is neither an essence nor a nature: it is a history, and there have been, over time, very different ways of being citizens. So it is truly a principle, but it is a principle for the existence of a multicultural society; in other words, there is the public domain, which is common to all, in which each is equal to the other, and there is the cultural domain, which is that of the private, where each freely expresses adherence to a particular culture or religion. This separation is not given once and for all; it is constantly negotiated, and, as you know, in the country that most loudly proclaims this separation, the boundary between public and private is perpetually negotiated with the most important religious organizations, but also with minority religious organizations, such as we are. Between the two world wars, the right to celebrate Kippur was not recognized; it had to be negotiated; at other times it has been generally recognized, and that is normal—these are the democratic negotiations to determine where the boundary lies between public and private, where the boundary lies between what constitutes universality, laïcité (secularism, the principle of separating the state from religion), the unity of the practice of citizenship, and the free choice of the social individual or the concrete individual to choose what gives meaning to existence.
Let us say that the liberal democratic society, if it conformed to its own values, would be a good way of managing the multiculturalism of any society.
What I would like to stress is the extent to which, in its very principle, the secular society protects minorities. By the very fact that it does not recognize one religion among others, it symbolically places all religions on the same plane. On January 1, the Grand Rabbi of France, the Archbishop of Paris, the head of the Fédération Protestante, and a representative of the Muslims go to present their New Year’s wishes to the President of the Republic. As if each of these groups represented the same thing in the social order. I think one can readily understand how, in French history in particular, the Jews were particularly grateful to the Republic, since it had symbolically recognized their equality with those who, for centuries, had persecuted them.
So: multicultural society, always; secular society, protection of minorities—this is how we try, or how the liberal democracies try, to resolve the tension between the necessity of exchanges among all groups at once and the wish we all share that, on the occasion of these exchanges, what makes for the value of cultures should not fall into a mediocre monotony that fails to express the best in man. It is normal to be faithful to oneself, or to want to be faithful to oneself, to a whole past of which one is the heir.
From there, I would like to say a few words about the problem of mixed marriages, which is clearly a logical consequence of this condition of the Jews of the diaspora in the liberal democracies, who wish at once to be full citizens of the society into which they are inserted and, at the same time, to remain faithful to their past, which they may define either in cultural or in religious terms. From this analysis, one can see the way in which different groups react to this problem.
There are those who, wanting to be entirely faithful to themselves, change nothing of the tradition as they believe they received it; this is a way of resolving the problem by saying that fidelity to oneself comes before all else, and in particular before participation in civic and economic life; it is a possible attitude. There is the other attitude, which consists in saying that fidelity to oneself is secondary, and that what comes first is participation in the society in which one finds oneself; and then there is the position that seems to me both the most appealing and the most difficult, the one on which one must reflect, which consists in combining the two attitudes and seeing therein one of the many tensions that tear at the human condition. As a great man said, the day there is no longer any tension in our life, it means we are dead. So it is one of the many tensions that define our way of being.
So, in relation to these three propositions, these three general positions, one arrives at three positions on mixed marriage: the first being the attitude of the consistorial institutions in France; the second being that of fully assimilated Jews who see no problem in any form of mixed marriage, and who, moreover, up to a point, reject the very idea of religious marriage, since what takes priority is participation in the national society in which they live; and then there is, I believe, for the majority of us, the way of trying to manage this problem of universal value and this legitimate desire to remain faithful to oneself. I had stressed, in an article a few years ago, the quite simply demographic problem. It seems, according to the statistics, that half of French Jews contract mixed marriages. So if one refuses these mixed marriages, if one refuses all the children of these mixed marriages, one must simply ask whether Judaism can continue if there are no longer any Jews. This is a problem to which I shall not, of course, offer an answer; it does not depend on me. But one can quite well imagine that through this policy, in refusing to accept non-Jewish spouses and their children into Judaism, one constitutes at once a small core that is very tightly, very passionately Jewish, and an extremely large share of people who will retain some contact with the Jewish world but who will not be accepted into the official Jewish world.
It remains the case that, as someone said, love transcends these problems, and that for two beings of goodwill who love each other beyond the official regulations, one can build at once a happy family and a Jewish family. Being myself the daughter of what is called a mixed marriage, I do not doubt this possibility.
It remains the case that, personally, I feel in harmony with the values of modernity—individualism, the choice of persons, the will, no ghetto…
I believe one must not be too simple, and that we all have examples of these non-Jewish spouses who have become more Jewish and more pro-Israeli than the one who inherited Judaism. If only in my own family, since I never saw my mother show the slightest reservation about the slightest decision of the Israeli government, which was not the case for my father, so I am very sensitive to this aspect of things.