Ever since Emancipation allowed them to become citizens in the various countries where they lived, Jews have never ceased to commit themselves politically — working directly for the cause of their own liberation when that proved necessary (Zionism, or Bundism), or fighting for the liberation of other groups, often perceived as a precondition of their own.
These political commitments mark a break with the traditional position held by religious Judaism for two millennia — that is, from the era when the Jewish people lost its independence and subordinated its destiny to the coming of the Messiah. Hence the traditional injunction: “do not hasten the coming of the Messiah by your actions, and pray for the peace of the State in which you live.”
This new political commitment, especially when situated “on the left,” is often perceived as having biblical roots tied to the demand for justice of the prophetic ethic. It is also felt to be the result of the historical experience of a minority people: an experience heavy with exclusion and suffering, which the Jews lived through during their long diasporic existence, whence the polarization of Jewish attitudes in two opposing directions.
The first, often found among active adherents of Zionism — defined as the liberation movement of the Jewish people — might be understood as the expression of a certainty that one can count on neither the help nor the sympathy of others. Antisemitism is perceived as a general phenomenon, and if not eternal, at least entrenched over the long term. Hence the necessity of liberating oneself.
The second attitude, the inverse of the first, was that of a great many Jews engaged in the communist movement, in the revolutionary movements, and more generally in the struggles for liberation — the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War. It would proceed from the sense that, too weak and left to their own forces alone, the Jews could liberate themselves only by helping other oppressed peoples to liberate themselves.
Their internationalism was real, yet one can nonetheless imagine the not-always-conscious motivations that a minority group invested in the communist hope. As Vasily Grossman writes in the portrait he draws of a Jewish revolutionary in Tout passe (Forever Flowing): “Perhaps the centuries-old chain of humiliations, the nostalgia for the Babylonian captivity, the opprobrium of the ghetto, and the establishment of compulsory residence zones provoked this insatiable thirst for justice, forging the incandescent soul of the Bolshevik Léon Mekler.”
Closer to us in time, a certain number of Jews, moved by a rootedness in a recent historical memory — notably the memory of the Shoah — committed themselves to the struggle for the civil rights of Black Americans, to the decolonization movements, or again to the struggle against the apartheid imposed on Black people in South Africa; this was also often the case for those who committed themselves to the recognition of the national rights of the Palestinian people and to respect for human rights.
If it is true that the historical memory of suffering acts within us, consciously or unconsciously, and has driven entire generations to rise up against the injustice and inequality they witnessed, one may ask whether this kind of political attitude can withstand the course of history and the changing of generations. This is all the more true given that the Jews, since being integrated into the countries where they live, have undergone a process of social ascent, and even of embourgeoisement. In a country such as the United States, home to the largest Jewish community of the Diaspora, the solidarity that once united Jews and Black people has gradually turned into hostility under the combined effects of Jewish embourgeoisement and the social conflicts that ensued. The rise of nationalism and of anti-white racism among certain Black militants — who now define themselves rather as African Americans — is compounded by antisemitism, even if Black American intellectuals, such as Cornel West, try to resist the racist and antisemitic wave of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, and continue to act jointly with Jewish groups or figures to preserve the tradition of a shared struggle.
Beyond political commitments properly so called, the collective memory of the Jews, arising from their very long history as a minority, has perhaps made them more sensitive to the fate of other minorities, and, for some at least, has developed an acute ethical conscience, tied to the resonance of the precept set out by the Torah: “Respect the Stranger, for you were Strangers in Egypt.”
In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one may suppose that the commitment of Israeli groups such as Shalom Ach’shav (Peace Now) or Btse’lem (B’Tselem), for peace and respect for human rights, even if it results from a realistic political vision, is not foreign to this tradition.
We will not enter here into a polemic concerning the deep nature of these commitments; we will not ask whether they were Jewish or whether they were those of Jews. The questions they raise, on the other hand, can prompt us to reflect on the evolutions of societies and groups.
It is true that the political commitments we revive in this issue of Plurielles were often those of Jews marginal in relation to their communities. But this was also the case for other human groups, for those who commit themselves are often in rupture with their group and thus in the situation of a minority. In any case, we are aware that the evocation of these political commitments of Jews in the modern world serves to qualify an unfair judgment according to which the Jews would have been, even in modern times, a passive group on the political stage. The figures evoked illustrate, rather, in their own way, this remark of Hannah Arendt: “Those who really did much for the spiritual dignity of their people, who were great enough to transcend the bonds of nationality and to weave the threads of their Jewish genius into the texture of European life, have been quickly dispatched and have received only a recognition of pure form.”
We have wished here to do them justice.