The clarification that follows takes its stand against an ethnocentric and irrationalist conception of Jewish historiography, brilliantly represented by the manifesto-book of the Jerusalem School recently translated into French1. It claims kinship, by contrast, with the works of the historian of philosophy Shlomo Pinès and, of course, with everything that Hannah Arendt’s œuvre can furnish us by way of weapons against the “national-religious” conception — today often disguised as a “duty of memory” — of the history of the Jewish people. Hannah Arendt: her profession of faith in the Introduction to The Origins of Totalitarianism (Antisemitism) is remarkable. Jewish historiography2 (Jost being the exception) effaces Jewish separatism, the hatred of the Other. In her correspondence with Blumenfeld she declares that she prefers “fanatical” historians like F. Baer — because they are authentic scholars — to the “truisms and falsifications…” of the vulgar ideologues. See also her correspondence with Jaspers and the articles collected in The Jew as Pariah (Auschwitz et Jérusalem in the French edition). She had clearly seen that ultra-orthodoxy and certain disembodied “universalists” join hands in giving the “essence of Judaism” an ahistorical cast.
How did the periphery become the centre?
In a course taught during the “Phoney War,” Léon Brunschvicg, the great Franco-Jewish philosopher, distinguished between “Europe as a geographical expression” and “Europe as a spiritual community.” The former had never had the slightest significance for “medieval” Jews, the overwhelming majority of whom lived around the Mediterranean and in the Near East. The presence of Jewish communities on the soil of what we today call the “European continent” — that little cape of Asia that Valéry speaks of! — dates back to the Roman Empire. It was a phenomenon in which it is quite difficult to distinguish the notion, empirically graspable enough, of Diaspora from that — more theological, truth be told, than historical — of Exile (of Galut). That the victorious Romans (in 70, in 135) massacred many “Judeans” is a very probable fact; that many other Judeans left their devastated homeland to join communities existing in the Persian Empire or in the Roman Empire is another. But this did not, in the consciousness of the people, constitute a phenomenon of “exile,” inasmuch as until the Muslim conquest and perhaps beyond (Itzhak Baer speaks of the eleventh century as the cutoff date), Eretz-Israel remained the centre, or one of the two centres, of the Jewish people. But in all this, and what is more in a context of extreme mobility, the geographical notions that are ours today did not enter into account. The space lived by the Jews, like that of the Persian, Byzantine, and later Arab civilizations into which they were plunged, knew the frontiers of Empires, not continental limits. It was only when the reality of “Europe-as-spiritual-community” emerged (and to this day it is the only significant one) that they had to define themselves in relation to it. We still have to do so today, at an hour when the “European construction” raises so many questions.
A plural Judaism
If we turn to what the great historian-theologian Jacob Neusner (practically unknown in France, with a single book translated by Éditions du Cerf) tells us about the plurality of Judaisms, the congruence between all the modern “Judaisms” and the birth of a Europe conscious of itself appears to follow absolutely from the nature of things. The “European” adventure of the Jews in fact really begins only when the signifier “Europe” constructs itself against the old notion of “Respublica Christiana” — a construction in which the pariahs of that Christian entity take part, first because they are solicited to, then increasingly in full awareness of the stakes.
In 1492 and 1497, the Jews are banished from Spain, then from Portugal, excluded from societies of which they were active cogs. But these communities felt nothing more in common with a community in Germany or Bohemia than with another located in Yemen. As for the Ashkenazi or Italian communities, they lived in a space, stretched from Alsace to the plains of Ukraine, which had no other significance than to be the “container” of collectivities that were the only relevant reality for them. One sees this still in the memoirs of Glückel of Hameln, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. A member of these communities might find himself, for one reason or another, transplanted to North Africa, for example; this changed nothing. What one asked of the “kingdoms” of the Goyim — were they located on the Moon — was to let the Jews live in peace under their Holy Law.
But around the year 1500 Christian Europe discovers the “Jewish question.” Is one to finish what was begun by the first nation-states (England, France) and render Western Christendom judenrein? Or is one, on the contrary, to bring the Jews (like the Greeks) back into a new Europe restored to its sources, for its re-birth? Charles Lehrmann and his Influences juives sur la pensée européenne (Jewish Influences on European Thought) bear witness to this. The use of the word “Europe” becomes general in the Renaissance. Indeed, religious identity — the only one that was significant for the “Europeans” of the Middle Ages (as it will remain, and still often does, elsewhere) — shatters irreparably after the Lutheran revolution (1517). On this, and on all that follows, one can do no better than refer to the great Michelet3.
Johannes Reuchlin: an archaeology of Emancipation
Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522) was, perhaps in spite of himself, the hero of the first modern struggle for the dignity of the Jews on European soil. At the outset he is a “humanist” theologian who, unlike many of his colleagues (foremost among them the illustrious Erasmus), holds that the “Renaissance of Letters” is a return to Greece, to Rome, and to Israel. Aided by rabbis, often first-rank scholars (such as Ovadia Sforno), he learns Hebrew and Aramaic, reads the Gemara and the Zohar in the original. His life will be overturned when the Jews of Mainz and Frankfurt call him to the rescue, in 1510. What is in fact happening? It is not a matter of ritual murder. It is in fact a matter of defending, against the charge of “blasphemy,” the very spinal column of Jewish life, of its “civilization” as we would say today: the Talmud.
This is what Heinrich Graetz, as early as 1857, would call “the battle of the Talmud.” The great historian is the first to restore to Reuchlin his true place as “father of the Reformation” in Germany, without whom Luther — who in many respects represents a regression with respect to his forerunner — would not have been possible. For Reuchlin, like his nephew Melanchthon (Luther’s lieutenant), is a humanist, that is, a resolute adversary of obscurantist scholasticism and of the Inquisition bound up with it. If, without being properly speaking a “friend” of the Jews (we are not yet in the seventeenth century!), he commits himself in favour of the defamed Talmud, it is because he had been able, over the course of years, to steep himself in the foundational Texts of the Hebrew Tradition, and singularly in the Kabbalah.
We will not retell here the history of the Christian Kabbalah at the dawn of the Renaissance. Suffice it to recall that in Florence there is, at the turn of the century, a philosopher, Pico della Mirandola, who — following the Rhinelander Nicholas of Cusa — wishes to unify all religions on the basis of a “Primitive Revelation”… of which the Kabbalah gives the closest image. Unfortunately, far from this “Peace of the Faith” and the syncretism it would call for, it is intolerance and massacre in the name of the “true faith” that provisionally triumph. And it is precisely in the Europe of the “Wars of Religion” that another type of Jew will be born, of whom we today, whether we wish it or not, are the heirs. These men and women, crypto-Jews or ex-“New Christians” who escaped the Iberian Inquisition, are called the “Marranos.” And it is they who will seal a contract with another “Europe,” freed of religious fanaticism… and which they largely help to bring into being.
The Marrano catastrophe and the recommencement of the history of the “European” Jews
Around 1500, Europe is, with the exception of Germany and Italy, judenrein. In theory, at least. For there exists, by virtue of the way in which the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, then from Portugal, has just unfolded, an underground, clandestine Judaism in the Iberian Peninsula. In the years, the decades, the centuries that follow, these Jewries of an entirely new type will spread throughout the entire world, from Latin America to the Indies, by way of the Ottoman Empire. But it is in what one begins to call “Europe” — and no longer the “Christian Republic” — that the destiny of the “New Christians,” who became, by force of circumstance, the first modern Jews, will be most decisive for the future of their people as a whole.
Marranism as matrix, metaphor, and model of intelligibility of the contemporary Jew — but also of the contemporary individual in general, whatever his origin — has long elicited sustained attention. One of the first to become aware of it was Heine, who loudly and proudly laid claim to his “Marranism.” By a paradox of History, it is Ashkenazi Jewry — the least equipped, by its theological baggage, to enter intellectually into modernity — that nonetheless did so. This was possible only by grafting onto the backward corpus of the Northern communities certain Marrano ideas, by way of the Sabbatian and Frankist crises. Whence some formidable time bombs…
Richard Popkin, with his identification of modern sceptics — and of himself, as a dissident from official Judaism — with the Marranos (see his Autobiography); he holds that Marranism irrigated French culture of the sixteenth century (Montaigne, his cousin Francisco Sanches, Bodin, but also La Boétie, Michel de l’Hospital and… Nostradamus). It was also a source of the Enlightenment. The Marranos did not publish their anti-Christian texts, even in Holland. But others read them later (the example of d’Holbach with Orobio de Castro’s Israël vengé). In our day, the “Marrano” theme significantly irrigates the reflection of Jewish thinkers such as Edgar Morin, Jacques Derrida, or, very recently, Daniel Bensaïd4. Today (see the remarkable issue of the journal Pardes on Le Juif caché, marranisme et modernité — The Hidden Jew: Marranism and Modernity), Marranism — after having served to understand the condition of communist Jews or of Jews under communist regimes — is increasingly regarded as an anticipation of the modern identity crises, concerning the European peoples first and foremost…
Extension of the domain of the struggle
One may regard the march “out of the Ghetto” (see Jacob Katz’s book of that title) toward Emancipation as an extension of the Marrano paradigm to the Ashkenazi communities, beginning with Germany, and then on to the farthest reaches of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. It is no accident that Mendelssohn translated Menasseh Ben Israel, the first “statesman” of modern Judaism. The word “Haskalah” is the counterpart of Aufklärung in neo-Hebrew. Note, however, that it is forged from a root (SKL) which supposes not an illumination after the night, but intelligence, “understanding” (the word sekel translated, in rabbinic Hebrew, the Greek nous or the Arabic aql), so that the literal equivalent in French would be not “Enlightenment” but “rationalization,” “intellectualization”…
The intellectual movement thus named was born in Germany around 1780. But its antecedents are far earlier. The Jews of the Holy Empire were worked upon (since 1700, according to Michael A. Meyer) by a tendency, if not toward “secularization,” then at least toward modernization (a timid openness to the German language and culture, to the “secular” sciences). In so doing, the Jewish communities gathered the inheritance of their own recent history — the anti-Sabbatian struggle of a Jakob Emden — but also that of the rabbis of Holland or Venice, pioneers in this domain.
If Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) is rightly considered the “father” of the Haskalah, he is not, strictly speaking, a party to it. He who earned from his (Christian) contemporaries the nickname of “German Plato” wanted nothing other, as an Orthodox Jew, than to purge “Judaism” (a neologism of which he is, in the German language, the inventor) of its superstitious dross. The “Berlin” Haskalah is composed of far more radical minds, influenced by English deism, then by Kant. They break with the strict observance of the Halakhah (Law) and call into question rabbinic authority. They concur, by contrast, with the projects of the “enlightened despots” (Frederick II and Joseph II) who aim to render the Jews “useful” to the states, in a perspective more “physiocratic” than truly emancipatory. Whence the insistence on the abandonment of Judeo-German, of Talmudic study (though less, in fact, than has long been said), and above all of the parasitic “Jewish trades” (see chapter XI of Jacob Katz’s Out of the Ghetto).
But there is also a properly religious aspect of the Haskalah, of which the Be’ur (explanation, commentary) remains the most important literary testimony. It is the Hebrew gloss on Moses Mendelssohn’s translation of the Pentateuch. If the Berlin Haskalah reflects in its own way the ambiguities of the concept of “natural religion,” its cousin in Eastern Europe takes on a wholly different significance. It is bound up with a will to persist as a separate human group, and its properly religious sources (for example, in Lithuania, with the “Gaon of Vilna” or Rabbi Menashe of Ilya) allow it to lean on incontestable authorities of the tradition (Maimonides or the “Maharal” of Prague) as well as on more sulphurous authors (Azariah de’ Rossi) in order to propose a modernized version of orthodoxy, having nothing to do with what the Judeo-German “Reform” would be.
Thus Rav Menahem Mendel Lefin of Satanów, a true Maskil in a caftan, will present to the Diet of Warsaw, at the moment of the Polish revolution of 1791, a pamphlet in French on the reform of Jewish life. There is also a later Russo-Polish Haskalah, which will confront the proponents of the traditional way of life (then represented essentially by the Hasidism of the third or fourth generation), in the name of the famous watchword “a Jew under your tent, a man without” — of which all the coming forms of revolt (“Bundist” labour movement, “secular” Zionism) will be the heirs.
Where the Prussian Haskalah realized, in spite of itself, Immanuel Kant’s terrible saying about the “euthanasia” of Judaism (Judaism being thought of as an archaic survival, and the “enlightened Jews” failing to transmit a modernized Judaism, converting, emancipating themselves as “unattached individuals” in the “semi-neutral” society, etc.), the Jewish Enlightenment, in the East, fully “deserved well” of the national rebirth of the Jewish people, at the price of a few revisions of the original doctrine (abandonment of the optimistic universalism inherited from the French Revolution — the “Eastern” Haskalah is a daughter of ’89 — rehabilitation of Yiddish, the passage from Emancipation to self-emancipation as a project). Gershom Scholem saw in the Haskalah the direct continuation of the Sabbatian movement, which had rendered the Law obsolete and undermined confidence in the authority of the Sages5.
There exists, at the deepest level, a profound unity among all the historical forms of the Haskalah, recalled by Professor Freddy Raphaël: “faith in reason, belief in an ideal of human brotherhood, the will to reintegrate the Jewish people into the course of history as an acting force.” In France, where the movement as such never existed, these ideals are found again, with the status of a charter for action, in the ideology of the “forty-eighter” Jews who rise up in 1860 to found the Alliance Israélite Universelle and to promote the first worldwide “Jewish policy” of modernity.
From Spain, then from the Republic of Venice, there had thus reached the Ashkenazi Jews the idea of what one may, in all rigour, call a Jewish Renaissance. It is not in fact a matter of “inventing” a new “Judaism,” but of returning to what the Jewish people truly was when it was not afflicted by those blemishes that are the ghetto, the unproductive trades, the “jargon,” superstition, ignorance of the sciences and of “secular” philosophy. A quite particular attention will therefore be paid — not without sometimes risking contradiction between models that are hardly compatible though equally prestigious — to the Judeo-Hellenistic symbiosis of the Philos and the Flavius Josephuses, to the reconstruction by the Sages of Yavneh, to Karaism of the great period, to the encounter of Arab Aristotelianism and the rabbinic tradition (Maimonides, Del Medigo), all taken as paradigms of a Haskalah ante litteram whose foundations already exist in the written Torah and the Talmud (which is not unilaterally rejected by the maskilim, whatever a persistent rumour may say).
From there, two destinies were possible for the Haskalah. One may be tempted to see the possible bifurcation at the demographic-territorial level. In the West, one has, in Germany and Italy (too often forgotten, despite its illustrious Venetian or Tuscan roots), communities very much in the minority within the global population, in the process of modernization and linguistic assimilation (since around 1700 in Germany, according to present-day estimates). The Enlightenment is therefore, there, a condition of possibility of personal integration, in particular through Education and Verbesserung more generally (“civilizing of manners,” Norbert Elias would say). The horizon is thus a pure adaptation to the majority society, through the invention in particular of a “Mosaic confession” reformed on the Lutheran or Calvinist model. The menacing horizon is conversion — the only true and definitive (until Hitler, at least…) “ticket of entry” into European society (Heine) — or the “self-hatred” born of the latent nihilism of a phantom Judaism that has lost all sense of what was the grandiose utopia of Mendelssohn and his immediate successors, namely the “mission of the Jews” in spreading the new universal Gospel of reason and freedom (see on this point Eugène Fleischmann’s great book, Le christianisme mis à nu — Christianity Laid Bare). The patent failure of this project, in which a Hermann Cohen would nonetheless want to believe to the very end, not without marked concessions to “Germanism,” will open the way to the pitiless critique of this moral bankruptcy by the totally assimilated (but not “integrated”) generation symbolized so brilliantly by the Letter to His Father of a certain Franz Kafka.
In that Eastern Europe, where compact masses of Jews lived — for the most part unemancipated, living their own language and their own culture as well as their personal status (which fascinated Kafka and other “Western” Israelites, with an inevitable tendency to idealize the “spiritual” situation of the Ostjuden) — the Haskalah had, as we have already suggested, a wholly different significance and a wholly different impact. In the tsarist Empire, in Romania, and even in Galicia (where the Jews possessed certain civil and political rights), Jewish society was, in particular under the influence of its native Enlightenment, modernized, not dissolved. Secularization was there not a ferment of “euthanasia” of Judaism, according to the wish openly formulated by Immanuel Kant (see above), but of religious, cultural, and national rebirth.
The history of the Haskalah in the Kingdom of Poland, little known, is nonetheless most instructive. The adventure of a Solomon Maimon or of a Zalkind Hourwitz, going to seek — the one in Berlin, the other in Paris — the living sources of the new Science, appears less cut off than it might seem from the general movement of Jewish life. The ambition to wed Tradition and secularized European Civilization (Torah ’im derekh-eretz) will irrigate up to and including a great part of the Jews of strict observance. “Religious” Zionism will draw upon it. But would even secular Zionism, including in its internal tensions, have been possible without the revolt of the Russo-Polish Haskalah against the mutilated Jewish life of the Pale of Settlement? A revolt that may just as well appear as an irrevocable condemnation of Mendelssohn (Peretz Smolenskin) as gravedigger of “national” Judaism, or as this panegyric of the Hebrew Enlightenment owed to Micha Yosef Berdichevsky: “With the Haskalah, with the age of criticism, we saw the first buds of freedom break forth among us.”6
Active promoters of the Enlightenment (see the impassioned life of relatively little-known figures such as Isaac de Pinto), the Jews could not but be the privileged target of those who wished to “resist” the Enlightenment, European liberalism, the nascent democracy. Therein lies the “terrifying secret” of political antisemitism, which leads to the “de-emancipation” of the thirties and to the Nazi Hurban. Those who composed and disseminated the poison entitled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and then their disciple Adolf Hitler, knew what they were doing7.
But things are more complex in reality than the mere statement of this “principal contradiction” would lead one to believe. Many Jewish intellectuals, in societies where it is not the Enlightenment but “romantic” ideologies such as ethnicizing nationalism that hold sway, let themselves be carried along by this current, while generally keeping their basic fidelity to universalist ideals. This is the case in Russia, in the Germanic countries, and even in France after the terrible shock of the Dreyfus Affair. Rallying to nationalism can, moreover, take various forms: it may be an adherence to the dominant national ideology, Russian, German, or French. But it may also be conversion to a specific Jewish nationalism. Great account is often taken of the messianic role of a future Jewish centre — in Palestine, in most scenarios — for the edification of a reconciled world, the realization of an ideal Europe. This was already the case in Joseph Salvador in 18568, then in his disciple Moses Hess, then in Theodor Herzl himself.
Europeans or “Orientals”?
The antisemitic crisis inevitably raises the question anew: are the Jews European? The antisemites’ answer is well known. That of the Zionists does not go without saying. Herzl and Nordau, borne along by the great movement of colonial expansion, want to transport Europe, in the person of its Jews, to Palestine. But there is also another current, which wants a rupture between a Jewish identity returned to its cradle and a continent that is radically other. This other current is embodied in the figures of Buber and Berdichevsky.
The Buberian conception of Judaism follows logically, then, from the refusal that it be merely a body of commandments cut off from what he calls the absolute life of the people. An enemy of the fussy formalism of the rabbis, Buber does not hide his sympathy for Jesus and for primitive Christianity, which once waged the same struggle before it was in its turn denatured. For Buber, in fact, Judaism is a spiritual “process” that can be summed up in three guiding ideas: Unity, Action, and the Future. It is Hasidism that for the last time embodied this essential Judaism. Buber will fight all his life for a Jewish renaissance that takes over from an exhausted Hasidic spirituality no longer suited to the conditions of the age. Political Zionism and the Jewish socialisms lay claim to such a watchword. Buber will cross their path at length without ever fully adhering to their creed. A socialist he has always been. Was not his first public appearance a celebration of Ferdinand Lassalle, charismatic founder of Social-Democracy, Marx’s rival and, above all, an emblematic figure of the European Jewish imagination (Freud, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Herzl himself, bear witness to this)? A piquant detail: Ferdinand Lassalle, though later wholly de-Judaized, was himself also fascinated, in his Silesian youth, by Hasidism… Half a century later a Walther Rathenau was too. But the birth of modern political antisemitism (around 1880) does not necessarily lead to speculations about Jewish identity, about “Jewish blood” and national character — speculations that, it must be admitted, situate themselves on a terrain that is exactly that of antisemitism when it affirms that the “Asiatic” Jews are consubstantially foreign to Aryan Europe.
Save the patient or eradicate the “disease”?
The Odessa physician, Pinsker, envisaged for his part a separation of bodies (Auto-Emancipation, 1882). Since the hatred of the Jews is incurable, one must seek for the latter a territory where they will be sheltered. (The author does not say that this territory will, of necessity, be Palestine.) It is self-emancipation opposed to the emancipation that is granted, and reversible. But others will think rather of treating the “disease.” That is the course the young revolutionaries of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia will take. Not that they all reject the path of national self-emancipation. But they oppose the idea that one must “desert,” depart, acknowledge that they have no “right” to inhabit this country; they prefer the idea of a Revolution that would bring down the “prison of peoples” that is tsarism, and would set up in its place a Union of peoples, in which the Jewish people would have its full place. These young people, in rupture with the Synagogue, first encountered Russian “populism,” and an intense desire to merge into the Russian language and culture. Disabused of that dream, they remain no less extremely marked by certain tendencies of the university youth, whose mentors are named Pisarev, Kropotkin, or Pyotr Lavrov. They are marked too (which is in no way contradictory) by the “Sabbatian” and Hasidic tradition of revolt against rabbinic asceticism and Talmudic formalism. They are in quest of a new scientific Halakhah, of a secular Messiah. Men deeply marked by Russian populism, such as Dubnow, An-sky, Nachman Syrkin, or Zhitlovsky, will try to propose one to them. But the question will soon arise of whether the Jews, in order to “self-emancipate,” must take the path of a nation-state in the manner of the other “ethnicities” of Europe, or propose an original model. It is here that original minds such as Ahad Ha’am and, above all, Martin Buber (1878–1965) intervene. One cannot understand their place in Jewish thought without taking into account other forms of secularized “messianism,” with which they have evident interfaces: Bundism, Shimon Dubnow’s “national cultural autonomy,” the Yiddishism of a Nathan Birnbaum or a Chaim Zhitlovsky.
Buber and “spiritual Zionism”
At first Buber, like other members of what is called in 1903–1904 the “democratic faction” of the Zionist Movement, opposes Theodor Herzl on points that have nothing to do with whether or not the presence of the Arabs in Palestine is taken into account. This unrepentant Proudhonian rejects then, above all, the idolatry of the State so patent among the Herzlian Zionists, admirers of Bismarck. Later, for the same reason, he will refuse the chauvinist exaltation that turns in so many illustrious heads during the war of ’14, and will take, with Landauer and a few Dutchmen, a Romain Rolland–like position. This idolatry of the “coldest of all cold monsters” is, in his view, but the product of a short-sighted materialism, in which it is the “physical” Jewishness of the Jewish populations (Judenheit) that is the only object worthy of interest, whereas the young philosopher has in view the renewal of “Judaism” understood as Culture (Judentum).
After the death of Herzl (1904), Buber withdraws from political action to devote himself to his researches on Hasidism, which will make him famous throughout the entire German-speaking world. His Tales of Rabbi Nachman (first edition 1908) will leave their mark on personalities as different as Walther Rathenau, Franz Kafka, or Georg Lukács. This publication coincides, indeed, with a phenomenon that Gershom Scholem will call the rupture with “the house of the fathers,” apropos of the young German (or German-speaking) Jews of the 1910 generation. Even if not all the children of this generation choose the Zionist option — far from it — their revolt against the bourgeois mode of life and the illusions of assimilation is general. To all of them Buber furnishes the image of an “authentic” Judaism, living, Dionysian, well in tune with the ambient Nietzscheanism. Without at all renouncing the Germanness with which he is steeped, he affirms the difference of Judaism and its originary “Orientality,” at which it must renew itself. “The Jews have remained Orientals. They were driven from their country and sent toward the Western lands; they had to live under skies they did not know and on a soil they did not cultivate; they endured this martyrdom and, worse still, a life of humiliations; they adopted the customs of the peoples among whom they dwelt and they began to speak their language; and (despite all this) they remained Orientals.” (A Land of Two Peoples…, p. 39) Thus does Buber express his conception of Zionism: it is not a matter of fundamentally “returning” to a land, promised or not, but of reintegrating one’s cultural sphere, independently of any political consequence. If the Jews, like the Chinese, the Indians, the Arabs, belong to the “Orient,” they must rediscover their roots; whether they do so in Vienna, in Sadagora, or in Jerusalem is secondary… Whence Buber’s accord with the thinkers of the “Democratic Faction,” who esteem cultural work in the Diaspora at least as important as the agricultural colonization of Palestine. But also a respect for Arab-Muslim culture that the average Zionist does not always share, to say the least. Following the Founder, Theodor Herzl, the latter holds that the Jewish People is rather the avant-garde of the advanced Occident within the backward Orient. Does the latter not in fact begin at the Russian frontier, beyond which live those despised Ostjuden, steeped in their archaic Hebreo-Aramaic and their Judeo-German “jargon,” incapable of speaking anything better than the basic “Kongressdeutsch,” mixed with Yiddishisms, in the Zionist assemblies? Then the Arabs and their heritage…
The “evident provincialism”9 of Israeli culture, noted by many, points back to a far more essential fact: the Jews, even Israeli ones, have not emerged from Europe, be they those who originated there geographically or those who had been “Europeanized” by the schools of the Alliance. It remains for Israel to find its way between a pre-Catastrophe Europe — which is also that of the deadly nationalisms of the East — and the “New Middle East,” dreamed of for a moment by Shimon Peres (and others!), and whose contours obviously remain, despite the events under way, more than ever to be invented. Without their long kinship with Europe, the Jews would never have entered History10. Such is the gain, valid for everyone, from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv. Just as the identity of today’s European Jews cannot be reduced to the sole instrumentalized “memory” of the Hurban (or of the “Shoah,” if one prefers), so that of their brothers and sisters the world over cannot conjure away what made the liberty and the dignity of the Jewish people after the Spanish Catastrophe. Without the Jews, no Enlightenment. Without Enlightenment, no Revolutions, and therefore no Emancipation. Without individual Emancipation, no “national” Emancipation. Let us remember it!
Notes
Itzhak Baer: Galut, Calmann-Lévy, 2000F↩︎
“There has never been, from the origins to our own day, a ‘Judaism’ — exclusive, unitary, linear — that defined an ‘orthodoxy.’ Quite the contrary, a variety of Judaisms, of ‘Judaic systems,’ have flourished…” (The Talmudic Anthology, I, p. 18)↩︎
Jules Michelet: Renaissance et Réforme (Renaissance and Reformation), “Bouquins,” 1982↩︎
Edgar Morin: Le vif du sujet (The Heart of the Matter), Seuil, 1987, Moi-marrane (Myself, Marrano), p. 357; Morin defines himself as “marginal and Marrano, neither Jew nor Gentile,” etc. See also his Journal (Seuil, 1994), and above all: Mes démons (My Demons), Stock, 1994 (Du néo-marranisme au post-marranisme — From Neo-Marranism to Post-Marranism). Daniel Bensaïd: Résistances (Resistances), Fayard, 2001 (chapter on “The Marrano Sign”)↩︎
Gershom Scholem, De Berlin à Jérusalem (From Berlin to Jerusalem), Paris, Albin Michel, 1981↩︎
Cited after Simon Halkin, La littérature hébraïque moderne (Modern Hebrew Literature), Paris, P.U.F., 1958, p. 73↩︎
On the link between Russian antisemitism and National Socialism, one must absolutely read Henri Rollin’s book: L’apocalypse de notre temps (The Apocalypse of Our Time), Allia, 1991.↩︎
Joseph Salvador: Paris, Rome, Jérusalem.↩︎
Cf. the remarkable book by Henri Meschonnic, L’utopie du Juif (The Utopia of the Jew), Desclée de Brouwer, 2001, p. 58.↩︎
I take the liberty, on this point, of referring to my book: Figures d’Israël (Figures of Israel), Hachette-Littérature, 1997↩︎