Plurielles: We are living through a Europe under construction, and therefore in the making. Museums generally exhibit elements of the past; how can one imagine a museum presenting the future of Europe?
Élie Barnavi: Yes, it is true that museums usually show what has been; and it is rare to have a museum that will show what will be. But in fact, it is fundamentally a historical museum. It is a museum of the history of Europe, oriented toward union; our intention being to show the historical roots of the construction now under way. An economic and political entity is coming into being whose precise contours no one can yet foresee, but it is taking shape; so we sought to show the historical roots of this thing now in the making, starting from the idea that political Europe is not simply the answer to a contemporary challenge. If it can come about, it is because it has a consistency, because it is a space of civilization. We therefore treat Europe as a unified space of civilization, and it is rather, if you like, as though we were making a museum of the history of France. Trying to see how this entity took form, came into being, developed and constituted itself across the ages. It is an original undertaking, given that we begin from the observation that the citizens of Europe are unaware of what makes their unity. The emphasis is most often placed on diversity, and so they often have the impression that it is something rather artificial, that it is a democracy in Brussels deciding their fate.
Plurielles: An abstraction?…
E. B.: An abstraction; there you have a kind of monster which is indeed an abstract entity, and we want to show that this is not the case, that it is something living, a culture, which has taken on different faces over the ages. Europe having this particularity, that it invented national particularisms. So this unity of culture is expressed in different languages, in different national and political frameworks, but this diversity will not mask what makes its homogeneity, that is to say a deep unity of culture. And so we proceed by way of a kind of vast historical fresco that shows how the European idea, the common European sentiment, was born, and that shows how, at each historical epoch, a space of civilization common to the whole of Europe takes shape.
Plurielles: At what period does the museum have this European cultural community begin? With the reign of Charlemagne? Or earlier? How does one connect civilizations of origin, many of them vanished (Celts, Etruscans), with the cultures of the modern period?
E. B.: The point of departure is one of the most debated, most difficult points. When does one have Europe begin? And when I reflected on this question — since it was I who drew up the first outline of this museum’s intellectual project — it appeared to me that Europe was indeed made of strata of civilizations, that is to say there was the Celtic stratum, if you like. But the museum will not go back that far, except by allusion. There is, of course, the Greek stratum, the Roman stratum. But all of that can be found elsewhere. What is a civilization? A civilization is made of elements each of which, or almost each of which, is found elsewhere, in other systems of civilization, but which, taken all together, make the unity, the singularity of that civilization. And it appeared to me — not without difficulty, moreover — that a distinct European entity, that is to say one conscious of itself, appears in the Middle Ages. It is made of all the strata of earlier civilizations, and what gives it its unity are social and cultural phenomena proper to this European space. That is to say, the Church, feudalism, the city, the university… There are a certain number of great phenomena that trace out a particular space, this space has a particular destiny and very quickly sets itself against other spaces of civilization, consciously, and notably against Islam and against Greek Europe, that is to say the Byzantine Empire. And so, if you want a mythical but convenient point of departure, it is indeed Charlemagne. This has no great historical significance, but it has a symbolic one. And very quickly it will be borne out, since there will be this double frontier of civilizations, which people feel deeply, with Islam and with the Byzantine Empire. And so a distinct space is created…
Plurielles: Could you specify the dividing line between this European space and the Byzantine Empire?
E. B.: These are two different languages, two different ways of conceiving the Church, two different ways of conceiving power, and they are two worlds that interpenetrate one another; of course, there are reciprocal influences, but they are different civilizations. Now, since the Byzantine Empire is not solely European — it has imperial ambitions, it considers itself the heir of Rome — it leaves to the other the notion of Europe, that is to say the shrinking of the idea of Empire. What is the idea of Europe? One may say it is the Roman Empire shrunk to the European space. And besides, when Western Europeans say Christendom, what they mean in fact is European Christendom, Latin Christendom. And so, from that moment on, all the great intellectual and social movements will concern above all Western Europe and Central Europe. This is true of feudalism, which is an invention of this space. It is true of the monastic orders, and it is true of the universities. If you look at a map of the universities of the Middle Ages, it traces very precisely the map of Latin Christendom, the easternmost university being the University of Kraków. And it is true of all the movements that followed: the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution. Here, then, is how a perimeter is drawn, a space of civilization whose roots run very deep, but which here yield a sui generis product that we call Europe. And besides, from the fourteenth century on, plans for European unification begin to be drawn up. There are writers and statesmen of all kinds from the beginning of the fourteenth century. We have the first plan for European unification by a Frenchman named Pierre Dubois. The problem, then, is obviously to leave no one out. The Europe now in the making is vaster than that historical Europe I was evoking, than that original core. And it is important not to close Europe off downstream, even if upstream it is thus that it came about. We must allow all those who have a vocation for European union to find their place in it. We must also show, upstream, the different potentialities, since Europe could have come about differently, even if it happens that it came about as it did.
Plurielles: Which should be favored — the Europe of nations or the Europe of cultures?
E. B.: We are going to show both. It is not a matter of writing an irenic history of Europe; it is evident that this common space is a fragmented political space, very quickly shattered. Europe declined itself into nations, and these nations then endowed themselves with states; what will later be called nation-states. Then the nations exacerbated their differences. What we are doing is scraping this surface a little to show, beneath it, the common substratum, and this substratum is common. It is evident that there are nation-states, but the nation-states themselves are largely artificial constructions. There is an example I am fond of giving, that of the people of Lille and the people of Liège; there is doubtless less difference between them than between a man of Lille and a man of Marseille, yet the man of Lille and the man of Marseille belong to the same nation-state, while the man of Lille and the man of Liège belong to two different nation-states. This does not mean that nation-states are purely artificial constructions, or that the long habit of living together, of sharing the same nation-state, has not created common habits, common cultures — of course it has. And so Europe is this space that is at once one, and divided into national particularisms. One of the particular traits of this civilization is that it produced the nation-states. So it will be necessary to show the tension that has always existed between the aspiration to unity — this feeling that we are part of a whole, particularly among the elites, which has always existed in the Middle Ages and existed very strongly in the age of the Enlightenment, where there are magnificent European texts, in Voltaire, in Montesquieu, in Swift, in others — the feeling of belonging to a common whole and, at the same time, the feeling of belonging to a particular whole. This tension makes Europe. Now, for a long time — broadly, from the collapse of the idea of Empire, at the dawn of modernity and of the appearance of fully sovereign states [here again there is a convenient date, 1648, the eternal Treaty of Westphalia], and up to the end of the Second World War — the strongest reality was the reality of the nation-states. And since then, the idea of the nation-state has been less dominant. A supranational space could be created, and this supranational space, I repeat, is explained on several levels. By immediate political and economic imperatives — Europe destroyed by two world conflicts that left it a field of ruins at the end of the Second World War, the Marshall Plan, the Cold War, the horrified recognition of what ideologies and states had been able to do: that is the immediate. But we are also building something on a base that exists, of which we become newly aware and which we bring to the fore. That is to say, we draw on a common element. Take the close example, the example of the Jewish people. God knows this people has been scattered across the entire surface of the globe — Jews as different as the Jews of Yemen and the Jews of Germany — and yet we have always had the feeling, the very strong consciousness, that this whole world, however different, makes a single whole; and it is this that allowed the survival of a people and, in the end, the creation of a nation-state that takes up these very questions. Europe functions in rather the same way: that is to say, in the transcending of particularisms, within a whole that takes them into account while at the same time transcending them.
Plurielles: How is Jewish identity to be presented: shattered across the national cultures, or forming a whole?
E. B.: It is both; Jewish particularism is there, but inserted within a vaster space of culture.
Plurielles: Is there a particular place for Jewish culture in Europe and, more generally, within the mosaic of minority identities?
E. B.: Of course; once again, this culture is very different, because it is that of a human group which considers itself different from the others, and which is considered by the others as different; which has a different religion; which has different ways of life, throughout its history, which has different occupations and a different socioeconomic pyramid, which has a different spirit, which is different in almost everything; but whose difference can be understood only within the framework of Europe, and European Jews are different from the Jews of other lands, because it is Europe that made them. So they follow, of course — as has always been the case everywhere — they follow the fate of the peoples in whose midst they live. They are therefore European, while being very different from the host populations, and they follow the fate of these peoples, the spiritual and political movements of the European peoples, until they are no longer different precisely, in the wake of emancipation, yet are still considered different. They often perceive themselves as different. Despite the erasure of differences, they remain nonetheless a group apart. And what is fascinating in the history of European Jews is precisely this: the subtle relationship between what makes their singularity and what they owe to their environment, their centrality and their marginality at one and the same time, and it is this double aspect that also makes the fecundity of the Jewish contribution to the history of Europe.
Plurielles: With reference to Wasserstein’s book, which describes a vanishing European diaspora, is there in your view a future for a European Judaism, as there is an American or an Israeli Judaism?
E. B.: That depends on the Jews themselves. There is room, of course. You will not make the United States of Europe as there is a United States of America, for the good reason that there are very, very strong national and cultural particularisms, and it is good that they remain. No one wants a uniformized Europe that speaks only one language; there would no longer be any difference, and it would not be worth the trouble. So one must imagine something new, something unprecedented, sui generis: a unified political whole that federates cultural particularisms. And in this mosaic there is room, of course, for all the Jewish components. But it is a very difficult place, since Jews are part, wherever they find themselves, of the national whole; they therefore partake of this particularism that is already there, and within this particularism they seek something that would be properly Jewish, while at the same time they wish to be in solidarity with other Jews elsewhere. So it is a very complicated configuration, which was not so as long as this particularism was a matter of law, founded on religion. It becomes very complicated once this particularism is no longer founded on religion, but is a particular culture that is not solely religious.
Plurielles: What place do you see for secular Jews?
E. B.: It is a complicated configuration. Let us say that it will be easier to remain an Albanian in a united Europe, or a Hungarian or a Croat or a Frenchman, than a Jew. Because the cultural reality that the word Jew covers is very elusive: it is religion, it is a memory, it is a sensibility, but all of that is not said in a language and is not explained over a territory. So it is very complicated. In a very tolerant host society where Jews are at ease and participate fully in the life of the city, it is very difficult to build a particularism; it is a difficult struggle.
Plurielles: Is there a specifically Jewish contribution to Europe?
E. B.: When one gives an account of the history of Europe, it is evident that there is a Jewish contribution that is altogether interesting. During the Middle Ages and the first modality, the Jewish contribution was both positive and negative, if I may put it that way. That is to say, positive in the sense that the Jews bring things, but few in the end. And negative, because Europe defines itself in relation to them, by the exclusion of the Jews — the Jews as witness-people, in short all that we know. As for the positive contribution of the Jews, that is to say the thinkers of the Middle Ages, Maimonides for example, he concerns Europe less than other lands, such as the Maghreb and the Mashriq. And then the contribution of the Jews is itself direct, massive: European modernity is hardly conceivable without the contribution of the Jews; capitalism is hardly conceivable without the contribution of the Jews; the intellectual flowering is hardly conceivable without the contribution of the Jews. With emancipation in the nineteenth century, which allows the Jews to enter the city, the contribution of the Jews proved considerable, and ambiguous at the same time, because it is by entering the city that they can give the full measure of their genius, of their contribution. One always evokes the triad, do one not — Marx, Freud, Einstein — one could add others, the revolution in every domain, in art, in thought; but it is precisely because they were able to do it, they were accepted, but they were accepted by halves, they were at the same time kept on the margins. I myself believe deeply that it is this ambiguous situation — at once inside and outside — that allows the flowering of these revolutionary, Jewish geniuses. And one may tell oneself that this is a closed chapter, since now there is no longer any marginality, the Jews are no longer marginal anywhere, and so it is no longer as Jews that they can bring what they are supposed to bring. Today the world has, in a sense, become Judaized — the Western world. Today it is less evident, and the political activism, the visibility of the Jews, is misleading from that point of view. It is considered to be part of the natural order of things, it no longer shocks many people; they were far more fecund, they gave far more, when this visibility was not so evident and when many Jews wished for nothing better than to write off this particularity as a loss. Everything has a price in the life of individuals, as in that of communities, and the price we paid for this happy insertion into the nations was the loss of our particularism.
