At the beginning of March 1999, three weeks before the Kosovo war began, an international conference took place in Budapest under the title: “Southeastern Europe: a new agenda for the twenty-first century.” No Jewish subject was broached there, since Europe no longer has a “Jewish question” and since no Israeli was present. And yet the principal speaker, a Hungarian, as well as a not insignificant number of the Balkan activists working for a transnational dialogue, a harmony without borders, and a civilized European space, were all Jews. They would no doubt have been horrified if someone during this conference had chosen to define them as Jews the better to relativize or even disqualify their remarks. A substantial Jewish presence thus remained invisible, as if the very idea of proclaiming in public “as a Jew in Europe, I would like Europe to be or to behave in such a manner” continued to be, after Auschwitz as much as before, an unutterable phrase, an identitarian sacrilege at the very heart of our societies, at once universal and sated with democratic individualism.
The presence/absence of so many Jews at this conference on the Balkans underlies the problematic of this essay. Have the Jews in today’s Europe become above all a group that has transformed the horrors of the Shoah into a new exclusivist identitarian emblem? Or can they still play a positive role in the future of a continent grappling with new democratic, pluralist, and multicultural challenges? I am of the opinion that the Jews, wherever they find themselves in Europe, have become, often without knowing it, not only central actors in the new political and cultural stakes of the continent, but also, again without knowing it, mirror images for the identitarian debates of an Israel in crisis. What the Jews have conquered as rights and identitarian spaces in their respective European States cannot but inevitably fall back as a legitimate demand for the “other” Jews and non-Jews within the very heart of the Hebrew State.
So many reasons to better understand the transformations of Jewish life in Europe over the last decade. I shall evoke five upheavals that may equally well be defined as the lifting of five obstacles linked to postwar European Judaism. First of all, after the Shoah, the overcoming (not without difficulty) of the profound antipathy for the very concept of “Europe” within a world Judaism dominated by the United States and by Israel. Secondly, the slow coming-to-awareness that the end of the Cold War, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, was a positive event for the Jewish world. Thirdly, the taking into account of a fundamental cultural and political event of the last decade: the return of the European memory of the Shoah, no longer confined to German guilt alone but integrated into the different national memories. Fourthly, the taking into account of the arrival on the European scene of “new Jews” with an identity and an outlook very different from those of the pre-Shoah period. And fifthly, the opening toward a new America-Israel-Europe triangle implicating Jews as well as non-Jews. The combined weight of these five transformations gives a new centrality to the Jews of Europe and allows them to envisage an important role within the continent itself as in the international Jewish world.
The ambiguity of the European Jewish reference in the postwar period
After the Shoah, most of the Jews of the world were persuaded that Europe had become the equivalent of Spain after 1492: a continent with a rich Jewish past but henceforth devoid of any significant Jewish life. Ideology moreover seemed to confirm history. Zionism, well before the arrival of Nazism, had already delegitimized the idea of a Jewish presence in a Europe of visceral antisemitism. For the Jews, there was but one solution, their return to Eretz Israel, the land of their ancestors. As for the Jews of America, they shared with the other immigrants come from the Old World the same negative vision of Europe as a continent of intolerance and injustice. They considered America as a land of exception where tolerance and harmony reigned, the equivalent of an earthly Jerusalem, feeling in no way in exile.
It is thus that the two poles of postwar Jewish life shared the same revulsion toward Europe and the same certainty that the Jews had no reason to continue living on the continent that had wanted to exterminate them.
This anti-European vision was moreover shared by the majority of the Jews of Western Europe. These could feel at ease in their respective countries but they continued to keep their distance from any reference to European “values.” The line dividing the “possible” countries from the “impossible” ones changed of course as a function of the nationality of the Jews in question. But certain “truths” were accepted by all. The Jews of Eastern Europe, steeped in yiddishkeit, no longer existed, the vast majority having been exterminated by the Nazis. The few survivors still possessing a Jewish spark had left the place to reach the Displaced Persons camps before departing illegally for Palestine and, after 1948, regularly for Israel. The others, perceived as confirmed communists, could only be Jews in the process of disappearing. Only the Soviet Union could conceivably contain captive Jews.
Moreover, throughout Europe, the Jews themselves perceived themselves as a species on the way to extinction. The “static” Zionists were persuaded that their children would make Aliyah in their stead. The assimilated Jews defined their Judaism above all as a memory coated in humanism and ethics. The communist Jews defined themselves as internationalist militants detached from any ethnic specificity. As for the ultra-orthodox Jews, their very clear Jewish identity was devoid of any real attachment to the countries in which they lived, and still less to Europe.
The ambivalence of the bonds between Europe and the Jews manifested itself just as much on the side of the non-Jewish Europeans, who were ready (for good but also less good reasons) to accept the Zionist vision of a Jewish future exclusively in Israel, all the more so as they continued to define the Jews among them as citizens of Jewish “origins.”
Thus, all these different actors seemed in agreement on one central point: there could no longer be any significant Jewish life in Europe.
The Rupture of 1989
This reading, so reassuring for the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds, was overturned by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. To tell the truth, in the second half of the 1980s already, there had been an upsurge in Jewish life in Eastern Europe, as the “lost” Jews of the communist world, and above all their children, began to seek their Jewish roots in a new quest for identity. In the context of his brand-new policy of “Glasnost” and “Perestroika,” Gorbachev himself gave the green light for the official resumption of a Jewish life in the USSR, before granting all Russians the right to travel or to leave the country. Consequently, throughout the communist camp, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the leaders who until then had repressed all Jewish life set about either reactivating it “from above” — this was the case of Honecker, who sought to make use of the minuscule Jewish community of East Germany on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of “Kristallnacht” in 1988 to win the favor of the United States — or letting the communities live much more freely, as was the case in Hungary.
The Jewish world, including the Jews of Western Europe, was persuaded that the fall of the Berlin Wall could have but one outcome: the departure of all the Jews of Eastern Europe, thus bringing to its final term one of the most terrible chapters of a multimillennial Jewish history. Such was not the case. In an entirely unexpected manner, a Jewish life, numerically weak to be sure, but all the more vibrant and active, developed in this Eastern Europe, supposed to incarnate the Shoah alone. The Jews who chose not to immigrate to Israel did not for all that turn their back on all Jewish identity; on the contrary, they laid claim to it as an integral part of their new freedoms.
It is thus that the end of the communist regimes inaugurated the beginnings of a new Jewish identity in Europe, for it is only after the departure of the last captive Jews that one could truly speak of a voluntary (and therefore voluntarist) Jewish presence in Europe and begin to disentangle its multiple pasts. These Jewish reunions thus took place between Jews of the communist camp emerging from an assimilation desired by their elders but often perceived as forced for the new generations, and Jews of the West themselves emerging from a cultural assimilation, above all with regard to their national pasts and to the ahistoricism of an amnesiac postwar period.
It is important to underscore that in both halves of Europe, the new identitarian momentum of the Jews implied in no way the slightest loss of political or cultural belonging within their respective nations. On the contrary. The Jews of this new Europe combine an almost ethnic Jewish identity — in the sense that the Ostjuden once gave it — with an acute sense (once characteristic of the assimilated Jews of Western Europe) of belonging to their respective political and cultural contexts. The power of this existential mixture made itself fully felt when the Shoah finally found its centrality in the historical experience of the different nations of Europe.
The European inscription of the Shoah
A fully Jewish life at the European level can be conceived ever since the taboo of the Shoah was lifted from the collective history of the continent. The shadow of the Shoah now extends beyond a guilty Germany painted in black and a Poland of dark-gray antisemitism, to penetrate in a Jewish key the identity and the history of all the other countries of Europe. From Norway to Turkey, from Portugal to Russia, the horror of the Shoah has found its specificity in relation to the more classic horrors of the sufferings of war and resistance against the enemy, of anti-fascist struggles and struggles of national liberation.
The confrontation with the Shoah throughout Europe implied above all the will to go beyond the ultimate symbol of Auschwitz-Birkenau in order to pinpoint the political, administrative, economic, and cultural measures that first isolated the Jews from the rest of the population, thus making them pariahs before their final journey toward extermination. This perspective has not ceased to gain ground over the past fifteen years with the latest trials of the collaborators with Nazism, which have revealed the specificity of the horror inflicted on the Jews while demonstrating to what point bureaucrats from all over Europe were able to pursue their sinister tasks while preserving their impunity after the war. The trial of Maurice Papon was exemplary in this domain. But it is above all the new readings of the roles played by neutral countries such as Sweden and Switzerland in the whole of Nazi policy that drew these countries out of their state of blissful absence from history. Likewise, one was able to underscore the weight of the antisemitic prejudices of a country as historically “pure” as the United Kingdom (whose coldness toward the survivors of the Shoah who tried after the war to reach Palestine disqualified, in the eyes of the Jews, every previous reading of British heroism). The same reversal of reading took place with regard to “kindly” little Italy, with its so tolerant behavior in occupied Nice but which had proved to be hard and contemptuous toward its own Jews after the imposition of the racial laws of 1938, just as in the case of the Netherlands, which lost 80% of its Jewish population thanks to a high rate of collaboration with the Nazi enemy. In the East, historians are only beginning to discover what really happened in the occupied zones of the Soviet Union, particularly in Belarus and Ukraine, where the collaboration of the local populations and their political cadres with the Nazis was not infrequent. The results of all this research, of these national questionings and these confrontations with painful pasts have been positive for all, and not only for the Jews, as the very recent case of the Polish debate around the murders committed against the Jews by their neighbors in the village of Jedwabne attests. These national debates have enriched the political and cultural agoras of all of Europe.
The new light cast on the Jewish destiny during these dark years has had a primordial effect for the Jews in Europe today. It has freed them from a major existential burden: that of being the guardians of the Shoah in the name of the disappeared and the survivors. Thus, with time, the Shoah should cease to be an abyss between Jews and non-Jews in order to become a bridge. Its inscription in the memory of Europe has not only lifted an oppressive silence. It has contributed to the reconciliation of the Jews with their respective countries. For it must not be forgotten that the Jews of Europe are the only ones who conjugate their verbs in the future on this continent. The descendants of the victims live their daily lives with the descendants of the guilty or the descendants of the silent spectators. Such a coexistence in no way minimizes the horror suffered, but it facilitates a more tolerant perception of the way in which persons or societies were able to evolve. If the Jews of today can live in a voluntary manner in Europe, that means therefore that there is no permanent and “maleficent” European essence.
The Jews of Europe in this context offer living proof that the Shoah, without ever being forgotten, can be transcended, and it is this mental attitude, more than anything else, that sets them apart from the American or Israeli Jews, for whom the Shoah has become a terrible frozen memory.
The Jews of Europe can thus begin to build themselves a more pacified identity by reinterpreting the Jewish world before the Shoah in a positive manner (and not as a prelude to Auschwitz), while underscoring to what point today’s Europe is qualitatively new (since more open and democratic) in relation to that of the past. In this new “Jewish Europe,” a creative memory turned toward the future will be able to replace a memory of the Shoah uniquely centered on the accounts of the past. And this memory will be enriched by the double interaction with the “others” of the European continent, be they members of the national majorities or members of the old or new minorities that henceforth people the continent. Jewish memory will become emblematic. The difference with America or Israel on this point is crucial.
The “New Jews” of Europe
In the Israeli imaginary and the American Jewish imaginary, and for quite understandable reasons, the Jews in Europe are most often perceived as the descendants or the heirs of their predecessors from before the Shoah. Yet nothing could be further from the truth, since the Jews of today are qualitatively different in relation to those of the prewar period.
First of all, in Western Europe, many of them are new, in geographical terms, thanks to the important postwar migrations. French Judaism was renewed thanks to the arrival of the Jews of North Africa, above all those of Algeria at the beginning of the 1960s. But this was also the case in Italy or in Switzerland, which received new Jews, just as the United Kingdom received Jews come from Lebanon, Persia, Syria, Egypt, and also, in the Italian case, from Libya. Sweden received Jews from Poland, while West Germany received Jews from Poland, Hungary, Romania, and, in a much more spectacular manner as reunified Germany, from the former USSR… not counting, for more or less stable sojourns, Israelis, just as in the case of the Netherlands.
A phenomenon just as important: the Jews who were the descendants of the Jewish communities with a long European history were themselves transformed into a new type of Jew by historical events. While keeping a national loyalty, these Jews could no longer feel the same type of fervent patriotism as their forebears, essentially after the Shoah but also after the Six-Day War in 1967. In Eastern Europe, the communist regimes had assimilated their Jews by force, but were also peopled by Jews who desired such an assimilation. The result being to render them apparently like everyone else, often at the expense of their fragile identities. It is thus that the Polish Jews of the postwar period had very little in common with the generations before the Shoah, just as the French Jews in relation to their Israelite ancestors. Moreover in France, the survivors among the Jews of Eastern Europe who had arrived before the war, and who did not belong to the old French Jewish elites, have now rediscovered their own identity, almost as a revenge, associating themselves in this new approach with their Sephardi cousins. In countries devoid of strong Jewish populations before the war, such as Spain or Portugal, new Jews arrived who are a mixture of German Jews in exile, Ashkenazi immigrants come from Latin America, North African Jews, and a few local Jews who emerged from the invisibility of their small communities, refounded at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is no accident that a good part of these new Jews in the East as in the West consider themselves “Marranos.”
To these new Jews, it is fitting to add all those who, issued from mixed marriages, have actively chosen to opt for a Jewish identity when in the past they would have left the Jewish world. These “half-Jews or quarter-Jews” pose grave identitarian questions on a double level. First of all they do not want to convert when they are issued from a Jewish father, as the Halakha would require, because they consider themselves already Jews by birth or by right. Secondly a significant number of the new voluntary Jews in Europe would no doubt not even have been born if their parents had not survived the Shoah thanks to the fact that they were themselves the fruit of mixed marriages.
To this mixture one must also add the American Jews living in Europe, who have played a crucial role in the reinforcement of a community life with democratic roots, and the Israelis living in the Diaspora, who have brought their own culture while seeking a historically more complex Jewish identity.
If the American Jews, with the opening of Eastern Europe, have undertaken a great nostalgic journey toward the lost world of Yiddishkeit, the new Jews of Eastern Europe, emerging from assimilation, feel no similar need. They are in search of a useful future rooted in Jewish traditions and not of a mythical past. These new Jews are living Jews who are in the process of conquering new places within their civil societies, wanting above all not to confine themselves to the old protective (or sometimes suffocating) niches of the State. Thus one can no longer speak of the traditional “Anglo-Jewry,” of the Jews of the Republic, or of the patriotic Italian Jews, and still less of the German Jews of the past. But one cannot either consider these new Jews of Europe as a cultural creation ex nihilo having nothing in common with their predecessors from before the Shoah. We are thus confronted with a new type: Jews weighted with multiple loyalties and who behave a bit like free electrons within new state and cultural perimeters, but who remain nonetheless conditioned by the weight of national language and cultures. They are thus the bearers of new identitarian challenges, since they no longer accept being defined by categories issuing from the dominant Christian world or by the “others” of the majority as was the case throughout European history. But this approach, it must be underscored, is possible only because it is the act of Jews who belong totally to their respective worlds.
A new America-Israel-Europe triangle
In the immediate postwar period, the world Jewish framework seemed extremely clear. Israel incarnated the future, along with the United States, even if the two new poles of the Jewish world cohabited in a precarious equilibrium. The Jews of America had security and power; the Israelis historical legitimacy and the sense of a mission in a “universal” context. The latter needed the former but the contrary was just as true. For these two entities, the Jewish irritation and even hatred toward Europe had in no way to be artificially maintained. The occasions to manifest them were numerous, since a weak and fragile continent multiplied its errors toward the Jewish State, above all after the Six-Day War. The relations between Europe and Israel were thus characterized by an infernal spiral of suspicion and disdain on the Israeli side. The Europeans, for their part, seemed bogged down with regard to Israel in an unhealthy mixture, tinged with psychological taboos, based on a silence and a guilt mixed with realpolitik considerations toward the Arab world and a deviated sense of international morality and legalistic preciosity… So many attitudes that disturbed not only the bonds between the Jewish state and the continent but just as much Jewish life in Europe. Consequently, even today, the Jewish world paradoxically feels more at ease with Germany, the “protector” of Israel within the European Union, than with Europe as a whole.
This overly schematic vision of each side of the triangle is in the process of fading as each camp confronts its own identitarian demons. American Judaism, traditionally so proud of its power, has withdrawn into itself to contemplate its own diasporic fragility: the fall of its demography, mixed marriages, the loss of a certain communal engagement and of certain ideals with the social ascension of its members, who have practically disappeared into a WASP world in less than three generations, leaving the American ethnic neighborhood, a kind of Shtetl, to reach the heart of national power. In the great American multicultural upheaval, the Jews find themselves ill at ease, having barely digested the struggles and tensions of their relationship with the Black world after the initial honeymoon of the struggle for civil rights. But the historical victims of Europe, not being able to present themselves as “victims” in the American body politic, have thus missed the multicultural boat that has characterized the current sociological recomposition of America, while not wanting to lose themselves in the American consensus of the WASP elites.
In the same manner, Israel has also undergone a transformation in its identity. The founding credos of its constitutive ideology, the historical purity of its progressivism, have been eroded. As the most powerful country of the region, Israel has also discovered the reality of its state power and the attendant realpolitik choices, of its errors and its injustices in particular toward the Palestinians. And alas, since last autumn, it is also discovering the weakness of its force. Moreover, the only democracy of the Middle East has developed its own internal enemies in the camp of the ultra-nationalist ultra-orthodox, whose beliefs are the antipodes of the social-democratic vision of the initial Zionism, sometimes verging on a Jewish version of fascist “blood and soil,” and mixed with a religious intolerance and a worrying concern for ethnic purity.
All these internal struggles prove that Israel, beyond its conflict with the Arabs, still has many democratic and identitarian lessons to learn. Zionism has had its own national and ethnic deviations and its own difficulties accommodating the historical “other” within itself. It is a matter not only of the Arabs but also of the “other” Jews, as the new Israeli historians have underscored. This coming-to-awareness, above all after the assassination of Rabin, has given a new humility to the Israeli elites. For new generations, Israel appears today much closer to old Europe and to its own democratic and identitarian stakes, in short much more “European” than Zionist ideology had given to believe. The gulf between the old world and the new Israel is in the process of narrowing, even (or above all) after the return of hostilities in the Middle East since the autumn of 2000.
Since 1989, moreover, Europe has begun to define itself as a function of democratic values and human rights in relation to what has become its self-proclaimed postwar specificity: historical reconciliation, national and between-nations. Values that Israel also needs on the internal plane in the context of the cultural, ethnic, political, and religious cleavages that only keep growing in the society and that recall the historical battles of the separation between Church and State in European history. Israel needs them also on the external plane in the Israeli attempts to find solutions with its Arab neighbors in order to put an end to what is in the process of becoming the equivalent of a “hundred years’ war.” Israel will therefore have to confront its European roots on both fronts.
Europe has also become more important in the life of Israel thanks to the fall of communism, since the Hebrew State has been able to reestablish bilateral relations with the other half of Europe and above all to intensify its bonds with a unified Germany that is in the process of taking the lead of a new European policy in its regard. Surely though slowly, the Israelis will turn toward Europe in search of their own political and democratic roots, but without the nostalgia of the American Jews toward the world of their ancestors. What will interest the Israelis will be concrete priorities turned toward the future with regard to a Europe that will become their historical and cultural “hinterland.”
The relativization of the three sides of this Jewish triangle is only beginning but it will have crucial consequences on the future of the Hebrew State as on that of the Jews in Europe. The Jewish State will need a strong diaspora not only as a spokesman for its interests but above all as a democratic and pluralist counterweight for its own priorities and its inevitable inclinations toward realpolitik. In this context, it will be in the interest neither of the Israelis nor of the Jews of Europe to speak of the poor agonizing cousins of Europe compared to a self-sufficient Israel. The relationship must be reciprocal and beneficial for both parties. In the future, the Jews of Europe may very well become the point of equilibrium between the American and Israeli Jewish poles. It is they who, paradoxically, will live in the years to come the most positive cultural and identitarian tensions in their quest for new historical syntheses. The principal challenges — that of pluralism, of multiculturalism, and of the Jewish presence in a growing Jewish space — will be important for all of world Judaism.
The Pluralist Challenge
The Jews of the post-Shoah period in Western Europe were able to live with dignity for the simple reason that their respective countries granted them what would have seemed unimaginable before: an incontestable citizenship with the implicit right to multiple loyalties through very strong bonds to another state, Israel, and through vast contacts with the Jews of all the Diaspora. This implicit contract remained valid even when, in the case of the Soviet Jews, their cause was not necessarily compatible with the détente interests of their respective countries. The best proof of the radical novelty of this contract between the Western democracies and their Jews could be perceived by looking at the fate of the Jews in the non-democratic European countries, of the right as of the left. Every form of Jewish cultural or religious life was considered dangerous and potentially hostile to the interests of the states. The Jews under Franco in Spain, under Salazar in Portugal, had police files, limited communal privileges, and remained, like the rest of civil society, absent from the national political agora while being the objects of a latent suspicion. Under the communist regimes, the Jews were always at the mercy of the accusation of being Zionists and therefore traitors — in short they were ideal candidates (despite the number of militant communist Jews) for the accusation of “cosmopolitan” counter-revolutionaries. Or on the contrary, for the accusation of ethnic particularism.
Now that the greater part of Europe is no longer under ideological grip, the challenge that the Jews must confront is much more internal than external. It is a matter of developing within the communities the same pluralist tolerance that the Jews expect to find within their countries, antisemitism and Zionism by proxy no longer constituting the pillars of Jewish life on the continent. Everything is now conjugated in the plural in the new Jewish life on the continent: religious life, culture, identity, and every choice is voluntary. The Jews now expect that the pluralist and sometimes even postmodernist context in which they live their external life should penetrate also within their Jewish life, thus making the two dimensions of their existence perfectly compatible. The result is that even the smallest communities now possess ultra-orthodox, liberal, and even radical Jews, with also their contingent of cultural, even secular Jews. All these groups contest the legitimacy of communal structures often unchanged since emancipation. A type of collective democratic individualism is in the process of penetrating the life of the Jewish communities of Europe, with major political consequences. Once the European States had managed to have a single Jewish interlocutor supposed to represent, like a prince, the whole community. This is no longer possible since Jewish voices have become multiple.
The contribution of pluralism within the community also implies the transformation of the mental categories of the State toward religions, which now define themselves as independent actors of civil society rather than as grateful actors in the wake of power. The communities will be able to take up this challenge only by becoming houses integrating all Jewish identities, thus putting an end to a monolithic representation. Two other domains flow from this problematic: the redefinition of the role of women and the inclusion of Jews having only a Jewish father. In both cases, the voluntarist and egalitarian bases of our societies have penetrated the life of the Jewish communities, for in a democracy all walls sooner or later become transparent, even in the religious context.
The Multicultural Challenge
As European societies take into account the different types of others within them, be they old ethnic minorities or more recent immigrants, the Jews of the continent will have to decide how they want to define themselves. In an ever more voluntarist manner, the Jews cover all the possible identitarian definitions, wanting at times to be as integrated as English lords or as separate as the Turks in Germany. In the United Kingdom, where the Jewish elites occupy the highest positions of power, many Jews, by contrast, feel at ease with a multicultural and ethnic definition of their Jewish identity. The most orthodox among them push this attitude to the point of considering themselves closer to the Muslims, with whom they share the same concerns for dietary purity and religious education, and the same identitarian struggles. The French Jews, by contrast, like France itself, refuse any minority status for themselves as for others. The Swedish Jews have chosen the status of minority, contrary to those of Denmark. The Hungarian Jews have violently refused it, contrary to the Jews of Poland. Sometimes there are ironic reversals: the Jews of Russia, after having struggled for decades against the reference to Jewish identity in their internal passports during the time of the Soviet Union, now wish to maintain it the better to benefit from the rights given to minorities in the new Russian Federation.
One thing is certain. Across the continent, Jewish identity is no longer a simple question of private religious observance for citizens who do not distinguish themselves from other national patriots. There has been a vast homogenization of Jewish identity, which now combines ethnic and religious references. Yiddishkeit and Sephardi culture have entered the multiple networks of what is in the process of becoming a planetary Jewish village.
Can one however consider the Jews as obvious members of a multicultural society? Can they be compared to Turks or Maghrebis or to those true strangers that are the immigrants come from distant lands and without any cultural or ex-colonial attachment to the countries of Europe (for example the Filipinos in France)? Can the Jews be perceived or self-define themselves as multicultural “others” when they have been at the heart of their respective societies even when these were much more antisemitic? Does the partial de-assimilation of the new Jewish generations mean for all that that they consider themselves as belonging to another culture? Surely not. It provides rather the proof of a total integration within each national context. For only insiders can afford the luxury of “exiting.”
To bring out the Jewish past and present at the heart of Europe thus becomes less an exercise of multiculturalism than of its contrary, a practical work of historical and cultural symbiosis. We are thus at the opposite of the ideological fashion of the moment. One can today ask the European nations to respect Jewish “dignity” or “difference,” but the essential lies elsewhere. The major stake is to make the Europeans understand to what point their own culture was and still is influenced by the Jewish presence, rather than to underscore its separate identity. The true challenge involves pinpointing the Jewish component of Culture (with a capital C), disentangling the symbiotic threads, encouraging new interactions, underscoring creativity against ethnic obviousness in a complex play of identities. It is no doubt in Germany that this challenge will be the richest to take up now that the children of the postwar Ostjuden occupy the symbolic heart of a new intellectual and cultural scene.
Paradoxically it is in the domain of the religious rather than in that of culture or politics that a Jewish multicultural approach imposes itself. The moment has come to dismantle the ritual and, all in all, convenient references to the “Judeo-Christian” tradition. The hyphen between the two adjectives must be interpreted as a sign of equality and not as an arrow indicating the final product of a chemical reaction. The challenge of presenting Judaism in all its richness and all its complexity for a vaster public looms imminently with regard to a Jewish world accustomed to distrust as soon as non-Jews take too close an interest in it. In this sense, Judaism represents a multicultural challenge for all the Churches at a moment when one can speak in our individualist and democratic societies of a new open market of spirituality.
The Jews must confront the multicultural challenge above all because, despite its sympathetic and positive sides, multiculturalism contains dangerous seeds and perverse effects that can lead to a new marginalization of Jewish life in Europe, even if this time the ghetto were a self-proclaimed ghetto. The Jews, it must not be forgotten, belonged to the European continent from its very beginnings. Even if, before the Emancipation, they often lived at the margins of society and with a center of gravity more turned toward their own collective life, they always profoundly interacted with the outside world. Today it is the nature of this belonging that must be rethought and not its validity. Ideally the Jews could serve as electrical transformers to better define the European belonging of all the “others” of the continent, but by defining it from the inside and not from the outside. This challenge must be approached in an enriching manner, all the more so as Jewish life contains its own multiculturalism, without forgetting that the Jews are now insiders who want to keep an outsider’s gaze — the absolute contrary of their ancestors from before the Shoah.
The Challenge of the Jewish Space
One of the results of the European inscription of the Shoah and of the transformations of the continent after 1989 has been the exponential growth of Jewish themes in European cultural life, well beyond the Jewish communities. Jewish museums and memorials have become driving forces of the first rank for the presentation of Jewish life well beyond the memory of the Shoah. Novels and films written or produced by non-Jews and that incorporate Jewish characters (the most notable in this domain being La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful) by Roberto Benigni), Jewish autobiographies, history books, and above all books dealing with Jewish traditions ranging from the study of the Torah to cooking recipes, Jewish jokes, and Jewish music have become so many cultural subjects for a vast public. To this must be added the academic field of Jewish studies, which keeps growing in numbers.
This phenomenon is entirely new in European history and presents a major challenge. First of all for a very concrete reason. There are not enough Jews on the continent for them to be able to fill these new Jewish spaces on their own. Contrary to Israel, which is its own Jewish space, or to the United States, where there are enough Jews to fill the space, the Jews in Europe can only fill it partially. This is particularly true in Germany, where in the universities, in the Jewish museums, in the domain of publishing, and in most of the Jewish activities (with the exception of religious life) it is non-Jews who constitute the bulk of the users and the cadres. But the same phenomenon occurs elsewhere, even in the United Kingdom and France, which possess in principle communities large enough to manage this space.
This lack of Jewish numbers in the European Jewish space must not be perceived as a calamity or as an impoverishment. On the contrary. The Jews of Europe should perceive this situation as a positive challenge, a challenge that is particular to Europe. For if the Jews now live on this continent in a voluntary manner, that means that they share with their non-Jewish fellow citizens a complex series of affinities, and it is this bond that must be deepened and transformed into a creative dialogue, beginning precisely with the non-Jews who have chosen to penetrate into the Jewish space.
These European Jewish spaces should not be based uniquely on the past, and certainly not on a past read as a long road leading to Auschwitz. Besides, no one has settled a fundamental question: is Auschwitz a Jewish space? The symbol as well as the physical place incarnate the Shoah and the summit of Jewish suffering, but Auschwitz also lies outside this Jewish specificity, since the camp and the name belong also to Polish, Roma, ex-Soviet memory and of course to that of all humanity. One cannot be Jewish through Auschwitz. It is for this reason that it is imperative to reconsider the Jewish past from before the Shoah in a positive and living manner, as a source of existential dignity, of cultural creativity, of religious depth but also of civic engagement… so many Jewish comings-to-awareness with a universal scope for the future identitarian stakes of other groups.
The Jewish space, moreover, can also reinforce Jewish cultural life, as is currently the case in Germany. The heirs of German Judaism, who are for the most part in Israel and the United States, are increasingly drawn to the German Jewish space, asserting their “rights” there and making their voices heard there. They fill it too in their own way; not to settle accounts with their past but above all as a stake for the future. And this is true everywhere in Europe, from Portugal to Russia. This nascent Jewish space is at once virtual and real, symbolic and concrete, cultural and political. It now plays a not insignificant role in the return to Judaism of many marginal Jews who feel reinforced in their identity by the interest that their respective countries accord to Jewish life.
It is thus that, in the last instance, the greatest challenge that the Jews will have to confront in the future is to reframe a rich and confident Judaism in the world of “others.” In the era of human rights, of international democratic references, and of respect for cultures, Judaism cannot afford to close itself off from the rest of the world in the name of an almost sacred specificity, thus losing its more than legitimate, indeed founding place in the agora of universal values, at the precise moment when the Western world for the first time wants to hear Jewish voices. The Jews in Europe should thus seize the opportunities before them, on a continent in full mutation. They should infuse Jewish life into their numbers, while welcoming into their midst those who want to belong to the Jewish people, and while building bridges with the others who wish to better incorporate Jewish culture into their general culture. Through the diffusion of religious values, of history, of culture (beyond ethnic fashions), of Jewish philosophy and ethics, the Jews should play an important role in a pluralist European coming-to-awareness, which must now accept the Jewish component on its own terms.
The invisible voices of the conference on the Balkans should feel free at last to express their multiple identities and their values. For the absolute victims of the past have become the greatest “success story” of the European postwar period. Endowed with a symbolic centrality, the Jews of Europe overlook the crossroads of the past, the present, and the future of the continent. May they have the collective wisdom to employ this symbolic power with openness, modesty, and justice.
