Faced with a theme such as “The Jews and Europe,” I was at first dumbfounded. What is there to say?
Historically, a great many things — but as concerns the contemporary period?
On reflection, it appeared to me that any number of reflections were possible.
For example, and pell-mell: Europe and the Jewish cultures, which of course include the heritage still very much preserved here, but to be saved as a matter of urgency there where Nazism and communism, for once united, brought it about that it now survives only in the state of traces, in the very places where it was most alive (all of ex-communist Europe).
Another example: can the Jews in Europe be considered a people? A community? A “minority” entity to which specific rights or specific aid must be granted in order to preserve and develop the language, the culture, and so on? But what are “the Jews”? Between a Lubavitcher and a member of the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, what connection is there — if not, perhaps, the memory of the past? But is this memory of the past the same for someone from North Africa as for someone descended from Polish or Alsatian lineages?
Another point: the question of Israel — the famous dual loyalty. But can one imagine a European Jewish lobby, acting upon the institutions in Brussels to justify (or, who knows — one may dream — to condemn Israeli policy)? I find it hard to think so. And besides, in whose name would it speak? For, after all, when someone speaks in the name of the Jewish Community, whom does he represent? And by what right can anyone whomsoever speak in the name of all Jews? Which raises once again the question “What is it to be a Jew?” A question eternally without an answer, save this one: “It is to ask oneself the question”!
In short, history has a great many things to say, and so does the Jewish militant, of whatever obedience he may be; but I — an atheist Jew, progressive, with no ties to the organizations and institutions and yet viscerally Jewish — I feel, despite my ignorance, concerned by the theme of Europe, and I would like to understand why (at least a little).
European, I am, to tell the truth, profoundly so. Descended from grandparents living in the Polish-Russian shtetls, Yiddish-speaking, who emigrated to France at the beginning of the twentieth century, with a father who lived more than ten years in Berlin, I carry within me a past of Europe, different cultural stratifications in which there mingle without conflict French secularism, the dreams of emancipation of the ghettos, Balzac and Bashevis Singer, bœuf bourguignon and stuffed carp.
Joking aside. We carry within us the pride and the courage of having known how to say no to conversion — and, in short, to disappearance as Jews — no to the violence in the old European societies that thought of nothing but waging war, at the price of persecution, rejection, the dire fate of a minority persecuted because it is other. To have, against all odds, gone on being other, not yielding to the demands of the dominant societies, seems to me one of the major forms of courage. To accept contempt, hatred, in order to go on being oneself, and to transmit this message of the supremacy of intelligence over force, of the “Book” over the territory. In the end, perhaps this is what it is to “be a Jew.” To sacralize the holy rather than power. That, at any rate, is the idea I form of it — perhaps a fantasy. In any case, a fidelity to those values.
By a reversal perhaps customary in history, this minority, these wretches, these near-untouchables, played — after their emancipation from the ghettos, after their entry into the global societies, after, if one may say so, their secularization — the role of a ferment in all the countries of Europe where they lived. They were part of every questioning, since the nineteenth century, of the world as it goes; often at the cutting edge of change or of the desire for change, in the economic, political, cultural, artistic, or scientific order. One thinks of the revolutionaries, of course, and of Freud, and of Marx. I shall not go on with this theme, which is all too well known.
But one should not forget a certain role in the development of capitalism, itself also a contester of the old feudal order.
The Jews, it seems to me, because they could not bear the heaviness of the “glebe,” the timelessness of landed property, because they had a very strong awareness of the injustice of the world as it goes, were very important actors of modernity. Their “inside-outside” situation in numerous European societies (inside, because they were full citizens or subjects of the emperors and the kings; outside, because antisemitism made of them subjects or citizens not quite like the others) gave them a more distanced, fresher gaze, more capable of thinking or dreaming of the “wholly other,” of what does not yet exist but could come to be. A secularization of messianism? It has often been said; that is no reason to think it false! But above all, a valorization of study, of reflection, of the circulation of ideas, of the possibility of seeing further than the “here and now.” A way, perhaps, of gathering the fruits of that forced mobility from one country to another, imposed on them for centuries, and which allowed them to understand almost viscerally that beyond the borders and the boundary-markers, there is still someone. A way, too, of compensating for the instability and fragility of their social insertion, whatever forms it may have taken. From the Polish small town in full disintegration to the Israelite citizen of the French Republic.
In short, modern Europe — I believe the Jews were creators and actors of it, in a very important way. And for that, they paid more than the full price. There is no need to insist.
That is how I feel things. Too subjectively, no doubt. But after all, we all have our founding myths.
One more word — or rather, a fear. Do the Jews still play, in Europe (and in the USA, in certain respects, and for the problem posed here, an appendix of Europe), this role of ferment? Between total integration and communitarianism in the diaspora, between that other form of integration and normalization which is Israel, what remains of Jewish cosmopolitanism? What remains of the critical gaze, of the distanced attitude, of the refusal to accept the order of things? I do not know. Of that muffled historical struggle between those who thought that in order to make antisemitism disappear, the world had to be changed, and the Zionists who thought that the Jews had to be changed within a state of their own — where do we stand? Perhaps the Jews partake of this Western one-dimensionality, as a majority in Israel, as a minority elsewhere? Perhaps the historical role of the Jews is finished? It is certainly not the new conflicts taking shape on the horizon that allow us to think that the Jewish dream (a world of justice) is making headway.
So there it is. Is this the end of a cycle? To be a Jew in Europe now — is it a “banal” citizenship, with, on the one hand, a specific and painful memory, and, on the other, the concern for Israel?
P.S. I am well aware of having given only the Ashkenazi point of view — that of a European since… almost always. This is, of course, not an oversight. I would very much like to know, on the subject of Europe, the point of view of those whose memory is bound rather to the Orient, and who are the majority of Jews in France, at least.