The Eyal Sivan–Rony Brauman duo

Who would not endorse the many initiatives of Rony Brauman and Eyal Sivan in the field of memory? Eyal Sivan’s film on the transmission of the memory of the genocide in Israel, in particular in schools, underscoring aspects that the author manifestly characterized as excesses, holds some interest for anyone concerned with the way the memory of the Second World War is presented and managed there. It is difficult to know, at least for the author of these lines, whether the thesis of “excess” is right or not. It is certainly debatable. Indeed, is it so abnormal, on the part of the pedagogical authorities of the State of Israel, that a commemorative activity around the Destruction of the European Jews should be organized for the country’s youth each year? Is it so scandalous that, in a general way, commemorations should surround this event in Israeli society? Is it true that it provokes that ad nauseam fatigue Eyal Sivan would have us believe, and that recalls the obligatory commemorations of the communist countries? For my part, I have been able to observe on two occasions the visits of Israeli high-school students to the Auschwitz museum over the past decade (since 1989 exactly, since the Israelis can easily travel to Poland), and nothing inclines me to think that this particular journey is part of an imposed memorial itinerary. Is it imposed in Israel? I do not know. In any case, the questions raised by Sivan were interesting in that they led one to wonder which pedagogy, which history, to transmit. The inquiry in this film was succinct but pertinent enough to make one question the virtues and the limits of transmission, in particular by way of official commemoration.

Who would not also endorse the message (or messages) of the film Le spécialiste (The Specialist), directed by Rony Brauman and Eyal Sivan about Eichmann, drawn from the archives of the Eichmann trial? Is there a message, moreover? Everyone will find their own in it, but it emerges from the debates that surrounded this film, and from the positions of the two authors, that one can find in it at least two ideas:

1. The fact that evil, following Hannah Arendt, is terribly banal.
2. That there is a necessity for personal judgment in every circumstance: it is a eulogy of disobedience, as the title of the book they drew from the film indicates.¹ Nothing is really new in this stance and, since the work of Christopher Browning and others, we know a little better how ordinary men can manufacture evil. Eichmann confirms this, and that is the de visu interest of the film.

There is in these messages no link with the Israeli-Palestinian war, and yet it imposes itself, so much do other positions taken by these authors bring us back to it. But they bring us back to it through biases, through simplifications that border, in my opinion, on the worst.

Eyal Sivan thus wrote an article published by Le Monde (7 December 2001), titled “The Dangerous Confusion of the Jews of France,” which caused a great stir and provoked vigorous replies (notably from a collective in which one finds, among others, the names of Serge Klarsfeld, Shmuel Trigano, Maurice Szafran, and Sefy Hendler, correspondent of the newspaper Ma’ariv). Any interested reader may consult their respective arguments (these articles can be found on Le Monde’s website). As for me, it is the following passages that disagreeably surprised me. “For practicing Jews,” writes Sivan, “Judaism is not a question. For secular Jews, on the other hand, torn between universalism and identitarian tension, Zionism has become a religion of substitution.” Let us pass over the fact that “for practicing Jews,” Judaism is not a “question”—even though one might precisely imagine the contrary, that it is the Question, and even the Question of Questions. But what “identitarian tension” can one perceive in secular Jews, and of what identity is it a matter? In what way does this “tension” lead secularism to brace itself against Zionism, against a Zionism that would substitute itself for universalism? Secularism, then, would be universalism, and vice versa? If the Jews of whom Sivan speaks are secular and Zionist, they are like hundreds of thousands of Israelis and, what is more, they would be better advised, if one follows Eyal Sivan’s reasoning, to go and realize their Zionism and their secularism in Israel. But this cannot be the case, if one judges from the programs of the various secular Jewish associations of France, whose principal object is, precisely, a secular Judaism: the question of Zionism exists for them only as one facet, one among others, as important as others, and sometimes even less so, of their identity and of their identitarian questionings. What is more, these associations are distinct. Some of them even have their a-Zionism as their very reason for being, and what occupies them is their status as a minority in France, on the same footing as the Basques or the Bretons. A few of them must certainly have fallen from the clouds upon learning that their secularism—led astray, to be sure—henceforth led them to a “religion of substitution,” whereas elsewhere, Sivan learnedly tells us, “the question of Zionism is outdated.”

At bottom, what are secular Jews doing in this reasoning?

If one understands Eyal Sivan correctly, secular identity would be fragile. “Of these Jews in want of identity,” he writes, “Yeshayahou Leibowitz, the Israeli philosopher, religious and Zionist, said: ‘For most Jews who declare themselves as such, Judaism is no longer anything but the scrap of blue-and-white cloth hoisted to the top of a mast and the military actions the army carries out in their name for this symbol. Heroism in combat and domination—there is their Judaism.’” It is not certain that Leibowitz’s remark targets the same Jews Sivan offers us as fodder—and, truth be told, it is even probably the contrary. But what does it matter? Strangely, for him, the only “identity” that holds, that is structuring, is religious identity, all the others doing nothing but legitimize the “colonial situation” that prevails over there (the formulation is Sivan’s). Thus secular identity, in want of consistency, in evident perdition according to him, can find a vital impulse only… in the armed action of Israel. One would be hard pressed to find in France, in the secular Jewish organizations, in particular those of the left—for it is the left that is targeted by Sivan (universalism has not yet become a value of the right)—virile appeals in favor of Tsahal. This is in any case perceptible neither at the Association pour un judaïsme humaniste et laïc, nor at the Cercle Bernard-Lazare, still less at the Cercle Gaston-Crémieux.

But Sivan’s reasoning does not stop there. Since secular, “universal” Jews find themselves in want of identity, it is at another source that they are going to slake their thirst, just as artificial as their false Zionism: the Shoah. “Victimary culture,” he writes, “becomes a pillar of secular Jewish identity.” Victim, victimary. For some years now, these words, associated with Jewish identity, have run across a galaxy of authors manifestly perplexed by the development of the Jewish memory of the genocide. One finds it in Tzvetan Todorov, in his work Les abus de la mémoire (The Abuses of Memory):² “If one manages to establish in a convincing way that a given group was the victim of injustice in the past,” he writes, “this opens up for it in the present an inexhaustible line of credit. Since society recognizes that groups, and not only individuals, have rights, one may as well take advantage of it; now, the greater the offense in the past, the greater the rights in the present.”³ One finds it likewise in Jean-Michel Chaumont, whose work La concurrence des victimes (The Competition of Victims)⁴ is entirely devoted to the supposedly compensatory effects of the recognition of victim status. One finds it as well in Norman Finkielstein’s book, L’industrie de l’Holocauste (The Holocaust Industry),⁵ that work of which Pierre Vidal-Naquet indicated that it deserved nothing but silence. And one finds it of course in Rony Brauman, in the afterword he precisely wrote for Finkielstein’s book. In each of these authors, and for each in his own way, Jewish identity dissolves into the genocide. Which means that without the genocide, without the disappearance of yiddishkeit, Jewish identity would have disappeared (under the blows of assimilation and/or of its own inanity). The vogue of the Shoah came, happily, to revive, if one dares say so, this poor flame (thank God, religion remains!).

One can reasonably and legitimately question the memorial omnipresence of the Shoah. The springs of this phenomenon are complex, inscribing themselves on the one hand in the general memorial wave breaking over European societies, on the other in the distance necessary to coming to awareness, and finally and above all in the stages of a historical writing that long occulted this event. One can be all the more irritated by it when one sees the gap between today’s memorial scansions and the (still) poor presence of elementary works and documents on the genocide. It must be recalled tirelessly that the Chronique du ghetto de Lodz (Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto) is still not translated into French, nor is Matatias Carp’s work on the fate of the Romanian Jews during the war; that a correct version of Emmanuel Ringelblum’s Chronique du ghetto de Varsovie (Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto)—Ringelblum being the principal collector-historian of the ghetto—is still not available in French (the one that exists is an incomplete version translated from English in the 1950s); and that it is the same for many other works.

To question, then, the place taken by the memory of the Shoah, to be irritated by it—rightly or wrongly—is one thing, but to denounce it as an indispensable identitarian marker is another, oh how reductive and ignorant of the rhythms of memory, of the history of this memory. One could not, however, address such a reproach to Sivan and Brauman, they who have read Tom Segev, they who have worked so long on the Eichmann trial and who know the place taken by that trial in Israel itself! The disagreement must lie elsewhere.

By their stance, Eyal Sivan and Rony Brauman pitch a binary world: there are on one side those who devote to the Shoah a cult that pushes them “to withdraw from the world,” and others who work to “establish a common world.”⁶ In this binary world, they choose their camp, that of the scourges of the Shoah-as-religion (they are not wrong, moreover, to denounce the sacralization of the vocabulary: holocaust, shoah), imagining that the one opposite would be homogeneous! It is thus not displeasing to Rony Brauman to affix his name to that of Finkielstein, even if he admits to having hesitated to do so and not to share all the theses of the American historian. One must have read the latter to understand Brauman’s hesitations. Finkielstein hardly burdens himself with nuances, in fact, in denouncing “The Holocaust Industry,” an industry founded on the extortion of the genocide for the benefit of Israel: “The Holocaust,” he writes, “has truly proved to be an indispensable ideological weapon. Thanks to the implementation of this industry, a country endowed with one of the most formidable military powers, presenting a disastrous record in matters of human rights, has assigned itself the role of victim-state, and the ethnic group that succeeds best in the United States has likewise acquired a victim status. This specious way of posing as a victim brings considerable dividends and, in particular, it immunizes against all criticism, however justified.”⁷ One can find other citations of this ilk.

Victim status, dividend, victimary culture, inexhaustible credit, profit—such are the words used by all those who reject the irruption of Jewish memory into the public space, not realizing, one must hope, how much such a vocabulary belongs to the usual panoply of a certain antisemitic argument. Those who use these words deliberately turn their backs—and some of them in the most odious way, others in the most insensitive way—on what still remains of individual and collective mourning. One would be tempted to say to them: be patient, the last survivors are old, some of them still need to speak their loss, their trauma, 60 years on; refer to the recent book Paroles d’étoiles (Words of Stars),⁸ which gathers “more than 800 testimonies of hidden children, brought together thanks to the work of the Association des enfants cachés, and thanks to the response to the appeals issued by all the local stations of Radio France in January 2002.”⁹ You will see there that if the act of writing or of public speech helps, it does not really manage to complete the work of mourning. Try to understand what the Liberation was for those who found themselves deprived of a parent, what their silence was for 40 years, their astonishment before a historical writing objectively occulted, their need for recognition once they had reached old age. It is a singular situation—and see in this adjective no quest “for the singularity of the Shoah”—that requires a minimum of empathy, of a memory that lays claim to no hegemony, whatever you may think of it…

The use of the past has become a formidable weapon whose protagonists do not measure the danger. This applies to José Bové, to Roger Cukierman; it can also apply to the Sivan-Brauman tandem. For, in the name of a legitimate protest against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, and perhaps of a disappointment with regard to “the Jewish man”—did they see him as eternally socialist, culturally kibbutznik?—they trace today the portrait of a Jew disincarnate, imaginary, warlike, warlike by proxy. For Sivan, let us repeat, there is at bottom no good Jew but a religious one, and Israel is, according to him, “a historical error.” Their duo broaches the question of the Jews’ relation to their memory only through the reductive angle of manipulation and abuse. This blindness seems astonishing in the authors of Le spécialiste (The Specialist). How is one to understand it in these good connoisseurs of Israel, who seem to share with the far left a number of analyses of the “colonial” character of the Jewish state, and with Finkielstein (and consorts) a “materialist,” and even material, reading of transmission?

The answer belongs to them, but in summoning materialism too much one runs the strong risk of perceiving History according to categories so rudimentary (interests, balances of power, social classes, etc.) that materialism itself would no longer find its way among them.

Notes