Here, then, is a welcome book within the secular Jewish current, a book with a provocative title that, all on its own, would justify an analysis. Written by one of the most original intellectuals of secular Judaism in Israel, it was published by the El-Ouns press, whose director, Rachid Aous, claims for himself the identity of a secular Algerian of Arab-Muslim culture.
Yaakov Malkin taught the aesthetics and rhetoric of theatrical works at the University of Tel Aviv. From 1958 to 1971 he founded and then directed the Beit Rothschild cultural centers, and Beit Hagefen, a Judeo-Arab community center in Haifa. Since 1994, he has been the founder and academic director of Meitar, Institute of Judaism as Culture. He is also the creator, in 1995, and ever since the editor-in-chief, of the journal Yahadout Hofshit (free Judaism). He is the author of numerous books, of fiction as well as essays.
Y. M. seeks first to make explicit the beliefs of secular Jews, and for him secular Jews are atheist Jews. Like everyone, they have their own beliefs and, conscious or unconscious, these manifest themselves in their behavior, in the education given to their children, in their political choices, and in the way they commemorate the festivals or the moments of the life cycle. Thus for Y. M. the central belief of secular Jews is the belief in man as the creator of God and of the values that allow man to become human.
Their beliefs concern their values; and the Jewish values to which we so often refer are, Malkin tells us, “universal values in Jewish dress.”
La foi athée des Juifs laïques is a book that engages a theoretical reflection on the stakes and the facets of Jewish identity, from its origins down to our own time. It is a book that invites us to cast another gaze upon our past and our present, by means of the concept of “Judaism as culture,” a concept with which I feel myself in harmony: indeed, nearly fifteen years ago I had coordinated an issue of the journal Panoramiques whose title was Les Juifs laïques (Secular Jews) and whose subtitle was du religieux vers le culturel (from the religious toward the cultural).
It is from two central figures that Y. M. sets out the foundations of Jewish ethics, that of Hillel and that of Kant, two worlds that seem to us so distant in time, in space and in language.
“The belief in the superiority of humanist values may be summed up in a principle stated by Hillel: a man must not do to his fellow what he would not like to be done to himself. In the language of Emmanuel Kant, it may be expressed thus: ‘every man is an end in himself, and must never be regarded as a means to the realization of any aim whatsoever. A moral principle is one only insofar as it is universal,’” he writes (p. 13).
Y. M. grounds this ethics likewise in the ethics of the prophets: namely, that social justice comes before rites.
According to the very model of sublation, of the Hegelian Aufhebung, Y. M. takes elements, givens, episodes from ancient Jewish history and gives them a new meaning by modifying their historical light.
Thus he shows how the synagogue is not only the place devoted to worship, as we usually conceive it, but a place of communal integration devoted to study.
Under his pen the pilpoul, the Talmudic controversy, ceases to be that intellectual game which sometimes appears to us as an exchange of quibbles. He demonstrates how, with the principle of majority vote introduced in the time of the Talmud, it becomes, from ancient times onward, the embryo and the foundation of a deliberative democracy within Jewish society.
This modern vision of Jewish society brings into relief a fundamental aspect of it from biblical times onward, namely, its pluralism.
This pluralism, a manifestation of its complexity, shows the difficulty there is in defining Jewish identity. The uniqueness of the Jewish people, like that of every people, resides “precisely in its capacity to harbor divergent and contradictory beliefs” (p. 44).
The central place given to this pluralism allows a vision of Jewish history as a dynamic process open to outside influences, the Jewish people giving and receiving, having almost always lived among host peoples. It is also this entanglement that allowed the Jews to free themselves from the constraint of the mitzvot, by means of a critical examination of them from the standpoint of reason, keeping only those that are useful to man and rejecting the others.
On another level, the book offers an interesting reading of Zionism:
Indeed, for Y. M., the Zionist movement was, for the Jewish people, the essential element of the collective transformation that allowed an exit from the religious system, putting into action and creating a secular Jewish society and a State whose essential imprint is secular, even if the struggle, the Kulturkampf, continues within it between the partisans of the mitzvot and those of reason and humanism. Zionism also marked the end of that long historical process that had dissociated nationality from religion among the Jews. A process long since accomplished among most other peoples, but which, among the Jews, is still often rejected by the partisans of the halakha, as we see in the debates that revolve around the questions of “who is a Jew?” or again of “what is a Jewish State?”
Spiritual life is an essential element of secular Jews, and their inscription within a communal dimension gives meaning to their life through the dimension of exchange and the place the other occupies within it. Y. M. recalls, as an essential element of this spiritual dimension, Martin Buber’s conceptions of dialogue, of the I-Thou relation, as opposed to the I-It relation. He considers, like Buber, that communities of the kibbutz type are an embryo of a place where this relation can unfold.
The conception of Judaism as culture that Y. M. develops implies a revision of our approach to history, notably with regard to studies of the Shoah, which according to Y. M. still too often remains the basis of Jewish identity. For him, we must cease to define the Jewish people as a people victimary by essence. It would be important to take an interest in the Jewish cultures that were exterminated, in what they were, in their living dimension.
Alongside the thinker of Jewish secularity, or the militant thinker, one always finds in Y. M. the concern of the pedagogue, the desire to teach and to transmit. To this end he draws up an impressive list of subjects for study and research to deepen this perspective, of which I will cite only a few: the Bible as literature and God as a literary hero, the status of women in tradition, the influence of atheist beliefs on Judaism, the schisms in the history of the Jews.
An extensive lexicon of names and notions closes the book. A remarkable preface by Albert Memmi, another thinker of Jewish secularity, opens it.
With this book, we have at our disposal a critical, secular approach to our own religious heritage, for the stake for Judaism, as moreover for Islam, is to desacralize the religious heritage, thus transforming it into culture, made of stories, of mythic narratives, which open in turn onto a capacity for cultural renewal.
Izio Rosenman