Journeys: that is the theme we have chosen for this eleventh issue of Plurielles, a theme strongly bound up with the image of the Jews, but also with that of the Roma (the “Travelling People”).
Since the dawn of time, all mythologies — and ours in particular, through the Bible — have been traversed by such peregrinations. One thinks of Cain’s wandering after the murder of Abel, but above all of Abram’s long journey from Ur to the Promised Land, for “the Lord said unto Abram: Get thee out of thy country, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee.” [Genesis XII, 1]. So one may say that the history of the Jews began with a journey toward an unknown Land, the “Promised Land” — a journey from which their ancestor Abram the Hebrew took his name, for Hebrew comes from ivri, the one who passes over, the ferryman. One might cite the journey of the explorers sent by Joshua to Jericho to discover this Promised Land, “where milk and honey flow.” Or, much later, Jonah’s flight from the mission God ordered him to undertake — to foretell the destruction of Nineveh should it fail to repent: that fantastical voyage in the belly of the Whale (“the great fish,” the text says), which, having swallowed him in the storm, ends by spitting him back out. Or, later still, already in our era, the journey of Yohanan Ben Zakkai as the Talmud recounts it, a journey of great consequence for our Jewish identity.
Indeed, in 68 CE, during the siege of Jerusalem by Vespasian, this Sage of the Talmud made a brief but unusual journey: he left the besieged City hidden in a coffin, for the Jewish rebels permitted no one to leave the City except to bury the dead. He had a very precise plan in mind. Once outside, he presented himself before Vespasian, then commander-in-chief of the Roman troops, and saluted him with the title of Caesar; and to Vespasian’s astonishment, he specified that he would soon be Emperor. Having thus won Vespasian over, he laid a petition before him: he asked to be permitted to open a Talmudic school in a small town, Yavneh. The future emperor, flattered, granted him this favour. Now this establishment of a Talmudic school at Yavneh, and not at Jerusalem, marked a true revolution in the history of Judaism. By the force of circumstance, Judaism ceased to be bound to the sacrificial cult attached to the Temple — which would soon, moreover, be destroyed — and thus to the caste of priests who carried out their activity there and drew their power from it. It became a religion founded on the study and knowledge of texts: synagogal Judaism (from the Greek synagogé, bet-knesset in Hebrew, that is, a place of assembly) had replaced the Judaism founded on sacrifices. Thus the sage took the place of the priest, all the more readily because in that period — the time of Herod — the priestly caste was heavily Hellenized, at once ignorant of the Texts and corrupt. Was it not already written in the Talmud of that time that “a learned bastard is greater than an ignorant High Priest”? So this journey of Ben Zakkai marked the transition toward a Judaism founded on synagogal fellowship and on knowledge, laying the ground, centuries later, for the possibility of a cultural Judaism — that of the modern era.
Much later, alongside the wanderings imposed by history, voluntary journeys and migrations were often the mark of Jewish destiny. Thus, in the Middle Ages, the Jews became, through their journeys, ferrymen — ferrymen of languages and cultures, importing and exporting goods, languages and texts, translating texts from Greek or from Arabic. One sees from these few examples that our history, like our mythology, is full of journeys.
Alongside the representations of the Jew as the Wandering Jew, who were these Jewish travellers in reality? A few examples let us discover them. They are the Benjamins, whether of Tudela or elsewhere, who recounted their peregrinations, and whose writings stand as testimony to the societies of the Middle Ages. There is Joseph Halévy, who, as early as 1867, discovered the Falashas of Ethiopia. Less well known are the scholar-travellers of the Maghreb, who roamed the Jewish communities to collect money meant to help the Jews settled in the Holy Land. And finally, wholly anonymous, there are the preachers, coachmen and pedlars of Poland.
But the journey is also an inner adventure, a discovery of the Other, as Segalen, Levinas or Jabès show us. The imagination and the dream, the dreamed-of object of the journey, is what often drives individuals and communities to travel — and how, then, not to evoke America, at once dream and reality for the Jewish immigrants? Lastly, the question of the journey leads us to discover the Roma of Europe, and their problems today. The theme of the journey thus touches, as we see, many aspects of human destiny, real as well as imaginary: history, literature, ethics.
Let us return from our journeys. Back to the present, to the place and time from which we write. Our reality is painful and violent. Close to us, beginning with France itself, reality — for us Jews — is also the multiplication of antisemitic acts; and I mean not only written or spoken insults, I mean violence, physical assaults on women and children, here, in the France of 2004. A violence that is mounting despite the exemplary mobilization of this right-wing government, which on this point I can only commend, my left-wing convictions notwithstanding.
Even so, we must not sink into an absolute pessimism, into a way of thinking that would carry us away from reality through an unfounded approach gathering disparate elements into a single whole and guided by a leitmotiv of the kind “they have all, in every age, been against us.” On this score, I invite you to discover a reflection — a searching and critical reflection on the theses of Jean-Claude Milner; it is important, and I invite you to discover it.
The calling into question, by some, of laïcité (France’s principle of secularism), which is the basis of our “living together,” likewise strikes us as worrying, for it would set us drifting toward a communitarian type of society, with its dangers both for the freedom of the individual and for the cohesion of society as a whole.
In the Near East, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict drags on with no end in sight: to the murderous suicide attacks of the Palestinian extremists, Israel responds with reprisals out of all proportion, accompanied by Sharon’s repeated refrain: “There are no partners to talk to.” Very fragile gleams of light in this stormy sky: the Geneva Initiative of Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo, and the appeal La Voix des Peuples (The People’s Voice) of Ami Ayalon and Sari Nusseibeh, which has already gathered more than 150,000 signatures among the Palestinians and as many among the Israelis. There is also Sharon’s initiative, should it ever come to pass — that is, the plan for the unilateral evacuation of the Gaza zone. For it to work and open a real hope, this move would have to go “from Gaza to Geneva,” as Peace Now sums it up — that is, it would have to lead to negotiations with the Palestinians; failing which Gaza will become a powder keg of Hamas, rather than the beginning of a State that might coexist with Israel. Let us hope.