This study will consider Franco-Judaism not as a dead star, but as a current of thought and action still vigorous in our own day, where it remains alive, though in a sense underground. It will therefore comprise three parts, corresponding to each century elapsed, or in progress, since the Emancipation.
In times past: a doctrine of combat
As Frances Malino puts it without mincing words (it is true that she is American!): “The idea of an ever-progressing assimilation is today held to be false.” This is indeed what emerges from all the serious historical scholarship, from Michael Graetz to Phyllis Cohen Albert, by way of Esther Benbassa and Frances Malino herself. And so the denunciation of a “political theory of assimilation,” which over the years has become a commonplace, has lost much of its force. It is hard to conceive of the theory of an unestablished fact. Yet that was the risk taken by the celebrated (Canadian) historian Michael A. Marrus in his classic book on Les Juifs de France à l’époque de l’affaire Dreyfus (The Jews of France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair) (1969; French translation, Calmann-Lévy, 1971). Positing that the Jews of France had “paid” for their emancipation with an entropy of identity, he denounced the ideology that had accompanied this surrender, calling it “Franco-Judaism” — perhaps on the model of “Austro-Marxism,” familiar to specialists of the labor movement! The implicit idea being to ridicule this Judaism in the French style, a mere antechamber to a voluntary “euthanasia” — to borrow the image that has been applied, just as questionably, to the “Science of Judaism” in Germany. “Jews of negation,” as they are now called in a certain vulgate. It is true that already the great Dubnow, in 1897, had voiced the same anxiety after reading the Frenchmen in question. Nothing new under the sun. Research has not validated these prejudices. While conversions always affected, marginally, this small population (fewer than a hundred thousand “Israelites” in 1870), what one observes above all is a variety of situations ranging from a stubborn fidelity to tradition to the search for a reformulation of the principles of Mosaism under the conditions of modernity, by way of a whole gamut of existential choices and intellectual constructions; we are already in a society composed of individuals. Some may choose a particular “post-Judaism,” in the name of Science and Liberty. This in no way implies a capitulation before a modernity imposed from without, an “abstract universalism,” as one sometimes reads, but rather the recognition of an “elective affinity” between Judaism conceived conceptually (the “theoretical Judaism” of the Catholic essayist Ernest Seillière) and the principles of 1789. An affinity that is no mystery, since on reading these doctrinaires one finds that the Decalogue was the condition of possibility of the Declaration of the Rights of Man! “I was brimming with republican principles,” said Alexandre Weill (1811–1899), the Isaiah of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, describing his state of mind when he left the Frankfurt ghetto for Paris, fresh out of the heder where he had been taught the rudiments of the Torah. It is therefore difficult to see a mere process of “assimilation” in what is just as much a plea for a “Judaization” of liberal society as an apology for Frenchification. From which it follows that the term Franco-Judaism was not so ill-chosen, and that today it commands unanimity, across all tendencies. But did this audacious “synthesis” emerge, as if by miracle, out of nothing?
In reality, the “plot,” as the late Paul Ricœur would have said, linking French culture, Judaism and “Jewishness,” does not date from yesterday. Without going back to Abelard, one must recall the children of Marrano mothers (Montaigne, Jean Bodin), the politiques who were great enthusiasts of rabbinical literature (Richelieu), the anonymous martyrs convicted of having “apostatized” in favor of the Law of Moses; the partisans of Natural Right accused of judaizing (Jean Barbeyrac, a precursor of Rousseau). But it is with the engaging figure of Zalkind Hourwitz (1751–1812) that the eruption of a free Jewish discourse in the French language begins. Free of the chains of a degenerate rabbinism, but above all freed of any fear of what the Gentiles might say. By “Gentiles” we mean the Christians, of course, but also the “enlightened,” the “philosophers” of the other camp, whom judeophobic prejudices have not always abandoned — sometimes even without their knowledge. With a causticity that still surprises today, this Polish Jew, who arrived in Paris as a clandestine immigrant, gives as good as he gets to the Grégoires, but also to the Mendelssohns, whom he judges too respectful of institutions. His most immediate “successor” will be Joseph Salvador, a descendant of Marranos, a physician, close to the Saint-Simonians. “Salvador is in fact the first French Jew to have expressed the thought of his people since the emancipation. From 1789 to 1822, thirty-three years had passed — the average span of a generation, and the time needed for the education of a ‘new stratum’,” James Darmesteter would write in a classic article, Joseph Salvador (1881), reprinted in Les prophètes d’Israël (The Prophets of Israel). We have seen that Salvador was not in fact the very first, but it is true that he was unquestionably a pioneer in his attempt to think the mission of the Jews and of “Hebraism” in the new world born of the Revolution. While the young Judeo-German elite, kept at the margins of the universities, was launching the program of a “Science of Judaism” to make up for the rebuff their demand for equal rights and recognition was meeting, their French brethren, already fully “emancipated,” were taking part — under their own banner — in the great debate on the future of the traditional religions and their possible supersession. Salvador would end, after analyzing in the manner of Montesquieu the Institutions de Moïse (The Institutions of Moses) (1822), then dissecting without complaisance Jésus-Christ et sa doctrine (Jesus Christ and His Doctrine), by describing, in the manner of the Prophets, a unified world that had triumphed over Catholic-imperial obscurantism around the values common to the Revolution of Fraternity — that of 1848 — and to the “republic of the Hebrews.” The “Vatican” of this liberated world would be in Jerusalem, which would thus have triumphed in its millennial struggle against “Rome,” after the messianic detour through “Paris.” Was Salvador a proto-Zionist? Many in the Jewish national movement believed so. Let us, however, guard against anachronisms. He is in any case one of the inspirers of the idea of a “Jewish policy” on a universal scale, of which the Alliance israélite universelle, founded in 1860 by men who had read him very closely, is the first concrete realization. Salvador is also a privileged source — down to the very title of the work (Rome et Jérusalem) — of the master-book, indisputably proto-Zionist this time, by Moses Hess. More generally, one is entitled to assert: “Franco-Judaism, far from being merely an inert obstacle to the penetration of Zionist ideas into the Jewish community, became, moreover, in the face of the challenges of antisemitism and of Zionism, a doctrine of combat…” (Catherine Nicault, La réceptivité au sionisme de la fin du XIXe siècle à l’aube de la deuxième guerre mondiale [The Reception of Zionism from the End of the Nineteenth Century to the Dawn of the Second World War], in Pierre Birnbaum, Histoire politique des Juifs de France, Presses de la Fondation nationale des Sciences politiques, 1990, p. 98). Other studies, such as those of Phyllis Cohen Albert, confirm this conclusion. Michael Graetz, for his part, has emphasized that the Saint-Simonian Jews were far from insensible to the idea of what would later be called a “spiritual Zionism,” and sometimes even went as far as the borders of a national project. Far from wishing to “assimilate” to the surrounding Christianity, they were deconstructing it…
There are filiations less well known still. Hans Kohn, of the “Bar Kochba” circle in Prague (where Kafka made a few appearances…), leads us, in his Jewish Humanism (1932), “Along the roads of French Judaism.” These are in fact the roads of Franco-Judaism! Dealing with the Dreyfus Affair, he shows himself more equitable than Hannah Arendt, who reduces the drama — as Marrus would later do — to a face-to-face between frightened Jewish notables and a Bernard Lazare entirely isolated in his prophetic undertaking. Without inquiring into the sources from which the poet of Nîmes drew, and in which James Darmesteter (1849–1894) holds an eminent place. We have already encountered this name — that of the son of a poor artisan bookbinder, come from Germany with his brothers — in connection with Salvador. He is doubtless the personality who best epitomizes Franco-Judaism arrived at maturity. A learned orientalist, an Iranologist, a disciple of Renan, a translator of the Avesta, James Darmesteter embodies — while holding himself apart from consistorial Judaism — the secularized, Maimonidean messianism for which the really existing French Republic is the Promised Land, no longer as utopia (before and after 1848), but as a society to be built (after 1870). For this, allies were needed against retrograde Catholicism. The Judeo-Protestant synthesis (Patrick Cabanel) was thus inscribed in the French equation. We know that it was destined to spill beyond confessional boundaries in an attempt to endow the Republic with a “civil religion” that would allow it to take root in the collective imagination, without thereby denying the Catholic contribution. Such is the message of James Darmesteter’s book Les prophètes d’Israël (The Prophets of Israel), today forgotten, but which was a reference text for the republicans (Bernard Lazare, Péguy) as for their “nationalist” enemies (Barrès, Maurras).
One sentence, itself authentically prophetic, sums up its inspiration: “After justice for the Jews, the Jews for Justice.” This conviction — that justice, and therefore the prophets who raised it up against all the powers, represent the true spirit of Judaism — was also that of the young Léon Blum. “Jehovah was justice,” he has a character say in his Nouvelles conversations de Goethe avec Eckermann (New Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann) (1901), where one may also read this sentence: “the principles of reason in whose name the philosophers speak are identical to the principles in whose name the God of Israel spoke to His people.” This reclaiming of the rediscovered spirit of Prophetism was destined for a great future (Asch, Sperber, Neher). But in 1890, it corresponds perfectly to the Alsatian, “Comtadin,” “Bordelais,” and German Jews who for three or four generations have been working for the republic and for the emancipation of the Jewish communities throughout the wide world. It was in this spirit that the Alliance israélite universelle (A.I.U.) was founded in 1860. Like the men of the Haskalah of Central Europe in a wholly different context, they claim two ancestors: Maimonides and Spinoza. Franco-Judaism was “missionary,” as is proved by the very existence of the A.I.U., and also by the astonishing adventure of Aimé Pallière, a Catholic Freemason, a “liberal” Jew, who introduced into France the thought of the Italo-Moroccan rabbi Elie Benamozegh (1823–1900)… and was the mentor of organizations such as the International Union of Jewish Youth or the Eclaireurs israélites de France (the Jewish Scouts of France) in the early 1920s. But is it simply a matter of stirring up civil society? That would be to misjudge the scope of the project, which had enough in it to alarm those who would have the Jews “stay in their place.”
The golden age of Franco-Judaism coincides with the entry of the Jewish elites into the threefold service that defines republican duty: service to Science, service to the State, service of Arms. These are the famous “State Jews” (Pierre Birnbaum). The question is whether this messianic enthusiasm for emancipating France — which led so many sons of peddlers or of synagogue cantors into public service — was or was not an illusion, even a fool’s bargain. In speaking of “madmen of the republic” or of “State Jews,” Pierre Birnbaum seems to think so. Still, in evoking elsewhere a “Jewish republic” (a term ironically borrowed from Charles Maurras), he is absolutely right. On condition, that is, of speaking rather of a “Judeo-Protestant” republic, as the historian Patrick Cabanel does not hesitate to do. The latter demonstrates that the “nationalist” intellectuals were lucid in their hatred, for the Third Republic rested essentially on the alliance of the Reformed and “Israelite” elites (plus a few “positivists”) against the bloc of Throne and Altar. Others emphasize the scientific service, of which Perrine Simon-Nahum has sketched the memorial (La cité investie [The Invested City], Cerf, 1991). To this common enterprise of republican “civil religion,” one may attach the Revue des Études juives (from 1880 on), supported by Renan, and even the French School of Sociology, with Durkheim, his nephew Marcel Mauss, Lévy-Bruhl, Robert Hertz. Can these last be attached to Franco-Judaism? It is not obvious. Let us venture the idea — which their correspondence would sometimes validate — that they were its “Marranos,” like Julien Benda and, later, Raymond Aron. Well before 1940, the “Judeo-Protestant” project was obsolete. The young Jewish intellectuals were turning toward another project, this one of national renaissance, symbolized by the names of Edmond Fleg or André Spire. Let us note all the same that these last continue to draw inspiration from a Darmesteter — following in this Bernard Lazare and Péguy, whom they revere — as from a master to think with, even though Zionism was by definition foreign to him. Others — young socialist agrégés with names like Raymond Aron or Claude Lévi-Strauss — revolt against the “abstract universalism” of the Kantian university, which is another way of registering the failure of the Judeo-Protestant Republic. But they will not evolve in the same way with regard to the “Jewish question.” Things are never simple. Even if the ambiguity of concrete situations escapes those who reason more geometrico. In his brilliant and contestable work Les penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique (The Criminal Tendencies of Democratic Europe) (Verdier, 2003), Jean-Claude Milner asserts that “the definitive solution to the Jewish problem” (in liberal nineteenth-century Europe) is “becoming bourgeois-cultivated within the framework of a nation-state, governed by the rights of man… and the holder of a recognized culture” (p. 49). This is obviously to misjudge entirely the differences of principle between Emancipation à la française and the always-disappointed search for an equivalent to this “Western” path in Germany. The latter country was slow — we know this only too well — to become a “nation-state,” and when this finally happened, Germany knew neither the rights of man nor, above all, the French concept of citizenship. Let us recall that this was already Bruno Bauer’s argument, in his famous controversy with Marx over the Emancipation of the Jews: why should the latter be citizens… in a society where no one is? In reality, Bildung (“formation,” the “culture” of an invisible aristocracy of the Spirit) — the ideal of the German Jews, who were not recognized as fellow citizens by the Christian Germans — was in fact the ideological accompaniment of a heroic and desperate attempt to be at last “worthy” of being accepted into Germanness, a last stage sometimes before the more radical gesture of conversion. That this was a delusion, the best minds had long recognized, well before our Lacanians. One need only read Heinrich Heine or Otto Weininger (Sex and Character) to be convinced of it. And so nothing remained for the “bankers’ sons” whom Milner evokes but to flee the real world for that of timeless Art or of the Philosophia perennis, either by remaining Jewish and humanist, or by severing, socially and intellectually, all ties with Judaism, trying to integrate into the conservative elites (the Hofmannsthal and Wittgenstein families). In France, access to citizenship had been the key that opened access to culture, and not the reverse. The Jews had thus been party to the modernization of France and to the construction of a society founded, in part, on their own contribution. To speak, then, of “Europe,” as if the Jews had always been a foreign body within it, is to misjudge the most profound historical dynamic (cf. our article in Plurielles no. 9 on Les Juifs et l’Europe [The Jews and Europe]). But there is Europe and Europe. Germany draws its Jewish elites into the impasse of the Counter-Enlightenment, even of the Counter-Revolution, and of “völkisch” reveries on Blood and Soil. It seems that today it is our turn. Without any critical approach, we feast on the Bubers, the Rosenzweigs, the Benjamins, without heeding the German ideology — problematic to say the least — with which they are imbued to the marrow (völkisch, “conservative revolution”). To those who might find that I am pushing things a little too far, I recommend reading Jean-Luc Evard’s Signes, paraboles et catastrophes (Signs, Parables and Catastrophes). They will see there the dangerous liaisons between the most deadly German ideology and a certain neo-Judaism. There are, on the other hand, troubling analogies where one would hardly expect them. Among American Jews today, returned from the internationalist revolutionary utopias, the “return” does not express itself in the mode of an identification with the Judeo-Weimarian “new thought” — although it wrought havoc over there too — but rather through the search for a symbiosis between Yiddishkeit and the founding myths of the American nation. A deep identity all the easier to discover for being always already there. The common basis, already recognized by the Puritans of the Mayflower, is quite simply the Pentateuch and the Prophets. On this basis, the “love story” evoked by Norman Podhoretz — illustrious editor of the magazine (yesterday “progressive,” today “neo-conservative,” Commentary) — rests on solid ground. The patriotism of American Jews, coexisting with their unshakable attachment to the State of Israel, does not expose them, or exposes them infinitely less, to the charge of “dual allegiance.” But the rhetoric of this patriotism recalls, irresistibly, the variations of Franco-Judaism on the founding myths of the old and the new Jerusalem — with this difference, that the Americans (for example the left-“liberal” Michael Walzer in his book Exodus and Revolution) tend rather to stress the Exodus from Egypt, whereas the French always returned to the primal scene of the giving of the Law at Sinai.
Yesterday: a “heroic illusion”
Freddy Raphaël was right to title his contribution to the Histoire religieuse de la France (Religious History of France) “La synthèse franco-judaïque et sa fragilité” (The Franco-Judaic Synthesis and Its Fragility). It was indeed a wager. Fewer than a hundred thousand Jews or “Israelites” could not, even allied with other minorities, take the lead of a “religious revolution” in France. The success of Drumont’s La France juive (Jewish France) was a first shot across the bow. The development of French “nationalism” in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair was even more significant. A particularly lucid enemy, Charles Maurras had perfectly understood the stakes: Catholic monarchy or Jewish republic, Christianity rediscovering its Hebrew root or the idolatrous paganism of pure Force. And he knew, with others, how to block the republican project by unleashing the antisemitic movement.
The crisis of Franco-Judaism, consequent upon “the Affair,” must not, however, conceal the fact that it was still vigorous in the 1920s. Not only does Edmond Fleg, the most typical representative of Jewish “affirmation” at that period, claim direct descent from Darmesteter, but the young Emmanuel Levinas, when he contributes to Paix et Droit (Peace and Right), the review of the Alliance, develops its essential themes. The same reverence for the France of 1789 and of the Rights of Man is found in the young André Neher. Julien Benda acknowledges his debt, as Robert Aron would later do. This is “theoretical Judaism” (Ernest Seillière). Edmond Fleg combines the heritage of Franco-Judaism with Jewish nationalism, and thus becomes “Chief Fleg,” the great elder of the Eclaireurs Israélites (E.I.F.) of France. The E.I.F. also benefited from the assistance of Aimé Pallière, the Christian disciple of Elie Benamozegh — the author of Israël et l’Humanité (Israel and Humanity), a book that openly refers to Joseph Salvador and his theory of “Hebraism” — who opened the columns of his review Chalom (where a certain Wladimir Rabinovitch would also write) to the young Robert Gamzon, thus enabling him to recruit the first E.I.F. members. Joseph Salvador remains topical among those, close to the scouting movement, who would form what would later be called the School of Orsay. The “années folles” are also years of searching for a humanist Judaism, battling to find its place in French culture. Alongside the cohort of converts — sometimes, in fact, more ambivalent than one imagines (Max Jacob, Raïssa Maritain, René Schwob, Jean de Menasce, an Alexandrian Jew who made Hasidism known to the “Roseau d’Or,” and even Maurice Sachs) — Albert Cohen and La Revue Juive (1923) embody a Jewish renaissance in which the names of Einstein and Freud appear. Does not the League of Nations, where the author of Solal worked, embody an almost messianic hope? As is also proved by the example of a professor of international law, René Cassin, a very “assimilated” Comtadin Israelite, who would practice Franco-Judaism without knowing it, in the juridical and ethical struggle against Vichy, before consciously rejoining his true spiritual family by becoming president of the A.I.U.
A leap forward in time. In 1972, Georges Friedmann, in publishing La puissance et la sagesse (Power and Wisdom), his intellectual testament, rediscovered the accents of the Salvadors and the Darmesteters. This unrepentant Spinozist belongs to a generation that sought to combine Marxism with Jewish mysticism. Around 1925, Morhange launched the idea of a “Trust of Faith” to which he had recruited the mathematician Mandelbrojt and the historian Benveniste. Within this new aristocracy he quite naturally assigned himself “the role of the absolute revolutionary, the continuator of the great line of those who shook the world, Christ, Marx” (Rabi, Anatomie du judaïsme français [Anatomy of French Judaism], 1962, p. 110).
Wladimir Rabinovitch (1906–1981), whose pen name was Rabi — since we are evoking him — maintained all his life an ambiguous relationship with Franco-Judaism, whose leading figures he was among the first to disinter, in his Anatomie du judaïsme français (Minuit, 1962). The review Chalom, of which he is one of the linchpins, welcomes pens that illustrate the classic link between French patriotism and attachment to a freely reinterpreted tradition (e.g. Jean-Richard Bloch, an “immigrant” from Yiddishland). The young Wladimir takes the measure of the egoism and spiritual poverty of certain Israelite milieus. But he does not generalize! Moreover, he forms ties — an uncommon step at the time — with avant-garde Christians. He writes in the young review Esprit — just like another “Litvak,” Emmanuel Levinas — to warn against the mortal menace of Hitlerism. Rabi is also a fervent Zionist who frequents partisans of Jabotinsky, such as Kadmi-Cohen, likewise a contributor to Chalom. For years, and right up to the aftermath of the Six-Day War, Judge Rabinovitch would combine a “Dreyfusard”-type engagement (the Finaly affair, later the Pierre Goldman affair) with the defense of the State of Israel. But this defense is always an ethical defense, founded on a deep attachment to prophetic values. Yet when Rabi takes notice, on the one hand, of the profound immorality of the colonization of the “Territories,” and on the other — and this is perhaps the most painful for him — of the complicity of the great moral authorities of the Community with this infamy, he will rediscover a “Dreyfusard” inspiration, this time turned against what he calls the “Structure.” This Péguy disciple denounces the degradation of the Zionist mystique into a politics of oppression of one people by another. After the Second World War, many interpret the genocide as the disavowal of the pre-Catastrophe illusions (Progress, Universalism). André Neher, very “Franco-Jewish” before the war, turns toward Jewish mysticism, and Jankélévitch severs all ties with German culture. The School of Orsay, born of the E.I.F., is at first rather bathed in a diasporic halo, open to the social, to dialogue with avant-garde Christians, rather “of the left,” to be frank. Jacob Gordin, its inspirer (come from Germany and from the philosophical school of the neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer, a defender of the humanism of the Enlightenment against Heidegger), takes up the “Salvadorian” theory of the “people-principle” to justify his own doctrine of the mission of Israel as Light of the Nations. It is also significant that Léon Askenazi, who came from the E.I.F. milieu, took up the term Hebraism. But after 1967, “Orsay” will, for the most part, evolve toward Kabbalah and the “new thought” of the Rosenzweigs and their like. Some of its members (“Manitou”) will adopt — under the growing influence of the “Kookian” theses (especially after 1967) — an attitude hostile to biblical criticism, to Spinoza, and favorable to a Greater Israel. There is another current issuing from Orsay: Gérard Israël, in whom French patriotism and the intransigent republicanism born of the Resistance maquis maintains the original spirit of Orsay, with, for example, the will to dialogue, without complex, with the other spiritual families of France. There are other continuities. One will not evade the question posed by Henri Atlan some time ago already (Les Nouveaux Cahiers, no. 112, spring 1993): did the School of Orsay, without meaning to, pave the way for the Jewish “integralism” of today? From Manitou to Benny Lévy, is there a continuity?
Today: “Why we remain Jews”
It is therefore to another “thought of the return,” very different from the delirious anti-Western and anti-modern fulminations with which we are today inundated, that the meditation on the Franco-Jewish project invites us. That project implied, as we have seen, an offensive idea: one must not only leave the ghetto, including the mental ghetto, but also leave it in order to “Judaize,” in a sense, the world, by allying oneself with forces waging a struggle similar to our own. Today such a struggle requires, first of all, that the perspective be broadened to the Judeo-European scale, taking into account the partial renaissance of the German, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, etc., Jewries. As for fronts of struggle, there is no lack of them: the struggle for the rule of law, for the rights of man, engagement in humanitarian work and the struggles on behalf of “immigrants” and of justice for the two peoples that contend over Palestine and must nonetheless coexist on its territory, against mass massacres and all genocides — all of these obviously have to do with that noble idea of the “mission of the Jews,” which was at the basis of the Alliance israélite universelle and still inspires today the American “Reconstructionist” current. We are summoned to be on the side of “affirmation.” But to affirm what? How can one ignore that the Judaism, or rather the Judaism(s), that we know today are the product of successive crises? Some (Christianity included) were born after the destruction of the Temple, and as a response to that destruction (Jacob Neusner, André Paul, Francis Schmidt, Guy Stroumsa). Others with Maimonides — who provoked the reaction of which Kabbalah is the product — and the last, finally, with the aftermath of the Iberian catastrophe (Sabbatianism, Haskalah, neo- and ultra-orthodoxy, Zionism and other nationalisms, territorialist or diasporist). All claim a tradition, more or less fantasized. All present-day cultures know this phenomenon, known to the social sciences as “the invention of tradition.” None can pass for THE Tradition. It is not certain that Franco-Judaism, or what corresponded to it in Italy (see on this subject Arnaldo Momigliano and Primo Levi), is a tradition of any lesser dignity than others. As Leo Strauss explains — albeit from a perspective different from ours: “authentic fidelity to a tradition is not to be confused with a literal traditionalism; it is in fact incompatible with it. It consists not in preserving the tradition purely and simply, but in preserving the continuity of the tradition. As fidelity to a living and therefore variable tradition, it requires that one distinguish between what is dead and what is alive, between the flame and the ashes, between the gold and the dross.
In a living tradition, the new is not the opposite of the old; it is its deepening…” (Pourquoi nous restons juifs [Why We Remain Jews], La Table Ronde, 2001, pp. 102/103). Let us also recall that extraordinary dialogue between Y. Leibowitz and Gershom Scholem: SCHOLEM: “you do not believe in God, you believe in the Torah”; LEIBOWITZ: “And you, you believe neither in God nor in the Torah, but God knows why, you believe in the singularity of the Jewish people.” (Y. Leibowitz, Israël et judaïsme [Israel and Judaism], Desclée de Brouwer, p. 86)