Slapped by reality: in France too?

In 1959, the great Vladimir Rabi¹ observed a “sensational shift to the right” in the Jewish world. In 2006, at the hour of the announced alignment of numerous community leaders and other intellectual spokesmen with Nicolas Sarkozy or François Bayrou, indeed with Villiers or Le Pen, it is no longer of a shift that one must speak but of an earthquake². Is this for all that a surprise? It has long been the case that among certain prominent Jewish intellectuals, it is not only the Revolution, but just as much the Enlightenment, the ideals of Equality or Justice that are regarded as worn-out notions. And the adjective “progressive” as the supreme insult. This study would therefore like to ask how and why the neo-conservative temptation is perhaps in the process of crossing the Atlantic.

Emancipated Jews — for Rabi this was a fact that brooked no discussion — had long felt a veritable tropism toward the Left. He even spoke of “fascination” and attributed it, in the case of France, to an instinctive distrust of the dominant Catholicism and of the counter-revolutionary right that was its political face. He recalled the role of young Jewish elites in a movement like Saint-Simonism, at once “messianic” in a universalist sense and pioneering on the economic plane. This is the rational kernel of the myth attached to the figure of the “revolutionary Jew,” as obsessive in the nineteenth century as that of the Rothschild-style capitalist Jew. These are two shock-images popularized by social reformers as by the creators of popular fictions, beginning with Balzac and Zola, before becoming, through a conspiracy theory, one of the axes of antisemitic discourse. Hannah Arendt will draw from it her famous dialectic of the “pariah” and the “parvenu,” meant to express the impasses of Emancipation.

But these schemas must be corrected — very seductive, and incontestably illuminating in many respects, but too unilateral. In the nineteenth century the Jewish elites are imbued with liberalism, but often socially conservative. The passage to the Revolution is the deed of rebellious sons (and daughters). Who often settle down fairly quickly. Disraeli is more typical than Lassalle. The admiration for England is a constant trait of the German-speaking Jewish elites and is found in a whole generation (from Freud to Wittgenstein, Hofmannsthal, etc., or to their fathers). What is admired by these men is a country attached to freedom, but very socially conservative. The figure of the reactionary Jew, and the unhappy or perverse conscience he wears slung across his shoulder, are well known, moreover, in literature, French in particular. One could not reduce them to the simplistic catch-all category of “self-hatred.” Marcel Proust drew from it some of his most unforgettable characters. The young Arnold Mandel too, doubtless in a discreetly autobiographical fashion. Maurice Sachs, and Bernard Frank… And Patrick Modiano has also remarkably exploited this vein of the Jewish character who does not want to let his social or political choices be dictated to him by the antisemitic fact. And who, a bit of a snob besides, would like to assimilate, as long as he’s at it, to the cream of Society… In Germany before 1933, in France before 1940, the old citizens of the “Mosaic confession” are, as a general rule, patriots and rather attached to the established order. The exemplary French Jewish political figure is not only Léon Blum the socialist, but at least as much Georges Mandel, a man of the right and a disciple of Guizot. It is the recent “immigrants” from the Yiddishland who bear (not all of them!) revolutionary ideas. During the night of triumphant Nazism, communism appears as the force of Resistance par excellence, but the idea of Jewish renaissance, cultural or political, imposes itself broadly on a whole young generation for whom Emancipation appears retrospectively as an immense lure. No one sees at the moment all its consequences, but they will prove considerable in the long term.

The end of Franco-Judaism

After the genocide, French Jewry reconstructs itself on pluralist bases. But Franco-Judaism, disqualified in the eyes of many by the betrayal of 1940, is no more than a survival. For every Georges Wormser who firmly defends his prewar convictions, how many will choose either the path of total assimilation, of changing one’s name, indeed of conversion, or, on the contrary, commit themselves to one of the paths of “Jewish renaissance” explored during the Resistance by the movement of the Éclaireurs Israélites [Jewish Scouts]. To be sure, there is no perceptible incompatibility at the outset between this will to renewal and the universalist republican commitment of yesteryear. Within the École d’Orsay itself, one is, after the Liberation, rather “left-wing” and diasporist, as one would say today. A Gérard Israël still bears witness to this today. But Orsay (or Levinas and Neher, both rather close in their youth to the Dreyfusard and republican ideals of Franco-Judaism) turn toward the Kabbalah, toward Rosenzweig, reject Spinoza and the Haskalah. This, while the prospects for the future are not obvious for a decimated and aging community. Let us not forget that in 1956 the tireless Isaac Pougatch could publish a brochure with an alarmist tone, Se ressaisir ou disparaître (Pull Ourselves Together or Disappear)… But that year two events occur that will modify the situation: the great crisis of communism (the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU and the crushing of the Hungarian revolution by Soviet tanks), which will sound the beginning of the rupture between the “Jewish street” and the PCF [French Communist Party]; and the Suez war, which will inaugurate the identity recentering around the Jewish State. The decline of communism in the Jewish milieu will not really profit a reformist left or a tempered liberalism, despite appearances. The itinerary of an Annie Kriegel is wholly revealing in this regard. The great historian will very quickly become a resolute and biting adversary of the lefts, both Israeli and French. The true rupture, however, comes only with the massive arrival of the Jews of the Maghreb, and especially those of Algeria (1962). The effects begin to make themselves felt from the cyclone of 1967 onward. It is true that this latter, tied to a danger perceived as mortal for the existence of Israel, sweeps along even Raymond Aron! But in the latter the rediscovered Jewishness implies only a distancing from De Gaulle, not from France. Such is not the case for many French Jews, in whom the event reopens the old wounds (the Statut des Juifs [Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws] and the complicity of the Vichy police with the organizers of the Final Solution for the “metropolitan” Jews, above all Ashkenazi; the abrogation of the Crémieux decree and the “abandonment” of Algeria for the Jews of that last country). One will have to await another crisis, that of 1980, to see this malaise within French citizenship given theorized expressions. One recalls indeed that, in the deleterious atmosphere of a dying Giscardism, the Jews of France live through a veritable psychodrama, believing they are reliving the blackest hours of far-right antisemitism, in the manner of the Thirties or of Vichy. The peak is reached at the moment of the Copernic attack (October 1980); in fact perpetrated by the Palestinian Abu Nidal group, this crime is attributed to imaginary neo-Nazis, and provokes gigantic demonstrations, as well as the birth of various neo-identitarian groups (Renouveau Juif, Association des Juifs de Gauche, “Kosher or not…”) and of reviews (Combat pour la Diaspora, Traces). As Le Quotidien de Paris headlined as early as 1979, “The new Jew has arrived.” This new Jew is apparently still largely anchored in a left-wing imaginary, antifascist and often tied to neo-Bundist or left-Zionist groups. The “religious” dimension, without being absent, remains discreet. The cultural question, often centered on the safeguarding of Judeo-languages (Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, etc.), is very much in the air of the time in France: returning to one’s “roots.” But the appearance of two books that will mark an era, in 1981, will show the extreme fragility of this anchoring in left-wing culture, even a post-“sixty-eighter” one. For both L’idéologie française (French Ideology), by Bernard-Henri Lévy, and La République et les Juifs (The Republic and the Jews) by Shmuel Trigano put on trial a France that would be the cradle of fascism (Lévy) and the tomb of Jewish identity (Trigano). Both distill the idea that the ideology of Emancipation is at best illusory, at worst antisemitic in its reality. The implicit conclusion, already largely present in the media racket of the “new philosophy” (Lévy, Glucksmann) from the end of the 1970s, is that the Jews no longer have much to do with the left, nor even to a certain extent with France, which made the bed of all totalitarianisms. Did France and the left not invent antisemitism? The question surfaces on all sides, all the more so as one then discovers Hannah Arendt and as Zeev Sternhell’s works on the French origins of fascism appear. Answering the expectation of a whole public, these analyses — of which innumerable less talented versions will circulate over the years — prepare the visible fractures of today. With this difference, evidently, that the theme of fascist France, of an eternal Vichy (which experiences a last rebound with the Carpentras affair in 1989, the occasion for a new collective psychodrama) and the anti-Christian passions will little by little vanish for the benefit of a new obsession. Henceforth France and the left are disqualified above all as accomplices, at least “objectively,” of an Islamo-terrorism whose armed wing within France is a community of Maghrebi origin (and on occasion Afro-Caribbean), instigator of a “new Judeophobia.” The bringing back into fashion of this term (already known from the pen of Léon Poliakov) marks above all a will to minimize the old European antisemitism. In certain cases one even comes to cast a more “balanced” gaze upon the French literary right or Vichy, because one must not mistake one’s enemy³. The shaping of this about-face is due, as one knows, to the inexhaustible dialectical talent of a Pierre-André Taguieff. We now know, thanks to him, that anti-racism and the belief in progress are the new opiums of the people, third-millennium version. But interminable denunciatory litanies pastiching Spengler could not serve as doctrine for intellectuals even slightly demanding. For that, it was necessary that from the rue d’Ulm [the École Normale Supérieure] (whence BHL already issued) should come the new scrolls of the Law.

From Mao to Leo Strauss

The former disciples of Althusser — for it is indeed they who are in question — who passed through “Maoism” or Castroism, are not generally truly converted to democracy. They have often passed through a “republican” phase before rallying to the beacons of the conservative revolution under way in the Western countries. They do so in the name of what Catherine Larrère calls their “pastoral politics.” This latter, issuing from Plato, is indeed their smallest common denominator, since some of them, like Alain Badiou or Régis Debray, having remained faithful — without too many illusions — to the old revolutionary ideal, justify it in the name of the same philosophical principles as their former companions become neo-conservative. It is always a question of preferring the “government of the Wise” to that of the multitude. Truth is accessible only through an “esoteric” teaching to which few, by definition, have access. It is clear that this teaching can be as much that of a sophisticated Marxism, as that of a Lacanism unburdened of any relation to the clinic… or that of a Kabbalah reinterpreted by illuminated readers of Levinas. And that it is always through a sectarian filter that this transmission passes. After the dissolution of the Gauche Prolétarienne [Proletarian Left] (1974), certain militants indeed remained personally faithful to the charismatic leader, Benny Lévy. Jews or non-Jews, they manifested this unfailing allegiance by taking with him all the Master’s successive turns: they were first Sartrean, then Levinassian (early 1980s), then won over to what Benny Lévy called the “thought of return” (1990s), around which the latter created the Institut Levinas (not recognized by the family and most of the disciples of the great philosopher). If it could have seemed for a moment that Benny Lévy had become a democrat, an “anti-totalitarian,” a convert to human rights, like his comrade André Glucksmann and a few others come, like them, from the wild adventure of the “Maos,” what followed proved that this was only a parenthesis. In the autumn of 2003, shortly before the abrupt disappearance of Benny Lévy, two books appear, naturally from Éditions Verdier, one by Benny Lévy himself (Être juif (To Be Jewish)), the other by Jean-Claude Milner (Les penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique (The Criminal Inclinations of Democratic Europe)), which constitute a thunderclap in the two microcosms of neo-Judaism and post-leftism. They are indeed two pamphlets of rare violence, which immediately call to mind the Cahiers de la Gauche prolétarienne of the years ’68 to ’72. There are also surprises. Levinas is more than half disavowed for “Occidentalism” by the one who presents himself as his legitimate spiritual heir and runs an Institute and a review under his banner; a disciple of Condorcet attacks the Enlightenment, accused of bearing within it the Jewish genocide as the storm cloud bears the storm…

USA 1953, France 2001: does history repeat itself?

All this rhetoric irresistibly recalls — the polemical talent aside — the way in which Irving Kristol, who is one of the leaders of this school, defined the “neo-conservative”: a man of the left “mugged by reality.” An extraordinary adventure indeed, that of this American “new conservatism” as it is reported to us by its historians, French (Jean-François Kessler, Sébastien Fath, Daniel Vernet and Alain Frachon) or American. The encounter of old counter-revolutionaries with the American political tradition of the Founding Fathers — that is, with a… revolutionary heritage — is at the base of this new ideological cocktail. To achieve this, it was necessary to prove that these Founding Fathers are not what one thought, but that they are, in fact, the heirs of the medieval political theology of the West. That between this theology and English-style liberalism, and between the latter and American institutions, there is no break in continuity. “Saint Thomas was the first whig.” One of the crucibles of this unexpected synthesis is the University of Chicago⁴, bastion of traditionalist Catholics and conservative academics, and a place of pilgrimage for the new conservatives of the planet. Then will come the former “leftists” of New York, Jewish or Irish. To take power back from the “radical-chic” elites (“when the New York Review of Books says something, one must think the contrary”) is their sole thought, as the proletarian Revolution once was. In France, however, even taking into account small groups of intellectuals directly “plugged into” the American religious or “Straussian” right (the “Cercle de l’Oratoire,” part of the team that publishes the review Le meilleur des mondes), there is no true equivalent to American neo-conservatism. The principal reason is to be sought on the side of the relation to national identity and in the unconditional American patriotism of an Irving Kristol or a Norman Podhoretz (is one of the latter’s autobiographical books not entitled My Love Affair with America?). On the contrary, their French imitators have a problem, as we have seen, with France and Europe, judged weak and decadent, not purged moreover of their “criminal inclinations” to antisemitism. Nor does there exist a theoretical work of great scope comparable to that carried out in the “think tanks” of the “neo-cons” across the Atlantic, at least until now, and despite the existence of a review of high quality such as Controverses (directed by S. Trigano), which articulates the denunciation of “denationalized” Israeli elites (read: Ashkenazi and Tel-Avivian…) and the defense of the West, of which an Israel waging without weakness the combat against the Arab-Muslim enemy would be the advanced spearhead, within the framework of a resolutely “Huntingtonian” schema of a war of cultures. Despite the similarity of titles, the French review Commentaire, founded in 1978 to support Barre and Giscard against the Common Program, is not the American Commentary, a specifically Jewish review with a left-wing past. In France the lingering fantasy of Spiritual Power is a serious obstacle to the constitution of an organization that takes seriously in hand the question of Power plain and simple, as the American neo-cons have done. One prefers the position of occult “adviser to the Prince,” in an individual capacity, in the eternal war of all against all that characterizes the French intelligentsia. This Prince may be “communitarian” (the CRIF and its President, this or that personality of the Israeli right) or “national” (as one sees on the occasion of the present presidential campaign), it matters little, provided that a certain vision of the world triumphs. The foundations of this Weltanschauung can thus be declined: the free Western, Judeo-Christian world is in a state of war against radical Islam and its allies (or “useful idiots”) “progressives.” Refusing to face this fact, seeking appeasement, the cosmopolitan elites, including in Israel, play into the hands of the internal and external Enemy. See the demand one finds sometimes expressed in so many words to see the “traitors of Oslo” one day put on trial, or again the analyses of Controverses on the causes of the failure of Tsahal [the IDF] during the war of the summer of 2006 against Hezbollah. Another difference lies in the obscurantist aspect one finds in the new Jewish right in France, which opposes it to the rationalist accent one finds among the American neo-conservatives (see the recent book by Gertrude Himmelfarb on the Anglo-American Enlightenment, supposedly conservative, unlike the French, subversive).

Thoughts of return and the new obscurantism

The Jewish partisans of a withdrawal into the most sclerotic forms of rabbinism⁵ make much, as we have already noted, of what they call, not without emphasis, the “thought of return.” What exactly is to be understood by this? Leo Strauss, who in his famous lecture What Is Political Philosophy? had already laid the accent on a continuous movement of counter-modernity that translated itself, according to him, from Rousseau to Romanticism, into a wave of “returns” to which he opposed, for his part, the “good” Enlightenment, namely the Jewish and Arab Enlightenment of the twelfth century (al-Farabi, Ibn Bajja, Averroes, Maimonides, etc.). The “return to Freud” (Lacan) followed by the “return to Marx” (Althusser) could also be evoked, or even the “returns to Kant” in which so many great Jewish thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries distinguished themselves. Now this thought of return, which was very rich in Germany — whatever one may think of it on the substance — runs aground on the banks of the Seine or in Jerusalem. It is a question of promoting “Pharisaic study” (Milner) without ever saying in what it consists, what its procedures and rules are, all while pursuing a work of demolition of the foundations of Western liberal or democratic thought (Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau) on the grounds that it would have as its sole thought the extermination (spiritual at the very least) of Judaism.

From Maurras to a Judaism of affirmation

The history of the relations between Charles Maurras, prophet of “State antisemitism” and great assailant of Judaism (and of the Gospel!) as the root of egalitarian and democratic decadence / subversion, holds surprises in store. Without going back as far as Marcel Proust, or to the paradoxical friendship between his young disciple Maurice Blanchot (in the 1920s) and Emmanuel Levinas, one can think of the admiration of George Steiner for Pierre Boutang, the most talented disciple of the founder of “Action Française,” not without repercussion on his own works, and of Boutang’s Jewish disciples — Boutang, professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne. Today, perhaps through Lacan (marked by Maurras in his youth), but more surely through Carl Schmitt, something of Maurras has indisputably passed into our Jewish anti-progressives of today. We have already evoked the prominence of “politics first” in the philosophy of Reason of State dear to Trigano. One can also remark that, in Milner, before his public rallying to a “Judaism of affirmation,” progressivism — a very pejorative term in his usage — referred to the idea of a transaction with the Revolution, an impossible idea, since the Revolution is a figure of absolute politics. The said politics may be revolutionary or counter-revolutionary (Milner does not hide his admiration for the Syllabus, charter of integralist Catholicism since 1864), it matters little, provided it escape deliberation. We are here at the closest to Carl Schmitt and his devastating polemic against liberalism, for whom true politics knows no compromise, but knows only the “Friend” or the “Enemy.” And so one will not be surprised that, just as the author of The Concept of the Political did not hide his admiration for Bolshevism, Jean-Claude Milner immediately finds, to illustrate what he means by “absolute politics,” the example of intransigent Catholicism. The Syllabus offers indeed the model of a will that does not let itself be bent to the spirit of the time, to the “marsh” of deliberation and to compromises with the World. It appears that Milner thinks Judaism today as he conceived (still conceives?) the Revolution, and progressivism as he now castigates the “Jews of negation,” embarrassed by the “Jewish name,” but wanting simultaneously to draw worldly profits from it. All this rests on a solipsistic, and ultimately tribal, conception of Jewish identity, which strangely recalls the “France alone” of Maurras, and coincides with a “communitarian” conception of French identity that animates today even certain presidential programs. In this connection the philosopher François Wahl, who knows Milner well for having been his editor for thirty years, recently wrote these luminous lines: “But Milner’s entire reasoning is implicitly founded on placing the Jews in a state of exception: as if they did not belong to the universal of the socius that lives among others on the same footing as the others, and ought to conclude from what their history has been that they would never belong to it. This historical pessimism is the guarantee of the worst to come.” (“Ce qu’il y a de ruineux dans Le Juif de savoir,” Le Monde des livres, January 19, 2007). One could not better say that there is developing before our eyes and in rigorous fashion under Milner’s pen a “Jewish” equivalent of the doctrine of Charles Maurras. The latter, in the name of his “integral nationalism,” advocated what his successors of today call “national preference” and an action of France disconnected from any reference to a one-humanity, to universal values; this is what the leader of “Action Française” summed up in the famous watchwords “politics first” and “France alone.” If one replaces “France” by “Israel,” one will have exactly what François Wahl aims at in his critique of Milner — which could also aim at a Shmuel Trigano and a few others. Milner’s case is moreover all the more interesting in that the author of De l’école (On the School) had made himself known to the general public in the 1980s as a theorist of an intransigent French republicanism. Almost as a distant heir of “Franco-Judaism,” if one pushes it a little! A double movement is therefore occurring before our eyes. To broaden the intellectual front of Israel’s defense, Jewish intellectuals adopt the theory of the “clash of civilizations,” and thus the vision of a Judeo-Christian West besieged by Islamic (or “Islamo-progressive”) barbarity. Meanwhile non-Jewish intellectuals, or Jews formerly “of negation,” have come to consider Israel as the concentrate of all the virtues that “decadent” Europe has lost, while being at the same time, geopolitically speaking, the advanced spearhead of resistance to the new totalitarianism. In short, a new Sparta, whose only fault is to exist in the imagination of its eulogists. One is entitled to regret the era when the Jewish State was admired for the model it offered in matters of justice and social experimentation. Save me from my friends…

Notes