Why devote an issue of Plurielles to the theme of the border? No doubt because, in the world we live in, a certain number of borders are tending to fade away, while others, on the contrary, are growing stronger, becoming veritable walls. Geographical borders, political borders, cultural borders, sexual borders, outer and inner borders. As Carole Ksiazenicer-Matheron writes in this issue: “Shifting and infinitely displaceable, the border is that place where the awareness of reality comes to the surface, through the confrontation with the other, outside oneself or within oneself.” The question of borders has often been, in History as in the relations between individuals, a source of conflict but also of self-definitions and of individual and collective reconfigurations of identity. The notion of a border between “barbarian” and “civilized” existed throughout the ancient world, in a polarization that shaped the construction of the collective identity of the Greco-Roman world, which became our Western world (E. Ndiaye). The history of the ghettos, long a symbol of the history of the Jews in the diaspora, is a history of separation and exclusion, whatever their consequences and their sometimes unexpected effects may have been. And, in Spain, the obsessive line of separation between Old Christians and New Christians rests on the belief in the purity of blood, inseparable from a racist vision of the world (C. Ksiazenicer-Matheron, H. Méchoulan, R. Calimani). In our immediate environment, the Europe under construction also raises the question of its borders, whether geographical, cultural, or political. To regulate the crossing of borders? To modulate their degree of openness? These are questions inseparable from the question of immigration (C. de Wenden). In present-day France, the borders bound up with the question of identities continue to assert themselves strongly. A reflection on community and communitarianism, bearing particularly on France, helps to shed light on current problems (R. Azria). The question of the border within sexual identity, as it arises for the Jewish poet Jacob de Haan, or that of the separation between man and animal through Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), help to enlighten us about a question that haunts the human race (M. Keilson-Lauritz, Ph. Zard). Literature and cinema interrogate this crucial question, whether in a literary work such as Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina, in those of Yury Olesha and George Orwell, or, more recently, in that of Nathalie Azoulai with Les manifestations (The Demonstrations), a book published during the Second Intifada (S. Hirel-Wouts, D. Oppenheim, N. Azoulai / Ph. Zard). Joseph Losey, in Mr. Klein, underscores the at once lethal and undecidable aspect of these borders of identity (A. Dayan Rosenman).
But the modern world has changed, as have the relations between Jews and Europeans. It is from this other border between yesterday and today that Zygmunt Bauman studies these transformations. Beyond this dossier, in the world of today — a postcommunist and globalized world — conflicts are varied, numerous, and violent. The nearest, and perhaps the most troubling, of these conflicts, particularly for us Jews, is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, both because of its very long duration (60 years, or more than a hundred, depending on the starting point one chooses) and because of its consequences, moral as much as political, Middle Eastern as much as European. For while one can see the nature of the solution — two States for two peoples — one still sees no beginning of its realization. The Israeli incursion into Gaza in response to Hamas’s incessant rocket fire on the Israeli civilian population reinforces the uncertainty as to the future, with the reciprocal hatred thus stoked by the fighting and the civilian casualties, particularly numerous among the Palestinian civilian population. The only door of hope that might be opened would be the beginning of a generous policy toward the moderates of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, marked in the West Bank by a significant lifting of the roadblocks and other checkpoints, the dismantling of a certain number of settlement outposts, a suspension of settlement-building — measures that might allow the Palestinian population to perceive some benefits tied to moderate positions. That is perhaps too much to hope for in a climate and a reality of war. Yet the possible future borders are more or less known. Ilan Greilsammer evokes the current questionings about these future borders, while Denis Charbit studies the debates within the Israeli left over Zionism. Nor, here at home, do we escape current affairs: it is within this framework that Philippe Velilla studies the electoral behavior of French Jews in the French presidential election of 2007. Faced with these current events, we can only express our concern at the general situation, at the grave economic crisis looming everywhere in the United States, as in Europe, with the worsening of unemployment likewise looming here at home in France, where serious threats weigh on the public services, the University, and the school system on account of the government’s policy. The one hope, and a considerable one, is the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States, which may open new and positive prospects in the world. Texts by Rolland Doukhan, Chams Eddine, and Jean-Charles Szurek, along with book reviews, complete this issue. I do not wish to end this editorial without voicing the sorrow we all feel at the death of our friend Jacques Burko, who left us a year ago now. He was at the height of his creativity. We miss him. And we have wished to pay him a friendly tribute.