The birth of the intellectual in our societies is often dated to the Dreyfus Affair. The function of the modern intellectual — to defend a cause he holds to be just, in the name of universal values of which he believes himself the keeper — would thus appear to have been born of the twin struggle against raison d’État and against antisemitism.
As for Jewish intellectuals, one might venture to find them distant forebears among the biblical prophets, who, precisely in the name of justice, were prepared to confront the abuses of power — at the time, royal power — and this sometimes at the peril of their lives. And many Jewish intellectuals, secular or non-religious, trace their commitment back to this prophetic ethic.
“You shall not oppress the Stranger, for you were strangers in Egypt.” As this sentence reminds us, the motivation for commitment among Jewish intellectuals is often the historical memory of the persecuted, whether recent or ancient, whether a collective memory or an individual one — the one frequently overlaying the other.
Concerning Jewish intellectuals, Vladimir Rabi wrote:
Who, in the diaspora, is the Jewish Intellectual? He is a man of hybrid culture, but one in which the surrounding culture is the dominant culture: a marginal man living, at different levels and with differing intensity, the cultural life and the historical tradition of two peoples that coexist within him — the exile, in the last analysis, par excellence.
Until emancipation the two worlds, Jewish and non-Jewish, were entirely separate; then came the Haskala (the Jewish Enlightenment), which fought against this conception that universalized the heterogeneity of the Jewish world.1
In our own time a large proportion of Jewish intellectuals have grown distant from tradition. The appeal to universal values may then take on an ambiguous meaning in relation to their Jewishness: do they act as Jews or as citizens? It is a question often raised with regard to political commitments.
Thus Pierre Vidal-Naquet wrote:
“During the Algerian War, did I act as a Jew? As an heir to the Dreyfusard tradition, rather, even if I sometimes thought with sympathy of the prophets of Israel and their demand for justice.”2
As for Richard Marienstras, in a critical analysis of the organic intellectual, he wrote:
… the role of Jewish intellectuals is not to furnish just any justification for just any Jewish act. It is rather to ask publicly under what conditions morality can still find its due in a context dominated by violence.
Other Jewish intellectuals, those known as “the Jews of the return,” hold for their part that the Emancipation of the Jews — which made them into citizens, that is, into persons capable of taking on commitments within the city — has been and remains a mortal danger for the Jews, a threat of disappearance through dissolution into the universal.
One may then ask: what role have Jewish intellectuals played since the Emancipation, what place have they occupied in the Jewish and non-Jewish societies in which they lived — pariahs, outsiders, or full-fledged actors?
For what causes did they mobilize? What was their share of utopia, and from what sources was it drawn? What place do organic intellectuals hold today within Jewish societies? What is their relationship to the Jewish religious tradition? And to the great political movements?
So many questions. The answers are very nearly as rich as they are diverse.
It is perhaps for all these reasons that there is no single type of Jewish intellectual, but rather Jewish intellectuals. This is why this issue of Plurielles offers more individual itineraries than general categories.
This editorial cannot close without registering the horror that seized us before the massacres perpetrated in Paris by Islamist jihadists: first at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, where the editorial staff was decimated, then at the kosher supermarket in Vincennes, where four people were murdered for being Jews — coming after the killings of the Jewish children in Toulouse and those at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. Fortunately many voices were raised among intellectuals of Muslim origin or culture to condemn these barbaric and racist murders, which are a threat to our democracy and our living together.