Before turning in greater detail to Rabi’s life and work, I would say that he is a true descendant of the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment), with all its simultaneous demand for rootedness in Jewish history and culture and in that of the society in which one lives — in this case, French society.
For fifty years, Rabi was an eminent figure of French Jewry, and one of the architects of its reconstruction after the disaster of the Shoah.
He was born in Russia to parents themselves born in Russia, within a Jewish society in transition, one foot in tradition and one in modernity. They both respected tradition (they celebrated the Festivals, and at one point even envisaged a future for their son as a rabbi) and were already on the left (Trotsky stopped at their home during a trip to Paris).
Rabi himself always maintained this polarity. He possessed a vast Jewish culture, religious culture included. He drew on it in his works, yet he was himself secular, and committed to the left.
For Rabi it was ethical demands that constituted — that ought to constitute — the originality and the specific contribution of the Jews to humanity. These demands were rooted in the prophetic tradition. A tradition of protest, in the name of justice, a voice raised against the established powers.
Rabi began writing very young: in addition to his books and plays, he wrote more than 500 articles, short and long, in a great many Jewish and non-Jewish reviews.
As early as 1929 he contributed to a review, Chalom, founded by Aimé Pallière, of which he was, from 1930 to 1934, the editorial secretary. He was close to Albert Cohen, who had created the Revue juive in 1925, and to whom he remained bound all his life.1 From 1933 onward he contributed to the review Esprit, just then founded, to which he gave texts on Jewish questions as well as on judicial matters and on political ones — as, much later, on the Algerian War. This collaboration lasted nearly 50 years, until his death.
His journalistic activity was intense:
He kept the book column for thirty years in La Terre Retrouvée and in L’Arche. He kept notebooks in L’Information juive and in Les Cahiers Bernard Lazare. He contributed to La Vie juive, to Kadima, to Menorah, to World Jewry, and to many other reviews.
He also wrote plays, among them Judas, during the war.
Finally, he was the author of numerous essays, of “combat texts”: L’affaire Finaly, des faits, des textes, des dates (The Finaly Affair: Facts, Texts, Dates), 19532; L’homme qui est entré dans la loi (The Man Who Entered the Law), on the Pierre Goldman affair3 (1971–76).
His essays bearing on Judaism are the following: Anatomie du judaïsme français (Anatomy of French Judaism) (Éditions de Minuit, 1962); Histoire des Juifs de France (History of the Jews of France), under the direction of Bernard Blumenkranz (1972); Un peuple de trop sur la terre ? (One People Too Many on the Earth?) (Les Presses d’aujourd’hui, 1979). His Journal de l’Occupation, de la Libération et de l’après-guerre (Journal of the Occupation, the Liberation and the Postwar Years), published recently (3 volumes, 2008–2011), is a fine daily testimony of a man — a young French Jewish intellectual hidden in the countryside in the Alps during the Occupation, immersed in the deep Protestant France.
To this must be added his contributions to the Colloques des Intellectuels juifs de Langue française (the Colloquia of French-Language Jewish Intellectuals), of which he was a central participant — though rarely in the mainstream line.
To evoke Rabi, who died on 6 April 1981, is to draw someone out of oblivion. For while his questionings grow ever more pertinent, Rabi has sunk into oblivion for the Jewish community — perhaps because of the passing of time, but more surely because of what he was during his lifetime. He troubled the organized community and its institutions with his questions, his articles, his stances. And so, beyond death in a sense, he has returned to marginality.
His last book — Un peuple de trop sur la terre ? — provoked a great deal of polemic and of hatred against him within the Jewish community. It is an uncompromising book, an assessment of Jewish existence in the twentieth century, and a forceful interrogation of Israeli policy that retains all its value today. An assessment of his life. A book that marked his estrangement from this community, after what he regarded as a kind of secular Herem — a banishment — pronounced against him. It is also a book of suffering, dedicated to Aher, alias Elisha Ben Abuya — another marginal figure from 1,800 years ago, a much-renowned Sage whose name was struck from the Talmud and replaced by Aher, “another” in Hebrew, after he declared that there is no Judge in the world, following an interpretation deemed erroneous by the Sages. This figure fascinated Rabi, as he had already fascinated the men of the Haskalah.
In Un peuple de trop sur la terre ? Rabi defines his marginality thus:
Marginal I have been. Even in the days when I dispensed justice, I never had the feeling of doing so “in the name of the French people,” but in the name of the idea I had of the French people and in the name of my Jewish conceptions of justice. Marginal I was also in my political choices. From 1927 on, I was incapable of tolerating what would become Stalinism, with its Moscow trials in 1934, its calls to murder backed by the Stalinist Jews — what self-criticism could absolve them? — in 1953. I was a marginal figure within the prewar Jewish community, repelled by its egoism, its cowardice and its refusal to confront its own condition, and finally by its rejection of the foreign Jews who threatened its security.4
Rabi remains the very model of the Jewish intellectual inscribed in the Dreyfusard tradition of Zola and Jaurès, but also in the Jewish prophetic tradition. A Jewish intellectual integrated professionally, culturally and politically into French society. But an intellectual critically committed within the Jewish community and within non-Jewish society. It is, moreover, thus that he himself defines the Jewish intellectual in an article in the Nouveaux Cahiers5:
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: he is 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 Haskalah, which fought against this conception that universalized the heterogeneity of the Jewish world. There followed, over the course of history, movements of opening and then of closing of the Jewish world.
The first characteristic of Rabi, then, was to be a Jewish intellectual committed to the struggles of his time: his life was wedded to the century.
Rabi did not dissociate his thought from his action, nor his Jewishness from his humanism, still less morality and ethics from politics. One must therefore make of him a portrait at once intellectual and political, in which history is conjugated in the present tense in order to carry the questioning into the future. This questioning concerns the Jews as much as humanity in general.
The Ethical Question Staged
By way of example of the way in which Rabi interwove the themes of Jewish tradition and the problems of the day in his writings, I should like to mention more specifically two plays he wrote in the 1950s.
The first is Varsovie (Warsaw), published in 1954; at its premiere, Maria Casarès held one of the principal roles. The play is written on the model of Greek tragedy. The action takes place in the ghetto on the eve of the Uprising and of its destruction by the Nazis. It stages at once real personages — Jewish fighters, and the president of the Judenrat who replaced Adam Czerniaków after the latter’s suicide — but one also encounters there Lilith, that mythical figure of the Midrash, mother of demons, here leading the Nazis. Varsovie is an interrogation of Evil.
The second is L’affaire Wittenberg (The Wittenberg Affair) (1957). Inspired by a true event, it too is an interrogation around the same themes. Wittenberg, a communist Jew, is the head of the Jewish resistance in the Wilno (Vilna) ghetto. Abba Kovner is his second-in-command. The Nazis demand that Wittenberg give himself up, failing which they will destroy the entire ghetto with its thousands of inhabitants. He ends by giving himself up, or by being denounced. The play interrogates guilt, courage and the absence of courage, but also sacrifice.
Wittenberg: I am the one who is guilty, I alone. Guilty of having, from the age of lucidity, refused to submit. Guilty of having, in this city of scholars and rabbis, imagined, envisaged, dared to glimpse that human effort would one day allow us to curb evil.
Wittenberg, a simple cobbler, is compared to the prophet Amos, who was a shepherd when the Lord called him to the prophet’s mission.
At one point the characters interrogate the sacrifice of Isaac, and the attitude of Abraham:
Mendele: So, imagine. Imagine for a single instant that Abraham had known doubt. [At the moment of the sacrifice]
These two plays thus take up the question of evil, of responsibility and of individual conscience. They attest, in the author, to that close alliance between a classical culture that gives them the form of tragedy, and the traditional Jewish culture that gives them their content.
Ethics and Politics
For Rabi the heart of Jewish identity is the ethical demand — a demand that does not content itself with theory, but carries practical implications. Thus he writes:
What is the meaning of our Judaism? We do not lack homiletic discourses — social justice in life, social justice in the Prophets; but to what does this correspond? We cannot apply it to concrete cases. To what does it correspond if this teaching has no value for the worker who labors in the factory? What is the use of it if we cannot apply it to concrete problems that shake our conscience at its very foundation — namely, for example, the Arab problem — Jewish world, Arab world — which Mr. Albert Memmi has declared to be problem number one? What is the use of it if we fail to apply it to the problem of torture in Algeria, to the process of the degradation of conscience in Algeria? What is the use of it if we cannot apply our theory, our thesis, our ethics and our philosophy, our sense of becoming, of history, to cases as concrete as these, which commit us entirely?6
Thus he observed that, since the end of the war, there had been an absence of commitment on the part of Judaism as a group, in the affairs of this world that precisely brought our ethics into play — namely the struggles against colonialism, against racism (Apartheid, the emancipation of Blacks in the United States), for social justice (in political combat).
All these reflections seem to me, moreover, of burning relevance.
He attributed this absence of commitment to the rightward drift of Judaism — or rather, to use Albert Memmi’s term, of Jewishness (judaïcité).
This analysis and this demand he formulated very forcefully, in particular at the time of the Algerian War:
In itself, as I said a moment ago, Judaism is neither of the right nor of the left. But there… one forgets to recall Judaism in its context and in its historical situation of the time: since 1792, historically, Judaism found itself oriented to the left because its ally was on the left, and because the right was the enemy, xenophobic and antisemitic. The Jew, therefore, had no choice; the Jews were for the left because the continual test of their choice was the question of antisemitism. And this leftward tendency was further accentuated at the end of the nineteenth century, first by the onset of the Dreyfus Affair, then by the appearance on the stage of history of Eastern Judaism, which, from 1880 on, began to carry out its formidable migration across the world. At the end of the nineteenth century, then, one may say that Western Judaism, together with Eastern Judaism, had a revolutionary potential — that is, it was ripe for all the revolutions, and among these revolutions there was socialism, there was Bundism, and also Zionism.7
As we see, in Rabi historical reflection on Judaism always has an implication for present reality; it is a putting-into-perspective grounded in history.
What vision does Rabi have of Judaism?
For Rabi, Judaism is a vocation, an ethic and a prophetism; it comprises a certain number of ideas, of doctrines, and a culture for which, he says, we are prepared to live and to die. And since moral options are defined at the level of political problems, it is necessary that we commit ourselves to the drama of the modern world.8
Closed Judaism and Open Judaism: The Necessity of Commitment
Rabi often opposes the concept of a closed Judaism, shut in upon itself, in which he sees no future for the Jews, to that of a Judaism open to the city and to the problems of this world, into which it ought to insert itself — for, he says, there is no miracle solution for our survival in modernity now that the traditional factors that contributed to the survival of Judaism (antisemitism, the great urban Jewish concentrations, the common language, religion) are in steep decline or have disappeared.9
What perhaps remains most pertinent in Rabi’s thought, what preoccupied him most, is his interrogation of the place of the Jews in the city.
He writes in Anatomie du judaïsme10:
The political emancipation of the Jews translated into a twofold cleavage: a cleavage within the Jewish man, between the man and the Jew, and a cleavage within the Jewish world, between the individual and the group. In fact, in the historical perspective of the survival of Judaism, it is essentially the group — be it reduced to the character of pure symbol, be it limited to the simple minyan — that counts, and not the individual, whatever his worth.
Here too he does not fail to cite the minyan11, the traditional conception of the basis of the Jewish collectivity. For him, the evolution of the French Jewish community — like, moreover, the evolution of the Jews in the world since the end of the Second World War — presents three tendencies: political neutralism, a general rightward drift, and, as a consequence, a rejection of traditional messianism.
He passes a rather harsh judgment on the positions of this pre-June-1967 Judaism12:
Conformist in its essence, French Judaism never once rose up against power. If it intervened, in the course of the Dreyfus Affair and in the course of the Finaly Affair, it was under constraint and compulsion, because the salvation or the honor of the community was at stake. The charge of defending prophetic values has always been borne by Jews acting individually and outside any communal context.
Repeatedly, he delivers a plea for commitment in the city, a commitment that he roots in the prophetic tradition13 which, for him, constitutes the very essence of Judaism:
Were they neutral, after all, the prophets who thundered against iniquity and abomination, against lies and idolatry, against all the forms of what we today call human alienations?
To invest oneself, to commit oneself, in the great combats of this century, beyond what touched the Jews alone: justice, human rights, the struggle against apartheid, against colonialism. Such, to him, seemed to be the new task of Judaism and the present meaning of the prophetic ethic, his permanent reference. He appealed in particular to the Jews to struggle, in the name of Judaism, against torture at the time of the Algerian War.
In La conscience juive (Jewish Conscience)14, Rabi writes:
I am somewhat surprised by the general affirmation, namely that the essence of Judaism is to be outside history. I believe that the essential problem, the line of cleavage, is this: we are in history, or we are outside history. I believe that, in effect, if for a long time the Jewish world was an object of history, for a hundred and fifty years one may say that the Jewish world is a subject of history. Had it not participated in the vast current of history, there would not have been, within the Western Jewish world, that movement toward political emancipation; there would not have been, at the end of the last century, that vast movement of collective and national liberation under the pressure of events and under the pressure of impoverishment. There would not have been that movement called Zionism, which made it possible to transform a part of the surface of the planet. I think, consequently, that to posit this premise — that the Jewish world must live outside history — is an error.
Belief in the necessity of commitment, defense of the persecuted, fidelity to ethical values, the struggle for justice — not in theory, but on the very stage of the political: these themes constitute the framework of his approach.
For him the struggle for justice cannot be divided. The defense of the persecuted, whoever they may be, he ties to this sentence from the Talmud15:
“God takes the side of the persecuted. Is this so only when the persecutor is impious and the persecuted just? No: even were the persecutor just, and the persecuted impious, God always takes the side of the persecuted.”
In his last published text, he sums up his attitude within the Jewish world thus16:
In the Jewish world, where I was never a religious spirit (but do I even know this myself?), I never tolerated the betrayal of ethical values. It is they that had allowed us to subsist and to maintain ourselves, despite the twofold current that divided us, between the aspiration to universalism and the necessity of a particularist structure.
It is through a refusal to renounce this ethical demand that Rabi defines his attitude toward Israel, in his intervention at the 1974 colloquium of intellectuals, Solitude d’Israël (Israel’s Solitude)17, where he evokes the “jealous (or zealous) care with which we have followed the functioning of the [Israeli] institutions: police, army, prison administration, as we do, with the same jealous care (or zeal), for the French institutions; the monitoring of respect for human rights in the occupied territories: administrative detention, the destruction of Arab houses, expulsions and deportations.”
His Attitude Toward Israel. Toward Dissidence
Rabi always held that solidarity with Israel should be whole, active, but at the same time critical and stripped of all messianic mysticism.
As early as December 1967, Rabi rose up against the nationalist and messianic wave initiated in part by francophone Jewish intellectuals in France and in Israel.
What Rabi rose up against was, first of all, unconditionality:
The major fault, because it accumulates all the failings, in the intellectual order and in the moral order, is unconditionality — the permanent temptation to justify all means by the end, the perversion of language that then accompanies this entire mechanism. Is this a phenomenon proper to every minority group in a position of uninterrupted combat, like the Jewish people?18
Even at the heart of a problematic that touched him so closely, Rabi always affirmed his refusal of Realpolitik and of the dissociation of morality:
The relationship with Israel would impose upon every Jew a scale of moral values that differs according to whether it is a matter of Israel or of some other State in the world. There cannot be one truth in the Jewish order and another in the universal order. I do not admit the scotomization of an ethic of which we have been the bearers for nineteen centuries — a period during which we had no State and during which we were able, thanks to this exceptional situation, to ensure our critical distancing from the inevitable abuses of any State. I do not admit, on the pretext that it is a matter of Israel, the theological and messianic justifications for the State of Israel’s errings. Zion shall be redeemed by justice and truth, not by the subterfuges of rhetoric.19
This ethical demand Rabi manifested from his earliest texts to his last. Thus in his play Varsovie, Jude, one of the heroes, says20:
The point is that it is not merely a matter of tactics. The immediate aspects our struggle takes on always mask or reveal the essential foundation of our belief: the place of man in the universe. We never decide in the abstract; we always choose in terms of morality and culture.
Likewise, in an allusion to the biblical discussion of Abraham with God at the moment of the destruction of Sodom — in Varsovie, with respect to the absence of help from the Polish resistance — a single Pole, Jurek, coming and remaining in the ghetto, affirms: “A single just man suffices to save a city.”21 This ethical demand Rabi manifests again in the last text, published after his death in Les Nouveaux Cahiers, a study in which, when he evokes the Jewish courts of honor that judged, after the war, the former members of the Judenräte, he salutes the high ethical level of these courts, writing that “neither hatred nor vengeance commanded their decision.”
The divorce between a community and a man who had devoted to it the strongest of his intellectual energy, who had the feeling of dying in exile, appears as the effect of a twofold phenomenon: the drift of the French Jewish community toward unconditional support for Israeli policy; and the reaction of a man who was not afraid to be in the minority, marginal even, in order to defend his ideas.
What, then, remains of this questioning, of this committed thought, of this voice so often discordant with respect to the majority Jewish hum, of this exacting criticism made in the name of Ahavat Israël, the love of Israel, by one of its own?
Rabi’s Legacy
His work: his historico-sociological studies of the Jewish condition in France, his original approach to Jewish culture made of a vast knowledge, of a critical adherence — as was his adherence to the State of Israel — of an adaptation of concepts to our reality, a polycentrist vision of Jewishness in which Israel and the Diaspora, in their respective permanence, each have their role to play. The questions he posed about the future of Judaism are still ours. There also remains his critical analysis of Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories and toward the Palestinians. One may, moreover, observe daily the accuracy of his analyses.
There remains, finally, his passionate appeal for the Jews to commit themselves to the century’s struggles for justice today, as he already formulated them in Anatomie du judaïsme in 1962, where he writes:
But can a Jew remain passive or neutral? Is the experience lived under Nazism not, for him, a lesson of the same order as that of the slavery of Egypt? /… / If civilization is to survive, there is still a place for man. There is still a place for the Jew, for his inalterable faith, for his indestructible confidence in justice. Our duty is, in every circumstance, whatever the immediate expediency, to affirm the primacy of our spiritual values. There are not two moralities; there is only one.22
Perhaps what is most important is his intractable demand for justice. A will that morality be one, that language be one. A fierce determination to inscribe the values of the prophetic ethic into the real, and the Jews into the history of peoples and into the questions of our world.
In a word: Rabi, a mensch in Jewish modernity.
Notes
Abridged and modified version of an article that appeared in Pardès, no. 23, 1997, “L’École juive de Paris.”↩︎
The Finaly Affair concerns two Jewish children, aged two and three, whom their parents — Austrian Jews living near Grenoble — hid in a nursery in Meylan before being themselves deported and murdered. After being entrusted to various Catholic institutions, which placed them with a devout Catholic, Mademoiselle Brun, she baptized them in secret after the war and refused to return them to their aunt. They were hidden in various monasteries and taken to Spain, with the complicity of part of the clergy, who held that, being baptized, they had to be raised in the Catholic religion. This affair mobilized the Jewish community. The justice system finally took up the case and issued an arrest warrant against Mademoiselle Brun for the sequestration of children. On 6 March 1953, an agreement was signed between Cardinal Gerlier and Grand Rabbi Kaplan, under the terms of which the children were returned to their family in Israel. This affair strained relations for several years between the Jewish community and the Church of France.↩︎
Pierre Goldman was born at the end of the Second World War, to left-wing Polish Jewish parents who took an active part in the Resistance in France. His parents separated, and Pierre was raised by his father, who did not want his mother to take him with her to communist Poland. As a student, he led the security service of the Union of Communist Students, then joined for a time the guerrilla movement in Venezuela in 1968. On his return to France, he fell into crime, committing several armed robberies, notably of pharmacies. He was arrested, tried before the Cour d’assises, admitted to only three of the four robberies — not the third, in which two female pharmacists were killed. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in December 1974. In prison he wrote an autobiography, Souvenirs obscurs d’un juif polonais né en France (Obscure Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France), which met with great success. This verdict unleashed passions, particularly within the left-wing intelligentsia (Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Signoret, etc.), which set up a defense committee. His trial was reviewed, and at the second, on 4 May 1974, he was sentenced to twelve years’ criminal imprisonment. He left prison after a few months, given his pretrial detention and sentence reductions. Pierre Goldman was murdered on 20 September 1979 in the middle of the street in the 13th arrondissement in Paris. The murder was claimed by an unknown group, Honneur de la Police. The murderers were never found, although in 2010 a former police informant claimed, under cover of anonymity, to have been part of the assassination commando.↩︎
Un peuple de trop sur la terre ?, Les Presses d’Aujourd’hui, 1979, p. 157.↩︎
Nouveaux Cahiers no. 48 (1977).↩︎
La conscience juive (Colloquia of French-Language Jewish Intellectuals), PUF, 1963, p. 295.↩︎
Idem.↩︎
“Les chemins de fuite (engagement et non-engagement),” in La conscience juive, PUF, 1963 (3rd colloquium: Morale juive et politique, 30 September 1960), p. 292.↩︎
Wladimir Rabi, Anatomie du Judaïsme français, Éditions de Minuit, 1962, p. 247.↩︎
Ibid., p. 233.↩︎
Minyan: a group of ten persons, traditionally men; the minimum number required to recite certain prayers. By extension, considered the minimum number to constitute a collectivity.↩︎
Ibid., p. 234.↩︎
op. cit., p. 233.↩︎
La conscience juive, op. cit., p. 144.↩︎
La conscience juive, op. cit., p. 103.↩︎
W. Rabi, “Bilan d’une vie,” written 31 March 1981, published in Esprit, January 1992, p. 119.↩︎
Solitude d’Israël : données et débats / XVe Colloque d’intellectuels juifs de langue française, PUF, 1975, p. 183.↩︎
Un peuple de trop sur la terre ?, Les Presses d’Aujourd’hui, 1979, p. 23.↩︎
Un peuple en trop ?, op. cit., p. 21.↩︎
Varsovie, op. cit., p. 27.↩︎
Varsovie, op. cit., p. 30.↩︎
Anatomie du Judaïsme français, chapter “Les juifs dans la cité,” Les Éditions de Minuit, 1962, p. 252.↩︎