“A committed writer is a gnat that believes it is pushing and toppling a pyramid that does not move, will not move, while the gnat goes on buzzing around the heavy pyramid and arching its back, an athlete of useless thought and effort. […] Yes, to be loved and to love at eighty-five and to laugh with happiness even though I know I am going to die is my only answer to your letter. All the rest is dust raised by the wind”1. Such is the substance of the last lines published by Albert Cohen, a few months before his death, in 1981. The assertion is clear: vanity and futility are the only attributes of the so-called committed writer. An author, then, would be nothing but a being with no grip on reality, a stranger to the world, living in the hermetically sealed field of literature. His tirelessly repeated efforts to escape the ideal domain of his pages would be a chasing after wind.
Throughout his life, however, the lines and deeds of Albert Cohen ran counter to the skeptical pronouncements of his existence’s twilight. “I am no longer the one who with his finger traces mirages on the air,” he proclaimed in Cantique de Sion (Canticle of Zion), a poem published in 1925 by the Revue Juive (Jewish Review), of which he was the founder and director2. Indeed, the experience of the Revue Juive attests to the close connection, in Cohen, between literature and history, between writing and the age. The brevity of the review’s run — six issues published from January to November 1925 — takes nothing away from its richness. It was a hearth of reflection on Jewish identity, a crucible in which Cohen and his collaborators wished to bring about the alchemy of a revitalization of that identity. Consequently, the Revue Juive was also a place of political debate and reflection. The expression of a renewed conception of belonging to the Jewish people was meant to ground and legitimize a historic political project, Zionism, leading in fine to the creation of a Jewish State.
On January fifteenth, 1925, there appeared, at the Librairie Gallimard, éditions de la NRF, the first issue of the Revue Juive. The prestigious editorial committee with which Cohen endowed it announced the new publication’s Zionist sympathies. While the committee included renowned intellectuals, such as the Danish philosopher Georg Brandes, and Jewish figures of worldwide prestige, in the likeness of Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, one also found there emblematic figures of Zionism, beginning with Chaim Weizmann in person, who had been since 1920 the president of the World Zionist Organization. Alongside him appeared as well Dr. Léon Zadoc-Kahn, son of the Chief Rabbi Zadoc-Kahn and a fervent supporter of Zionism. The latter was also a member of the League of the Friends of Zionism constituted in 1917 by André Spire, friend and inspirer of Cohen. Spire himself had not cared to join the editorial committee, but had assured its director of his collaboration in the life of the Revue Juive. Finally, a non-Jewish but convinced Zionist personality, the economist Charles Gide, the writer André Gide’s uncle, was also a member of the committee.
In 1979, to a question asking what had given him the idea of creating the Revue Juive, Albert Cohen replied: “Dr. Weizmann had told me: in France, people know nothing about us. He was already the great leader of Zionism”3. Chaim Weizmann indeed played a crucial role in the birth of the review. In 1921, Cohen had taken the initiative of writing to him to send him a copy of Paroles Juives (Jewish Words), a collection he had just brought out. By the same occasion, he expressed to him his desire to serve the Zionist cause. When Cohen became a member of the diplomatic division of the International Labour Office, Weizmann entrusted him with negotiation missions, to remain secret, with Egyptian circles. Meeting in Geneva a member of the ILO was in fact in no way compromising, for anyone, and thus allowed contacts with the Zionist Organization to be established in all discretion. In the wake of his first contacts with the Zionist leader, Cohen sent him, in the autumn of 1924, his project for a review, which Weizmann immediately approved. Buoyed by his support and his moral endorsement, Cohen gathered the first collaborators and laid the foundations of the review. It was subsidized in a thoroughly substantial manner by Zionist funds, Weizmann having granted, even before the publication of the first issue, one thousand pounds sterling, a considerable sum for the time. Thereafter, and until the review’s demise, Zionist funds regularly replenished its coffers.
The conception Cohen had of the Revue Juive, nevertheless, far exceeded the strict framework of service to the Zionist cause. Of his review, Cohen wrote in the letter to Weizmann in which he laid out his project, that he wished to make it “the intellectual center of a reborn Israel”4. The review would allow him to unite the two aspirations that were his: to promote a rebirth of the Jewish people and to promote the Zionist movement, the one proceeding from the other, and reciprocally. Albert Cohen set out, in a “Declaration” placed as an epigraph to the first issue of the Revue Juive, the objectives and ideals of the new publication. This text, which was submitted to Weizmann and approved by him before its publication, appears as a veritable “manifesto of the Jewish people.” It is therefore a capital document, in which, as well as in Einstein’s “Message” that follows it, the philosophy of the review is made explicit.
“We shall give an account of the total thought of dispersed Israel and, without advocating artificial relations, we shall try to find the possible points of real welding, to invent in broad daylight a new and living Israelite unity,” announces Cohen from the very first lines of his text5. From the outset, then, a unifying design is affirmed for the review, the will to breathe a new unity into the Jewish people. The notion of a people implies a notion of unity, the Jews are a people, but for historical reasons that go by the names of exile and dispersion, the unity of this people has been occluded. It is this forgotten unity that the Revue Juive takes as its mission to make spring forth again and to exalt. “The Revue Juive is founded by men who are conscious of belonging to a living race whose spiritual work is not yet complete, which has a task to fulfill and which must work to recognize it”6. The rebirth of the unity of the Jewish people will come about through the affirmation of what, beyond borders, manifests everywhere the existence of a Jewish identity, that is, Jewish thought, called by Cohen the total thought of Israel. From this, two characteristics of the Revue Juive directly follow. It will be, firstly, an international review, for, while the Jewish people no longer exists except in a state of diaspora, the Revue Juive will thus be capable of reaching the Jewish nation wherever it is to be found, that is, dispersed among the nations. The Revue Juive will be an international review “because it will be the organ of liaison of the Jews of all countries; because it will teach the Jews to the Jews”7. Secondly, the Revue Juive will have a clearly affirmed intellectual vocation, since it is thus that it will be able to bring to light, delimit, and analyze Jewish thought, which is the emanation of the soul of Israel. The study of the history of the Jewish people will in particular allow whole swaths, ignored by humanity, of this soul to be unveiled: “Our exploration of Hebrew memory will allow us to discover, not, no doubt, the Jewish spirit, but the Jewish spirits, sediments deposited by the ages upon the thought and the heart of wandering Israel”8. An international review and a cultural review, the Revue Juive will then be in a position to make itself, among all Jews, the organ of the spiritual rebirth of Israel. The review, by being the reflection and the revealer of the grandeur of the Jewish people, of its vitality, its faith, its activity, will allow a return of the Jewish people to itself: “For the men of our race, the Revue Juive will be the occasion of a resumption of consciousness; for all free spirits, the possibility of seeing at last the soul of Israel.” Consequently, the review will also be a literary review, for it is in literature, and more generally in art, that Jewish thought blossoms:
“We shall have an aesthetic since we are a race. A race is an idea made flesh. […] Let it suffice for us to say that, repudiating art for art’s sake, we do not believe in gratuitousness and we do not dare to admit that one can create and think with disinterestedness”9.
Thus, for Cohen, the intellectual and cultural dimensions of the review served in no way as an alibi allowing one to cut oneself off from the life of the world, from the contemporary events constitutive of History in the making. On the contrary, the review had as its objective the defense and illustration of a conception of the situation and role of the Jewish people in the age. In Cohen, the gestation of this conception had been favored by the intellectual and political influence of Weizmann, certainly, but also and above all by that of André Spire. The latter played a decisive role in the initial hours of Cohen’s two vocations, that of Jewish writer and that of Zionist militant. Cohen met Spire for the first time in 1917, during a journey of the latter’s to Geneva. Spire, as his poetry attested, proclaimed with pride his belonging to the Jewish people. In 1919, he brought out at Grundig, in Geneva, a collection with an evocative title, Poèmes Juifs (Jewish Poems). A year later, Cohen composed a volume of poems that appeared at the same publisher. The title reveals the filiation with Spire’s verses: Paroles Juives. As Denise Goitein-Galperin writes, in Paroles Juives, Cohen, who is twenty-five years younger than Spire, often places himself in the wake of his elder10. The two collections bear witness to the same questionings, the same conceptions of religion, and above all the same vision of the Jewish people. If the question of the existence of a God arouses doubt and laceration in Spire as in Cohen, in both, equally, unshakable confidence in the Jewish people and its future is affirmed, hammered home in the poems. For Spire, the Jewish people is “the proud people, the just people… A holy people, a pure people,” and Cohen affirms in echo: “my people of saints, my people of the elect.” More than a return to faith, Spire and Cohen call for a return to the pride of the people of Israel, a return to the affirmation of the dignity of the Jewish people. Now this return passed through the questioning, indeed the negation, of assimilation.
This double process, Spire had already integrated when his friendship with Cohen began. He had been, in particular, strongly influenced by his reading of Israel Zangwill’s short story, Chad Gaya, published in the Cahiers de la Quinzaine by Péguy, “a sober and poignant tale that recounts the story of a young de-Judaized Venetian Jew, steeped in classical culture”11. The tale ends with the suicide of the young Jew who has returned to his father’s house for the Seder:
“How beautiful was that serenity, that quietude of the father, contrasting with the feverish life, the tormented spirit of the son! Why then had the Jews accepted Emancipation? Why had they let dry up that source of energy which had sustained their ancestors?… The son thirsted for God. Life without God seemed to him intolerable. Death rather!”12.
According to Spire, Zionism was the path on which the Jews had to commit themselves in order to escape the baleful alienation that struck them, in order to remedy the dissolution of Jewish identity caused by assimilation. Taking part in Basel at the Zionist congress of 1911, he tried to share his enthusiasm with his mother in a letter whose conclusion cracked like a manifesto: “It is not from assimilation that I await our regeneration. Assimilation is death. Zionism is Life”13.
In a remarkable study, the historian Michel Abitbol has shown that for the whole of the French Israelites of the time, the assimilation so decried by Spire was the foremost virtue. Assimilation did not stem from a simple desire for adherence, for adaptation to French identity. In a much deeper and more logical way, it was “the tangible and irreversible result of the encounter between the ideal of the prophets and the spirit of 1789”14. The emancipation of the Jews, a corollary of the Revolution, had made Judaism pass from the state of a nation to that of a religion. The nation-State inherited from the Jacobin revolution had imposed a universalist egalitarianism; emancipation thus presupposed the relegation to the private sphere of all forms of particularist allegiances15. Over the course of the nineteenth century, reference to a people and a land beyond national borders gradually weakened among the French Israelites. Jewish institutions and practices changed in meaning. Henceforth stripped of any political design, they devoted themselves to cultic, cultural, or humanitarian ends. By the end of the century, the majority of French Jews had opted for citizenship, in the full and irreducible sense of the term16.
Under these conditions, the very idea of the creation of a Jewish State could be apprehended by the Israelites of France only as a step backward and a regression. For them, Theodor Herzl was mistaken when he foresaw the failure of assimilation. Moreover, the history of the Jewish people was that of an eternal minority, certainly persecuted, but to whom, in France, the Revolution had procured a relative quietude. To adhere to Zionist ideals would have been to deny the past of the Jews of France. This is the argumentation of, for example, Alfred Berl:
“Be a nation of prophets among the nations, says a Hebrew text that thus excludes by anticipation the Zionist doctrine, that is, try no longer to constitute a distinct nation but frame yourselves, not as Jews but as men, among the other peoples; and, in their midst, profess, without ever denying them, those principles of the Revolution to which you owe having become again the equals of men and citizens of your native homelands”17.
The theses of Herzl’s faithful lieutenant, Max Nordau, who in his writings had carried out a scathing critique of the effects of emancipation and assimilation, could not fail to trouble, indeed to terrify, the Jews of France. Contemplating the situation of the Jews of Western Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, Nordau made the bitter observation that they had abandoned all authentic form of unity and solidarity and that, under the outward appearances of liberty, social enslavement prevailed18. He went so far as to regret the ghetto, in which external subjugation guaranteed, at least, an inner spiritual freedom:
“The Jews of the ghetto lived, from the moral point of view, a life of plenitude. Their external situation was uncertain, often gravely threatened, but inwardly they attained the full development of their particularities and their life had nothing fragmentary about it”19.
The resolute opposition to Zionism, widely spread, was relayed by diverse personalities, who frequently numbered among the most influential leaders of the representative institutions of the Jewish community of France. Among these personalities, the most famous was, in the aftermath of the war, Sylvain Lévi. In 1918, he published, in Le Temps, an article relating to the journey he had just made to Palestine. In it he wrote that Judaism had always been divided into two great inspirations: “The one, inspired by Moses, tends to drive the Jewish people back into its ethnic isolation; the other, heir to the prophets, extends a fraternal hand to humanity in order to march in concert toward triumphant justice”20. French Judaism, for its part, was permeated by the second. Thus, when Lévi, as a member of the central committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, was invited to express himself during the debate of the supreme council of the Allies on Palestine in 1919, he made there a clearly anti-Zionist presentation, in which he denounced in particular the dangers of which Zionism was the vector. According to him, Zionism notably introduced into the Jewish world a “double allegiance,” an expression that signified that the Jews would find themselves placed in a murky and ambiguous situation, in which they would have to define themselves in relation to their homeland and in relation to the future National Home in Palestine, and would not succeed in doing so in a clear and satisfactory manner. In Sokolow and Weizmann, who had also been invited by the council of the Allies, Lévi’s words aroused stupefaction and anger. Weizmann publicly called him a traitor. Yet, when Sylvain Lévi became, on June twenty-seventh, 1920, president of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, far from modifying his positions, he reaffirmed them. The fracture between the Jews of France and the Zionists was therefore patent, and no development seemed to contribute to reducing it. At the hour when the first issue of the Revue Juive appeared, the ideological opposition between Zionism and assimilationism was as vivacious as nearly a quarter of a century earlier, when Herzl set down this disillusioned reflection in his Journal: “The French Jews are absolutely of no use to us, in fact they are no longer Jews at all. They are not French either; they will probably become the leaders of European anarchism.”
Striving to transcend the Zionism-assimilationism cleavage, Cohen affirmed that the pages of the review would be wide open to “those of our brothers drunk with the desire to disappear into the unitary current of the nations that have adopted them and that they wish to love without reserve”21. Yet, immediately after this sentence, Cohen underscores the dangers that assimilation can, in his eyes, represent: “For us who do not want suicide and do not fear submitting our spirit to the infallible laws of the blood, we shall say as often as need be the reasons for our fidelity.” Is the “suicide” of which Cohen speaks not that of the Jew who, seeking to melt into the crucible of the nation at whose heart he evolves, kills what is authentically Jewish in him? Cohen here takes up on his own account the precept of Spire, “Assimilation is death. Zionism is Life.”
Several articles of the review set out to denounce the inanity of anti-Zionist arguments. In the fourth issue, a long chronicle is devoted to the justification and promotion of Zionism. “The most important objection, the gravest, remains that which the partisans of assimilation oppose to the national idea. For us, these two solutions are complementary”22. Complementary, because in order to allow the Jews of Eastern Europe to assimilate, as those of the West have done, one must first “decongest the countries where the Jewish masses are too compact to be penetrated by the surrounding influence.” To this end, Zionism is salutary and thus constitutes an indispensable prerequisite for ensuring a harmonious assimilation. Léon Blum is cited as an example, who declared, in 1925, at the banquet given by the Keren Hayesod of France in honor of Weizmann:
“We, the French, are very calm, very happy in France. But is the sentiment of the Jewish community going to be so completely abolished in us by the sentiment of our own security, that we forget that, in other countries of the world, there are Jews who do not live as happy, as calm as we do?”23.
To the detractors of Zionism who reproached it for substituting the concept of nation for that of religion, the chroniclers of the Revue Juive respond by affirming that religion is equivalent, in the case of the Jewish people, to a veritable nationality. The Jews are defined as constituting a “historical race,” for race does not create religion, but it is religion that creates the race. Victor Jacobson, who was permanent delegate of the Executive in Geneva and director of the Zionist political bureau in Paris, in his “Sketch of a Zionist Policy” develops in his turn arguments that justify for Zionism the legitimate right to lay claim to national sentiments: “Zionism is above all a national movement. It marks the will to rebirth of one of the oldest peoples that history has known”24. Now, under the pretext that the Jews no longer had either territory or government, nor even a language of their own common to each of them, some have denied the Zionists the right to evoke the existence of a Jewish nation. Yet, writes Jacobson, the Zionists are determined to affirm from the outset the essentially national character of the Zionist movement, which “is founded on the ineradicable sentiment of a great number of men of belonging to a group formed by History, tempered by the vicissitudes of the past, and as if welded together by a common hope in the future”25.
A movement of the nationalist type, Zionism, Jacobson hastens to specify, is afflicted by no form of aggressiveness. On the contrary, it wishes to be a factor of peace. This last aspiration of Zionism is particularly developed in the “Message” of Albert Einstein, which, in the first issue of the review, follows Cohen’s “Declaration.” Einstein founds his reasoning on the idea that the existence of diverse nationalities engenders antagonistic nationalisms and must consequently be considered a misfortune. Nietzsche said that one of the characteristics of the Jewish people is to know and to practice “the subtle use of misfortune”26. Now, one is forced to observe that the Jews are treated, throughout the world, as a clearly characterized national group, “The Jews must therefore use their nationality. Let them use it for the general happiness.” Since the disappearance of the Jewish “nationality” seems impossible, at least in the immediate future, the Jews must therefore justify its existence and make it creative. In this, Zionism can help the Jews “by reminding them of a past made of glories and sorrows, by presenting to their gaze a healthier and more dignified future, it brings them to misjudge themselves less and to take courage. It restores to them the moral force that will allow them to live and to act more nobly. It removes from their soul an inexcusable sentiment of exaggerated humility […].” Above all, Zionism allows the creation in Palestine of a center of Jewish spiritual life; it proceeds from an impulse of moral resurrection. “That is why Zionism, a movement apparently nationalist, has in the final analysis well deserved the gratitude of humanity.”
Several articles, notably a long report on agricultural colonization, give account, in the Revue Juive, of the work of the Zionists in Palestine. While the progress of the material situation demonstrated the economic viability of Zionism, the return of the Jewish people could not be limited to an enterprise of economic colonization. On the Promised Land, the spirit of Israel was to deploy itself and, in his “Declaration,” Cohen was proud to be able to announce the imminent opening of a university in Jerusalem. The inauguration of the latter was related at length in two articles published in the second and third issues of the review. In these articles were found, on the one hand, detailed the history of the creation of the Hebrew University and the role the World Zionist Organization had played; on the other hand, were set out the designs the University intended to serve. In the speech he delivered in 1918 on the occasion of the laying of the first stone, Chaim Weizmann remarked that it might seem paradoxical, in a country almost entirely empty of population, in a country that needed everything, and first of all the most elementary things, roads, farms, plows, that the Zionists should undertake to create “a center of spiritual and intellectual development.” But this was a paradox only for “one who does not know the Jewish soul.” Indeed, it was only when the spirit of the Jews could fully exercise its activity that the Jews would then be fit to respond to the social and political problems that arose in Palestine.
Following the articles devoted to the Hebrew University, the Revue Juive published several messages of sympathy written on the occasion of the inauguration by French personalities — Léon Blum, Édouard Herriot, Albert Thomas, Paul Painlevé, Charles Gide — or foreign ones — Tagore, Einstein, Freud. The opening of the University of Jerusalem had a profound impact on international opinion and the Jewish communities. The substance of the messages relayed by the Revue Juive shows that it was perceived as the symbol of Zionist success in Palestine. In France, the news of the opening of the University was at the origin of the rabbinate’s rallying to the Zionist theses. The Chief Rabbi of France, Israël Lévi, had personally gone to Palestine for the inauguration of the University. Impressed by the Zionist achievements, on his return he had the general assembly of the rabbis of France vote a motion inviting the Jews to participate actively in the work of reconstructing Jewish Palestine. In the same impulse, he founded the Palestinian Work of the Jews of France — Tehiyyat Haaretz — to collect funds destined for Palestine. This marked a perceptible evolution in the Chief Rabbi’s sentiments with regard to Zionism, which he had keenly criticized during the Kippur sermon, in 1920. On the occasion of the Jewish Passover, in 1926, the Chief Rabbi’s appeal was read in all the synagogues of France. The initiatives of Israël Lévi contributed to rallying French Jewish opinion to Zionism and, by 1930, most of the rabbis of France were collaborating actively in the local committees of the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael27.
Despite its fundamental importance, Zionism does not constitute the sole center of interest of the Revue Juive. Cohen assigned to it the objective of taking an interest in, in order to relay them, all the aspects of Jewish life and of the Jewish people. “Our beauty is to give ourselves to the nations — not to become a small, hairsplitting, intolerant, and selfish tribe,” he wrote in January 1922 to André Spire28. Thus, besides the numerous articles concerning the return of the Jews toward Zion, the chronicles and documents informing the readers with precision about the situation of the Jews, both political and social, throughout the world and of course in Palestine, the review contains many articles, chronicles, or book reviews, that bring to the fore the different facets of Jewish thought or “soul of Israel.” A factor of unity overlies the eclecticism of the publications of the Revue Juive. To take up the terms of Denise Goitein-Galperin, the “central nucleus [is] the sense of the mission of the Jewish people to the world, perceived in a perspective that declares itself resolutely modern and of universal scope”29.
To illuminate the meaning of this mission, a number of intellectuals were solicited: artists, writers, philosophers, historians. Paul Morand, who had been contacted to publish a short story, declared himself ready to collaborate in the review. Before launching into the writing, he wrote to Cohen to ask him for clarifications. In a letter dated November twenty-ninth, 1924, Cohen replied to Paul Morand: “You ask me whether your short story must have a Jewish hero or heroine. If possible, yes.” Reading this sentence, one of Cohen’s biographers notes: “It seems that one thus arrives at two criteria: either the author is Jewish, or his subject is. A Jew speaks of whatever he wishes: psychotherapy or nuclear physics; or else a non-Jew speaks of the Jews”30.
The procedure stems from the factor of unity and above all from the universal scope that Cohen wished to confer on the Revue Juive. His approach is no doubt not without a kinship to that of Montaigne. In the Essais, the latter relies on the Aristotelian categories of substance and accident, with the idea that by dint of depicting the accident through introspection, he will end by depicting the substance, “the entire form of the human condition.” In composing the Revue Juive, does Cohen not adopt an analogous intellectual attitude aiming, for its part, to ground in a first stage a knowledge of what “the entire form of the Jewish condition” is, in order, in a second stage, to make explicit the contribution of this condition to “the entire form of the human condition”? The idea of an analogy with Montaigne can be lent credit by the presence in the fourth issue of the review of an article by Léon Brunschvig entitled “The Historical Moment of Montaigne.”
Be that as it may, the extreme diversity of the articles of the review attests to the will to reflect at once the diversity and the specificity of the Jewish contribution to the world. One finds there, among others, poems by Max Jacob, a “Defense of the Aspect Assumed by the Idea in the Semitic Languages” by Louis Massignon, a long essay by André Spire on the young Jewish poet-philosopher Henri Franck, a reflection by Jacques de Lacretelle on his own novel, Silbermann, texts by and about Martin Buber, unpublished texts by Proust, who died in 1922, an article by Einstein “Non-Euclidean Geometry and Physics,” etc. In “Resistances to Psychoanalysis,” Sigmund Freud sets out at length to justify the soundness of his theories, demonstrating that the criticisms concerning the foundations of his approach stem not from science, but from the inertia of medical circles “trained to attach importance only to the anatomical, physical, or chemical order. And it is because they were not prepared to recognize the psychic order that they received it with indifference or hostility”31. His remarks connect only at the very end, in the conclusion, to the Jewish question. There Freud raises the question of knowing whether his quality of being a Jew played a role in the elaboration of the theses of psychoanalysis:
“It is perhaps not a mere chance that the promoter of psychoanalysis happened to be a Jew. To advocate psychoanalysis, one had to be amply prepared for the isolation to which opposition condemns, a destiny that, more than any other, is familiar to the Jew”32.
Jewishness and system of thought are therefore, according to Freud, closely associated. The fact of being a Jew is a predicate that conditions thought and determines, at least in part, its essence, leading to what Cohen names the “Jewish thought” characteristic of the people of Israel. It is this thought that the Revue Juive proposed to delimit in order to present it to the world.
When the Revue Juive ceased to appear, it counted nearly five thousand subscribers and was distributed in some forty countries. Cohen imputes the death of his review to “intrigues” on which there is scarcely cause to dwell except to say that they brought about, it seems, the halting of the Zionist subsidies33. One must rather underscore the originality of the experience of the Revue Juive, of its role, through the mobilization of intellectuals, in the political debate and in the consolidation of the Zionist movement. The originality of its role, too, in the emergence of a renascent interest in the concept of Jewish identity. The Revue Juive carries in germ the double commitment that was that of Albert Cohen’s life: commitment in the service of the Zionist cause, in the age, and literary commitment, in the celebration of his people, the two being in him indissociable, because partaking of one and the same ideal.
To inscribe at the frontispiece of his work, one must, assuredly, prefer to the sarcastic definition of the committed writer that he drew at the end of his life, the one he delivered in the first pages of the Revue Juive:
“We who do not believe that one can do a work by shutting oneself up in the closed palace, without germs, without mire, of literature; we, decidedly incapable of separating thought from action, of understanding this separation, do we need to say that we shall take care not to ignore the daily and eternal aspects of the Jewish event? And not only that. But also of the human event.”
Text originally published in the Cahiers Albert Cohen no. 5, 1995.
Notes
Text published in Le Nouvel Observateur, “literature special,” May 1981, page 49, on the occasion of an inquiry conducted by the magazine on the notion of the committed writer.↩︎
Albert COHEN, Cantique de Sion, Revue Juive, Librairie Gallimard, Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, Paris, issue 3, 15 May 1925, 342.↩︎
Interview granted to Jean-Jacques Brochier and Gérard Valbert, Le Magazine Littéraire, April 1979, dossier, p. 9.↩︎
Cited in Jean BLOT, Albert Cohen, Balland, 1986, p. 100.↩︎
Albert COHEN, “Déclaration,” RJ, issue 1, 15 January 1925, pp. 5-6.↩︎
Ibid., p. 5.↩︎
Ibid., p. 11.↩︎
Ibid., p. 8.↩︎
Ibid., p. 8.↩︎
Denise R. GOITEIN-GALPERIN, André Spire et Albert Cohen : Convergences et Divergences, University of Tel Aviv, p. 58, study consultable at the Atelier Albert Cohen.↩︎
Ibid., p. 53.↩︎
Cited in Michel ABITBOL, Les Deux Terres Promises, Les Juifs de France et le Sionisme, Olivier Orban, Paris, 1989, p. 112.↩︎
Unpublished letter communicated by Mme A. Spire to Denise R. GOITEIN-GALPERIN, op. cit., p. 56.↩︎
Michel ABITBOL, op. cit., p. 37.↩︎
Pierre BIRNBAUM (ed.), Histoire Politique des Juifs de France, presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Paris, 1990, introduction, p. 11.↩︎
Dominique SCHNAPPER, “Les juifs et la nation,” in Pierre Birnbaum, op. cit., p. 300.↩︎
Alfred BERL, Le mouvement sioniste et l’antisémitisme, 1899, cited in Michel Abitbol, op. cit., p. 35.↩︎
Alain DIECKHOFF, “Les logiques de l’émancipation et le sionisme,” in Pierre Birnbaum, op. cit., pp. 171-172.↩︎
Max NORDAU, Zionistische Schriften, Cologne and Leipzig, Jüdischer Verlag, 1909, 46, cited in Alain Dieckhoff, art. cit., p. 171.↩︎
Cited in Michel ABITBOL, Ibid., p. 72.↩︎
Albert COHEN, art. cit., p. 5.↩︎
RJ, issue 4, July 1925, Chroniques (anonymous), p. 242.↩︎
Ibid., p. 247.↩︎
Victor JACOBSON, “Esquisse d’une politique sioniste,” RJ, issue 4, July 1925, p. 436.↩︎
Ibid., p. 437.↩︎
Albert EINSTEIN, “Message,” RJ, issue 1, fifteen January 1925, no pagination.↩︎
Michel ABITBOL, op. cit., p. 133.↩︎
Cited in Denise R. GOITEIN-GALPERIN, “Albert Cohen, le Peuple juif et le Sionisme dans sa Vie et son Œuvre,” Actes du Colloque International sur le thème Les Juifs de France, le Sionisme et l’État d’Israël, organized in 1987 by the Inalco and the Ben Gurion University, p. 176.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
Jean BLOT, op. cit., p. 117.↩︎
Sigmund FREUD, “Résistances à la psychanalyse,” RJ, issue 2, 15 March 1925, pp. 211-212.↩︎
Ibid., p. 219.↩︎
Interview granted to Jean-Jacques Brochier and Gérard Valbert, Le Magazine Littéraire, art. cit., 9. See also Gérard VALBERT, Albert Cohen, le Seigneur, Grasset, Paris, 1990, p. 207.↩︎