In the aftermath of the Shoah, in response to the attempt to exterminate Judaism, a group of Jewish intellectuals developed within France an unprecedented spiritual experience, known under the name of the Paris School of Jewish Thought. It is so named following a quip launched by Vladimir Rabi several years after its beginnings, and this name was ratified by Emmanuel Levinas in a review, Les Cahiers de l’AIU1. Of this undertaking, the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française (Colloquium of French-Language Jewish Intellectuals, CIJLF) and the École Gilbert-Bloch d’Orsay were the illustration. Still too little studied despite the richness of the reflections broached, these high-level colloquia, animated by Jewish intellectuals, were regular Parisian gatherings2 between 1957 and the beginning of the 21st century, the themes proposed being most often linked to current events and resting on the texts of the Jewish tradition and on their questionings. Their success was ever-growing. But at the end of the seventies, the emigration to Israel after the Six-Day War of Jewish thinkers sitting on the committee charged with its preparation, as well as the crisis of the intellectual model set in place after the Second World War, eroded its influence. These gatherings nonetheless remain a reference for apprehending the figure of the Jewish intellectual in France, for they allowed the birth of a new type of thinker formed simultaneously in the sources of the tradition and a specialist in Greek and German philosophy, to which Jewish cultural initiatives of contemporary France still bear witness.

From its creation in 1957 and until 2004, the date of the last gathering3, nearly half a century passed during which the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française became a veritable institution of French Jewry. This regular appointment, which made it possible to see the degree of openness of a Jewish elite to modernity, aroused numerous hopes at the moment of its creation, inaugurating ten glorious years, until the seventies, which marked a certain breathlessness of this experience4.

Hope after the Shoah

Far from having put an end to the European Jewish wealth of identity and culture, the genocide of the Jews brought about an existential upheaval in their history. Within France, the reference to the Shoah, felt as a failure of modernity, became a major element of contemporary identity and constitutes after 1945 an inescapable reality around which fundamental questionings are elaborated.

What could happen after the will to annihilate a people, a religion, a culture, a thought? In this context and in view of the “catastrophe” still so near, the intellectuals who decided to federate a study group set themselves the ambition of drawing from Jewish texts answers to the destruction of the Jews of Europe, engaging the questionings that each could pose to himself. They also wished to prove that European Judaism had not disappeared and that it was capable of being reborn from its ashes more resplendent than ever. Moreover, these intellectuals — academics, philosophers, historians, mathematicians, physicians, artists, or rabbis — also sought to redefine their belonging to Judaism. By participating in the CIJLF, they committed themselves to the path of replenishment. Finally, while the Shoah had decimated the principal cadres of the Jewish community of France, the hour of the Liberation was also that of the spiritual reconstruction of French Judaism and of the formation of new charismatic personalities to guide it.

The Beginnings

On Friday, 24 May 1957, the eve of Shabbat, the first Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française took place. The initiators of the meeting did not yet know that they had just founded a fundamental appointment in contemporary French Jewish cultural life.

Indeed, the first gathering of Jewish intellectuals occurred fortuitously in a house of the Œuvre de Secours à l’Enfance (Children’s Aid Society, OSE), in Versailles. Some twenty Jewish personalities such as Edmond Fleg, André Neher, Éliane Amado Lévy-Valensi, Léon Askenazi known as Manitou, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Emmanuel Levinas, or Jean Wahl had been brought together under the aegis of the cultural commission of the French section of the World Jewish Congress, for a “full Shabbat.” Edmond Fleg, who then presided over the French Section of the WJC, had signed the invitations, aided by the director of the Paris Bureau Armand Kaplan, who made it possible. The soul and the foundation of the gathering belonged to André Neher and Emmanuel Levinas, who had determined the themes broached. The meeting wished to inaugurate the reconciliation of the Jewish intellectuals who wished to stand on the side of the universal with the Jewish tradition, considered not as a confessional particularism, but as a thought receivable by Jews and also by those who were not.

Each of them participated in the discussions, with no precise theme, other than that of taking an interest in the meaning of the history of the Jews and of answering the ontological question: what is it to be a Jew after the Shoah? Later, this “Versailles nucleus,” since the first gathering had taken place at Versailles, decided to structure the meetings through the creation of a preparatory committee, presided over at its beginnings by Professor André Neher and then, thereafter, by Jean Halperin. The Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française was born.

The Factors of Its Success

An ensemble of factors made possible the creation of the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française and its endurance. Various historical, spiritual, and political catalysts were at the origin of its success. During the Second World War, Jewish intellectuals excluded from the university because of the anti-Jewish measures had taken to gathering. The idea of these meetings belonged to Léon Algazi and Aron Steinberg, both members of the World Jewish Congress, who decided to renew the experience after the Shoah in order to allow Jewish scholars to find a place that would be propitious to reflection, but that would also be a factor of encounter and discussion. The crisis of the values of civilization engendered by the events that had preceded incited the Jewish intellectual to question himself and to express himself. A deficiency had to be remedied: the abdication of the Jewish intellectual as a Jew, his absence of reflection around Jewish religious, moral, and cultural values.

During the holding of the second Colloquium, on 28 September 1959 in the afternoon, as it was drawing to a close, André Neher made what may appear as the official act of its creation:

I should like it to be understood that now these gatherings of Jewish intellectuals have become a good habit. What will come of them, we shall not presume, but I am certain, for my part, that nothing can come of them but good. I believe that if Judaism, French, American, and in general, finds itself in the state in which it is, a state I do not wish to qualify, this is due to its being amputated of its intellectuals. Jewish intellectuals work in all domains, with considerable successes; they are useful in all domains of thought, of science, and Judaism remains intellectually poor. If we are here, if we can again be gathered, perhaps and even surely we shall succeed in remedying this intellectual and spiritual poverty of the Judaisms of the West.5

Writing the preface to the publication gathering the proceedings of the first three CIJLF, André Neher attempted a first definition of the gathering:

The Colloquia [he wrote] thus passed rapidly from the experimental approach to that of a maturity I should not hesitate to qualify as doctrinal. They were places of debate, of exchange, of dialogue. Associating the themes of eternal meditations with the urgent problems of intellectual and political action, hitching individual, spontaneous, diversified reflections to the philosophical and theological exegesis of traditional biblical and Talmudic texts; coordinating the properly intellectual phases with precious and congenial moments of relaxation, the Colloquia acquired a sort of liturgical dynamism, by which they render, within contemporary Judaism, an exceptional testimony.6

In this paragraph seemed perfectly formulated the great orientations that the first participants in the CIJLF wished to breathe into it: a doctrinal approach to the themes broached, papers eliciting debate and openness to dialogue, the bringing together of universal philosophical reflection and traditional biblical texts, as well as the coordination of phases of arduous reflection with convivial moments of relaxation.

It is difficult to imagine the success won by the Colloquia, which followed one another annually, then every two years, that is, in total forty gatherings up to the beginning of the 21st century. Beyond this witticism of Josy Eisenberg, chairman of a session: “I am glad to be chairman, it was the only way for me to be sure of having a seat!”, one may wonder about the reasons for such an affluence.

These gatherings wished to bear witness to the universalism of Judaism, a religion that had been made to disappear at Auschwitz. The philosopher David Kessler, a fervent participant of the appointment in the nineties, wondered, in the course of an analysis of the first twenty-five Colloquia, about what had made it possible for these participants to accept the principle of such a gathering. For him too, the upheavals occasioned by the Shoah had justified its necessity. And he cited Vladimir Jankélévitch, a member of the Versailles nucleus, who expressed this laceration:

We are no longer what we were before; there are hands we no longer shake, countries to which we no longer go, things we no longer do, words even that we no longer pronounce, and this is not only negative, it is also an adherence to values we did not recognize. You well know that this is one of the reasons why we are always as numerous at a session of the WJC; many of us had no consciousness of Judaism.7

The Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française drew part of its legitimacy from the rupture occasioned by the events of 1933-1945 which, through the pariah situation made for the Jewish individual, translated a failure of “being-Jewish-in-Europe.” The thinkers who instigated the first gathering of Jewish intellectuals could only take note of it. They thus had to learn to redefine themselves in the mode of identity, to reposition themselves in favor of their Jewishness.

The Participants in the Colloquium

The animators of the Colloquium discussed themes linked to current events in the light of Jewish sources and of their questionings before a public of the “perplexed,” according to the term of Edmond Fleg.

André Neher’s preface to the first publication of the Colloquia constitutes a crucial datum for understanding the reasons that underlay the enterprise. In a formulation that became famous, Neher wrote:

For a long time, the Jewish intellectual cut the figure of a lost child of Judaism. On all building sites, he was at the task; on all battlefields, he led the struggle; in the most laudable and most perilous combats, he constituted the vanguard, but these were the sites, the arenas, the risks where the most diverse human responsibilities were engaged, save one: that, precisely, of Judaism.8

The attitude then observed by these Jewish intellectuals stemmed either from indifference, for “confronted with his Jewish condition, the Jewish intellectual reacted at best by a movement of ill humor or of indifference,” or from more virulent reactions with “at worst, a morbid psychosis of contempt or of hatred.” At the root of these attitudes, André Neher thus detected ignorance expressed in several forms: “subjective ignorance of what could and should signify in each person the four irreducible cubits of the Jewish soul; objective ignorance of the religious, moral, cultural, political values of a Judaism at whose gates one never came to knock to question it about its meaning.” And the thinker castigated this attitude: “One gave the best of oneself to all the philosophies of the world, but one had neither the time, nor the curiosity, nor the courage to imagine Judaism otherwise than under the mask that prejudices, biases, and age-old commonplaces lent to it.”9

Arnold Mandel, with even greater severity, denounced what may be defined as a sort of Jewish anticlericalism on the part of these scholars who attempted a secularization of Jewish matters:

In the final analysis, we came to have facing us a sort of Jewish element […] totally de-Judaized, having completely lost not only all affective experience, but even any kind of point of reference […] and this gave, at last, finally, after the whole lineage of depletion, these cold exegetes, who were Jews, and who sometimes encountered or even chose Jewish matters in their works of erudition, and treated them with that wholesale objectivity, which indicated above all, whether consciously or not, a total absence of bonds of responsibility, on their part, for this matter.10

One of the objectives of the first gathering was thus to attempt a reconciliation between intellectuals of every stripe, but also a reconciliation of the Jewish intellectuals with their Judaism. It was audacious to bring together from the start two universes that had ignored each other in France for too long: that of religious Judaism, repository of traditional Jewish thought and values, counting many masters formed at the university and in particular at the school of Jacob Gordin11, but also having sometimes, for lack of sufficiently demanding interlocutors, a tendency toward complacency and apologetics; and that of the Jewish intellectuals, who wished above all to be men formed in Greek and German philosophy.

For several decades, these gatherings were the privileged place where traditional Jewish thought, replenished by modernity, openly proclaimed its values and attempted to bring answers to the questionings that the Jewish collectivity posed to itself in diaspora. The chosen themes of the gatherings, starting from Judaism as a particularity, made it possible to answer preoccupations stemming from universal questionings. The subjects of reflection of the Colloquium turned around Jewish consciousness, Israel, and the diaspora, at its beginnings at least. Their thematics evolved over the years toward more generalist subjects in order to allow an openness and to attract a more numerous public. Indeed, whereas for a long time the choice of subjects was “Judeo-centered” — “The Shabbat in Jewish Consciousness,” “The Solitude of Israel,” “Jerusalem, the Unique and the Universal” — one could subsequently perceive an evolution: “The Seventy Nations,” “The Idea of Humanity,” “The Reserve of Self.”

During the first CIJLF, the intellectuals strove to reflect on the whole of the questionings developed by bringing to them the most urgent and the most burning answers for a Jewish group living in diaspora. One thus saw in dialogue — and in mutual challenge — representatives of all the facets of the Jewish world whatever their degree of religious practice: Zionists (André Neher) and non-Zionists (Wladimir Rabi, Richard Marienstras), chief rabbis (Jacob Kaplan, Meyer Jaïs) and laypersons (Albert Memmi, Vladimir Jankélévitch), Marxist atheists (Robert Misrahi) and anti-communists (Arnold Mandel), famous academics distant from the community (Raymond Aron, Jacques Derrida, Georges Friedmann), not to forget Israeli academics (Élie Barnavi). This exchange of ideas among very diverse personalities was a sure rampart against any desire on the part of one current to monopolize Judaism. It made it possible above all to enrich the reflection of these different tendencies.

The speakers were selected with infinite precautions by the preparatory committee. The orators of the Colloquium were academics, professors, philosophers, writers, scientists, artists, and rabbis. The overwhelming majority were men; women represented only 8% of the total. What was the numerical ratio of the Sephardim recently arrived in France in relation to the Ashkenazim? Facing the latter, there was a minority of Sephardic Jews, about one-third of the total of orators. They were counted in greater number among the public.

As has been said, so-called universal thought was thus evaluated according to the criteria of Jewish consciousness. Which means that the Hebraic connotation of any concept was required, first of all, as the obligatory verification of any intellectual plausibility. From then on, the comparison with analogous notions in other cultural registers, in particular the universe of the Christian tradition, became all the more assured and fecund.

Edmond Fleg, a marking figure of French Judaism and an instigator of the Colloquium, had created, after the Liberation, with the historian Jules Isaac, the Amitiés judéo-chrétiennes (Judeo-Christian Friendships) under the presidency of Jacques Madaule. The chief rabbi Jacob Kaplan, one of the participants who collaborated actively in the reconstruction of French Judaism, was a leading actor in this rapprochement. He attended, in 1947, the Seelisberg conference12 and also played a major role in the resolution of “the Finaly affair”13. It is thus that the bonds between the Jewish intellectuals of the Colloquium and the intellectuals issuing from the Christian world were numerous. They were sought by the preparatory committee. Judeo-Christian dialogue was at the center of their preoccupations. This is why numerous non-Jewish friends, linked to the Amitiés judéo-chrétiennes or to the Protestant world in particular, spoke at the Colloquium. Let us cite, among others, on the Christian side, an intellectual such as Jean-Marie Domenach, a faithful of the Colloquium. Even before the creation of the gathering, these intellectuals had participated in other experiences. In 1954, Edmond Fleg and Jacques Madaule had directed at the Protestant cultural center of Cerisy a colloquium entitled “The State of Israel, its role, its mission.” The same Jacques Madaule proposed in 1955, in the same framework, a colloquium on “The Historical Mission of Israel.” In parallel with the CIJLF, other Jewish intellectuals such as Raymond Aron, Annie Goldmann, or Jacques Derrida, for example, were present at Cerisy.

A comparison can moreover be sketched with the Centre catholique des intellectuels français (Catholic Center of French Intellectuals), another laboratory of thought in the second half of the 20th century. It makes it possible better to grasp the specificity of the Colloquium. The Catholic Center was, for its part, concerned to raise secular culture to the level of religious culture: it sought to bring modernity and Christianity into dialogue. The two experiences nonetheless made possible the birth of a new type of intellectual: the religious thinker, Jewish or Christian.

The Six-Day War, the Turning Point

The Six-Day War in 1967, then the emigration to Israel of charismatic personalities of the preparatory committee, among them André Neher, Éliane Amado Lévy-Valensi, Henri Atlan, Benno Gross, or Léon Askenazi, left this intellectual scene somewhat forlorn.

Moreover, the initial idea that guaranteed the success of the gathering began to wear thin. Notably, with the arrival of Sephardic Jewish thinkers, come essentially from North Africa, who had already been initiated into the “medieval Judeo-Arabic culture” according to the expression of Léon Askenazi. By integrating into the group of the Jews in France, they invented new expressions of Jewish identity distant from Franco-Judaism, but also from the traditional forms of attachment to religion they had known in their countries of origin. For a great number of them, solidarity with the State of Israel or else the memory of the country left behind seemed to substitute themselves for the classical criteria of defining Jewish identity, such as the observance of the religious commandments or the study of the sacred texts.

At the same moment, in the seventies and eighties, other places where new methods of reflection were elaborated were opened and competed with it, around notably the Collège des Études juives (College of Jewish Studies), the review Pardès, then later the Institut universitaire d’études juives Élie Wiesel (Élie Wiesel University Institute of Jewish Studies).

Only the “Talmudic Lesson” — an illustration of the theme of the Colloquium based on a text drawn from the Talmud — pronounced by the charismatic philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, kept its regular public. After the philosopher’s last intervention in 1991, the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française, without losing its renown, had become an appointment that passed almost unnoticed among the Jewish collectivity. As the years passed, the model of the Jewish intellectual reconciling his Judaism and his knowledge of philosophy became rarer, while intellectuals versed in one or the other of these domains appeared. Between a rabbi formed in the sources of the Tradition, and academics for whom the Jewish religion was only incidental, between the representatives of opposing fringes of French Judaism, dialogue became each year more difficult.

From its creation, the CIJLF wished to be at the origin of a new type of Jewish intellectual, living in a serene mode between his Jewish condition and his universal formation. He was, moreover, the one who could not be absent from the scene where Jews suffered. But the Judeo-universal symbiosis that the Jewish intellectuals of the postwar period had wished to inaugurate within the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française gave way to another definition of Jewish identity, in the making at the beginning of the 21st century, whose most significant element might be the abandonment of the Israelite dream and of its universalism forgetful of the Jewish condition, in favor of a return to Jewish identity. Neither Franco-Judaism, nor Sephardic identity, Judeo-French identity remains at this date under construction between these two traditions.

At present, the dynamic that was developed by the postwar thinkers is to be relaunched. It is moreover the object of a reflection and of the setting up of a research group within the Fondation du judaïsme français (Foundation of French Judaism).

The Proceedings of the Colloques des intellectuels juifs de langue française were published by the Presses universitaires de France, then by Gallimard (coll. “Idées”), Denoël, and Albin Michel (coll. “Présences du judaïsme”).

Notes

  1. Alliance Israélite Universelle (Editor’s note)↩︎

  2. The first of the gatherings was organized at Versailles.↩︎

  3. Other colloquia of intellectuals have been proposed. In 2007, a colloquium on the theme of “Modernity and Judaism” remained unfinished. In 2013, another colloquium paid tribute to Professor Jean Halperin, the devoted president of the preparatory committee until his passing.↩︎

  4. This study rests on the examination of the archival documents of the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française, which are conserved in two distinct places: in Jerusalem, at the Central Zionist Archives (CZA), and at the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in Paris. Before 1983, the WJC sources were sent to Israel by the French officials of the WJC. After this date, they are consulted in Paris, where the documents are meticulously conserved by dossiers, each comprising the documents relating to the preparation of a CIJLF.↩︎

  5. Jean Halpérin, Éliane Amado Lévy-Valensi, La conscience juive, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1963, p. 208.↩︎

  6. Ibidem, p. 4.↩︎

  7. Jean Halpérin, Georges Lévitte, Mémoire et histoire, Paris, Denoël, 1986, p. 182.↩︎

  8. Jean Halpérin, Éliane Amado Lévy-Valensi, La conscience juive, op. cit., p. V.↩︎

  9. Ibid., p. V-VI.↩︎

  10. Ibid., p. 92.↩︎

  11. The inspirer of this experience was incontestably Jacob Gordin (1896-1947), born not far from Saint Petersburg and a former member of the German Academy for the Science of Judaism in Berlin, the famous Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, who profoundly inspired the postwar Jewish intellectuals in France, where he sojourned from 1933 onward. The figure of Jacob Gordin thus remained tutelary and marked this current oriented toward a double fidelity devoted at once to Judaism and to philosophy, by dedicating itself to the spiritual formation of a whole generation of enlightened Jewish thinkers, among them Léon Askenazi, André Neher, or Emmanuel Levinas.↩︎

  12. Bringing together 70 personalities come from 17 countries, this conference was held in the village of Seelisberg in Switzerland from 30 July to 5 August 1947, to study the causes of Christian antisemitism. (Editor’s note)↩︎

  13. Before being deported and murdered, Fritz and Annie Finaly had entrusted their children Robert and Gérald to a Catholic institution in the Grenoble region, which placed them with a guardian. The close family searching for these children after the war, this person refused to return them under the pretext that they had been baptized. The family finally won its case in 1953. (Editor’s note)↩︎

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