Enzo Traverso and Alain Finkielkraut, Nostalgic Intellectuals

Nostalgic, not to say reactionary, in the sense that they express, in recent works, an attachment, a fidelity, to political postures and situations of the past supposed to be lacking today¹. I shall not inscribe myself, and I shall not include them, in the classic and conventional debate that opposes “reactionaries” to “progressives,” so true is it that, in each of these authors, each of these dimensions can be detected, provided of course that one agrees on the words. But the very heart of their messages arouses in me a keen opposition.

Let us begin with Enzo Traverso, whose thesis is the following: “After having been the principal hearth of critical thought of the Western world — at the time when Europe was its center — the Jews find themselves today, by a sort of paradoxical reversal, at the heart of its apparatuses of domination. The intellectuals are called to order. If the first half of the 20th century was the age of Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leon Trotsky, the second was rather that of Raymond Aron, Leo Strauss, Henry Kissinger, and Ariel Sharon”². Two major events would accompany this inversion: the birth of Israel “which corresponded to the birth of a new pariah people — the Palestinians — deprived of political recognition and of rights”³ and the memorial presence of the genocide: “Transformed into the ‘civil religion’ of our liberal democracies, the memory of the Holocaust makes of the former pariah people a protected minority, heiress to a history by the yardstick of which the democratic West measures its moral virtues”⁴.

Let us pause on the few ideas advanced, which strongly resemble those of certain components of the French extreme left. Since the end of the Second World War, the Jews — contrary to Traverso, I write Jew with a capital letter, for it designates the belonging of the Jews to a historical ensemble that is not reduced to religion — would thus no longer be the critical and disquieted ferment of the established order and would have outright adopted a contrary posture. It is, to begin with, the terms of this proposition that pose a problem. Although it is presented as a History with a capital H (“History of a conservative turn”), Traverso’s work stems more from the essay than from a convention of scientific writing. Be it said in passing, it thus rejoins the intellectuals it castigates, Alain Finkielkraut or Bernard-Henri Lévy notably, treated not as authors, but as actors well placed in the “culture industry” and, thereby, disqualified in the eyes of Enzo Traverso. But can one really speak of a conservative turn from 1945 onward that would specifically concern Jewish intellectuals? I am inclined to think that Jewish intellectuals, understood here as thinkers active both in the City and in the Jewish world, follow the general tendency of their society. If, during the first half of the 20th century, there were Trotskys and Rosa Luxemburgs, it is because Europe was preparing to live through revolutionary experiences. It is doubtful that their message was particularly Jewish. The exemplary character of their universalism, the result of their critical posture, can also be debated. Thus, the Polish Communist Party (KPP), which numerous Jews had joined, was long reproached for indulging in the sin of “Luxemburgism”: by this was meant the negation of the struggles for national independence in favor of the class struggle (“The workers have no homeland,” as the saying went). Rosa Luxemburg thought indeed that the stage of national independence was not only a useless stage for the laboring classes, but moreover a pernicious one, “impeding” their coming-to-consciousness. Nothing astonishing that the KPP could never break through among the masses barely emerged from the oppression of their nation — or of what was going to (re)become their nation — by the surrounding empires. More exactly: the nationalist idea was far more victorious than the socialist idea. As for the “Homeland of the workers,” it quickly transformed itself, under the crook of Stalin, into a Great-Russian empire far removed from internationalism. To take up the idea of abstract universalism without analyzing its historical consequences comforts a certain Weltanschauung — I too admire the figures of Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg — but hardly helps one understand why they must be summoned today against Raymond Aron or Ariel Sharon (curiously united in the same sentence).

For Traverso, a good Jew is a non-Jewish Jew according to the expression of Isaac Deutscher, that is, an individual in solidarity with the persecuted, but who has nothing Jewish left except the bond with the persecuted (“I am a Jew because I feel the Jewish tragedy as my own tragedy…” says Deutscher cited by Traverso). In sum, the jews (here a small j as in Edgar Morin) who have a right to consideration are those who, having abandoned their ghetto, “have all gone beyond the frontiers of Judaism. They have all found Judaism too narrow, too archaic, too restrictive”⁵. Rosa Luxemburg, the author recalls, “no longer had in her heart any ‘special nook’ for the ghetto”⁶. Yes, before the war, this ideal type of Jewish intellectual rallied to him thousands of Jews desirous of leaving their shtetl, religion, tradition, and above all of integrating into the encompassing societies. Many of them joined the communist parties; they also became, even if weakly lettered, universalist intellectuals. When the hour of antisemitism sounded anew (in the USSR and in Poland after the war, in Poland in 1956 and 1968), some of these non-Jewish Jews questioned themselves again about their Jewishness, about their choices of universality and, oh horror, even joined the Jewish State.

But these Trotskys, Luxemburgs, great or small, were not the only Jews. Enzo Traverso uses only the definite article: “the” Jews were critical before 1945, since then “the” Jews have passed over to the side of the bourgeois order, of domination, etc. The use of the definite article constitutes an evident abuse that masks the existence of other political groups, the left-wing Zionists, the Bundists, and others. In the case of the Bund precisely, the principal workers’ party in the Jewish milieu in Poland and Russia, whose central aspiration is cultural autonomy, and therefore not the Zionism denounced by Traverso, but the maintenance in the country where one lives, in symbiosis with the other workers, are there critical intellectuals worthy of figuring in La fin de la modernité juive (The End of Jewish Modernity)? Well, no, for those Jews, speaking Yiddish, are far from being non-Jewish Jews. They are mentioned only as the internationalist antechamber to Russian social democracy. The Polish Bund, though massive during the interwar period among the Jewish workers, thus merits no place in his book. Neither Vladimir Medem nor Henryk Erlich nor Victor Alter, famous Bundist leaders, are mentioned. Were they not sufficiently critical Jewish intellectuals?

And after 1945, no critical Jewish intellectuals either? This proposition also seems to me false. What of Daniel Cohn-Bendit? Perhaps, passing from the libertarian stage to the liberal stage, he has ceased to be frequentable in the eyes of some? And of Henri Weber, another Trotskyist leader of 68, become a socialist? And of Benny Lévy who, leader of the Gauche Prolétarienne (Proletarian Left), rallied to the Jewish religion? Is it not derisory to inscribe their evolution, personal and political, to take only these emblematic examples, in the new “apparatuses of domination”? Let us add still, when one evokes the anti-totalitarian combats in the East, the figures of Adam Michnik or of Bronisław Geremek in Poland, of János Kis in Hungary, of František Kriegel in Czechoslovakia. Let us leave to Traverso the care of verifying to what point those were, or are, Jews or non-Jewish Jews. It is true also, if one follows the logic of our author, that they passed from the oppositional phase to that of power…

One could also wonder to what point it matters to extol “critical” thought. Raymond Aron was long a counselor of the Prince and a right-wing thinker, abundantly published in Le Figaro, in L’Express. In his multiple wranglings with the Marxist intellectuals as well as with Sartre, was it not he who was right by his critical reading of the communist system? To say this is not to espouse the established order and domination — which fundamentally characterized Aron — but to invite one to grasp “the critical spirit” in its context.

According to Traverso, “the memory of the Holocaust,” become a cult, constitutes, for the Jews, one of the essential attributes of the transition from the universe of the dominated to that of the dominant, with, in addition, the construction of a communitarian withdrawal (of a delicious return to the ghetto in a way…). “Finally,” writes Traverso, “it is the memory of the Holocaust which, cultivated as a sort of civil religion of human rights, resuscitated among the jews a sentiment of communitarian belonging, by redrawing the profile of a minority that was no longer stigmatized”⁷. The recognition of the Shoah has thus become a moral and political passport of the European order. Even if these words sound ill to our ears (“/…/ transformation of the memory of the Holocaust into a sort of ‘civil religion’ of the Western world, a necessary standard to measure the moral virtues of its democracies and a test to which are submitted the States that wish to integrate its political institutions”⁸), let us try to understand to what they refer. It is incontestable that, for thirty years, the recognition of the genocide of the Jews, called eponymously Shoah after the film of Claude Lanzmann, has given rise to a multiform institutionalization. The museums and memorials devoted to the history of the Jews and to the Shoah have multiplied in Europe (in Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, Bucharest notably, to take only these examples) and it is true that the combat against antisemitism has become a democratic marker of the European Union. The Auschwitz museum, though still Polish on the administrative and financial plane, has acquired a European dimension by the institutions that support it materially or that take an interest in it (I set aside the fact that its initial antifascist construction always rendered it European, but in another way⁹). An organization such as the Task Force For International Cooperation on Holocaust, which gathers an important number of European countries, objectively plays an important role of democratic socialization for those East European States little inclined to recognize the crimes committed by the generations of before.

Let us therefore grant Traverso the idea that the murder of the Jews (the Shoah, the Holocaust) has become the major referent of “Never again.” This situation, need it be specified? is however not the doing of the “Jews,” whoever they may be: no agent, no force, issued from “their ranks” commissioned the eminent place the Shoah occupies in the national or international institutions. Be it said in passing, it would moreover be fitting, in order better to understand this phenomenon, to link it more to the multiple forms of the “dictatorship of memory” (Pierre Nora) than to any other enterprise. But after all, is it not understandable, not to say normal, that the magnitude of this crime should have been integrated into the consciences of democratic minds? And one can, of course, only deplore that it has become the object of a competition of memories, even though this latter phenomenon is also understandable.

What shocks here above all is that, according to our author, this recognition of the crime accompanies “the conservative turn” of the Jews, that it nestles in its hollow not in order to draw dividends from it, as Jean-Marie Domenach said in former times, but for the benefit of a “sentiment of communitarian belonging.” Is this true? If it is true, is it condemnable? What is a communitarian belonging? All these chains of reasoning, presented with self-evidence, do not go without saying. The time is not yet so distant when, as in Jean-Claude Grumberg’s l’Atelier (The Workshop), the information about the crime circulated without being truly heard. The institutionalization of the Shoah, traversing the global society, traverses also, necessarily, the so-called communitarian institutions. This institutionalization even inscribes itself in their attributions, but in what way does it reinforce the sentiment of communitarian belonging? There is here a maintained confusion between organized community — which in no way represents the totality of the Jews — and communitarianism. One must therefore clearly denounce this triple amalgam: 1. between the organized community, effectively dominated, and ever since always, by right-wing politics, and a population of Jews whose relations to Jewish identity are complex, 2. that this population of unorganized Jews would align itself, thanks to the new civil religion, on this “sentiment of communitarian belonging,” 3. that this movement would be one of the symptoms of the “conservative turn.”

All these amalgams, skillfully set end to end, seem to form a coherent totality, but, deconstructed, they illustrate the author’s nostalgia for the revolutionary past of the revolutionary Jews (to whom he unduly adds Freud and Kafka — who pertain all the same to another category than Trotsky or Luxemburg), those Jews who thought “against,” against all dominations.

There exists still a segment of this chain, presented by Traverso as good news, on which one must indeed say a word, so much can it seem strange: the end of antisemitism. “Apart from its partisans, ever less numerous, no one will regret the end of antisemitism…,” writes Enzo Traverso, leaning in part on the works of Michel Wieviorka¹⁰. The old antisemitism, that of Drumont and Maurras, would be in decline in favor of a “new Judeophobia” that would confound antisemitism and anti-Zionism. There would thus be, fanned by the unconditional support for Israel of the official spokesmen of the “Israelite communities,” a “negative equation that leads the antisemites to profane a synagogue, seeing in it an expression of the ‘Jewish State’”¹¹. In what convoluted terms these things are said…

On one essential point, Traverso is right: in a growing part of French society, ever more subject to the xenophobic sirens, it is indeed the rejection of the Arab, French or not, legal immigrant or not, that finds itself at the center of racist hatred. For all that, the antisemitism of yesterday — or of tomorrow? — is doing well. The year 2014 was fertile in this regard. Whether it be the Dieudonné affair — which is not slight if one thinks of the thousands of good young people more shocked by the banning of his show than by its antisemitic substance — the cries of “Jew, France is not yours” at the “Day of Anger” demonstration proffered by the extreme right on 26 January, or the Jewish shops ransacked in Sarcelles by a crowd “that imported the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” the loop is closed: all the antisemitisms have rejoined one another, undermining the “good news” of Enzo Traverso. A poll conducted by the Ifop confirms it: “Muslims are two to three times more numerous than the average to share prejudices against the Jews” and it is among the voters of Marine Le Pen that “one finds, and by very far, the most antisemitic and xenophobic opinions”¹².

To be sure, Traverso’s book dates from 2013, but neither Dieudonné, nor Holocaust denial, nor Merah, nor the death of Ilan Halimi (a fine example of pure antisemitic alchemy, archaic and modern at once, be it said in passing) date from today. What is astonishing in Traverso is his faculty of passing over the historicity of the Jewish being, and therefore of antisemitism, he who has written works on the Jewish intellectuals, on Nazi violence, on Auschwitz, on memory. This disarming blindness accompanies an idealized world of critical Jews of yesterday and serves to denounce the “domineering Jews” of today without seeing that there still exist Jews of the left, secular and above all plural. And that, moreover, the domineering Jews decline themselves in multiple ways.

With Alain Finkielkraut, it is another past that is summoned and cherished, a past in which many French people recognize themselves if one judges by the success of his book and of the theses he upholds. “In that France of yesteryear,” he writes, “people believed in politics”¹³ whereas now “we do our mourning of the impossible”¹⁴. L’identité malheureuse (The Unhappy Identity) is a certain French identity that no longer recognizes the France of today, that France, he says, where money reigns more than writers, bad manners more than gallantry, and above all ethnic diversity and its violences. Under flowery garments, where the most elegant authors are summoned to evoke the France “that one loves,” this old country, the book is essentially a violent attack against immigration. “… What is happening to us, what we are taking full force, with this irresistible movement of recomposition and repopulation of the world, is the crisis of integration”¹⁵.

Renaud Camus is not far off. Thus are mentioned the notorious facts that have studded that field of living-together: the veil, the separate swimming pools, the violence of the housing projects, etc.

One can conceive that the transformations of French society, due notably to its Europeanization, i.e. to its place in Europe, and to an important presence of immigrant populations, provoke tensions. France, with England, invented the nation-State; it transmitted it to the world thanks to that founding act that was the French Revolution. At the hour of Europeanization and of peace on our continent — with the notable exception of the war in the former Yugoslavia — national identity, which the preceding generations acquired through hard struggle, imposes itself as a given so self-evident that the history of its construction seems forgotten. Who, among the young generations, still knows the words of the Marseillaise or the effects of the war of 1870 on patriotic belonging? That German philosophers, such as Jürgen Habermas or Ulrich Beck (who does not have Finkielkraut’s favor), show themselves favorable to a constitutional patriotism or to a European cosmopolitanism, they whose country suffered so much from nationalist deliriums, should gladden all those who try to find intra-European bridges. The idea that a post-national era is developing, with its imaginary and its relations of sociability, takes nothing away from the national formation. It is indeed in the mastery of his language that each person constructs his “identity” and, if one judges by the annual profusion of novels in France — one criterion among others, but an important one — it seems difficult to grasp in it a decline of French.

There remains the question of immigration and of integration, treated solely in Finkielkraut in the form of failures, especially scholastic ones, of incivilities, of social crisis. Never are the successful examples pointed to; only the zones in difficulty are singled out, the “discordance of usages”¹⁶ according to his expression. To be sure, these difficulties exist and one would have to be blind — that blindness he reproaches to his detractors — not to see them. But how to see them, with what eyes? Must one grasp these French people originating from the Maghreb or from sub-Saharan Africa as non-integrable, unassimilable ethnic categories, that would cultivate an Islamist cultural and religious project within “our” banlieues, or as a poor proletariat, an industrial reserve army according to the well-known formula, enclosed in poor pockets, themselves stigmatized as well. At the hour of a mass unemployment that has lasted for thirty years, in particular in those categories of the population, where generations have known only underemployment and discriminations, how to imagine being able to hold to them the discourse, ever so rational, of assimilation and of the duties of minorities? Nothing astonishing that there should have formed there microsocieties with their own codes, machismo, violence, and even antisemitism as one saw in the Ilan Halimi affairs and, more recently, in that of Créteil. But, once again, to train the spotlights on the urban revolts, the burned cars, or the veil, is to divert one’s gaze from all the examples of successful integration: how many of our fellow citizens issued from this immigration occupy jobs in commerce, in culture, in the civil service, at the University, despite the walls of discrimination they encounter? Who occupies the hardest service jobs if not immigrants or freshly naturalized French people? It is to divert one’s gaze from the fact, which must be hammered home, that anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia — never mind the words, the reality is indeed the same — have become an obsession of whole swaths of French society. And that antisemitism is developing in the Muslim world changes nothing in this situation, whether it be fueled by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or by the most backward prejudices (“the Jews have money”).

So, in the context of this unheard-of rise in power of reactionary forces (i.e. of those that wish to go backward: to marriage before the law of 2013, to a rejection of foreigners, of the European Union, etc.) and of major social struggles in perspective, one must choose one’s camp, see where the essential lies. Cease imagining that “national identity” would be struck with “unreality” for the benefit of “diversity”¹⁷. To think thus is to fuel the fears of the unknown that traverse French society by choosing scapegoats. Sorry to write it so banally, but to denounce only “national disintegration” and “the consequences of a demographic transformation that gave rise to no debate, that was not even decided by anyone”¹⁸, is to install oneself in the movement of the partisans of the idea of the Great Replacement propagated by Renaud Camus and by the extreme right. If these forces acquire weight, as the (ill) wind of History seems to point, all the nostalgic regrets for the civilities and the civilization of bygone times will hardly weigh against the brutality of the neo-Maurrassian revenges.

Enzo Traverso, Alain Finkielkraut, nostalgic and reactionary therefore, Traverso surely more nostalgic. The one regrets the Jewish intellectuals, the other is a Jewish intellectual, except that, in L’identité malheureuse, it is as a French intellectual that he expresses himself. On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is rather as a Jewish intellectual that Finkielkraut takes positions. Why Jewish? First because he often claims a Jewish heritage, then because a number of his books (Le Juif imaginaire, L’avenir d’une négation [The Future of a Negation], and others) attest to his preoccupation, his care for the Jewish being and becoming, whether it be a matter of the Shoah or of Israel. Many of those who situate him on the right of the political chessboard, recalcitrant to a black-blanc-beur France, would be astonished to learn that, concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he supports the creation of a Palestinian State, the movements La Paix Maintenant (Peace Now), JCall, in a word the Israeli left, so much in the minority at this moment. Personally, my thoughts have long kept sympathetic company with that Finkielkraut, the one who sensed the negationist danger from its birth, the one who sees Israel going astray in the colonization of the Palestinian territories, the one who was among the first to denounce Serbian aggression. But his de facto alignment on the theses of the extreme right concerning immigration and the transformations of French society revolts me.

There would thus be two Finkielkrauts, at least. Like everyone, he is double, triple, quadruple, but what interests us here is the doubling between this right-wing and left-wing identity. To be sure, this non-congruence can go without saying, but it is all the same striking that he should be, on the one hand, a critical Jewish intellectual on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the sense of Traverso, and a conservative, reactionary French intellectual, on the other.

One would be tempted to advise him to rejoin the Jew who is within him.

Notes