Issue 22 of Plurielles, whose theme is “The Jew and the Other,” appears in very particular circumstances: those of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has profoundly — and perhaps definitively — altered our ways of living, and along with them the ways we conceive of the other and of ourselves.
Beyond the political leaders and the institutions, what is now being called into question, even put on trial, is the economic model that has governed us for more than forty years — neoliberal globalization and the ideology that underpins it.
More fundamentally, we are witnessing an upheaval in our relation to the other, as it has been constructed both by modern political institutions and by our daily habits: our ways of working, the modes of encounter and contact — between confinement and distance —, the expression of a planetary consciousness mingled with the reappearance of borders and the emergence of social panics. All of this sketches a radically unprecedented landscape.
What holds true for citizens of the world holds true, of course, for the Jews.
Throughout their history, the Jews have often been perceived as the embodiment of a threatening otherness, despite their small numbers (a few thousandths of the world’s population).
This other has frequently become the scapegoat, blamed for everything in the world that was troubling or unexplained. One thinks, of course, of the epidemics of the Middle Ages, but also of modern times, when the Jews were cast as warmongers and as the authors of economic crises.
Today, when the course of the world so often escapes us, we see the proliferation of conspiracy-theory websites that, with the constancy of an idée fixe, accuse Israel or the Jews of being behind the current pandemic.
The experience of otherness, the place of the stranger and the respect owed to him, long constituted one of the foundations of Jewish values and of the Jewish religion — those recalled each year during the ceremony of the Passover Seder.
And even after the Emancipation and the secularization of Western societies and of part of Jewish society, this experience continues to be regarded as foundational to a secular ethical Judaism. One may suppose that the historical and/or mythical memory bound up with the destiny of their own people played an important role in the commitment of many Jews to the movements for the national or social emancipation of oppressed peoples and groups in the twentieth century — a commitment that was sometimes accompanied by disappointments, for, as Albert Memmi reminds us, nationalisms have little tolerance for otherness (what he calls “the heterophobia of young nations”).
Since the most ancient past, the relation to the other has often been a vital concern for the Jewish people. Mireille Hadas-Lebel offers an example here that predates Christianity: confronted with the civilization of the other — the Hellenistic civilization of Alexandria — the Jews sought to safeguard their own culture by adopting the Greek language. Philo of Alexandria was an eminent heir of this acculturation.
From the Exile onward, the Jewish people’s relations with the State were profoundly transformed. As Danny Trom writes, the “exilic condition has this peculiarity: political power, now lost, is henceforth the political power of the Other.” From then on the Jews are inscribed within a double allegiance: that which they owe to the Other, the earthly King, and that which they owe to the “King of Kings,” God. Danny Trom studies the way in which this double loyalty was elaborated by the rabbinic tradition.
Within Jewish consciousness itself, the experience of otherness is foundational, François Rachline reminds us. By its very name, the word “Jew” carries the idea of a becoming and of an impossibility of being once and for all. The Jewishness of the Jew would thus be this strangeness to himself, this questioning of a gap with himself that can never be bridged.
Gérard Israël, his biographer, evokes a destiny exemplary in the recognition of otherness: that of René Cassin, a French Jew who, after the war, drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Nadine Vasseur approaches the encounter with the other from several points of view. The daughter of a vehemently secular Jew, she recounts her own discovery of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods of New York, the passionate curiosity this encounter aroused in her, and — free of any judgment — her desire to understand. As if in a mirror, she relates two accounts and two itineraries of young people raised in this tradition who leave their highly structured milieu out of curiosity about the world, without hatred, and even retaining an attachment to it. Their books, Celui qui va vers elle ne revient pas (All Who Go Do Not Return, Shulem Deen) and Je suis interdite (I Am Forbidden, Anouk Markovits), seem to illustrate this grave question: how, by solitary paths, does one become an individual?
Yet, as in other groups, relations of hostility sometimes arise within the Jewish world between subgroups of differing origin or practice. A condescending hostility, a dividing line, is described by Elias Canetti in the Vienna of 1915; it runs between the Jews of old Sephardic families originally from Turkey and the Galician Jews who arrived later. As Martine Leibovici writes, drawing on the analyses of Norbert Elias — themselves inspired by John Scotson — these oppositions are experienced as those between insiders and outsiders. The same phenomenon is described, moreover, by Philip Roth in his short-story collection Goodbye, Columbus. Guido Furci, in his analysis of the story “Eli, the Fanatic,” shows how a young lawyer, Eli, charged by the assimilated Jewish residents of the “gilded ghetto” of Woodenton with persuading the newcomers — survivors of the Shoah — to leave, ends up identifying with them and with their character as Hasidic Jews, adopting their manner of dress.
We see that the relation to cultural identity, as it is inscribed in memory and history, can give rise to complex behaviors. In a moving interview, Yann Boissière recounts a personal choice: his decision to convert and to become a rabbi of the Mouvement Juif Libéral de France, fusing his own destiny with that of the other in whom he recognized himself.
The Jewish people, as a figure of the other, held a particular fascination for Pascal, drawing his attention both by their longevity and by the “quantity of admirable and singular things” he found in them. This relationship is analyzed here by François Ardeven.
Gérard Haddad, for his part, evokes the fascination the Jews exercised over Lacan, who throughout his life surrounded himself with Jews.
Let us not forget that, for more than a hundred years, in Palestine and then in Israel, the Jew’s other was often the Palestinian Arab — frequently evoked in modern Hebrew literature, sometimes as an abstract figure, sometimes as a more concrete character depending on the period — a subject treated by Michèle Tauber. Philippe Zard, meanwhile, offers a critical analysis of the figure of the Israeli and of Israel as a figure of the other, illegitimate and unnameable, in the work of the poet Mahmoud Darwish, bard of Palestine.
Francine Kaufmann has revisited the work of André Schwarz-Bart, author of Le Dernier des Justes (The Last of the Just) but also of the Antillean saga to which La Mulâtresse Solitude (A Woman Named Solitude) belongs. She shows that the sense of belonging to humanity is a recurrent theme in a writer profoundly Jewish and intrinsically open to the world, one who devoted his life to combating racism so that, as he put it, the stranger might be loved for his difference, prized as an enrichment.
To return to realities more immediately political and closer to home, around the theme of the Jew and the Other, Brigitte Stora evokes, at the opening of this issue, the dangers that may be posed by a Jewish identity built upon a closure to the other. To evoke a more external danger, Simon Wuhl analyzes the wellsprings of antisemitic hatred that threaten the Jews in present-day France.
Outside the dossier, Daniel Oppenheim examines the gaze cast upon Jews and non-Jews by the writer Isaac Babel in Red Cavalry, a kind of chronicle of the Revolution, written with the portraitist’s gift that was the writer’s own.
The Other has not finished questioning us, and we have not finished being confronted with it — for better and sometimes for worse, for we have, alas, had to relinquish our belief in a triumphal march of Progress.
As this issue of Plurielles goes to press, we learn that Albert Memmi, the founder and first president of the AJHL, has left us. With his death, a major Jewish intellectual passes from us. He leaves behind an immense body of work, both literary and sociological, which helped to illuminate a number of political and societal phenomena bound up with domination and dependency. The analyst of Portrait du colonisé (The Colonizer and the Colonized, 1957) and of La Libération du Juif (The Liberation of the Jew, 1966), the novelist of La Statue de sel (The Pillar of Salt, 1953), he created major concepts such as that of judéité (Jewishness), which still serves to describe our Jewish identity in its intimate and personal dimension.