Jew, or the other within

In its origin, the word “Jew” is bound to the family of the patriarch Jacob. To forget its genesis, or to take no interest in it, makes it unlikely that one will penetrate the nature of its singularity. The lines that follow strive to locate, in its history and in its linguistic construction, the otherness it bears within.

A family story

Jacob, in love with Rachel, believed he would win her hand after working seven years for his uncle, Laban. The latter deceived him, granting him the hand of Leah instead. Seven further years were demanded of him before he obtained satisfaction. This did not prevent Leah from bearing Jacob four sons. The biblical text (Genesis, chapter 29, verses 32 to 35) tells us that she named each of the first three according to what she felt toward her husband, in the hope that each birth would bring him a little closer to her. These efforts were manifestly not crowned with success. And so she gave birth once more, but this time she named her last boy Judah (Yehudah — יְהוּדָה), which comes from the verb “to thank,” “to acknowledge” (lehodot — לְהוֹדוֹת), and concluded: “This time I give thanks to YHWH!” — without this signifying that she had been fulfilled as a wife.

YHWH, the unpronounceable tetragrammaton, designated only by other names — notably Adonai — is written in Hebrew (reading from right to left): יהוה. It is easy enough to notice, even when one does not read Hebrew, that the word “Judah” (יְהוּדָה) and the tetragrammaton have exactly the same structure, to within a single letter. In both terms one finds the four letters (yod, he, vav, he), independently of the vowels (points or strokes attached to the consonants), but with one letter more for Judah, between the vav and the final he: a dalet, the d in our alphabet. It is very rare to encounter a proper name so close to the quartet that designates the Elohim of Israel.¹ Others in the Hebrew Bible contain as many as three of these letters,² but never four. Judah is a unique case. This is not without consequence for our subject, the Jew and the other.

Without dwelling on the episodes that punctuate the existence of Judah (see on this point Genesis, chapters 37 and 38), it must be retained that his father, Jacob/Israel, on the threshold of death, receives his twelve sons, one after another (Genesis 49:1–10), and reserves for this one a place apart: “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the rod of authority from his descendants.”

Indeed, Yehudah gives his name to one of the two kingdoms that divided the inheritance of Solomon, at the schism of 931 BCE. The northern kingdom, called Israel, brought together ten of the twelve tribes, while the southern one rested on the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin alone. The capital of the former was Samaria, that of the latter, Jerusalem. Archaeological work has shown that the Northern Kingdom was far richer than the Southern, and for that reason an object of covetousness — including that of the Assyrians Shalmaneser V and his successor Sargon II. The latter annexed it in 722 and deported its inhabitants. Judah — Judea — then held on as best it could, until its last king, Zedekiah, was defeated in 587 by Nebuchadnezzar, the prelude to the destruction, a year later, of the First Temple of Jerusalem, erected by King Solomon in the tenth century. The inhabitants of the north were called Yisra’elim and those of the south Yehudim. The first gave, in French, the word israélites (“Israelites”) and the second that of juifs (“Jews”).³

Jew

In French, a verb in the future tense, in the third person singular, ends in -ra: il rira (he will laugh), il sera (he will be), il remerciera (he will thank). In Hebrew, it always begins with a yod (י), transliterated in our language by a y: yitshaq (יִצְחַק) he will laugh, yihyeh (יִהְיֶה) he will be, yodeh (יוֹדָה) he will thank. Judah, Yehudah, is therefore a future form. Consequently, so too is “Jew.”

This is a first essential point, but one that furnishes us with no element of explanation. Why is the future inscribed at the heart of the word “Jew”? In what way does this allow us to think that the relation to the other is, so to speak, consubstantial with the Jew?

To attempt to bring some elements of an answer to these two questions, a detour is required through a key passage of Exodus, verse 14 of chapter 3. It is the episode in which Moses questions himself on his destiny, on his will to propose to the Hebrews held in Egypt their liberation, and on the best means of attaining it. He glimpses this adventure while tending the flocks of his father-in-law, Jethro. With his project in mind, he envisages all the difficulties he will have to face, until the moment when he stumbles on a decisive question: in the name of what will he speak?

At the time when the action unfolds, all the peoples of the earth had gods in great quantity — hundreds of them for the Egyptians or for the Assyrians, all possessing a name and riches sometimes superior to those of sovereigns, like Amun of Thebes. Moses wonders what he will have to answer the people assembled before him if, as is almost certain, they want to know in the name of which divinity he is addressing them. “Behold, I will go to the children of Israel, and I will say to them: the Elohim of your fathers sends me to you… If they say to me: What is his name? what shall I say to them?”⁴ In one of the most vertiginous passages of universal literature, in a form of dialogue with the Elohim of Israel, YHWH, in the manner of a Plato or, much later, of a Diderot, Moses hears the answer at verse 14: “Elohim said to Moses: I shall be what I shall be. And he added: ‘Thus shall you speak to the children of Israel: I shall be has sent me to you.’”⁵

This is a major qualitative leap. If one puts oneself for a moment in the place of those who heard this apostrophe for the first time, how can one not imagine their skepticism, or their stupefaction? Here is a man who claims to guide an entire people and who lays claim to… “I shall be.” This is not a name, nor any representable divinity to which one might sacrifice, but a verb conjugated in the future. Moses had to lay claim to I shall be, to speak in the name of I shall be, to propose a goal by means of I shall be. Tacitus, a card-carrying antisemite long before that adjective had been invented, was not wrong to think — as he writes in the Histories — that Moses ended by persuading the Hebrews that they could count neither on the gods nor on men, but solely on themselves. That is indeed the message of the text: “I shall be” constitutes the source of all action and enjoins those who hold to this hope never to halt along the way.

Becoming a stranger

One need not have studied the Torah to interiorize a teaching that has been transmitted for centuries and that finds, in each Jew, an echo more or less avowed. The greatest books are those that influence you even if you have not read them. There is, in this “I shall be,” a kind of injunction: seek, be in movement, explore your humanity, advance on the path of your inmost being, accept yourself as undefinable — that alone will make of you a Jew in all his strength. And do not complain of the difficulty of such an undertaking; this is called a destiny. Stand face to face with yourself, and you shall be. Which led an Edmond Jabès to consider that “identity is perhaps a lure. We are what we become.”⁶

By its very name, the Jew thus carries within him the idea of a becoming. He cannot be, once and for all. Within him lies the yet-to-come. He is not necessarily conscious of it, but he is traversed by it. The Jewishness of the Jew is this strangeness to himself, which forbids him to define himself in the present, even as he cannot cease reflecting on who he is. Which drives him to question himself about this gap with himself, a gap he will never be able to bridge. Nothing was more Jewish in Kafka than this reflection set down in his Diary, in January 1914: “What have I in common with the Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself.” A kind of strangeness all the more evident in that every effort to penetrate it reinforces it by raising it up before oneself. As Montaigne expressed it: “I have seen no monster or miracle in the world more express than myself: one grows tame to any strangeness through use and time; but the more I frequent and know myself, the more my deformity astonishes me, and the less I understand myself.”⁷

He who wishes to know himself, anxious to answer the injunction of Socrates — to which Freud has furnished technical means — soon confronts the impossibility of succeeding. The stranger that he is to himself, whom he would dearly like to tame, others remind him, one day or another, that he is one to them as well. Which is no doubt why the Bible underscores how much the stranger, whoever he may be, deserves consideration and respect: “He shall be to you as one of your countrymen, the stranger who sojourns with you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God,” prescribes Leviticus (19:34), while Numbers (15:16) recalls “an absolute rule for your generations: you and the stranger, you shall be equal before YHWH.” Deuteronomy (10:19) returns to the charge, in a manner more imperative still: “You shall love the stranger, you who were strangers in the land of Egypt.” These repetitions are not fortuitous. The biblical injunction implies that this is not a natural tendency in everyone, and that it is therefore necessary to insist on it with force. Faced with a stranger, the Jew must remember that this is another self, a mirror held up before him in which his own history and his own interiority may be read. So that the Jew — at once a stranger to himself and, for that very reason, of an irreducible otherness to others — is in a certain way “the stranger of the stranger.”⁸

Yes, but why? Why this double strangeness in the Jew? The answer must be sought in the particular nature of the Elohim of Israel, YHWH. It is astonishing that everyone, or nearly everyone, should absolutely insist on deciphering the tetragrammaton. André Chouraqui noted that all the languages and all the dialects that exist on the surface of the Earth translate it, even though this quartet, which does not let itself be named, can obviously have no translation. A simple observation attests to this. There exist fourteen or fifteen vowels in Hebrew — the short, the long and the composite. The number of combinations between the four consonants of the tetragrammaton (the yod, y, is one) and the vowels is therefore between 144 and 154, that is, between 38,416 and 50,625 possibilities. Yahweh, for example, is only one of them, as are ayhuwih, or yohwiah, or yuhewiha, and so on. Yet the attempts to determine what the true pronunciation of the tetragrammaton might have been are beyond counting — as are the errors accumulated over time about this name that always remains hidden, which makes it akin to a non-name. As far as YHWH is concerned, any appellation is pure betrayal.

This impossibility of naming the essential thus places the Jews in a particular situation. At the very heart of their being-Jewish lies an unsayable. Within themselves there lodges a strangeness that renders them other to themselves. They thus find themselves forever in search of what they might be, forever in becoming, in echo to “I shall be.” And in this endless quest, what each Jew encounters is that which, within him, can only be other.