Why a text — or rather two — on antisemitism in a dossier of our review devoted to “the Jews and the Other”? Is antisemitism not precisely the opposite of this theme? Something one might define as “the Others and the Jew”? In what way is antisemitism — an inescapable dimension of Jewish existence — constitutive of Jewish identity? And in what way is it a trap, and perhaps a challenge?
Sartre’s Jew, a product of antisemitism
In 1946, when Jean-Paul Sartre’s book Réflexions sur la question juive (Anti-Semite and Jew) appeared, many felt a profound relief, recognizing in the philosopher’s approach a salutary courage and audacity amid the silence of the postwar years. This book-as-break-in dared to brandish the Jewish name at the very moment when pain and shame had taken turns to silence it.
In it, Jean-Paul Sartre painted a pertinent and masterly portrait of the antisemite, that being in deficit of subject and of ethics, “the man who wants to be pitiless rock, furious torrent, devastating thunderbolt: anything but a man.” Jean-Paul Sartre perceived antisemitism at once as a passion, a worldview, and ultimately a hatred of the human condition.
But Sartre also wrote that “the Jew is a man whom other men hold to be a Jew.” Perhaps by this sentence he wished to protect the surviving Jews, refusing — along with antisemitism — a wounded and vulnerable Jewish identity that he could conceive of only as the mirror of oppression. And yet, through his words and beneath his pen, it seemed that this Jew, barely wrenched from nothingness, vanished once again beneath the antisemitic question.
It would take decades, and the strength one acquires when danger seems to recede, before one could at last lay claim to a positive Jewish identity. The Jewish name, present in the title and yet barely sketched, even missed, by Sartre, would paradoxically allow many of his readers, years later, to take hold of it anew. Thus Emmanuel Levinas, Claude Lanzmann, Maurice Blanchot and Frantz Fanon would set about thinking, then claiming for themselves — beyond the gaze of the antisemite or the gaze of the colonizer — the place of “subject.”
Being Jewish, a positivity
In 1962, in his “Être juif” (“Being Jewish”), Maurice Blanchot clearly reproaches Sartre for having made the Jew “the product of the other’s gaze,” “a negative of antisemitism.” By reducing Jewish being to a historical or sociological category, one misses its metaphysical dimension, its positivity — or, as his friend Emmanuel Levinas wrote, “the place it occupies” in the economy of being.
For these authors, the task would henceforth be to seize the missing subject by contesting the Sartrean reduction. No, antisemitism does not make the Jew; the Jew exists through his history, his thought, his perseverance, outside of, in spite of, but perhaps also against antisemitism. And this existence is precious to others as well. Beneath Maurice Blanchot’s pen, the Jew has nothing negative about him; on the contrary, he is the bearer of a “nomadic,” universal “truth.” To the question, “What does it mean to be Jewish? Why does this exist?”, he answers: “It exists so that the idea of exodus and the idea of exile may exist as a just movement; it exists, through exile and through that initiative which is the exodus, so that the experience of strangeness may assert itself among us in an irreducible relation; it exists so that, by the authority of this experience, we may learn to speak.”[^1]
In a parallel undertaking, Frantz Fanon had written, in 1952, Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), making of racism not the identity of the Black man, but his alienation. This thought of dis-alienation would run like a guiding, liberating thread from oppression to emancipation, toward a plural identity in the making. The task would be to claim a way of being a subject in the world that, by detaching itself from the gaze and the identitarian assignment of the oppressor, the antisemite and the colonizer, can at last make room for oneself and for the other.
Antisemitism seems to have almost always accompanied and rendered precarious the existence of the Jews. Even before the birth of Christianity, the hostility of the Others toward the Jews is regularly addressed in rabbinic literature, all the way to the biblical text itself. In the reading of the Haggadah (the account of the departure from Egypt) that Jews recite on the eve of Passover, there appears this striking sentence: “It is Providence that assisted our ancestors and that has assisted us, for it is not a single enemy that has sought to exterminate us; in every generation they seek to annihilate us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, preserves us from their hands.”
It is surely not insignificant that this reference to the hostility of the nations should be present and inscribed in the Passover ritual that celebrates the exodus and liberation. The origin of the word Egypt, “mitzraïm” in Hebrew, has been the object of many commentaries, for its root (tzr) is also the one that denotes narrowness, suffocation, confinement, anguish. Mitzraïm, “Egypt,” would then be less a territory than that fear which inhabits us, that slavery, that inner prison from which we must, in one and the same departure, free ourselves…
“The whole world is a very narrow bridge; the essential thing is to have no fear at all.” This maxim of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav has become a song that is taken up at every wedding, birth, bar mitzvah… In a few words it has managed to describe not only the Jewish condition, but perhaps the human condition as well.
How does one stay alive despite fear, despite hatred? How were the Jews able to traverse so many centuries of hostility, serving an apprenticeship in an almost permanent, irreducible alterity, subject to the whims of the powerful, to arbitrariness, to the possibility of murderous popular outbursts? Faced with the splendor of mosques and cathedrals, deprived of the sense of security that comes from truly belonging to a country, to a majority, how, and by what means, did the Jews hold on? By what mad obstinacy did they maintain, against all odds, customs and rituals such as circumcision, which generation after generation delivered up their own children to the possibility of murder? What was this secret treasure, fragile and indestructible, that no conversion could have equaled…?
Faith — or rather trust in divine election — could not, on its own, contradict the many massacres, the tens of thousands of pyres of the Inquisition which, long before Auschwitz and the terrible pogroms of Eastern Europe, were to confirm the unbearable lightness of His Providence. In spite of this, Judaism remained a kind of fidelity and pride. Pride of fidelity, fidelity to that pride.
This impregnable freedom is described thus by Abraham Heschel: “These were men who knew that the Jews are in exile and that the world is not yet redeemed. On the outside, the Jew might be a beggar, but within himself he felt a prince, an intimate of the King of Kings… a free man.” (Les Bâtisseurs de temps, The Sabbath)
But exile and the diaspora were also the site of massacre. The extermination of the Jews throughout the world, in the complicity or the silence of the nations, the almost realized possibility of total destruction — these may have returned the Jews to another temporality.
“The revelation of Sinai lost its validity with the accomplishment of Auschwitz,” writes Imre Kertész. Many survivors, such as Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Imre Kertész, questioned the silence of God, even His absence. But if faith in humanity had claimed to replace the divine to good advantage, it too shattered against the gateway of Auschwitz. Robert Antelme and Jean Améry interrogated this eclipse of humanity still more painfully. Despite the light of the Righteous, could one still believe in Man?
Staying alive
The Jews had been active on the front of emancipation, many of them committing themselves to the service of the “Others.” But very few of the “others” came to their aid… One could have understood it if, after the war, the Jews had ceased to believe in humanity… One could have conceived of an inexorable drying-up of that wellspring of commitment which is the hope for a human concord freed from ostracisms, racisms and oppression.
Nothing of the sort happened. And it is a wholly different story that would unfold. In the aftermath of the Shoah, and in the pain of their wounded existences, the Jews undertook a work of return to life. Hatred and vengeance could have no part in it.
In 1965, Manès Sperber writes: “We are in solidarity with the martyrs, but without rancor against the peoples whose victims they were. In spite of everything, it is the eschatological optimism of the prophets, their dream of a universal reconciliation, that determined this wise attitude. It alone allowed the Jewish people to survive without being devoured by the hatred that the persecutions ought to have provoked in it.” (Être Juif, Being Jewish)
A form of resurrection makes itself manifest in every domain: intellectual, scientific, artistic, but also political. What tradition calls Tikkun olam, the repair of the world’s fractures, then appears as a necessity more urgent than ever. The philosophers and thinkers of the École d’Orsay set out from Jewish misfortune in order to think the world. Their claimed Judaism is also a call, a dialogue imposed upon the Others.
For Emmanuel Levinas, any attempt to avoid the “face of the other,” to escape his singularity as much as the unity of the human race, is a preparation for murder. Jewish philosophy means to be response and summons. Emmanuel Levinas writes: “The trauma of slavery in the land of Egypt, with which the Bible and the liturgy of Judaism are marked, would belong to the very humanity of the Jew, and of the Jew in every man, who, slavery freed, would be very close to the proletarian, to the stranger and to the persecuted. Does not Scripture, which ceaselessly recalls this founding fact, or this myth, go so far as to make the inconvertible demand for justice the equivalent of the spirituality of the Spirit and of the proximity of God?”
After the war, many Jews throughout the world would commit themselves to international solidarity alongside the colonized peoples and the oppressed groups. From the struggle for civil rights in the United States to feminism, to the labor movement, all the way to the fight against apartheid in South Africa, Jewish commitment seems heightened by the memory of the catastrophe. As if the Jews, having lived through the world’s abandonment, could not in their turn perpetuate that abandonment. No more saying that one did not know…
The memory of Auschwitz seemed to redouble the biblical injunction so often repeated in the Torah: “You shall not oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
For a long time, this anxious vigilance in the face of injustice and the world’s misfortunes was constitutive of Jewish identity, like a refutation of Nazi annihilation. This Jewish humanism was indeed a response and a victory of Judaism after Auschwitz.
Before the war, but also after it, and whatever their political, philosophical, artistic and literary sensibilities, the Jews could for a long time lay claim to a number of prestigious names: from Kafka to Rosa Luxemburg, from Trotsky to Emma Goldman, from Clara Zetkin to Abraham Heschel, but also from Hannah Arendt to Raymond Aron, Romain Gary, Léon Blum, Mendès France, Jean Zay, Simone Veil… The “Jewish name,” to paraphrase Maxim Gorky, had a proud ring to it…
The place of the other
What has become today of this pride, but also — for the two seem linked — what has become of this place of the Other? Before any melancholy, it must surely be recalled that an unprecedented unleashing of anti-Jewish speech took place in the early 2000s, and that twelve Jews — men, women and children aged from 3 to 87 — were murdered in our country. Despite some questionable stances, the Jewish institutions long showed dignity. The Jewish community, sorely tried and disoriented, has not yet produced any murderers…
It was perhaps inevitable that these years of Jewish solitude should end up weakening the millennial hope for a “repair of the world.” The return of antisemitism, even after the Shoah, appeared to many of us as the “return too far.” As if, in our wounded souls, definitively undermined by the Catastrophe, the twelve murdered Jews came to be joined to the six million near-anonymous ones, giving them a face, a name, an unbearable echo… The imaginary tied to the Shoah, so powerful, was at times invoked lightly. Thus, at the time of the murder of Mireille Knoll in April 2018, much was made of the particularly cruel fate of this old lady, “a survivor of the Vel d’Hiv roundup and of the Shoah.” The young Mireille was no longer in France in July 1942, but, like all the Jews of her generation, she owed her survival to chance and to destiny — a destiny that should not have caught up with her seventy-six years later…
How can one remain positively Jewish when antisemitism once again bears down on us with its threat, become existential since the Catastrophe? For by the measure of the Shoah, the misfortune of others carries little weight, when it is not simply inaudible… How is one to find the strength to denounce the policy of Israel — now a possible refuge, whose disappearance, as Hannah Arendt already wrote, would “affect us more deeply than anything else”?
Faced with this challenge once again thrown down, grief and anger contend for our consciences. For if many Jews are still individually committed on the front of solidarity, their voices sometimes seem dissident, smothered beneath a wholly different music. A sad identitarian music far removed from the old melopoeias. Today, the denunciation of antisemitism seems henceforth, for the most part, propped up by an unconditional defense of Israel — including of its unjust policy — by a reactionary discourse of fear and withdrawal, a discourse in which emancipation is the enemy, in which every collective value is mocked.
In July 2014, the Israeli writer David Grossman, who had lost his son in the previous war, nonetheless warned us: “How has it come about that hope has turned into a coarse word, a criminal one, scarcely less dangerous than the word ‘peace’?” In Israel, and in France too, sarcasm toward the “droits-de-l’hommiste” (the “human-rightsist,” a term popularized by Le Pen), contempt for democracy regarded as a “Greek invention,” now hold forth all too often in colloquia and salons.
All too often as well, on social media and in certain “community” newspapers, the thought and the obsessions of the far right are relayed — its eternal hatred of foreigners, of Islam, and so on.
And yet, when thousands of exiles drown in the Mediterranean, when the world closes itself off to a portion of humankind, when, in Trump’s America and elsewhere, families are separated at the borders, is it not also the whole of Jewish history that is once again summoned?
To enlist not only the Jewish name, but also Jewish grief, in an identitarian and nationalist crusade in the service of the West is a villainous enterprise that shames History, the heart and the intelligence.
For with the forgetting of having been “strangers in the land of Egypt,” the forgetting of exile and of distrust toward any coincidence between self and self, the forgetting of the repair of the world, it is also a part of Jewish pride that seems to falter — that part of joy alone capable of ensuring transmission.
Of course, this withdrawal does not concern only the Jews. For want of a common horizon of collective emancipation, every-man-for-himself seems to triumph everywhere. To make room for the Other — is that not, then, to risk losing one’s own?
In a world where the competition of misfortunes, of memories and of communities seems to follow the same path as marketing products, the Jews do not escape the rule. Henceforth, in Israel and in the Jewish world, a consciousness once clandestine — long silenced by reticence and optimism — finds ever clearer expression: that of having “given” enough, of having been, all too often in History, the sacrificed, the abandoned, the betrayed of every cause, of every resistance. Alas, though historical arguments are not lacking, this victimary credo of rupture nonetheless echoes other identitarian discourses, whether held by minorities or by majorities unaware of themselves… A “never again that” for oneself, more than for humanity as a whole.
Whether borne and propagated by Soral and Dieudonné, by the far right, by the Islamists and all their useful idiots, antisemitism, alas, is nothing new — and it is precisely in this that it is frightening. One may, not without interest, seek out different sources for it, particular cultural variants. What dominates, however, is the idea of a global conspiracy aiming to control the world, a plot that goes by the names Israel, Rothschild, BHL, Soros.
This conspiracism, which has done more harm than the verses of the Qur’an, is doing well in our hexagon and elsewhere. We find it among young people in our housing estates, but also in medical schools, in the Gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests) demonstrations, the Manif pour tous, and in all the national-populist affects that, more or less everywhere on the planet, are raising their heads.
Antisemitism, a truth of the Jews?
Antisemitism was, for a long time, conceived by the Jews as the personal illustration of a deeper evil, of a vaster human misfortune, of an injustice that had to be fought. The hatred vowed against them was that dark matter from which one had to extricate oneself in order to stay alive. In the face of antisemitic negation, many Jewish thinkers responded with a Hineni (here I am), which in Hebrew denotes one’s presence, one’s availability to take up one’s share of responsibility — that is to say, again and always, the share of the Other with oneself.
The hatred of antisemites is not the truth of the Jews, any more than racism is the truth of those who suffer it. Consenting to antisemitism as an identitarian determination strongly resembles the “reversal of the stigma” so dear to decolonial thought… It then becomes a matter of considering all our identities in the mirror of the hatred suffered, claiming for oneself the identitarian assignment. And this identitarian and victimary thought is paradoxically taken up by white supremacism, which likewise deems itself a besieged minority, threatened with disappearance by the Great Replacement, in a situation of legitimate self-defense…
In Être juif (Being Jewish), Benny Lévy enjoins Jews to pass from “curse to blessing.” But must not this claimed pride also point the way out of the identitarian assignment one has suffered? Can it be anything other than an exodus from Egypt, for the Jews and for the Others? Such is perhaps the meaning of the “way of Man” that Martin Buber, faithful to Hasidic doctrine, advocated: “To begin with oneself, but not to end with oneself; to take oneself as the point of departure, but not as the goal.” (Les Chemins de l’homme, The Way of Man)
Several centuries before him, the sage Hillel summed it up thus: “If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”
Antisemitism has as its end the destruction of the Jews, of their bodies, of their souls. To fight it is to stay alive in the face of the call of hatred and destruction. In the face, too, of the forgetting of the Other.
What is a Jew who has renounced the repair of the world, a Jew who no longer believes in social justice, a Jew who has forgotten that he was a stranger in the land of Egypt? And that terrible oxymoron: a chauvinist and nationalist Jew? Is not this Jew, lost to himself, finally that Jew of Sartre’s — barely sketched and already doomed to vanish?
If this Jew of “retort” rather than “response” were henceforth to triumph, it would constitute an unprecedented defeat of Judaism. A defeat that centuries of hatred and pogroms, up to the great catastrophe, had nonetheless not managed to bring about. To consent to antisemitism as the foundation of Jewish identity constitutes the foreclosure of the meaning and the positivity of Jewish being.
For antisemitism is indeed also the hatred of the human condition, the hatred of the Other, of every other. As Levinas wrote so powerfully: “To the memory of those closest among the six million murdered by the National Socialists, alongside the millions upon millions of human beings of every faith and every nation, victims of the same hatred of the other man, of the same antisemitism.”
NOTES: [^1]: Maurice Blanchot, “Être juif,” in L’Entretien infini, Paris, Gallimard, 1969, p. 182.