We are in Vienna in 1915. Elias Canetti is ten years old; he is coming home from school with his friend Schiebl, the son of an Austrian general. He remembers:
“One day, in the Schüttel district, we passed near the railway bridge that spans the Danube canal. A train packed with people had stopped on it. Freight cars alternated with passenger cars; all were full of people standing, pressed against one another, looking down at us from up there, silent, on the alert. ‘They’re Galicians,’ said Schiebl. And after a moment’s reflection spent avoiding the word ‘Jew’: ‘Galician refugees’ (…). With their black caftans, their sidelocks at the temples and their strange hats, one could easily pick them out in the crowd (…). Out of consideration for me, he tried not to give in to the repulsion these people inspired in him (…). I stood there, as if rooted to the spot; and he, he remained planted beside me, conscious of my dismay.”[^1]
Three types of alterity are at play in this emblematic scene of encounter: the alterity of the “Galician refugees” for Schiebl, that of Canetti for him, and that of the Jews with caftans, sidelocks and strange hats for Canetti.
Having until then lived his relationship with his friend under the sign of similitude, Canetti realizes that the latter does not consider him exactly his equal; at the same time, these other Jews are at once foreign to him, but in a different way than an Englishman, an Italian or a Japanese man would be, for their encounter reawakens an unbearable feeling of proximity with an alterity that he discovers as much as he rejects it. A little later, young Elias tells his mother that, while coming home from school with his classmate Kornfeld, they had been hailed by a boy who shouted at him: “Filthy kike!” Mathilde Canetti then indicates to her son that “this was directed at Kornfeld and not at you,” because, she went on, “being Spanish Sephardim, we were worth more than the others.”[^2] She does not, however, urge Elias to dissociate himself from Kornfeld, but suggests that he adopt a chivalrous attitude by accompanying him everywhere in order to protect him.
Those whom Schiebl carefully calls “Galician refugees” — the first type of alterity in the scene — are truly strangers to this son of an Austrian general. But whence comes the discomfort he feels at uttering the word “Jew” in the presence of his friend Elias, whom he tacitly knows to be one as well? It can be illuminated with the help of Norbert Elias’s theory of relations between established and outsider groups, which he developed in an essay written on the basis of the inquiry conducted by John Scotson at the end of the 1950s in Winston Parva. In this suburb of a large industrial city in the Midlands of England, the inhabitants of the “village” or old quarter, descended from families settled there before the arrival of the inhabitants of the other quarter — a more recent housing estate, built for the occasion — still considered the latter, though they too were workers and English, as intruders, outsiders, people from elsewhere, endowed with all manner of negative characteristics. Although most of the estate’s inhabitants were natives of it, the origin of their families — workers who had lost everything in the bombings of London in 1940 and had come to work in a factory producing for the armed forces — still weighed in the representations and practices of the old families. N. Elias himself says that it was his experience as a Jew in Germany that inspired the theory by which he would account for this phenomenon, and Schiebl’s discomfort testifies to the fact that, despite cultural assimilation and therefore a certain similitude between Jews and Austrians, an alterity of the Jews persists — inherited, according to N. Elias, from their marginality in the societies of the Christian states, already shot through with divisions between established groups and marginal groups, excluded and stigmatized. This is why “the mere term Jew had contemptuous and insulting overtones, rather like the word nigger in English.”[^3]
The dread felt by the brilliant young pupil that Canetti was — passionate, under his mother’s influence, about German and world literature — nevertheless reveals an insider/outsider division at work among the Jews themselves. Canetti’s mother expresses it when, in order to reassure him, she designates his Jewish classmate — Polish perhaps, Ashkenazi for sure — as the sole target of antisemitism. Yet, although the scene takes place in Vienna, the “group charisma” that emerges from what she says — that is to say, according to Norbert Elias, the belief in the virtue and the infused grace of one’s own group, whose counterpart is always “the disgrace one ascribes to others”[^4] — is not the one that German and Austrian Jews were accustomed to attributing to themselves when they compared themselves to those they called the Ostjuden. It refers back to an established/outsider relationship that divides the Sephardim of Bulgaria themselves between those who consider themselves to be of direct Spanish descent and those who took a detour through Turkey. In the same period one finds the same kind of division between the French Israélites and the Polish or Romanian Jewish immigrants, but also in the France of the 1960s between the Ashkenazi Jews and the Jews of North Africa — in my maternal family, originally from Bucharest, which prided itself on speaking German and not that Yiddish whose accent could be heard in my paternal grandmother; a division also expressed by that Sephardi from Egypt whom my maternal great-aunt had married despite the family prejudices about the Schwarze, when he would evoke his own Egyptian origin by beginning his sentences with: “We, distinguished foreigners.” The insider/outsider relationship that so often establishes itself among the others that the Jews are for non-Jews presents numerous points in common with the representations and attitudes observed by N. Elias at Winston Parva, in particular the importance taken on by the ways of behaving, the manners, of the outsiders. But when one is Jewish, the self-representation as an established group is far more fragile and, moreover, the frontier between insider and outsider does not preclude the feeling of a responsibility of the former toward the latter, the implementation of a solidarity — which is what Mathilde Canetti ends up, in spite of everything, transmitting to her son. Historically, it could take a philanthropic form, which was criticized by generations of young Jews who did not recognize themselves in the assimilated milieus that had seen them born, these young people developing an inverse movement of idealization of the outsiders, considered to be the substantial Jews that their parents no longer were. Not only does the established/outsider relationship decline differently when insiders and outsiders are Jewish, but it is also different according to the place or the era in which one observes it, the same people being able to find themselves insiders or outsiders depending on the contexts. It is probable that this relationship was radically transformed after the Shoah and the creation of the State of Israel.
I - Self-control and the disgrace one ascribes to others
One of the principal themes of the gossip that circulated in the old quarter of Winston Parva concerning the inhabitants of the new one had to do with their supposed dirtiness as well as their way of behaving: they did not carry themselves well. Preference goes to the anecdotes whose heroes lead a dignified and respectable life and conform to the implicit rules of good conduct, all the while corroborating in their remarks the disparaging clichés about the others.[^5]
If, in a group that represents itself as more virtuous, the question of the others’ loose way of life is such a preponderant theme, it is because the ethos of the latter revives the inner constraint necessary for the control of one’s own affects and the injunction to conformism demanded by submission to the norms of the established group. According to N. Elias’s forceful expression, one must “close ranks,” and for this avoid all close contact with the members of the other group.[^6] This submission is the counterpart of the pride and the narcissistic gratification that membership in the group of the established procures for each person, permanently reinforced by the support of its public opinion. Hence the courage it takes to rid oneself of shared prejudices, and the opprobrium that must be borne by whoever departs — sometimes without having sought to — from the common norms.[^7]
The inquiry into the inhabitants of the new quarter of Winston Parva shows that they tend to internalize the negative prejudices that weigh upon them. Yet, when he evokes the established/outsider relationship that alterized the Jews in Germany, N. Elias notes that, in his experience, the majority of them did not at all have a devalued image of themselves. To be sure, they suffered from their marginalization as well as from the insults and accusations aimed at them, but “these did not reach the substance of the feeling one had of one’s own worth.” Not without reason, N. Elias attributes this resistance to the long tradition of the Jews as the “people of the book, who accord a particularly high value to intellectual work.”[^8]
One can, however, take his analysis further by showing that this feeling also owed something to a disgrace they ascribed to other Jews, the counterpart of this comparative self-valorization being also a demand for self-control.
As Steven Aschheim shows, while the expression Ostjuden spread at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the stereotype it conveyed dated from the eighteenth and was the corollary of the diffusion of the Enlightenment and of the ideal of Bildung among the Jews, an ideal that joined the requirement of behaving in a certain way to an access to knowledge, to literature and to the arts. This ideal spread at the same time as a process of embourgeoisement and modernization that was carried out, from the outset, by contrast with other manners attributed to the figure of the “ghetto Jew,” which designated, for example, the inhabitants of the Jewish quarter of Frankfurt, those who lived on the borders of Prussia or in the Pale of Settlement in Russia. These Jews were reputed to be ignorant, “noisy, coarse and dirty,”[^9] their religiosity appeared niggling and superstitious, and the language they spoke produced a disagreeable impression of jargon, which Mendelssohn himself deplored as a factor of immorality. To be modern was to have traded the caftan for the necktie, to speak — obviously — German, but neither too loudly nor with one’s hands, to have a sense of beauty, to be salonfähig, presentable in polite society — in short, to be no longer either visible or audible as a Jew; which, it must be specified, did not mean abandoning Judaism, but reforming it. It was indeed a matter of self-control, of the internalization of new norms of behavior meant to repress the old ones.[^10]
Between the Jews on the path to assimilation and their others, it was not at first a matter of an established/outsider relationship, properly speaking, for they were still very close to those “ghetto Jews” in whose milieu a great many of them had still been born (Mendelssohn, for example), but from which they were precisely in the process of extracting themselves. So the others represented for them a past to be surpassed, and they proposed to work toward the others’ education — the particularity of the assimilation movement in Germany having been to value culture, as emerges from N. Elias’s own testimony.
An established/outsider relationship — in which seniority of place counted for something — only set in from the 1880s onward, when very many Jews, driven out by destitution and the terrible pogroms raging in Russia, came to take refuge in Germany and to populate entire quarters of Berlin (the Scheunenviertel) and Vienna (the Leopoldstadt). For their part, the German Jews now had the impression that the ghetto was far behind them and that they were durably settled, integrated and Germanized, to the point of distinguishing themselves from the Germans only by a religion whose rites the reformers had brought closer to Protestant services. Henceforth, the encounter between the latter and the Jews come from the East — now called Ostjuden — revealed the cultural chasm that had opened up between them. While they reactivated the stereotype of the ghetto Jew, the new arrivals were now perceived as foreigners rather than as brothers. S. Aschheim cites a text by Jakob Wassermann describing what he felt on contact with Polish or Galician Jews: a certain sympathy made of emotion, amusement, pity or sadness, but no kinship (they are neither brothers nor relatives); they are foreign to him through and through, when they do not disgust him.[^11]
However, the very fact that Wassermann describes his feelings in the mode of denial (I feel neither fraternity nor kinship) clearly indicates that these strangers concern him in a specific way that endangers his established position and reveals the fragility of that settledness, in an era of rising antisemitism quick to suspect the salonfähig Jew of concealing the caftaned Jew that he would fundamentally have remained.
To read Canetti, the antisemitism he discovers in Vienna was almost nonexistent in the multi-ethnic Ruse of his childhood, where, alongside the Jews, there lived Bulgarians, Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Albanians and Roma. Each population had its own language — including Judeo-Spanish for the Jews — but the atmosphere hummed with the echo of the other languages. One spoke several oneself, and this multilingualism was the source of a somewhat contemptuous pride toward those who, like the Bulgarian peasants, spoke only one. When he evokes the milieu of well-off merchants from which he comes, Canetti remembers their “Spanish mentality” that made them look at the other Jews “from above, with a feeling of naive superiority.” “A word invariably charged with contempt,” he adds, “was the word ‘Tudesco,’ designating a German Jew or an Ashkenazi,” and on account of this prejudice “it would have been unthinkable to marry a ‘Tudesca.’”
Yet what Canetti calls a “caste pride” also divided the Sephardic families, despite their common Spanish origin and material ease. The alterization was organized around a criterion of seniority declined in a way very different from the one that stigmatized the Ostjuden in the Germanic sphere. Canetti identifies it from a set phrase he heard hundreds of times: “Es de buena familia, he is of good family” — by which was meant that this family was “rich for a long time.”[^12] Extrapolating from what Canetti himself writes, one may suppose that not to be so was to be “nouveau riche,” the most commonly made reproach against the “parvenus” being their flashiness, the display of their wealth, which shocks the chic discretion of the first ones. What Canetti recounts, on the other hand, of the hostility that reigned between his grandfather Arditti and his paternal grandfather adds another criterion of differentiation, so salient that grandfather Arditti regarded the marriage of his daughter Mathilde to Paul Canetti as a veritable misalliance. An orphan who had become a prosperous merchant thanks to his personal qualities, grandfather Canetti is not only a parvenu but, although a Sephardi himself, was born in Adrianople in Turkey.
An oriental atmosphere emanates from the memory of the Canetti house in Ruse: there are divans, one smokes the narghile and consumes coffee, the orientality being embodied above all by grandmother Laura Canetti, whose description — which calls to mind a harem woman — concentrates all the stereotypes of laziness and immobility generally attributed to the Orient. For its part, the buena familia attaches great importance to its passage through Livorno after Spain. To valorize oneself, one seeks a justification in the past, pinning down a difference within the common origin itself. The Canettis no doubt came from Spain like the Ardittis, but their settling in Turkey would have orientalized them, in some sense effacing the glorious Iberian character that the passage through Italy would have preserved, when it did not add new titles of glory to it. Grandfather Canetti, however, makes this stereotype tremble: “He had all the air of an Oriental and yet he was always in motion.”[^13] Endowed with a piercing gaze and an unfailing dynamism, his grandson describes him as a great seducer capable of capturing the attention of others through his voice, his gift of the gab, his boastfulness, his exuberance, his overflowing sentimentality and his talents as a storyteller. Canetti specifies that he was a respected figure in Ruse, and it is probable that the multi-ethnic character of Bulgaria neutralized the requirement to conform one’s behavior uniformly to a Western model. However, the excessive side of this “master sorcerer”[^14] is jarring when he comes to visit Mathilde and her sons in Vienna; he shames the young boy when he swaggers, claiming to “speak to each person in his own language,” which he pronounces strangely and in which he commits an impressive number of mistakes. Or again, faced with a coarse gesture his grandfather makes toward a waitress in Zürich, the young man points out to him that this was not Vienna here, but Switzerland.[^15] In a country where one must behave properly, the visibility and the overflowing exuberance of grandfather Canetti come to underscore the inner constraint demanded by the desire for assimilation. There is no doubt, however, that Canetti prefers this colorful character to grandfather Arditti, who manifests caste pride to the highest degree, whereas grandfather Canetti “was rich, but not at all proud.”[^16]
One recognizes many aspects of the established/outsider relationship in Nadine Vasseur’s description of the relations between the Ashkenazi Jews of the Sentier and the Sephardic Jews come from North Africa to France in the 1960s. Although the settling of the former is relatively recent — it dates from the interwar period or the immediate postwar years — the criterion of seniority (we were here first) plays a part in their relation to the others, but it is less determined by the number of years or centuries of presence than by the fact that the Ashkenazim “are no longer struggling and have had the time to grow bourgeois.”[^17] The intruder here is closer to the figure of the Ruse parvenu than to the Berlin Ostjude, but like all intruders he bothers the established by his manners, by his way of behaving, thus reviving the sufferings due to their own demand for self-control. Thinking of their way of doing business, one of the merchants of Tunisian origin acknowledges it: “the Ashkenazi Jews (…) could not bear our ways of doing things.”[^18] This intolerance goes well beyond commercial practices alone, and N. Vasseur, somewhat in the manner of the Winston Parva investigator, makes us understand how a stereotype is constructed from the circulation of anecdotes that corroborate it — in this case, the luxury of such-and-such a wedding or such-and-such an extravagant bar mitzvah, the Rolexes, the Ferraris and the Porsches — while remarking that, like any stereotype, it neglects the heterogeneous character of those it claims to lump together. The common component of all these anecdotes is their insistence on the Sephardim’s way of drawing attention to themselves: they “make themselves noticed,” they are not simply visible to the gaze of others, they do their part to be seen — whereas “‘Not making oneself noticed’ (is) a veritable leitmotiv” among the Ashkenazim.[^19]
As in the other insider/outsider relationships, the Ashkenazim happen to valorize their own group morally by emphasizing — since we are in a quarter of commerce — their propriety, their seriousness, their sense of thrift, even their honesty in business, by contrast with what, openly or by allusion, they designate as the others’ trickery. But unlike at Winston Parva, this type of judgment is uttered with caution, almost in a low voice: when it comes to broaching the question of the “not very recommendable,” even scandalous, “practices” of certain Sentier merchants, it is the old precept of “washing one’s dirty linen within the family”[^20] that holds them back from dwelling on it too much. What weighs here is a sustained feeling of the precariousness of a settledness that some are always ready to contest; it is the principal reason why one must avoid drawing attention to oneself. To be sure, one of the Sentier elders wonders whether they are not in the process of being ashamed of the Sephardim as the French Jews were ashamed of them in the thirties, but their demand for self-control has directly to do with the very recent experience of a murderous antisemitism. Which does not prevent certain survivors from using it internally, one might say, to justify the supposedly higher morality of their own group’s behavior, insinuating that if the others are as they are, it is because they knew neither the pogroms nor the camps.
II - From an obstinate sense of solidarity to the idealization of authentic Jews
In all the rather disparate cases I have just evoked, the established feel threatened in their integration by a kind of naive self-affirmation of the new arrivals — a stereotyped caricature never being entirely without relation to the reality of behaviors. We have seen that, in order to ward off the threat these pose to an integration that the established pay for with a severe self-control, the insiders develop a group charisma (“we”) founded on the disgrace they ascribe to the others (“them”).
For N. Elias, these representations — which engage the way in which an individual’s collective identity intimately forms part of his personal identity — correspond to a specific relation of power. The power of the established is not a direct power over the marginal, but a power to dispose of resources that are de facto inaccessible to them. At Winston Parva it is exercised as a control of public affairs by the old families, who monopolize the positions of responsibility in local associative life (clubs, town council, parish, brass band, charity committee, etc.). Presupposing relations of mutual acquaintance inherited from a common past, it reinforces the cohesion of their group. The new ones, having no common past on the spot, have a more anomic social structure, which renders them powerless to counter the power of the old and to keep them in exclusion.
I evoked above the way in which the established strove to avoid all too close contact with the marginal. More precisely, a single type of contact — and thereby of acceptance of the new by the old — could have been tolerated at Winston Parva, if the new ones had behaved “like people who needed to be rescued (and) had placed themselves under their wing,” if they had been content with the inferior place that fell to them. Elias and Scotson speak in the conditional, for the first-generation Londoners of the estate did not resign themselves to it, while in the second generation, which had lived through the rejection by the inhabitants of the “village,” a part of the young responded to it by feeling “a malicious pleasure in doing the things they were reproached for.”[^21]
To place oneself under the wing of the established Jews is, on the other hand, what the Ostjuden did on the whole as they fled westward from poverty and the pogroms at the end of the nineteenth century, and then from the political upheavals that came with the First World War. S. Aschheim recalls the ambiguity of the intention of the first ones when, from the end of the nineteenth century, they set up a series of relief organizations directed toward their coreligionists (Glaubensgenossen). On the one hand, on account of the cultural chasm that had opened up with the Ostjuden, the only relationship the established Jews were able to establish with them was of a philanthropic and paternalistic type. Not only did it not reduce the social and cultural distance of the assimilated Jews with respect to those they were helping, but it was, moreover, fundamentally inegalitarian, since, in Hannah Arendt’s expression, “the pariah (made himself a) Schnorrer.”[^22] On the other hand, philanthropy testified to the persistence of an “obstinate sense of collective Jewish responsibility” and to the fact that “the dissociation from the Jews of the East was never total.”[^23] According to the fine title of S. Aschheim’s book, these latter were always perceived at once as brothers and as strangers. To be sure, they represented a threat to the integration of the established Jews, a threat that many of them wanted to conjure away by favoring the others’ education and by bringing them aid, but their presence also revived the memory of the persecution their fathers had suffered and the fidelity they owed them. Until the period of the Weimar Republic, this ambivalence never ceased, although for most of the liberal Jews who concerned themselves — above all after the war of 1914–18 — with the relief organizations, what prevailed were the threat these latter represented, the tendency to attribute to them the rise of antisemitism, and the desperate affirmation of their own Germanness.
At an individual level, is it not the condescension of the protector who feels superior to his poor protégé, associated with the persistence of a Jewish responsibility toward him, that Mathilde Canetti expresses? Without entering here into the great complexity of Canetti’s relationship with his mother, let us note only that, from the very beginning of La Langue sauvée (The Tongue Set Free), he indicates the contradictory character of his mother’s message: on the one hand, “nourished on the literatures of the various languages of culture that she mastered,” she was animated by a “desire for universality”; but, on the other hand, Elias is troubled by the coexistence of this desire with the narrow-mindedness of her caste pride “which was defined not only by Spanish origin, but also by money.” Pushing to its limit the “desire for universality” awakened by the access to literature transmitted by his mother, Canetti goes further than she and revolts against the merchant mentality of his family, all the while refusing to “take seriously”[^24] any attitude amounting to feeling oneself superior by birth to anyone whomsoever.
One finds in Canetti the distance from their Jewish milieu of origin — which could go as far as outright revolt — of a whole generation of Central European Jewish intellectuals, especially after the war of 1914–18. In Germany, and this was shared by the German Zionists, it took the form of a calling into question of the liberal progressivism of the assimilated Jews, which made them perceive, according to N. Elias, “the discrimination and stigmatization of the group to which we belonged (…) as though through a veil,” antisemitism appearing as “the doing of a minority of people, for the most part uneducated and/or uncultivated, whom one could regard with a kind of condescension, a kind of counter-stigmatization.”[^25] A calling into question, too, of the bourgeois way of life of the assimilated Jews and of their paternalism toward poor Jews, which moreover extends beyond the Germanic sphere alone when they are denounced by Bernard Lazare.[^26] A calling into question, again, of the very way in which the assimilated Jews lived Judaism. One could find in Kafka, Scholem and many others this judgment of Canetti’s on the purely formal way in which the Sephardic Jews of Ruse practiced Judaism: they are “believers (and) therefore very attached to the community,”[^27] they observe the rites, say the prayers, but without understanding them. And it is not the teaching of the Talmudic school that Canetti has to attend in Vienna at grandfather Canetti’s injunction that will improve matters: “We learned well enough to read Hebrew and to drone fluently the prayers found in the books. But we did not know what the words we were reading meant, and no one thought to explain them to us.”[^28]
As S. Aschheim reveals, the radical critique of Jewish life in Germany — above all after the war of 1914–18 — was accompanied, in some, by a reversal of the figure of the Ostjude, which, from negative, became entirely positive, to the point of becoming the object of a veritable cult. The historical circumstances of this were the occupation by the German army of large territories in the East, where the German Jews incorporated into it discovered a Jewish world still intact despite poverty and oppression, but also, after the war, the peopling of entire quarters by a great number of refugees, where they were seen maintaining their Jewish culture in their language, their dress and their religious traditions.
Canetti, who lived in Vienna, says nothing in particular about the Leopoldstadt, and one may imagine that, in his earliest experience, the marginal whom the established of Ruse rejected were parvenus little likely to arouse compassion, while being much closer to the established than the Ostjuden were to the Jews of the Germanic sphere. The horrors of the war of 1914–18, moreover, prompted a number of them to a radical calling into question of technical modernity, definitively sapping the faith in the liberal ideas of human progress that the assimilated Jews had, in their majority, adopted. This calling into question often took the romantic form of a search for community against modern anonymity and individualism, as well as a quest for spirituality opposed to the positivist and materialist spirit of their society. The religiosity and fervor of the Jews of the East appeared to them as the manifestation of a substantial and vibrant Judaism. As against the reserve of the assimilated Jews, their relations were warm and fraternal, they were bearers of a true community, they were the authentic Jewish people. S. Aschheim devotes an entire chapter to the figure of the hasid popularized by Martin Buber, and recognizes, to differing degrees, the unfolding of this disposition of mind in a great number of authors, whether they were Zionists like Buber and Scholem, or not, like Landauer, Kafka, Rosenzweig and even Alfred Döblin.[^29]
S. Aschheim nonetheless interrogates the type of encounter that was at stake, and wonders whether, despite this idealization and even because of it, exteriority was not maintained all the same — in the sense that it was not underpinned by real social interactions, the counter-myth being the inverted image of the myth. The solid communal ties, the emotional solidarity, attributed in particular to the Jewish minority come from the East to Germany were in large part a projection. The difficulties of emigration had given rise, rather, to a process of atomization, close to what N. Elias observes at Winston Parva, as well as to a strong tendency toward the rejection of the past and toward a total secularization. Moreover, the Jews of the East never managed to set up unified organizations to defend their interests, and felt, rather, desperately powerless and alienated. As an editorial published at the time in the Yiddish-language newspaper Der Ostjude put it: “We are a Galut within the Galut, lamentably dependent on the goodwill of others.”[^30]
After the Shoah, nothing remained of this situation in Germany; the world of the Jews of Ruse has disappeared and, even if they continue to echo within us, the prejudices transmitted to us by our families — themselves issued from vanished worlds — lose their force. Israel, on the other hand, is a country constituted exclusively of relations among others, among other Jews, their reciprocal alterity being called upon to be transcended by a new identity — which, as we also know, is just as constitutively shot through with the tensions and conflicts between these alterities inherited from the diaspora. The tensions have sometimes taken unexpected forms, when, for example, the German Jews fleeing Nazism into Mandatory Palestine became Yekkes in the eyes of the Ostjuden who had taken the lead in the building of the country.[^31]
It is probable that, in France, the arrival of the Jews of North Africa will have been the last time that established Jews were confronted with marginal Jews. Although a great part of the Jews of France are issued from different waves of immigration, they are no longer, as a whole, in a position to be the new immigrants. N. Vasseur herself notes that the relations between the Sentier Jews she describes at the end of the eighties are in full evolution. As one of her interlocutors declares, the tendency of the Ashkenazim to drape themselves in their moral superiority worked all the better because, at the start, “(the Sephardim) had a form of respect for the Ashkenazim and for all that we had endured,” but he specifies in parentheses: “That changed afterward.”[^32] The same man makes us understand to what extent the Sentier was a laboratory of social interactions in which the ones were transformed by the others, and reciprocally. The relations between Ashkenazim and Sephardim of North Africa in France are not — or no longer — relations of philanthropy, and one no longer finds a monopoly of the community’s institutional positions by the established Ashkenazim.
Independently of the tensions tied to the visibility and the ethos of the newcomers, we are confronted today with a demand for visibility associated with the choice that some make of a sociality organized around a strict religious orthodoxy. Such an alterity, claimed both with respect to non-Jews and with respect to other Jews, and which can go as far as an excluding separatism, reconducts in a new way our questioning of what it means to be Jewish today and of the way in which we intend to live our own Jewishness in the France and the world of today.
NOTES: [^1]: Elias Canetti, “Histoire d’une jeunesse. La langue sauvée,” trans. M.-F. Demet, Écrits autobiographiques, Paris, Albin Michel, 1998, p. 131. During the First World War, many Jews of the East take refuge in Vienna as the Russians approach, and settle in the Leopoldstadt district. [^2]: Ibid. [^3]: Norbert Elias, Norbert Elias par lui-même (Reflections on a Life), trans. J.-C. Capèle, Paris, Hachette, “Pluriel,” 2013, p. 153. [^4]: Norbert Elias, John L. Scotson, Logiques de l’exclusion (The Established and the Outsiders), trans. P.-E. Dauzat, Paris, Agora, 2001, p. 223. [^5]: A selection: “they don’t have the same values,” “they’re East End people,” “they have no authority over their children.” On the other hand: “people here don’t quarrel, they don’t make a fuss.” N. Elias makes clear that it is always a minority that casts a shadow over the whole quarter. A common trait of relations between established and outsiders is “a distortion pars pro toto in opposite directions (…): there is always one element or another to prove that one’s group is ‘good’ and the other ‘bad’” (Logiques de l’exclusion, op. cit., p. 40). Likewise, the dynamic of gossip always goes “in the direction of the most favorable, most flattering image of one’s group, and in the direction of the most unfavorable, most unflattering image for the unruly outsiders” (p. 210). [^6]: Ibid., p. 46. [^7]: Thus a woman who had recently moved into the “village” was struck with ostracism by her neighbors because, one very cold day, she had done something that was not done: invite the dustmen in for tea (Ibid., p. 140). [^8]: Norbert Elias par lui-même, op. cit., pp. 154–155. As at Winston Parva, “the self-valorizing image of the ‘we’ is forged ‘on the model of the minority of the best’ and that of the worst on the model of ‘the minority of the “they”’” (Ibid., p. 155). [^9]: Steven Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers. The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish consciousness, 1800–1923, University of Wisconsin Press, 1982, p. 3. [^10]: S. Aschheim cites the work of a reforming pedagogue, Anton Rée, who urged the Jews to reconfigure entirely their gestures and their ways of behaving. One had to “gentilize” oneself, according to the formula “Es ist doch gar zu ungentil, ein Jude zu sein!” (Die Sprachverhältnisse der heutigen Juden im Interesse der Gegenwart und mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Volkserziehung, 1844, cited p. 10). [^11]: S. Aschheim cites an English translation of J. Wassermann, My Life as a German Jew (1921, 1934), in “Reflection, projection, distortion. The ‘Eastern Jew’ in German-Jewish culture,” in Impulses for Europe, Osteuropa, 2008, p. 67. Online: https://www.zeitschrift-osteuropa.de/site/assets/files/4004/oe081004.pdf [^12]: E. Canetti, Histoire d’une jeunesse. La langue sauvée, 1905–1921, in Écrits autobiographiques, op. cit., pp. 6–7. [^13]: Ibid., p. 101. [^14]: Ibid., p. 304. [^15]: Ibid., p. 102. [^16]: Ibid., p. 305 [^17]: Ibid., p. 101. La Langue sauvée, op. cit. p. 6. Which does not prevent Canetti from acknowledging that, even in this milieu essentially preoccupied with commercial affairs, a properly Jewish respect for the written word endured, perpetuated in their own way by those who chose literary or intellectual careers. [^18]: Nadine Vasseur, 36 rue du Caire. Une histoire de la confection, reissued together with a text by her father, Guy Vasseur, D’Alexanderplatz au Sentier, Paris, Petite Égypte, 2019, p. 150. [^19]: Ibid., pp. 151, 152. [^20]: Ibid., p. 161. [^21]: Ibid., p. 53. [^22]: Hannah Arendt, “Le Juif comme paria: une tradition cachée” (“The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition”), in Écrits juifs, trans. S. Courtine-Denamy, Paris, Fayard, 2011, p. 445. [^23]: Brothers and Strangers, op. cit., p. 17. [^24]: La Langue sauvée, op. cit. p. 6. Which does not prevent Canetti from acknowledging that, even in this milieu essentially preoccupied with commercial affairs, a properly Jewish respect for the written word endured, perpetuated in their own way by those who chose literary or intellectual careers. [^25]: Norbert Elias par lui-même, op. cit., p. 156. Having emigrated to England in 1935, N. Elias implores his parents, who had come to visit him in 1938, to come and settle there. They could not bring themselves to it; his father dies in 1940 and his mother is deported to Auschwitz the following year. [^26]: “The demoralization of a people of the poor and the persecuted, receiving the dole of its rich and having revolted only against persecution from without and not against oppression from within. Revolutionaries in the society of others and not in their own. Holding their rich in blissful admiration, whose honors reflect upon the poor. Even today, in the Jewish newspapers, one notes the privileged ones who attain honors” (B. Lazare, Le Fumier de Job, Strasbourg, Circé, 1990, p. 78). [^27]: La langue sauvée, op. cit., p. 5. For Kafka, see in particular the “Lettre au père” (“Letter to His Father”), trans. M. Robert, Préparatifs de noces à la campagne, pp. 238–241. For Scholem, see De Berlin à Jérusalem (From Berlin to Jerusalem), trans. S. Bollack, Paris, Albin Michel, 1984. [^28]: Ibid., p. 100. [^29]: See in particular chapter 6, “From rationalism to myth. Martin Buber and the reception of Hasidism” and chapter 8, “The cult of the Ostjuden. The war and beyond.” [^30]: Ibid., pp. 247–248. Galut is the Hebrew term for exile. [^31]: Cf. Nathan Friedenberg, “The reversed hierarchy. Ostjuden and Yekkes in mandatory Palestine,” online: https://www.academia.edu/7503688/The_Reversed_Hierarchy_Ostjuden_and_Yekkes_in_Mandatory_Palestine [^32]: 36, rue du Caire, op. cit., p. 155.