Editorial — Jews in modernity

With two world wars and the Shoah, the twentieth century taught us not to associate the idea of modernity too naively with that of progress; it tempered the enthusiasm of the Jews who had thrown themselves with passion toward this modernity, forcing them to weigh the price they had had to pay for that entry.

It is hard to give an unequivocal definition of modernity. It is a long-running process — perhaps even a continuous one from the moment a society moves out of tradition and repetition.

In Europe one might define it broadly as a change of perspective: emancipation from tradition, a movement of autonomization that allowed the individual to gain his liberty with respect to the group and the religion which governed so many dimensions of his private and public life, the development of science, secularization.

There is no doubt that it exerted an immense pull on the Jews, for whom it represented something more still: a promise of liberty, of equality, of respect for difference, the possibility of existing outside the ghetto and taking part in civic life.

One of the first consequences of modernity in Europe was the appearance of the Enlightenment, and, in its wake, that of the Haskalah — the Jewish Enlightenment — of which Spinoza was the precursor and Moses Mendelssohn one of the principal architects, through his rational approach to religion and his faith in reason and tolerance.

But one may ask whether, beyond the name of Mendelssohn and the Haskalah, there were not, for the Jewish population, successive entries into modernity. As Alessandro Guetta emphasizes, the Italian Jewish community, through its rich cultural production and its rational grasp of questions of History and culture, was among the first to follow “the Jewish path to modernity” and to create intellectual models which would later be developed in Germany and in Eastern Europe. Though the Italian Jews (50,000 at most) were never numerous enough to exert a decisive influence on the other European communities, names such as Samuel David Luzzatto (1800–65), a native of Trieste and professor at the rabbinical college of Padua, and Elia Benamozegh (1823–1900), a native of Livorno of Moroccan family, stand among the great precursors in dialogue with modernity. For her part, Ariane Bendavid shows how the Jews, in the course of their multi-millennial history, have always known how to adapt to changing cultural and political realities and to whatever appeared, at each moment, as a form of modernity. Citing Yuri Slezkine, she recalls the extraordinary identification of the Jews with the fundamental forces that “shape the world”; “adopt and adapt” seems to have been the credo of a considerable share of them. This would explain the unique phenomenon of Israel’s persistence across the centuries despite its exile, its dispersion, and an environment so often hostile.

Another question: in this process of integration, how is the essential to be preserved? One may ask what the consequences of modernity were for the Jewish population of Europe.

We thus enter the modern period of Western societies.

Simon Wuhl, drawing on a few Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century — notably Simon Dubnov, Horace Kallen and Michael Walzer — examines the place to be given to the collective belonging of Diaspora Jews and to their cultural identity (whether religious, intellectual, artistic or ethical in nature). Such a questioning led Dubnov to reflect on the need to preserve cultural rights as the only means, in his view, of resisting the dilution of the Jewish collective personality. Likewise, in Walzer, this same questioning gives rise to a “Jewish thought of cultural differences” which leads him in turn to a critical interrogation of French-style laïcité.

A further question concerns the success and the development of secularization in Jewish modernity.

Ilan Greilsammer recalls that Zionism, out of which the State of Israel was born, was from the outset bound up with the question of modernity, and that the dream of Israel’s founding fathers was to create a liberal, modern, democratic state, governed by the separation of powers. But he emphasizes that, for part of the population, to accept the instruments of modernity did not mean accepting the ideology of modernity. Hence the compromises Ben Gurion had to strike with the religious forces — and the paradox of a modern state, a start-up nation, where the civil status of citizens still depends on the rabbinate.

In the cultural domain, Léa Veinstein evokes the case of Kafka colliding with an insoluble contradiction, whether on the score of his relation to the modern world or his problematic Jewish identity. She cites Stéphane Mosès who, gathering texts by Kafka, Benjamin, but also by Scholem, Freud and Rosenzweig, sketches the traits common to a generation of sons who underwent “the disruption of the processes of transmission within Judaism,” an effect of “the entry of Western Jews into modernity.”

Meanwhile, asking after the Jewish modernity of the painters of the École de Paris, Itzhak Goldberg notes that it remains surprising to group under the name École de Paris artists who all come from elsewhere. He recalls that if one can attest the presence of numerous Jewish artists within modernity — even if they rarely figure as pioneers — it is because the arrival of these creators, engaging for the first time in profane art, is virtually contemporaneous with the first waves of the avant-garde. He notes, lastly, that “identity, and the anxiety of the loss of identity, is central in Chagall’s work — and perhaps common to Jewish life and to modern art.”¹ Two films by the filmmaker Yolande Zauberman are also evoked.

One is very recent: M., dealing with sexual violence in the ultra-Orthodox milieu in Israel — the subject of an interview with the filmmaker by Monique Halpern and Jean-Charles Szurek. The other is earlier: Ivan and Abraham (Moi Ivan, toi Abraham), analyzed by Anny Dayan Rosenman.

In both cases, the attraction of modernity is not without internal struggles, pitting the individual’s desire for freedom against the coercive force of the group and of tradition. The dossier continues with an interview by Brigitte Stora with Izio Rosenman, on his life and his commitments as a left-wing, secular Jew, shaped by a family tradition of the Left and by the violences of History. An interview in which he evokes values drawn from the ethical tradition of the prophets — values essential for him in that they sustain hope in mankind, even if they are paired with an anxious vigilance.

The dossier closes, finally, with a reflection by the historian David Biale, excerpted from his book Not in the Heavens — The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought and translated by Martine Leibovici, on the theme of Heritage, understood here as cultural heritage. David Biale describes new developments both in Israel and in the United States, evoking the calling into question of the old categories tied to modernity and the fact that, henceforth, religion is steeped in the secular and the secular is steeped in religion. He recalls that some of the religious movements in Israel are creations of modernity as much as responses to it, while in the United States a so-called “post-modern” generation considers its identity modifiable, fluid, in some sense “à la carte,” moving beyond the historical opposition between secular and religious.

Outside the dossier, we reproduce the contributions to a round table devoted to the great Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever, in which Rachel Ertel, Carole Ksiazenicer-Matheron, Claude Mouchard, Guillaume Métayer and Martin Rueff took part, each evoking the modernity, the breath, the incandescence of a poetry which deployed its power in its confrontation with History.

Norbert Czarny presents the work of Eduardo Halfon, a Jewish and Guatemalan writer too little known in Europe, each of whose novels — from Monastery (Monastère) to The Polish Boxer (Le Boxeur polonais) or Mourning (Deuil) — forms one piece of a complex and droll family puzzle, still in the making. He represents that third generation after the Shoah which has the requisite distance, in both space and time, to take in past and present.

We also remember Stanislas Tomkiewicz, who died in December 2020, and publish one of his short stories: Counter-meaning (Le contre-sens).

And today? We are witness to a calling into question of the gains of modernity and of the Enlightenment, translating into irrational approaches and a perversion of the freedom of thought won in the era of the Lumières — for the benefit of approaches that contest the universality of truth and reason in favor of so-called alternative truths. With the development of conspiracism, of hatred of the other, of populism, it is democracy itself that is endangered. Marine Le Pen’s vote totals prove it.

The invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia, with its destructions, its massacres and its barbarism, shows us how fragile our situation is, and how threatened by totalitarianisms.