“The Modern Age is the age of the Jews, and the twentieth century is the Jewish century.
Modernity means that each of us becomes urban, mobile, educated… In other words, modernity is that we have all become Jews.”
It is with this slightly provocative remark that the American historian and anthropologist of Russian origin Yuri Slezkine opens his remarkable book, The Jewish Century (Le siècle juif).1 Before speaking of this “Jewish modernity,” we need to come to terms. The concept of modernity, to be sure, only emerged as a category in its own right in the nineteenth century, and only in Western Europe. Yet every period is quite naturally “modern” for its contemporaries.
My aim here will be to show how Judaism may be called modern, and to what extent one can affirm that this modernity did not only manifest itself from the Emancipation onward.
A banal and recurring question may stand at the origin of this reflection: how to explain the unique phenomenon of Israel’s persistence across the centuries, despite its exile, its dispersion, and an environment so often hostile? To this question, the most Orthodox Jews answer without hesitation: the Jews have endured because they remained faithful to the Torah and to the commandments… Tradition, no one would dare deny it, is the pillar of fire that guided Israel in its successive exiles and allowed it to traverse the centuries of a chaotic history without losing its identity or its cultural patrimony. For two millennia, the Jew defined himself by the observance of the mitzvoth, which dictated his behavior from rising to retiring. Whatever the context, this attachment to daily practice appeared not only as a religious obligation, but as a rampart raised against physical and spiritual disappearance.
This attachment was certainly a necessary condition… but was it a sufficient one? Had they done no more than observe the commandments while turning inward upon themselves, impervious to any foreign influence and to any progress, would not the Jews have died asphyxiated?
Would they not have disappeared, as the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian and even Roman civilizations have disappeared? There is, to my mind, another answer to the question of their astonishing persistence: their survival they also owe to their extraordinary faculty of adaptation. Since Antiquity, “adopt and adapt” seems to have been the credo of a considerable share of them: adopting what others made them discover and adapting it to their own vision of the world, to their own conceptual schemas.
Ahad Ha-Am, champion of cultural Zionism in Russia, emphasized that all of humanity, and the Jewish people in particular, have always functioned by imitation. But there are, he shows, two kinds of imitation, one positive and the other negative: the negative form consists in borrowing other nations’ systems of thought until they become so dominant that the minority group loses its original identity. When a people finds itself dispersed and exiled within another, it is generally the weaker, or the less developed, that imitates the stronger or the more developed. This kind of imitation may stem from a feeling of inferiority, from passivity, or simply from too great a numerical weakness. It is a self-effacement, whose inevitable consequence is the progressive abandonment of one’s own customs, modes of thought and ways of life.
It generally ends in total assimilation. The second type, positive, consists in understanding and integrating the surrounding culture — this time no longer so that it should take the place of the old, but on the contrary so that it should enrich and diversify it. Imitation then becomes a formidable factor of progress, a kind of springboard that allows one to leave a system more or less closed, even sclerotic, made up essentially of respect for ancestral traditions.
Ahad Ha-Am’s conviction is that the Jewish people remained alive through time, despite its numerical inferiority and its weakness, because it always favored the second type of imitation, and spiritual progress. In each of the places of its exile, it managed to absorb positive foreign influences and to blend them intimately with its own values for its own enrichment. To this notion of imitation described by Ahad Ha-Am one might add that of emulation, that astonishing engine of History. Of course, in periods of persecution, the Jewish people tended to withdraw into itself. But as soon as the opportunity was given, it nourished itself on outside contributions. It is doubtless this will to learn from the other, to do “as he does” — and even better — that enabled it not to remain frozen in a system of thought. It never ceased seeking the adequation between what its own culture dictated to it and what its environment, even a hostile one, could bring it. It felt the world evolving and evolved with it, not in the rejection of its own culture, but most often in the concern to adapt to a changing world, and in the refusal of a sclerotic anachronism.
As early as the biblical period, its borrowings from the surrounding mythology — attested for example by the episode of the Flood, which is nothing other than a “copy-paste” of the epic of Gilgamesh — are manifest proof of these influences. But already in this domain, it knew how to “adopt and adapt”: it suppressed, for instance, from this episode the quest for immortality of Gilgamesh — a quest proper to myths and totally absent from monotheistic thought, in which man accepts his mortal condition. Later, in the Talmud, it took constant care to update the problematic texts of the Torah (and there are some!), always in the direction of progress. The lex talionis, for instance — “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” — which the Torah borrows from the Code of Hammurabi, is interpreted by the Talmud as the necessary proportionality of the penalty to the offense — out of concern to avoid any misunderstanding liable to lead to a spirit of vengeance.
The redactors of these texts did not content themselves with borrowing from others.
As early as the fifth century BCE, one finds in the writings of the prophets remarks revolutionary for their time: “Is not this the fast that I have chosen — to loose the chains of injustice, to undo the bands of every yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and at last to break every bond? — yet also, to share thy bread with the hungry, to gather into thy house the unsheltered wretched, when thou seest a man naked, to cover him.” This text of Isaiah (58:6–7) was written 2,500 years ago! Amos clearly goes in the same direction, perhaps even more directly, when he has God say (5:21–24): “I hate, I despise your feasts; I take no pleasure in your assemblies. When you offer me burnt offerings and oblations, I will not accept them. … Spare me the noise of your songs! But let justice spring forth like the water, righteousness like a torrent that never dries up.” With the subordination of ritual to ethics, with the primacy given to justice — or to what Levinas will call the “for-the-other,” and this even at the expense of worship — biblical prophetism took a decisive step toward a form of modernity. As for the “invention” of monotheism, and the non-representation of God, this is doubtless one of the greatest advances of thinking humanity. What is more modern, indeed, than to cease believing in a multiplicity of “human, all too human” gods, who quarrel with and limit one another? Or than to cease believing that the sun is a divinity? Or that the gods can be represented by statues? Of course, anthropomorphism is still perceptible in the biblical texts, but it has been minimized as far as could be in view of the period…
Contrary to received wisdom, the Jews did not, then, wait for the Enlightenment to accede to a certain modernity. Nevertheless, although they originated a number of innovative ideas during the biblical period, exile created a new situation to which they had to react. To protect themselves, they raised “a hedge around the Torah.” Indeed — but not only. Often to the great chagrin of the most conservative among them, they also chose movement. During the centuries that followed their exile, they sought a difficult equilibrium between what the Torah dictated to them, and what adaptation to the societies in which they lived implied. A Talmudic adage already specifies through the expression Ha-Idana that it is essential to live with one’s time. The Jewish intellectual elites never ceased to dialogue, to exchange with their neighbors, absorbing foreign knowledge or even anticipating it — provided of course that it was not in contradiction with the principal values of monotheistic thought.
What would Philo of Alexandria be without Greek philosophy, Maimonides without Aristotle or Arab-Muslim philosophy, Spinoza without Descartes, Mendelssohn or Levinas without Western thought? Sciences, medicine, philosophy — nothing was ignored of what could lead toward human, social and cultural progress. The elites, to be sure, were the first concerned, but they would in turn shape the spirit of the greater number.
The Hebrew poet Haim Nachman Bialik wrote that the Jewish people has always — sometimes even simultaneously — opened and closed upon itself the gates of the ghetto. It has always oscillated between tradition and modernity, between particularism and universalism, between fidelity to the Law and openness to other conceptual schemas. Fortunately, while the halakha2 has indeed been frozen for a long time with few exceptions, notably in the medical domain, thought, for its part, never has been.
Study as a factor of progress
Alongside this faculty of adaptation, there developed among the Jews, from their origin, an extraordinary thirst for learning. In the context of exile, the Jews felt that their survival depended on it. We know the famous quip of Péguy: “The Jew is a man who has read since always, the Protestant is a man who has read since Calvin, the Catholic is a man who has read since Ferry.”3 Should one conclude from this that only the Jews displayed this thirst for learning? Certainly not — but the proportion of Jewish children in school was for a long time markedly higher than that of non-Jews. As early as the first century of the common era, Joshua Ben Gamla, high priest and Pharisee, had a decree promulgated which would have the force of law: every Jewish father had to send his son to study from the age of six or seven. In a majority-rural and illiterate environment, the biblical books are read, copied, and commented on. The Talmudic period will be an intense period of literacy, and the Talmud itself is nothing other than a sum of contradictory debates attesting to an exceptional intellectual effervescence. In the Academy of Yavneh, after the destruction of the Temple, the Sages unanimously agreed that the practice of sacrifices should be replaced by the study of the Torah and by prayer. One may consider this one of the greatest advances of a religion toward modernity.
Faced with new stakes, the Jews understood very early, then, that study was a factor of progress, of development and of flourishing. It is obvious that this literacy and this thirst for learning enabled them to adapt more easily to their environment. Praising the merits of the State of Israel, the “start-up nation,” the economist Daniel Haber writes: “This adventure is not new. It was prepared in exile, when the brain was the only space of freedom still possible. It is in the heder (the traditional Jewish school) that children become familiar with the critical study of biblical texts; it is there that the taste for knowledge and for permanent questioning was forged.”4 Jews are not better than others.
But they had to and knew how to develop, over time, an agility of mind, an art of contradictory debate, which were the guarantee of their survival. In a very beautiful short story entitled The Kerchief (Le Foulard), Agnon stages a modest merchant father returning from a fair. On finding his young son again, the only question he asks him is: “What have you learned?”
The turning point of the Enlightenment
In spite of this, it must be acknowledged that until the Enlightenment, the ambient hostility and the fear of disappearance pushed the majority of Jews to remain focused on strict observance of the commandments and on their communal life. The halakha remained the rule, and whoever departed from it was considered a traitor. But from the eighteenth century onward, in Western Europe at least, and in the space of one or two generations, the Jews seized the chance given them to participate fully in the life of their host countries. They were not, Yuri Slezkine emphasizes, the “inventors” of modernity, but no matter, he writes: “If there is one theme on which European intellectuals agreed, it is the identification of the Jews with the fundamental forces that shape the modern world.”5 And it is astonishing to find that they adopted this modernity “with an intensity and a fervor worthy of the ancient yeshiva, and with a success so striking that the goyim6 were torn between admiration and resentment.”7 Little by little, thanks to this permeability to outside influences, Judaism became a “modern religion”: a religion that rejects superstitions and is not afraid to cast a critical eye on its texts — even sacred ones.
One that does not judge the other on the basis of what he believes. One that respects the freedoms of conscience, of worship, and of expression.
It is with Spinoza, undoubtedly, that Judaism takes its first steps into Western-style modernity. Profiting from the extraordinary cultural crossroads that was the seventeenth-century Netherlands, the excommunicated philosopher will — without really having wanted it — shape modern Judaism. From that point on, as Jonathan Israel writes: “The type of cultural cohesion founded on religious belonging begins to disintegrate, initiating one of the most decisive cultural and intellectual mutations of Western history. As the supremacy of theology declined, non-theological conceptions of man, God, and the world began to spread.”8 Spinoza creates, without naming it, the until-then inconceivable concept of the “secular Jew.” At the same time, he argues in favor of another marker of modernity: the separation of Church and State, the indissociable corollary of freedom of conscience. He was ahead of his time. We know what it cost him.
One must then wait for the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) and the humanist ideals of the French Revolution for the walls of the ghetto to crack, before being entirely torn down. In France, religious affiliation as marker of identity weakens before the offensives of an often militant laïcité of which we are still witnesses today.
By relegating religion to the private or synagogal sphere, emancipation brings the Jews fully into modern society.
This emancipation, however, required a double movement: it had to be that non-Jewish society step out of its old schemas and accept the Jews as full citizens, regardless of their religious identity, without however demanding of them the outright abandonment of their Jewish identity — which could indeed be the case in the name of the Enlightenment, and, essentially in France, of laïcité. But it also had to be that, on the Jewish side, change be accepted. As always, it concerned first the highest layers of society — of which there were already examples in the seventeenth century with the “Court Jews.” But it very quickly extended to the majority of Western Jews thirsty for liberty and recognition. Here again, though, one cannot generalize. The emancipated Jews could be ranged in two major categories (with within each a whole palette of nuances): those who, as Yuri Slezkine again emphasizes, embraced this modernity with the zeal of a convert, who chose to be wholly and solely citizens of their host country, adopting new heroes in place of Abraham and Moses: Goethe, Freud, or Marx. These massively “killed the Father,” at the risk of falling into a form of self-hatred. But another group, fortunately a majority, is made up of those of whom Kafka said: “Their hind legs still stuck to the Judaism of their Fathers, and their front legs found no new ground.”9 Although they wished, in the depths of their being, to adapt and to integrate, some felt themselves on the edge of the abyss… As Bialik magnificently expresses it in his poem “On the Threshold of the House of Study,” they remained between two worlds, one foot in the Beit Midrash10 and the other outside: indefectibly attached to their origins and their culture, but drawn, often against their will, by the world that was opening to them. From the moment that their former enemies were opening the gates of the spiritual ghetto in which they had been enclosed, could they reasonably close them again upon themselves? It probably took another generation or two for a certain equilibrium to be found, and for these “modern” Jews to become conscious that laïcité, far from being a negation of their identity, was a promise of progress. So much so that one can today say without difficulty that one is perfectly Jewish and perfectly secular, even atheist.
The place of women, marker of modernity
The place of women, finally, is to my mind one of the most important markers of this entry into modernity. The birth in Europe of the Reform movement, then of liberal Judaism,11 was the culmination of a process begun by the Haskalah. Rules were relaxed, the sermon in the vernacular was introduced, and the door was opened to equality between men and women. This does not mean that this reform imposed itself without clashes.
Until the modern era, girls (Jewish or not, for that matter) received, with rare exceptions, no religious education. In the most cultivated families, tutors taught them the Bible, the Aggada,12 and the specific commandments. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an Orthodox thinker but one of great openness of mind, liked to say that the entry of women into the world of study was the greatest revolution of the twentieth century in the Jewish world. In Italy, France, and Germany, by the end of the nineteenth century, the majority of girls would be in school. A decisive step would be taken in 1846, when the rabbinical conference of Breslau — a conference of liberal rabbis — would inscribe the equality of women in religious life in so many words.
The morning prayer “Blessed art Thou for not having made me a woman” would (at last) be abolished and in certain communities women would be integrated into the minyan.13
Even in Russia, where antisemitism and the weight of traditions still kept the Jews in a form of backwardness, girls increasingly attended the Hadarim metoukanim, those reformed schools founded in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In the Sephardi world, the Alliance schools would work in the same direction. In the Ottoman Empire, in 1912, there were 71 Alliance schools for boys, and 44 for girls.
Unfortunately, many men, even today, refuse to integrate women into synagogal life and firmly reject the idea of a woman rabbi. To fight this segregation, many women, even Orthodox, have for several decades fought for equality, drawing on the texts that allow it — for they exist. The movement began in the 1970s in the United States: a women’s study group called Ezrat Nashim sought to ensure that no domain be forbidden to women. In Israel, it is the movement Kolekh (Your Voice) that fights for women’s rights, for the improvement of the condition of religious women, against the moral and even sexual harassment of which they are victims at the hands of their husbands, for their acceptance within the synagogue, in study circles and in professional life. A long road remains to be traveled in the Orthodox world to attain full equality, and it is troubling to see certain young women in France today returning to practices that seemed past, the wearing of the wig being one of the symptoms.
Of course, adaptation to the present, inevitable, is not without danger. If we Diaspora Jews do not want to see this multi-millennial culture, of which we are depositaries, disappear, we will have to find a difficult equilibrium between two belongings that ought not to be set in competition, but indeed to cohabit. This is doubtless the greatest challenge we face today. Ideally, emancipation should not rhyme with assimilation, but with integration — which is not the same thing. Let us remember the “credo” of Franz Rosenzweig: “Let us then be German (or, for us, French) and Jewish, both at once, without troubling ourselves about the and, without speaking about it much, but truly both.”14
Yuri Slezkine, Le siècle juif (The Jewish Century), La Découverte, Paris 2009.↩︎
The body of Talmudic texts relating to the laws.↩︎
Péguy, Note sur Bergson et la philosophie bergsonienne, Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 1914.↩︎
Daniel Haber, Les surprises de l’économie d’Israël, L’Harmattan, 2016, p. 70.↩︎
Y. Slezkine, op. cit., p. 72.↩︎
Non-Jews, Gentiles.↩︎
Ibid., p. 75.↩︎
Jonathan Israel, Les Lumières radicales, la philosophie, Spinoza et la naissance de la modernité, Éditions Amsterdam, 2005, p. 50.↩︎
Kafka, Letter to Max Brod, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 3, Paris, Gallimard, p. 1087.↩︎
House of study.↩︎
Or Reform Judaism and the Liberal Jewish Movement.↩︎
Set of passages of the Talmud composed of narratives devoted to the ethical interpretations of the Bible.↩︎
A collective of ten persons required for certain prayers.↩︎
F. Rosenzweig, Letter to Helene Sommer of 16 January 1918, in Briefe und Tagebücher, vol. 1, p. 508, cited by Pierre Bouretz in L’Europe et les juifs, Labor et Fides, Geneva, 2002, p. 179.↩︎