In 2019, the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme organized a colloquium entitled “The Jews, a Blind Spot in the National Narrative” (Les Juifs, une tache aveugle dans le récit national),1 in the course of which all the contributors — archaeologists, historians, sociologists, museum curators and teachers — shared the observation that Jews and Judaism had been relegated to a blind spot of French historiography.
Among the explanations for this state of affairs, Paul Salmona, in his synthesis of the proceedings, advances the hypothesis of a “secularist bias” stemming from the republican struggle against the religious domain in the first place, but which “persists to our day in the Éducation nationale to the detriment of the teaching of the Jewish fact beyond its merely religious aspects.”2 Thus, describing the way one of the greatest French historians of the nineteenth century, Jules Michelet, evokes the Jews in the history of France, Perrine Simon-Nahum emphasizes that they never appear “as actors of their own history. They are always, in a sense, ‘acted upon,’ playthings of the powerful who, by turns, drive them out of their kingdoms or seek to conciliate their good graces in order to obtain some financial largesse.”3 Finally, Dominique Schnapper observes — and is surprised — that this occultation of the history of the Jews in France as actors in the history of France is found “even among the historians most well disposed toward Judaism, and even those who have affirmed their Jewish heritage.”4
The effacement of the Jews as subjects of their own history and of the history of France raises a question that goes beyond the specificities of that country and probes the possibilities of collective affirmation of Diaspora Jews, beyond the religious, in their country of residence. So, before returning to the French case, it seemed pertinent to us to present the reflections of great thinkers of Jewish modernity on the theme of the collective belonging of Jews in the Diaspora.
First, Simon Dubnov (1860–1941), whose theses on the cultural autonomy of the Jews in the Diaspora played a founding role by defining the Jewish Diaspora as a people (or rather a nation, the term used at the time) and not as a religious community.
Then, Horace Kallen (1882–1974), often presented as the inventor of multiculturalism in the United States, who was in any case the first thinker to introduce the idea of recognition of cultural diversity within American society.
Michael Walzer, finally (born 1935), who deepens and stabilizes the idea of cultural pluralism by introducing the notion of multi-belonging, or what he calls “hyphenated identity” like that of Jewish-Americans, Italian-Americans, etc.
We will return to the French debate and its different interpretations of laïcité, asking whether these Jewish thinkers of collective identity carry a project that is in part generalizable (not to say “universal”), or whether the validity of their theses is closely tied to the period or the national context that saw them emerge.
Simon Dubnov: For a cultural autonomy of the Jews in the Diaspora
Simon Dubnov, killed by the Nazis in 1941 at the age of eighty-one, was an exceptional figure. He was first of all one of the principal historians of the Jewish people grasped in its entirety in a ten-volume Universal History of the Jews. The historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, though seasoned in the company of historiography in general, does not hide his admiration when he writes of Dubnov — the man and his work: “Simon Dubnov had identified himself with Jewish history — the history he lived, the history he reconstituted, the history he wrote for more than sixty years, while he actively participated in the debates of his time.”5
But beyond his activity as a historian, the dimension of Dubnov that interests us here is that of the political thinker who defines Judaism as an entity possessing the attributes of a genuine people in the Diaspora. His theses are developed in Letters on Old and New Judaism6 — published for the first time in 1907, then reworked several times until 1937 — a text that refers continually to his historical works and to his immense experience as a man of action accumulated throughout his life.
Let us look at the different stages of Dubnov’s reasoning in the elaboration of his thesis on cultural autonomy, condition of the existence of a Jewish nation in the Diaspora understood as a “cultural nation.”
1) The theory of the historical development of nations in three phases
Following the positivist problematic of Auguste Comte in establishing the cycle of development of nations, Dubnov distinguishes three general phases of evolution: the “racial” stage (we would say “ethnic” today), where regrouping takes place on the basis of a community of provenance; then the politico-territorial stage, with the anchoring of a political sovereignty (a kingdom, generally, at the start) to a territory; finally, the highest level, the most mature for Dubnov — the cultural stage, where the ties perpetuate themselves without the mediation of a sovereignty and a territory being required for their exercise. Overturning the theory of the “pariah people” advanced by Max Weber concerning Judaism, he asserts on the contrary that only the Jewish people would have attained this highest stage before the creation of the State of Israel.
Two remarks make it possible to specify Dubnov’s thought.
First, the use of the term “nation” refers neither to the idea of a nation-state (in reference to a sovereignty and a territory), nor to an essentialist union forged in lasting fashion through time by the bond of blood.
The idea of “cultural nation,” on the contrary, breaks with the purely biological substrate. On this plane, moreover, Dubnov refers several times to the theses of Ernest Renan, who defined the nation by reference to a past heritage on the one hand, and on the other hand as the expression of a permanent consent to prolong this common legacy (by a daily plebiscite). There is therefore a contractual character in this definition of the nation, and nothing prevents its extension to new members who accept to inscribe themselves in the tradition and enrich it. Today, one tends rather to use the term “people” to evoke Judaism as a whole.
Second, the term “cultural” must be understood in its broadest acceptation, encompassing all the productions of the spirit of a collectivity — religious, intellectual, artistic, ethical in nature — customs, and more generally the diverse ways of being. Let us note that Dubnov himself uses other formulations, such as “historico-cultural nation,” or even “spiritual nation,” this last expression being abandoned because of its religious connotation.
In sum, the guiding thread of the process of evolution of nations thus defined proceeds from “the evolution of the physical toward the spiritual… At an elementary cultural stage, the distinction between peoples is above all of a physical order, while in the course of subsequent stages, this distinction becomes historico-cultural.” (Letters…, p. 84)
2) The historical evolution of the Jewish people toward a consolidation of cultural ties
Simon Dubnov’s reading grid applied to the historical destiny of the Jewish people, whatever the criticisms one might formulate concerning the linearity of this overly functional process, has the merit of clearly bringing out the references to the consolidation of cultural ties.
Two references with a strong cultural dimension prepared the ground, as it were, during the politico-territorial phase of the Hebrews’ full exercise of sovereignty in the millennium before Jesus Christ:
First, the growing place of the Prophets, who broadened the religious core into a whole system of ideals of social justice and ethics. Thus, in the face of the threats of invasion by the great powers, the prophets explain that “weakness, or even political dependence, is not dramatic if the people possesses a strong internal cohesion, for the State is to the nation what the shell is to the almond. They want straightaway to raise the Jewish people to the higher level of national existence.” (Letters…, p. 89) Then, another event of importance in the priority given to cultural ties, the competition between two branches of Judaism in the face of the Roman invasion: the Sadducees, partisans of an armed military response to the Roman invasion, and the Pharisees, bearers of a spiritual conception favoring the solidification of religious and cultural ties internal to the national community. For Dubnov, the victory of the Pharisaic current is positive on two planes: on the one hand, a military resistance by the fragile kingdom of Judea would have meant the end of the Jewish people in the face of “the Roman iron fist”; on the other, the Pharisees thereby prepared the future consolidation of the Jewish people welded by cultural ties.
That is why, finally, the fall of the kingdom of Judea will not entail the disappearance of the Jewish people: deprived of any institutional and territorial materialization of its existence, the Jewish people will define itself as the people of the Book, as the people of the Torah.
3) The critique of the Israelite model à la française
For Simon Dubnov, the Israelite model — which reduces Jewish identity to its religious portion confined to the private sphere (even to the intimate, for some) — corresponds to a doctrine of pure and simple assimilation of the Jews to the French nation through the negation of their own rights as a historical collectivity. And he adopts a very severe tone in castigating the attitude of the Western Jewish intellectuals and religious or civil representatives — French in particular — accusing them of abandoning their collective personality by diluting it within their society of residence. The criticism does not, of course, bear on the claim — satisfied in 1791 — for equality of civic rights; nor even on the fact that the French Jews, in a position of numerical weakness, were constrained to accept the conditions of assimilation imposed on them.
The target of Dubnov’s vehement criticisms is the official submission of the Israelite representatives, exemplified by the obsequious declaration of the Grand Sanhedrin (representative of the official Israelite institution) pledging allegiance to Napoleon Bonaparte in 1807: “Henceforth, the Jews no longer constitute a nation; they prefer to share in the great French nation and regard this as a spiritual redemption” (cited in Letters…, p. 132).
Likewise, the criticism is directed at the “vanguard” Jewish intellectuals, who set themselves up as defenders of the French model of assimilation, thinking that an attitude of “national suicide” would assure them a certain consideration, whereas “experience shows that one can only respect the personality that respects itself…” (Letters…, p. 118).
To grasp Dubnov’s reasoning on the matter of equality of cultural rights, it is useful to recall the debates of the Convention of autumn 1789 concerning the access of resident Jews to French citizenship. In this debate, which did not in fact reach a conclusion (the Jews obtained equal civic rights in 1791, without debate), two camps confronted each other: the camp hostile to the civic emancipation of the Jews in France, on the grounds that the latter already constituted a nation, which would be incompatible with their assimilation to the French nation; as for the defenders of emancipation, they posed as a condition, following the famous prescription of the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, that “everything must be granted to the Jews as individuals and nothing as a collectivity.” Dubnov points to the confusion of this debate, linked to the ambiguity of the meaning of the term “nation”: faced with the arguments of those opposed to the emancipation of the Jews, Dubnov answered that what was at stake was to obtain an equality of cultural rights alongside the civic rights, and certainly not to create a Jewish nation-state (with a sovereignty and a territory) within the French nation-state then under construction; faced with the partisans of individualized assimilation, Dubnov objected that the Jews could indeed be considered as individuals (citizens like the others) with regard to civic rights, but that for the realization of equality of cultural rights — and on this plane alone — recognition of their collective personality proved indispensable.
Let us add that, on the plane of the legitimacy of this claim to cultural equality, the strength of Dubnov’s argument is to show that the Jews have undeniable historical rights stemming from the anteriority of their presence — on the one hand, with respect to the creation of nation-states, and on the other, with respect to numerous categories of national citizens: “Europe has served as native land to a significant portion of the Jewish people for two thousand years (…); here, as colonists of ancient Rome, we witnessed the advent of Christian civilization, the appearance of national state unions; here we ourselves developed an intellectual and industrial culture that also influenced our Christian neighbors; and after that, we are called strangers, foreigners…” (Letters…, pp. 126–127).
Let us complete this rapid presentation of Simon Dubnov’s theses on the creation of a Jewish nation with a cultural vocation in the Diaspora, alongside and with the political nations, with three further observations:
The first expresses the hierarchy established by Dubnov between the power of the cultural tie, on the one hand, and the ephemeral, even instrumental character — in his eyes — of the political tie on the other: “We must understand once and for all that the State is a formal social and legal union whose aim is to protect, while the nation [cultural] is an internal, psychic, existential union. The first is by essence transformable; the second is immutable.” (Letters…, p. 121, italics by Dubnov)7
For a critique of Schlomo Sand’s analyses concerning Dubnov’s theses on cultural autonomy, see Simon Wuhl, Modernité juive et Laïcités (Le Bord de l’Eau, 2015, pp. 127–131).
A second observation concerns the definitive formulation of Jewish autonomism enunciated by Dubnov, which he was careful to highlight in his text by italicizing it (which we reproduce as such): “The Jews who take an active part in the civic and political life of a country enjoy all the rights granted to its citizens, both as individuals and as members of their nation. Equal on the civic plane, the Jews demand equality of national [cultural] rights within the limits compatible with the integrity of the given state organism.” (Letters…, pp. 177–178).
The last sentence betokens a pragmatic attitude in Dubnov: if he presents himself as extremely rigorous on the theoretical plane in his desire to rehabilitate Judaism as a cultural (or spiritual) nation in the Diaspora, he remains more flexible in his will to translate this into facts.
The third observation underscores Dubnov’s premonitory role concerning the embodiment of his ideas in the Diaspora — in the United States rather than in Europe: “It seems that North America will be the contemporary center called upon, in the very near future, to play in our history the role of Arab Spain in the Middle Ages, or more recently of Poland, the role of the most powerful cultural center of the Jewish people.” (Letters…, pp. 193–194).
Simon Dubnov was not mistaken on this point: it is in the United States (to a lesser degree, in Canada) that the spirit of his theses on the cultural autonomy of the Jews in the Diaspora will find its best defenders and its best possibilities of realization, according to the local sociopolitical context.
Horace Kallen and cultural pluralism in the United States
Horace Kallen, Jewish-American philosopher, was born in Germany in 1882.
The son of an ultra-Orthodox rabbi, his family emigrated to the United States in 1887. He studied at Harvard and taught philosophy at that same university for some fifty years.
Devoting the bulk of his work to the relations between the cultural identity of minorities and national citizenship in their country of residence, he was the first thinker of stature to produce a theory of society based on the recognition of cultural pluralism. This was in the context of the 1910s in the United States, much influenced by “racialist” theories, which aimed on the contrary at absorbing cultural differences by their dilution within Anglo-Saxon culture. His founding article Democracy versus Melting-Pot8 appeared in 1915, only eight years after the publication of Simon Dubnov’s Letters on Old and New Judaism. The kinship between the orientations of these two authors is striking, given the very great difference between the geopolitical contexts in which the ideas on cultural pluralism are expressed.9 Kallen, however, was in a position to broaden the field of Dubnov’s thinking on two planes: on the one hand, opening the reflection to the whole set of minorities beyond the Jewish minority alone (even if Dubnov had begun this reflection); on the other, a global vision of the organization of national society articulating the singular cultures with the common culture, which remained the reference for all.
A philosopher on the ground and a great observer of the American society of his time, Horace Kallen establishes a diagnosis of the respective evolution of the country’s socio-cultural dynamics, in particular:
In the face of a regressive standardization of the cultural reference of Anglo-Saxon origin on every plane (artistic, scientific, educational, etc.), the quality of cultural development is henceforth to be found within the recent categories of immigrants. Indeed, for Kallen, the old Anglo-Saxon culture is henceforth relegated to the register of memory. As for modern culture, it is realized in the diverse communities in connection with each heritage. But, an important point, this process in no way ends in a rupture with the common national references. Taking the example of the cultural dynamics of the Jewish community, Kallen argues that the immigrant group most enthusiastic in its adherence to American life is the one that shows the greatest autonomy and the strongest collective consciousness in the domains of spiritual and cultural development.
Secondly, by observing the trajectory of the different categories of immigrants, Kallen draws out a constant around the passage through four phases, evolving counter-intuitively from a search for assimilation to one of de-assimilation as the material integration of these groups proceeds: first, a search for assimilation, almost an obligation to secure economic independence; then this process slows with the advent of a certain material security; next, the group turns toward its cultural heritage and tends to affirm its own collective personality; finally, a movement of relative de-assimilation of the group begins, not to separate itself from the national collectivity but on the contrary to enrich it culturally by appropriating its own historical heritage.
In conclusion, for the organization of American society, Horace Kallen first vigorously opposes a melting pot blind to cultural pluralism, which will impose itself for several decades of the twentieth century in the United States, until the 1960s.
The alternative proposed by Kallen is a democracy of nationalities, endowed with a certain cultural autonomy, in which each cooperates voluntarily and actively in the realization of the common good. The English of the great tradition would be the common language, but each minority could use its own language, especially for artistic and intellectual creation. However, the politico-economic framework of such a society would indeed be unique. It is therefore not a matter of each group playing a separate score. On the contrary, Kallen maintains, it is by setting out from multiplicity to realize unity that American civilization can elevate to perfection a harmonious cooperation. To be still clearer about the model of society he proposes, Horace Kallen illustrates it with the metaphor of the orchestra: contrary to the creation of a musical symphony, the symphony of civilization is not written before being played (which would be the model of a melting pot imposed from above); on the contrary, the work of social and human progress is written at the same time as it is played from day to day. It is thus that, starting from the diversity of harmonies, it enriches and deepens itself continually.
On a more critical plane of Horace Kallen’s analyses, he has been reproached for describing cultural communities in too fixed a manner, by emphasizing the physical character of groups — what he calls the “psychophysical” heritage — at least as much as the cultural specificities. Thus he argued that identity was inalienable because determined by heredity: “Man can change his clothes, his political opinion, his wife, his religion, or his philosophy, but he cannot change his grandfather.” But perhaps Kallen’s view was somewhat distorted by the overly recent character of the immigration he was observing. Let us recall that the great waves of non-Anglo-Saxon immigration to the United States unfolded between the 1880s and 1924, the date at which this immigration was halted for several decades. We will see below that the thinkers who pursued the path traced by Kallen — Michael Walzer in particular — have analyzed and integrated the transformations observed within non-fixed cultural collectivities, in the wake of conversions, mixed marriages, processes of assimilation, cultural transfers, etc.
Michael Walzer: From cultural pluralism to multi-belonging
Social theorist, political philosopher, historian of ideas and anthropologist, Michael Walzer (born 1935) is a Jewish-American thinker of international renown. He is a professor at Princeton, and his work addresses many questions in the socio-political domain — political theory and practice, social justice, cultural pluralism, ethics in the face of military or terrorist violence.
Moreover, an emblematic figure of the American intellectual left, he long edited a respected journal, Dissent (Controverse), in which the principal political and social debates traversing American society are expressed.
On the politico-cultural terrain, Michael Walzer has sought to overcome what he considers a sterile opposition between two extreme conceptions of the political organization of democratic societies: “civic communitarianism,” on the one hand, which, like a “republicanist” current in France, accords value only to the political tie, and disqualifies communities united on the basis of inherited ties; conversely, “radical multiculturalism,” which leads either to a communal enclosure or to a form of separatism with respect to the common culture.
The persistence of the communal fact in democratic societies
Following the analyses of Simon Dubnov and Horace Kallen, Michael Walzer first undertakes to show the enduring character of the communal fact, attested in particular by its resistance to the pressure exerted against it by the Soviet regime.10 He advances three types of arguments to this end:
First, this is a fundamental given, of an anthropological nature: the expression of communal differences is observed throughout the history of societies, whatever the political regimes.
In response to the objections of certain progressive currents that reject any “essentialist”-tinged argument, Walzer counters with the pragmatism of historical observation: “I do not know what is irrevocable and what is not. But, during your lifetime and mine, your perspective [of negation of the durability of the communal cultural tie] is doomed to fail.”11
Second, as a corollary of the preceding observation: it is always possible to repress cultural communities — brutally, as in authoritarian regimes, or through ideological disqualification and contempt — but they cannot be suppressed. In this regard, the example of the bureaucratic regimes of Eastern Europe before 1989 is particularly illuminating: after decades of repression of cultural minorities and national aspirations in the people’s democracies, in the name of a commanding communist universalism, “the tribes are back, and in still more spectacular fashion in the places where they were most repressed.”12
Third, finally, from his analyses of various societies through history, Walzer concludes that the denial of recognition of cultural difference results in the opposite of the aim sought: not in a reinforcement of the tie to the nation, but in an identitarian withdrawal and a rupture of that tie. Here, Walzer falls in line with the analyses and observations of Dubnov and Kallen:
For these three authors, the recognition of the collective personality of minorities is not an obstacle, but one of the preconditions for integration into society.
However, unlike his predecessors, Walzer will add other conditions in order to favor the creation of a virtuous cycle of social integration.
Cultural pluralism and national social bond. The open and tempered pluralism theorized by Walzer is distinguished from versions of multiculturalism with ill-defined contours by the addition of three further incentive conditions as factors favorable to a full integration into society.
First, cultural pluralism in Walzer is inclusive in nature.
The institutional encouragement of the exercise of an active citizenship — particularly in associations with an economic and social vocation — is considered a natural extension of cultural engagement.
Second, this pluralism is redistributive in nature. It proves necessary to accompany it with an active policy of professional integration and of reallocation of resources for the benefit of the most deprived and of the poorest communities. The incentive to associative and union militancy responds to this objective of redistribution. In the same vein, Walzer proposes a redistribution of resources between cultural communities — these ensuring social-support services in the United States — between the better endowed (the Jewish community in particular) and the more poorly endowed (communities of African-American or Latin American origin, for example).
Third, faced with an unfixed identity evolution that becomes individualized and complex, Walzer suggests generalizing the possibility for each person to identify on the basis of several belongings (this is generally a dual belonging, one national and the other associated with the original community). Indeed, reasoning in terms of historical community no longer suffices to account for the evolution of democratic societies traversed by accelerated movements of individualization.
Moreover, in these societies, if one does not choose the cultural heritage that is transmitted, it is entirely possible to separate from it totally or partially. Thus, the development of the process of individualization gives rise to affiliations of a pluralist nature: in general, then, a dual belonging — Jewish-American, Italian-American, Latino-American, African-American, etc. There thus develops, in Walzer’s expression, a hyphenated identity. An important point, however: the processes of individualization, and the multi-belonging that follows, in no way call into question, according to Michael Walzer, the indispensable role of the historical and cultural community. The latter remains an indispensable reference when individuals feel the need to anchor themselves to indefectible ties. Indeed, circulation among several inherited or chosen identities can only take place under good conditions if there exist “anchorage points” — historical and cultural communities, in this case — which provide bearings for the redeployment of identities.
Jewish belonging in the Diaspora and French laïcité
Can one refer to Jewish thinking on the maintenance and development of the collective personality in the Diaspora in the permanent debates on laïcité that stir and divide French society? Or, on the contrary, has this thought developed in periods or sociopolitical contexts so different from the French reality of today that mobilizing this contribution would be disqualified in advance? Before answering this question, I wish to make a few clarifications concerning my approach to the particularly sensitive theme of laïcité in France.
First, for some three decades, French laïcité has been regularly mobilized on questions of Islam and its alleged excesses, on the dangers of Islamism in particular, and even against terrorist attacks. In this climate, pleas for an “open” — that is, “tolerant” — democracy are accused of laxness. The debate centers on an intransigent opposition between those, on the one hand, who wish to harden laïcité, ceaselessly extending the spaces of neutrality (sartorial in particular); and those, on the other, who think one must hold to the sole neutrality of the State and its agents, arguing that any hardening is counterproductive, inducing forms of resistance from many Muslims who interpret it as a discriminatory attack on their religion as such.
As regards Jews, the focus of public debate on laïcité in the direction of the Muslim religion and its pathological excesses obscures its deleterious effects on their collective existence: the non-recognition of Jews as actors in the country’s history and development, social destabilization consequent upon the resumption and renewal of an antisemitism that surges periodically with greater and greater intensity, loss of confidence in the protection supposed to result from the Jews’ successful integration into the “republican pact”; and finally, a risk of loss of substance for the Jewish world in France as a whole, consequent not only on the emigration of some of its members but above all — in a France often obsessed with the secular spirit — on the difficulty of having an increasingly secularized Jewish culture recognized as fully part of the national patrimony. While it is not a matter of imputing to French laïcité all the difficulties the Jewish world of this country encounters in the transmission of a teeming Jewish culture, more and more recent works demonstrate the role of this “over-interpreted secularist atmosphere” which irrigates all French institutions and reaches well beyond the 1905 law, in limiting the possibilities for the Jewish world in France to anchor a collective presence (beyond its diversity), both within society and within its historical and cultural tradition.13
The important colloquium on The Jews, a Blind Spot in the National Narrative, op. cit., evoked in the introduction to this article, with on the one hand the mention of a “secularist bias” as one of the explanatory factors of the effacement of the Jews as actors of the History of France as much as of their own history; and on the other, the internalization of this secularist bias by Jewish historians themselves or those in empathy with the Jewish world.
On the difficulties of collective affirmation of the Jews in France, see Michel Wieviorka in his analysis of the crisis of the model he calls “neo-republican,” which is supposed to grant a certain tolerance to the Jews for their collective expression in the public space, in exchange for their attachment to the republican pact. But this tolerance is not a recognition, and this intermediate situation proves today insufficient and destabilizing, according to the author.
Pierre Nora analyzes the “disaffiliation” of part of the Jews in France with respect to the republican pact over the past twenty years in his article: “Mémoire et identité juive dans la France contemporaine,” in Regards croisés sur le Proche-Orient (Michel Derczanski, ed.), Editions Yago, 2011.
Second, the question under debate is that of the interpretation of laïcité on the basis of the 1905 law through its triptych — separation of Church and State, freedom of conscience, neutrality of the State with respect to religions and convictions — and not the principle of laïcité itself. Indeed, this model of laïcité has had very concrete effects on individuals, of personal emancipation with respect to religious and traditional assignations. Even if, as we will see below, one may discuss the model’s claims to universality, the form of individualized citizenship it has generated is deeply anchored in mores, in the same way that the cultural traditions which shape minority belongings are anchored. To my mind, it is indeed a certain rigid interpretation of the principle of laïcité that poses problems, and not the principle as such. I align myself here with François Dubet when, reacting to certain remarks in a book exclusively at the charge of the French principle of laïcité, he responds in a nuanced manner: “While one can easily share the critique of a secular crispation that has lost its initial impetus to become nothing but a way of defending itself against the mutations of a society henceforth plural, the question of laïcité does not disappear for all that (…). Behind the abstraction of a universal and national model, many individuals have found paths of personal emancipation and a certain freedom. They were able to free themselves from the obligation to believe (…).
They were able to escape traditional assignations.”14
Third, symmetrically, provided one consents to leave the heaven of abstractions, individual references to cultural identities — majority or minority — have very real effects as supports for the formation of subjects, for self-understanding, and for the emancipation of individuals. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, going further, forcefully emphasizes that “the denial of recognition [of cultural identity] can be a form of oppression.”15 Now, anxious to defend a laïcité above identities, by relegating them to an inferior sphere supposed to be particularist, many authors maintain the confusion between identity and its retrograde form, identitarianism. This is the case of the political scientist Alain Policar, for example, who writes: “Insufficient attention is paid to the fact that the reference to a common identity or to ‘our roots’ implies the idea that all authenticity is contained in the origins. Subsequent influences, foreign by definition, are then but denaturation.”16 Policar here describes a fundamentalist conception of identity, hostile to all common life, which corresponds perfectly to Philippe Corcuff’s definition of identitarianism: “a conception that reduces individuals or groups to a single or principal, homogeneous and closed identity.”17 It should be noted that the Jewish thinkers of cultural difference do not slide into identitarian drift. This is obvious with Walzer, partisan of multi-belonging, but also with Dubnov stating that the consideration of cultural identity is a condition for any participation in national civic life, and with Kallen, great defender of dialogue and interrelation among identified cultures.
To criticize identitarianisms, Philippe Corcuff continues, “is not to refuse any place to individual and collective identities in politics; it is to challenge the political fixation on a single, homogeneous and closed identity in apprehending an individual or a group.” And he adds: “it is legitimate to defend minority cultural identities.”
In sum, we are in the presence of two modes of legitimacy — and not of legality — strongly anchored in subjectivities: republican laïcité, on one side, undeniable vector of an emancipation of individuals issued from the majority culture, but struggling to recognize a pluricultural sociological evolution; cultural minorities, on the other, bearers of other forms of singularity claimed as cultural rights deserving of recognition.
Currently, in the wake of the emotion consequent on attacks of Islamist origin, public debate focuses on pathological forms of Islam through the “struggle against separatism” — that is, against attempts to break the republican pact — and against “communitarianism” defined (at last!) as a will to subject a group to the interpreted norms of a religion (in this case, Islam). But the political debate does not for the moment concern the general question recalled by François Dubet: “[we must] redefine a secular alternative, a rule preserving a manner of living together with our differences.”18
To do this, it seems pertinent to consider the question of French laïcité in its most general form: of its relation, beyond religions, between the majority and the cultural minorities. It is therefore a matter of stepping back from the focus on the religious — more precisely on Islam — and questioning the presuppositions of the French model of laïcité which claims to derive from the philosophy of the Enlightenment: a model of citizenly relation with a universal vocation, on the one hand, faced with minorities representative of particularist traditions, on the other.
In this perspective, it is interesting to draw on a text by Henri Pena-Ruiz,19 one of the philosophers long-time defenders of a demanding laïcité, who returns to the fundamentals underpinning the French model of laïcité, beyond the relation to the religious. And to confront his argument with the analyses of the Jewish thinkers of cultural plurality — Michael Walzer principally.
Fundamentals of French laïcité and critical resources in modern Jewish thought
The interest of Pena-Ruiz’s article is to enter into dialogue with the partisans of greater recognition of cultural pluralism in France, by responding to the criticisms most often addressed to the French form of laïcité and to its evolution. He retains two principally: the negation of cultural difference, on the one hand, and the negation of the universal character of the French model — characterized as a mere cultural model embedded in a national tradition.
Concerning the negation of differences, Pena-Ruiz argues that there is here a misunderstanding. Minority cultures are in no way denied, he says, but they drag in their wake oppressive and retrograde elements that relegate them to the rank of particularisms: “But by a common slippage (…) ‘cultures’ thus understood [as a whole] may convey oppressive traditions. And the refusal to dissociate certain cultural traits from the wholes within which they take their place leads thereupon to suspecting any criticism that targets them of disrespect for cultures taken as totalities.”20
Pena-Ruiz continues, setting forth his interpretation of the role of laïcité: “It is precisely because laïcité results from an effort to set at a distance the traditions and to assume them only in their authentically cultural dimension, to the exclusion of any oppressive norm, that it can have universal value, without however denying particular realities. The secular ideal unites all human beings through what raises them above all enclosure.”21
A general remark first: the movement of “communitarian” thinkers (with Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel in particular) has shown convincingly that to criticize a tradition in an emancipatory sense, one must first know it in order to appropriate it. Moreover, the absence of this familiarization with one’s culture of origin generates forms of alienation — of non-reflective submission to the dominant culture — which pose problems for a consented integration into society. But once the bases of one’s own culture are acquired, every individual is at liberty to break the ties — totally or partially — with his original culture. Against any possibility of communal assignation, the right of the individual must take precedence over collective rights in democratic societies. It remains the case that for such an appropriation to be able to occur, evolutions are necessary in the consideration of the question of cultural pluralism.22
The Jewish thinkers of the right and of the recognition of cultural pluralism are suspect neither of advocating communal enclosure, nor of accommodating themselves to the oppressive and inegalitarian forms included in the Jewish tradition.
The first of them, Simon Dubnov, was close to a Jewish socialist movement, the Bund (the Union of Jewish Workers), which fought against all forms of oppression and for citizenly equality, notably equality between men and women. As for Michael Walzer, he has proposed, in line with Jewish modernity, to submit the whole of the Jewish tradition to a concerted critical evaluation, in accordance with the criteria of secularization, the extension of human rights, and political democracy.23
It is above all the second misunderstanding identified by Pena-Ruiz that poses a problem — the one that would consider laïcité as a mere “cultural product” and not as a universal principle (thus independent of historical traditions) of organization of society. We are thus brought back to the debate between universalism, above traditions, and particularism, locked into a tradition. Pena-Ruiz’s argument here is unappealable: laïcité is not negotiable, he says, for its status is universal — just as Habeas corpus (the prohibition of arbitrary detentions not framed by law), first recognized in England, does not hold only for the English. Consequently, for Pena-Ruiz, it is not a matter of defending laïcité as a conquest inscribed in a national history steeped in Catholicism.
This universal status of laïcité, according to him, would render derisory any attempt to soften it into an “open laïcité” — which would make no sense.24
By referring to the Jewish thinkers of modernity, one can advance two types of objection — one theoretical, the other more concrete — to Pena-Ruiz’s argument:
On the theoretical plane, first, Michael Walzer has brought to light in a famous article the existence of two universalisms:25 the first, dominant in Western consciousness, is a universalism that comes from above, with the claim to shape all human communities around a single conception of the good life, of ethical excellence, of the just society or of the good political regime. This centralizing universalism, Walzer calls covering-law universalism [universalisme de surplomb]. It corresponds perfectly to the most widespread vision in France, and the one made explicit by Pena-Ruiz.
The other universalism — the universalism from below, decentralized — is the one in which each society progresses by following its own path, integrating, for example, experiences of emancipation drawn from other cultures, in accordance with its own historical traditions. This other universalism, respectful of cultural diversity, presents itself for Walzer as a universalism of reiteration. It is in particular the path followed by the Jewish Diaspora, that of Jewish modernity up to our day.
There are of course interrelations between these two forms of universalism.
It is therefore not a matter of opposing them systematically in practice. But Walzer’s demonstration prompts us to temper the claims of the partisans of a covering-law laïcité to present themselves as the sole defenders of universalism in the face of minorities confined to particularism.
The second objection to Pena-Ruiz’s argument on the universality of laïcité is that he confines himself to the terrain of theory and abstraction, feigning to ignore the very concrete politico-religious context that shaped the spirit of the law at the origin of the French conception of laïcité. Emmanuel Levinas, in an article in which he notes the difficulties of making Judaism live in practice in France, gives us one of the best illustrations of this “catho-laïcité”: “The game is indeed unequal between Christianity, which even in a secular State is present everywhere, and Judaism, which dares not show itself outside, held back by the scruple of breaking, by such indiscretion, the pact of emancipation. The secular city incorporated into its secularized substance the forms of Catholic life (…) Churches are integrated into landscapes that always seem to await them and to sustain them. One does not think about this Christian atmosphere as one does not think of the air one breathes.
The separation of Church and State did not dispel it. The rhythm of legal time is punctuated by Catholic holidays; cathedrals orient cities and sites. Art, literature, morality still nourish themselves on these themes.”26
And Levinas concludes, further on, with a call for the de-marginalization of Judaism in France, through its integration into the heart of the dominant society, into the heart of the diffusion of knowledge in particular: “Judaism can only survive if it is recognized and propagated by laymen [non-Jews] who, outside any Judaism, are the promoters of the common life of human beings.”27
Conclusion
Jewish modernity, by putting an end to the hegemony of the religious over thought, action and political organization within Judaism, has modified the apprehension of the collective personality of the Jews in the Diaspora. Considered in the eighteenth century as religious minorities in their country of residence, the Jews who remain attached to Judaism — beyond their diasporic path and whatever their tie to religion — are henceforth united as a people by reference to a common past, on the one hand, and by a sense of belonging to this people, on the other.
From then on — a reflection that began a little before the creation of a Jewish homeland in Mandatory Palestine, prelude to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 — how to reconcile the existence of the Jews as a people (or collective entities tied to the Jewish people) within their society of residence in the Diaspora with their generalized citizen status in Europe and the West at the start of the twentieth century? Three Jewish thinkers played a primordial role in the creation and evolution of reflections concerning difference in the political organization of nation-states: Simon Dubnov, from Eastern Europe at the start of the twentieth century, Horace Kallen, also at the start of the twentieth century but in the United States, and Michael Walzer, another American who is our contemporary.28
Simon Dubnov defends with vigor the idea of collective equality of cultural rights for the Jews, complementary in his eyes to the individual equality of civic rights they had already obtained in the European and Western nations. For Dubnov indeed, culture in the deepest sense — the whole of the production of the spirit of a people — is the factor that enables the Jewish people to weld and perpetuate itself without even needing a sovereignty bound to an anchorage in its own land. The claim for collective cultural rights, condition of the existence of the Jewish people in the Diaspora for Dubnov, opposes the idea of a dilution of the collective personality of the Jews within their nation of residence (as seemed to be taking shape in nineteenth-century France). But it is not a matter of advocating communal enclosure or withdrawal — on the contrary: for Dubnov, obtaining equal cultural rights is a condition and not an obstacle for the exercise by the Jews of their full citizenship in their nation of residence.
As he foresaw, the path traced by Dubnov is prolonged in the America of the 1910s, broadened to the whole set of cultural minorities by the philosopher Horace Kallen. Opposed to the dominant ideology of the “melting pot” aiming at suppressing cultural differences by integrating them into a common culture supposed to be enriched thereby, Kallen built the theoretical premises of a multicultural society. Setting out from his personal experience as a great observer of the dynamics of cultural minorities, and of Jewish life in particular, he had remarked that this Jewish minority was at once the most advanced in its cultural and social development and the most desirous of integrating into the common culture and into the American nation.
Whence a multicultural project that wished to be balanced, seeking to reconcile minority cultural expressions and full citizenly participation in the common life.
It is with Michael Walzer in the United States that a Jewish thought of cultural difference reaches maturity. Acting for several decades on a double plane — of theoretical production and of animation of the debate of ideas through the journal Dissent (Controverse), which he edits — Walzer has a perfect grasp of the drifts now well identified: the negation of cultural differences, and the unchecked promotion of cultural difference. So Walzer is not content, like Dubnov or Kallen, with demonstrating that obtaining cultural rights remains compatible with the exercise of full national citizenship. His project, based on a balance between identity and citizenship, contains proposals — including economic or redistributive aids — aimed at fostering the exercise of economic and political citizenship. Moreover, conscious of the evolution toward a greater individualization of cultural engagements in democratic and liberal societies, Walzer integrates the idea of the circulation of individuals among several belongings. He draws two consequences on the plane of concrete proposals: on the one hand, the recognition of a status of dual belonging (or, more rarely, multi-belonging), what he calls hyphenated identity — Jewish-American, Italian-American, etc.; and on the other, the reinforcement of anchorage points, of reference cultural institutions, so that cultural nomadism, where it exists, may be accompanied by bearings that prevent a deadly blurring of identities.
Is Jewish thought on cultural difference too distant from the contemporary French context to constitute an appropriate resource in view of the very lively debates that periodically stir society on this theme? On the contrary, as we have seen, this thought brings highly precise elements of response apt to deconstruct an argument that confers absolute superiority on French laïcité — considered as an intangible principle — on the grounds that it alone would hold the keys both of the emancipation of all citizens, on the one hand, and of the universality of social organization, on the other. Yet on the plane of emancipation, Simon Dubnov as well as Michael Walzer show that the critique of oppressive and retrograde forms within Judaism is already well under way; but above all, that it must be conducted in close connection with the tradition in order to be massively appropriated, and not by a directive proclaimed from above. On the plane of universality, when we abandon the ideal world of principles for the real world, Emmanuel Levinas’s demonstration is implacable as to the rootedness of French laïcité in a specific universe inherited from Catholicism, which imposes itself on us as familiarly as “the air one breathes.”
That said, the broad lines of the French form of laïcité are well anchored in society and even constitute a specificity of this country that will not disappear. In fact, the debate does not bear on the principle of laïcité itself, but on its interpretation. The stakes are clear: to confine oneself to State neutrality, in the spirit of the 1905 law, or to extend it ever further toward a neutrality of cultures in society and the public space; to broaden the possibilities of recognition of cultural difference or to confine it as tolerance, in the intimate space at the limit. The debate is, moreover, obscured by the focus on the religious — on Islam — and more precisely on its pathological forms, in the expression of Cécile Laborde: identitarianism and separatism (which also concern religions and sects other than Islam), the hyperpoliticization of the religious, terrorism claiming the mantle of Islam.
The debate would be clearer and more fruitful if, on the one hand, one dissociated the pathological forms from the ordinary forms of the religious, and if, on the other hand, the question of laïcité were debated on the more general plane of the place granted to cultural minorities — between tolerance and recognition — in French society.
Even if it does not appear in the foreground, Judaism in France is fully concerned by the conception and interpretation adopted for laïcité in this country. The 2019 colloquium on “The Jews, a Blind Spot in the National Narrative” laid bare their effacement as collective actors in the elaboration of the history of France. This collective invisibility necessarily has effects on their sense of belonging to the nation and to French society. Thus, under the repeated blows of various sources of antisemitism — issuing from the populist hateful far right or from murderous Islamism — many Jews, faced with the want of solidarity from the active forces of civil society in particular, have disaffiliated themselves from the republican pact. The effects are equally real on losses of the sense of belonging to Judaism. If the rupture of ties results from enlightened choices on the basis of a knowledge of one’s culture of origin, there is nothing to be said against it. If, on the other hand, it is a matter of a rupture of ties by default, linked to the difficulties of connecting with one’s culture in a universe of social competition and systematic underestimation of minority identities, this is hard to accept.
All the more so as, let us recall, the Shoah struck French Jews very harshly with the extermination of a quarter of its population at the time, with consequences — including on the demographic plane — that are still felt today.
When one defends the idea of greater recognition of collective identities, one generally advances proposals in the domain of educational policies, of the granting at times of certain collective rights to reinforce religious or cultural institutions — with an absolute primacy of individual right over any collective right — of the granting of financial means to keep minority cultures alive, and of a training of the media world in the representation of cultural difference. But more fundamentally, before questions of right and of financial means, it is a matter of orienting public debate toward an important change of mindset in the consideration of minority cultures. As for the Jews of France, who often show themselves more “republican” than the others, the change of perspective concerns them too in the highest degree: for example, no provision of the 1905 law obliged the Jewish historians or those in empathy with the Jewish world who participated in the elaboration of the national narrative to censor themselves, to endorse the invisibility of the Jews as collective actors of this history. The question of their recognition is therefore also the affair of the Jews themselves, of their capacity to present themselves as a collectivity — diverse, to be sure, but belonging to a people animated by a common community of destiny.
Proceedings under the direction of Paul Salmona and Claire Soussen, Albin Michel, 2021.↩︎
Ibid., p. 19.↩︎
Ibid., p. 19.↩︎
Ibid., p. 10.↩︎
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Simon Doubnov: L’Homme-mémoire,” in Réflexions sur le Génocide, La Découverte-bibliothèque 10/18, 2004 [1995], pp. 86–104.↩︎
Simon Doubnov, Lettres sur le judaïsme ancien et nouveau (Letters on Old and New Judaism), translated from the Russian, annotated and introduced by Renée Poznanski, Cerf, 2011 [1988].↩︎
In his book Comment le peuple juif fut inventé (The Invention of the Jewish People) (Flammarion, 2010), Schlomo Sand undertakes a critique of the great Jewish historians of the nineteenth century, and of Simon Dubnov in particular, enrolling the latter among the pre-Zionist historians who would supposedly grant a large place to biological and essentialist attributes in their definition of the nature of the Jewish people. Schlomo Sand advances as his principal argument the sentence in which Dubnov — inspired by Herder — speaks of cultural ties as those of a [cultural] nation that is immutable (emphasis ours). Now, Dubnov did not take up Herder’s term, who spoke of natural cultural ties — precisely avoiding essentializing these cultural ties. In Dubnov’s mind, the term “immutable” implies ties that last a long time and not ties of blood. Moreover, Dubnov frequently expresses in his Letters… his non-essentialist conception of the formation of the Jewish people: the ethnic reference reflects the original tie of this people around a community of provenance; the cultural attributes progressively substitute themselves for the ethnic attributes in its constitutive heritage, in step with its historical evolution.↩︎
Horace Kallen, Democracy versus Melting-Pot, in “The Nation,” 1915. Article available online: expo98.msu.edu/people/kallen.htm↩︎
In fact, Horace Kallen seems rather to refer to the works of Ahad Ha’am (pseudonym of Asher Ginsberg), one of the principal theorists of Zionism, who professed the same ideas as Simon Dubnov on cultural Judaism.↩︎
See in particular, Michael Walzer, “Le nouveau tribalisme,” in Pluralisme et démocratie, Edition Esprit, 1997 [1990].↩︎
See Allan Arkush, “Walzer’s secular Jewish Thought,” in Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, July 2012, p. 231.↩︎
Michael Walzer, “Le nouveau tribalisme,” op. cit., p. 111.↩︎
See in particular:↩︎
François Dubet, “La laïcité et son autre,” apropos the book by Béatrice Mabilon-Bonfils and Geneviève Zoïa, La laïcité au risque de l’Autre, Editions de l’Aube, 2015. On the site of la vie des idées: http://laviedesidees.fr/La-laicite-et-son-autre.html↩︎
Charles Taylor, “La politique de la reconnaissance,” in Multiculturalisme, différence et démocratie, Champs-Flammarion, 1997 [1992], p. 55.↩︎
Alain Policar, “La laïcité travestie ou les infortunes de l’identité,” AOC média, 2018.↩︎
Philippe Corcuff, La Grande confusion, Textuel, 2020, p. 80. The author analyzes the two symmetrical drifts from identity to identitarianism: among minorities, more frequently targeted by criticism of identitarianism or communitarianism; but also among the majoritarians, partisans of a reinforced laïcité, which Corcuff defines as a “national-republican” laïcité. Ibid., pp. 84–85.↩︎
François Dubet, “La laïcité et son autre,” op. cit., p. 6.↩︎
Henri Pena-Ruiz, “Culture, cultures et laïcité,” in Hommes et Migrations, 2006, no. 1259, pp. 6–16.↩︎
Ibid., p. 3.↩︎
Ibid., p. 4, emphasis ours.↩︎
I leave aside here the question of the treatment of the pathological forms of religion: political Islamism and terrorism in particular. On this subject, Cécile Laborde, in a “Letter from London” published in the journal Esprit (June 2021), emphasizes that the United Kingdom, contrary to France, completely separates the struggle against Islamic terrorism from the management of cultural and ethnic pluralism. According to the author, this practice that separates the pathological forms from the ordinary forms of religious and cultural activity has the effect of pacifying intercommunity relations.↩︎
Michael Walzer, The Paradox of Liberation, Yale University, 2015 (text not translated into French).↩︎
Henri Pena-Ruiz, “Culture, cultures et laïcité,” op. cit., pp. 7–8.↩︎
Henri Pena-Ruiz, “Culture, cultures et laïcité,” op. cit., pp. 7–8.↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, “Comment le judaïsme est-il possible ?”, in Difficile liberté, Albin Michel, 1976 (1963), pp. 367–368.↩︎
Ibid., p. 373.↩︎
Among the French Jewish authors who have oriented their work on cultural difference, let us cite: Richard Marienstras, Être un peuple en diaspora, Éditions Les prairies ordinaires, 2014 [1975] and Michel Wieviorka, La différence, Balland, 2001.↩︎