The dossier of this issue is devoted to the theme “Visible Jews / Invisible Jews.” This theme, or rather this reality, has accompanied the history and geography of the Jews, in happy periods as well as unhappy ones.
One could even say that it began in the mythical times of the children of Israel still in Egypt, since a midrash holds that the only ones to leave Egypt among the children of Israel were those who had not changed their name, their language, or their clothes — that is, those who kept a visible Jewish identity.
Over the course of their long history, Jews have at certain periods chosen — or been compelled into — a position of invisibility.
Such was the case of the children hidden during the Shoah with non-Jewish individuals or in Christian religious institutions, as happened in France.
Such was again the case, for example, after the Shoah, when under the effect of trauma and the fear that persecution might begin again, many Jews changed their names. But also at other moments — as for instance between the two wars in France, where in their desire to be accepted by the surrounding society, they would change their names while sometimes choosing the majority religion. In the second half of the 19th century, Heine wrote that conversion was “the entry passport into society”; later, at the beginning of the 20th, this was the path taken by Mahler. That same 19th century was, moreover, “the belle époque of antisemitism” on the Parisian stage, as Chantal Meyer-Plantureux illustrates in her contribution. An antisemitism that saw Jews everywhere — that delirium illustrated before the war in publications such as Je suis partout.
During the persecutions that preceded and followed the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, there appeared the phenomenon of the Marranos, Jews officially converted but who secretly kept the Jewish faith and practices. Livia Parnès devotes an article in this issue to the Portuguese Marranos, who over the centuries dispersed across the globe while preserving their memory.
Closer to our own time, there has been and there still is the antisemitic delirium that sees Jews everywhere, and the hand of the Jews everywhere. One need only evoke The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published more than a hundred years ago, which sees the hand and the power of the Jews in every phenomenon occurring in the world, and which still enjoys a brilliant career with new editions, notably in certain Arab countries.
Everywhere, moreover, antisemites seek to discover hidden Jews — like those who kept a register of name changes.
But let us not forget those Jews who chose extreme visibility, like the Hasidim who wear the fur hat and black silk garb (dating from the 17th century in Eastern Europe), or even the wearing of the kippah, which appeared only in the Middle Ages.
After addressing the theme in history, a second part of the issue takes up this theme in philosophy and in current affairs.
There has been — and there still is — an invisibilization of Jews within the collective reality of the present, as Evelyn Torton Beck shows in the American feminist movement. But there is also, more broadly, a collective invisibilization of Jews regarding their contribution to the History of France, as Paul Salmona shows here.
Lola Lafon, in an interview with Brigitte Stora about a night spent at the Anne Frank Museum, shows that behind the universalization of the figure of Anne Frank there has often lain a desire to efface the fact that she was a young Jewish girl.
Emmanuel Levine, in a work devoted to the forms of Jewish invisibility in Levinas, shows in particular that for the latter “The vision of the face would not be the representation of a facial appearance, but sensitivity to the unjust sufferings that befall others.”
In a probing dialogue with Philippe Zard, Rabbi Rivon Krygier examines the various aspects of the voluntary choice of visibility or invisibility by Jews, in the ancient world as in our contemporary world: between dress code and discourse toward others. What balance between private space and public space?
As in each issue of PLURIELLES, part of the theme treated concerns the domains of literature and art, with a piece by Cécile Rousselet comparing the invisibility of the slave and of the Jew in André Schwarz-Bart; the complexity of Jewishness in Romain Gary, considered under the visibility/invisibility aspect, is taken up by Anny Dayan Rosenman. Meanwhile, Itzhak Goldberg examines the challenges that the passage from figurative to non-figurative art represented at the beginning of the 20th century, with its implications for the visible-world / invisible-world problematic.
A final part of the dossier consists of testimonies that illustrate the complexity of our problematic. Céline Masson shows the psychological implications of recovering one’s original name, for those who have inherited a name changed for various reasons. Nadine Vasseur describes the lived experience of a child whose father has just changed his Jewish name — and hence the child’s name — to a commonplace one, allowing him to blend into the crowd. Carole Ksiazenicer-Matheron recounts the story of her father at the time when the Vichy regime had decided to register the Jews through a self-denunciatory questionnaire.
And Jean-Charles Szurek tells us the gripping story of Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel, who, passing from a Jewish name to a non-Jewish Polish name during the war, at the same time passed from the state of Jew to the state of Catholic priest — only to recover, years later, his state of Jew… in Israel.
Finally, outside the dossier, Simon Wuhl shows us, through a study of Michael Walzer, how for the latter Judaism grasped as culture bears within it a universalism.
Happy reading.