Jewish visibilities: an interview with Philippe Zard.
The notion of invisibilization is in fashion, carried by a critical sociology grounded in the paradigm of domination. It is certainly not without interest when applied to the history of antisemitism, which has taken at times the path of stigmatizing visibilization (from the rouelle to the yellow star), at others that of invisibilization (the effacement of the Jewish fact or signifier). But it is not so much from this angle that we wish to hear the voice of a rabbi, as from an internal point of view. We will speak with you less about Jewish sociology than about Jewish normativity, about Judaism as observance and as religious thought: what does Judaism have to say about its own relation to visibility?
– One can start with a question that holds a bit of all the others. From a normative point of view, the Jews are called to “distinguish” themselves not only by their religious practices, but even by their appearance: does this make them what we would call a “visible minority”?
– If we place ourselves from the point of view of halakha, of the normativity defined by great decisors such as Maimonides, yes, such injunctions exist: to depart from the ways of the idolaters (not to follow “the ways of the Amorites”) is a guiding principle. And so, indeed, it enjoins not dressing like others. There are even very precise injunctions from the Torah: not to shave the corners of the beard, not to shave the sides of the head (and consequently, the whole skull)… Maimonides considers that these were idolatrous practices in the time of the Hebrews. Hence a vast debate, in the Middle Ages: if such was the reason, what would have to be done once idolaters no longer had the same practices? This was, one understands, a polemic against Maimonides’s contextual explanations. There remains, fundamentally, and independently of the reasons one gives for it, the idea that one must have a distinct appearance and attire.
– But it is not always easy to distinguish between the signs imposed in the name of a ritual obligation, the signs that were not originally particularly distinctive but have become so, and others that were not originally ritual but have ended up being so…
– Let us take a few examples. There have been customs, like the wearing of a head covering, which became, late on, the wearing of the kippah. This did not impose itself from the outset: there are notably midrashim that say that men walk bareheaded, unlike women… One can also think of the wearing of the beard. It is notable that Muslims gave themselves similar rules, but one will notice that the cut of the beard among them is deliberately distinct from that of the Jews — just like the way of covering the head among one or the other, with this same concern to distinguish oneself. The signs of belonging of the Jews are not necessarily their exclusive prerogative, even if, each time, details allow specific modalities to be distinguished… One thinks too of the peyot (ritual sidelocks). This custom of letting them grow is not an obligation in itself, but it ostentatiously manifests respect for a commandment concerning the cutting of hair; or again the tzitziot (ritual fringes of the tallit, the prayer shawl). This too is a sign of Jewish visibility, even though it is not obligatory to display them. Other signs carry an intrinsic message — for example the mezuzah, an application of a positive commandment, whose first effect is to signal Jewish houses among all the others. It is a ritual of memory as much as a way of maintaining and cultivating one’s singularity.
In itself, this kind of marking and demarcation between communities, between tribes, was rather common in the ancient world. At certain periods of Jewish history, well before modern times even, it could happen that this distinction was felt as an embarrassment by generations anxious to blend into the dominant culture. This is what we see for example in the deuterocanonical book of the Maccabees: there are denounced the Jews who, wanting to participate in the games held in the Greek cities (knowing that the games were held in the nude), practiced epispasm, a kind of cosmetic operation to hide their circumcision, in order to blend into the mass, to be no longer distinguishable…
– This will to externalize difference, by signs or rites, is no doubt, to a contemporary eye, what distinguishes Jewish religiosity or identity from Christianity. What is proper to Judaism is also that religion is not conceived as a merely interior affair (nor is it so in Christianity, for that matter, but never mind the shortcuts…)
– Yes, it has become something specific with the abandonment, in secularization, of a good number of ritual aspects in Christianity; many of our Christian friends moreover envy us for having maintained these ritual or identitarian markers. I believe it was an illusion of many secular Jews to tell themselves that they were going to maintain Jewish identity through culture (poetry, song, or narrative), blithely dispensing with the distinctive signs of adherence: but a very large part of memory circulates and survives thanks to ritual. We see this with the Marranos of Portugal who, after centuries, knew nothing more except, for example, that they had to light a candle on Friday evening. Ritual is decisive because we are beings of behavior before being beings of thought. And appearances are decisive factors, the drive belts of identity. Of course, the problem is that in the modern era, we mean to keep our identity while being part of the concert of nations, to remain ourselves and enter the city, not to create a barrier. Hence hybrid behaviors, forms of acculturation. The whole stake lies there: to integrate into the wider world without dissolving into it.
– In the case of the Marranos, there was a clear dissociation between the domestic maintenance of rite and the secrecy, the masking outside: one had to be invisible to the external world. Mutatis mutandis (and the disappearance of the peril is no minor detail!), for secularized Jews this model was maintained: “Jew at home, man outside.”
– That was the model of emancipation promoted by Mendelssohn’s disciples at the beginning of the 19th century (even if this formula seems to be not his but that of the poet Yehuda Leib Gordon)… It is this very state of mind that enabled the transition; it is this posture that has allowed many Jews to take on this double belonging, of singularity and citizenship, in order to solve the survival equation. But non-hybrid, antithetical attitudes survived: identitarian display and concealment. From a traditional point of view, this is already played out in the scroll of Esther, which speaks, for the first time, of the Jews in diaspora, in exile. There is indeed a question, in Haman’s diatribe, of the stigmatization of a separate people, which refuses to mingle with others, in that its members are governed by other laws, supposedly hostile and rebellious… We are already in the famous accusation of plotting by international Jewry… Now, with regard to identitarian affirmation, it is striking that the two heroic figures work in tandem and in contrast: Mordecai tells Esther to protect herself by not revealing her identity; but he displays himself without complexes. When he is asked why he refuses to bow before the vizier Haman, he replies that it is because he is Jewish! Double discourse, double strategy: on one side, to confront Haman ostensibly, descendant of Amalek, sworn enemy of Israel; on the other, to enjoin Esther not to reveal her Jewishness. I often say, jokingly, that his strategy for facing Haman’s hostility consists in telling Esther: “You be the Ashkenazi, and I’ll be the Sephardi!”
– This politics of discretion — isn’t it also that of Joseph, who is often brought close to Esther as a figure of the exiled Hebrew?
– It is a form of discretion — Joseph takes on Egyptian dress (like Moses, for that matter…), which amounts to integrating into the dominant culture — without however falling into self-effacement. For Esther, it is different: Mordecai expects the worst with Haman, he prepares his rear. Dissimulation is a defense strategy. By contrast, the whole Egyptian court knows perfectly well that Joseph is Hebrew. He shows it when he reveals himself to his brothers, when he has his father Jacob buried in the land of Canaan, accompanied by a delegation from the Egyptian court. Entered into diaspora, the Hebrew becomes… hybrid! In the same way, those who would later be called “court Jews” were clearly identified as Jews. To serve the State while remaining oneself.
– Yes, everyone knew that Joseph was Hebrew, but he was not separated. In the matter of distinctive marks, it is not the same thing to be visible (identifiable) as a Jew while being a “Jew among others” or to be a visible Jew the better to guarantee a separation, an isolation, a certain autarky? Isn’t this also a bit where the fractures within religious Judaism itself were created, starting, let us say, from the 19th century?
– Yes. What is happening is that the communal structure shatters. It is not only distinct dress: it is the language, the schools, the courts, the authority of the rabbis, everything that conveyed the maintenance of identity. Over time, there are fewer and fewer distinct behaviors, and even less will to distinguish oneself. To be Jewish becomes an often secondary attribute; yes, this reversal takes place, carried by the idea of the nation-State, by the hope that it would be the solution to the Jewish question. We know that, after the Dreyfus affair, this illusion begins to dissipate. The Jews are caught up by their identity, pointed at by those who refuse to assimilate it to theirs.
– And what then about the debates of the time within religious Judaism?
– There is a whole range of dispositions in self-affirmation, attempting to combine more or less Jewish identity and citizenship. There were certain cases of radical decisions. In American Reform, they went as far as forbidding the wearing of the kippah in synagogues, called “temples”! At Temple Emanu-El (New York), for a very long time, it was forbidden, even in prayer. Then it was only… allowed. Until today, it is not obligatory. It was a clear desire: not to impose a dress code that would distinguish from others; to privilege prayers in vernacular languages, etc. This does not concern only the Reform movement. One only needs to look at the architecture of 19th-century European synagogues: they resemble temples, sometimes churches; there were even organs and pulpits; the aim was indeed to blend into a model of ambient religiosity. So it was with the “consistorial” Judaism of the time, the official Judaism.
– To finish with the question of rite: that of Hanukkah deserves that we stop on it, on account of its degree of extraversion.
The commandment of “publication of the miracle” (pirsoum haness) corresponds indeed to the display of the victory of the revolt that put an end to the decrees of forced assimilation under Antiochus Epiphanes; the ritual is a kind of parade, a symbol of counter-Hellenization, of counter-assimilation. Normally the hanukkiah (Hanukkah candelabrum) is placed facing the mezuzah, at the entrance of the house; and failing that, at the window. It is the Jewish way of answering the injunction of assimilation. The Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, had understood the importance of communication. Many Jews (because of secularization and secondarily of the Shoah) had entered a kind of complex-ridden clandestinity; and he understood that we would recover dignity by “raising an army” (that was his term!) to go out and expose Judaism in the public square, to say “jewish is beautiful.” It is a master stroke, in which a traditional Judaism uses the techniques of modernity to help its faithful to recover a form of dignity, to come out of embarrassment and dare to be Jewish in the city. That said, the Judeans had not revolted against Hellenization in itself but against the dissolution of identitarian codes. There were 150 years of Hellenization before the revolt, and still more after, without that being shocking, so long as one could be both Jewish and an integral part of the Hellenistic world (for better and for worse). Today, in fundamentalist milieus, the festival of Hanukkah is presented as the struggle of Judaism, of the Torah, of light, against Hellenism, rational philosophy, darkness. It is a binary and Manichean vision!
– This goes as far as these ceremonies where giant hanukkiot are lit in certain major cities… Does this seem to you a gesture in good taste?
– It is the story of the pendulum. It was healthy to dare to affirm oneself; but this does not necessarily pass through denigrating what is other and falling into an overdetermined Jewish identity, in a somewhat shrill manner, in a kind of over-identity. I do not partake of this chauvinistic state of mind. But I believe that the singularity of France is that the exhibition of the religious is regarded there as indecent or displaced. We fall into the opposite excess by stigmatizing singularities. Communal affirmation is not necessarily a narrow communitarianism. To proclaim the right to difference is not ipso facto to demand a difference of right! In most European countries, the religious is displayed in the public square without provoking such debates. There is a balance, a vivre-ensemble in the concern for good taste and respect for public space that are to be sought, without overly tensing up at any manifestation of a religious character.
– It seems to me that Judaism is not targeted as such; I think it is the collateral victim of a political situation where it has no real part. French laïcité* was conquered against the power of a very powerful Church at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries; and, more recently, it has had to rethink itself in response to the new challenges that the affirmation of a very aggressive political Islam was throwing at it…*
– I agree. Fundamentally, if the veil had only been the expression of a religiosity, there would have been no reason to forbid it, even if there is room to discuss what it expresses in terms of women’s status. What one understands is that it is not played strictly at the personal and identitarian level: there is a political will, an authoritarian agenda…
– On modern Jewish visibility, it is rather remarkable that where the strictly religious signs often faded away, there has been, let us say from the 1970s on, a flowering of external signs of Jewishness (one thinks of the profusion of chai, magen David* and other pendants).*
– Secular man remains a homo religiosus. When one no longer finds one’s place within the framework of an instituted religious life, there remains a need for symbols: these are indeed forms of secularized religiosity, referring to a living Judaism, proud of what it is, but freed from the tutelage of a religious authority or an institution judged retrograde. It is in large part linked to Zionism and to what happened with the State of Israel. We were speaking earlier of Hanukkah: this festival has become a major symbol in Israel. The State has seized hold of it. Even though the Maccabees are not in good odor in traditional texts, these traditional signs have been taken up to secularize them and propose a modern political reading of them. Likewise for Tu BiShvat, which initially was not even a festival, and which became an important symbol with the creation of the State of Israel. This national rebirth aroused a kind of secular, hybrid religiosity, built around a national identity, even in the diaspora (by delegation, in a manner of speaking). There is not only crude opportunism in this. It is the sign of an identity mutation in search of meaning.
In parallel, we are also witnessing, for some forty years now, a return of the religious pure and hard, and not only secular appropriations of religious signs. Thus, I am struck to see that the black kippah is making a strong comeback. The fascination for the identitarian and the national, after the disappointment of modern ideologies like socialism or even unbridled capitalism, as fallback values is a worldwide phenomenon that raises many concerns. And I take the liberty of “prophesying” a return of the Christian religious, including in France, although in probably new forms, in the years to come.
– To finish, let us pass from visibility to audibility, if you will permit me. Is there something to be said about the Jewish voice, the Jewish public word in France (or in Europe)? Where are the Bubers, the Heschels, the Levinases who were able to have an audience beyond communal circles? Does Judaism still know how (and want) to speak to others?
– It is the whole challenge and richness of Judaism in diaspora to carry a voice that is at once that of Jewish wisdom and of attachment to its environment, at the junction of the particular and the universal. In Antiquity great figures did so: Philo of Alexandria, for example… But we are no longer in the time of great charismatic figures, in the classical sense of great men (or women) of spirit. The era has changed. Communication has changed. We are in a kind of great marketplace. One must stick to a certain type of expectation, to a way of treating subjects in an “influencer” language that is that of the new media codes. The best are not necessarily the most heard and recognized. Take the work of Charles Mopsik: in my opinion, he was clearly above the fray. There is a depth without equivalent in his writings, some of which (on homosexuality, for example) were truly precursors; but who really reads and knows him? A fortiori today: what great intellectual or spiritual figure would be in a position to emerge and to be audible in the media and digital din? And this is not true only for Judaism; we have changed paradigms, we are in something else.
– But what about even this will to address others? When one travels through religious websites, in France at least, one wonders what non-Jews might be interested in the debates that take place there.
– There is indeed a big problem… It is sometimes calamitous. The fact is that these sites nonetheless answer the expectations of a certain public, which wants the identitarian, the navel-gazing withdrawal. Then, there are nonetheless various personalities who, as can be seen on the Akadem site, know how to reach beyond their circles. There remains much to do to bear the colors of a Judaism that is affirmed and nevertheless turned toward the universal.
Interview conducted by Philippe Zard