For several years now, the achievements of the Enlightenment have been called into question, giving way to a return of the religious — often in its most sectarian form.
This issue of Plurielles is titled Judaïsme, religion et pouvoir politique (Judaism, Religion and Political Power). It begins from a single observation: the surging strength of religious messianist-Zionist movements that have corrupted the original secular Zionism, and the danger this development represents.
Carole Matheron reminds us that Gershom Scholem and Moshe Idel, though in divergent ways, have underscored the proximity between messianic movements and Hasidism, on account of their mystical approach, their collective dimension, and the central place granted to a charismatic personality maintaining a close bond with the faithful in their relationship to God. The article thus addresses the trajectory of Sabbataï Tsevi, of Jacob Frank and of the Baal Shem Tov, while Dominique Bourel shows, a contrario, what the Judaism of Moses Mendelssohn could be: an Enlightenment Judaism advocating a religion of reason. He recalls in this regard the central place Mendelssohn occupied as a philosopher within the Enlightenment movement.
Concerning Israel, Raphael Zagury-Orly delivers an in-depth analysis of this neo-messianism linked to the colonization of the occupied territories. He shows how its ideologues, and notably Rav Kook, have relied on a distorted interpretation of Jewish messianism — an interpretation that has spread throughout the Jewish public both in Israel and in the Diaspora, contesting the very foundations of socialist and secular Zionism and claiming to bring about “a perfect synthesis between Jewish orthodoxy, the halakha and an ethnocentric nationalism”. He notes that this movement also excludes from Jewish being a large portion of secular and liberal Jews in the diaspora, and turns the Torah into “a weapon of war” in the service of the colonization and occupation of the Palestinian Territories.
Sylvaine Bulle and Perle Nicolle-Hasid likewise show how the religious-Zionist messianism currently developing within the State of Israel “imposes, through its force and its exaltation, a political and electoral recomposition” and, consequently, a new political construction that entails moving beyond the secular Zionism — bearer of universal values — which was at the origin of the creation of the State of Israel.
Brigitte Stora analyzes the terrible synchronicity of two dramas: the destruction of Gaza by the Israeli army, and the antisemitic wave that, since October 7, 2023, has engulfed the world, recycling all the old antisemitic myths and prejudices. She asks whether the good conscience of antisemites — long undermined by the Shoah — has not found, in Benjamin Netanyahu’s criminal policy, the pretext for its recent resurrection, underscoring the ties between Holocaust denial and anti-Zionism.
We wished to present excerpts from an interview by the journalist Guid’on Lev with the philosopher Michael Walzer, originally published in Israel in the newspaper Haaretz, in which, on the basis of his definition of just wars, Walzer examines the specific case of the war in Gaza.
Claude Klein, one of Israel’s most eminent constitutional scholars, examines — in an article that has become a “classic” — the place of religion in Israel within legislative texts and in case law, as well as its evolution since the country’s founding, underscoring in particular the place and role of the Supreme Court in the State’s jurisprudence.
More broadly, Jean-Claude Monod, drawing on the theory of democracy put forward by Claude Lefort, recalls that, for Lefort, the democratic regime provides a framework for the expression of conflict, whereas autocratic regimes crush all difference beneath the fantasy of the One. He also reminds us that, in Lefort’s view, even if a theologico-political residue persists within democracy, democracy at the same time pries the political apart from the theological.
Martine Leibovici, for her part, has taken an interest in the modern rebirth of Hebrew and in the stakes of its secularization, drawing on the works of the filmmaker Nurith Aviv and on her film Langue sacrée, langue parlée (Sacred Language, Spoken Language). She also evokes, in this connection, the exchanges between Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin.
The transformation of Hebrew from sacred tongue into spoken tongue — first by Ben-Yehuda, then by the Jewish immigrants in Palestine — left within the language a religious dimension that cannot be secularized. It is in this spirit that Gershom Scholem, in a letter to Walter Benjamin, voices the fear that “the children of parents come from elsewhere,” speaking only this secularized language, will bear witness to a definitive loss of Hebrew’s dimension as sacred language.
Bernard Kalaora sets out from Y. H. Yerushalmi’s De la cour d’Espagne au ghetto italien (From the Spanish Court to the Italian Ghetto), in which Yerushalmi characterizes the status of the Jews essentially as that of Marranos, with their torn identity. He analyzes how this identity is transformed once political Zionism achieves its aim of safeguarding the Jews and builds a State with its own institutional functions. He underscores the shift in Judaism’s center of gravity — “from the Law and the text toward the State apparatus, from discussion toward decision, from internal plurality toward national unification, opening the way — after the occupation of the Palestinian territories — to the crumbling of universalist forces within Israeli territory.” Jewishness, once a minority and reflexive experience, would thus tend to be redefined as a majority identity, defensive and exclusive.
We pay tribute to Simon Wuhl, who passed away a year and a half ago. Simon Wuhl was, for several years, a member of our editorial committee.
His loss is felt deeply. Simon Wuhl was an intellectual of remarkable creativity. In recent years he had turned his thinking to Jewishness and what it engages in the contemporary world. He was France’s foremost specialist on the work of the American Jewish thinker Michael Walzer, to which he devoted several articles as well as his final book: Michael Walzer et l’empreinte du judaïsme (Michael Walzer and the Imprint of Judaism).
We publish here his last article: Sécularisation et tradition du judaïsme : rupture ou maintien du lien ? (Secularization and the Tradition of Judaism: Rupture or Maintenance of the Bond?). In it, he sets the prewar viewpoints of Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin against one another, and examines Michael Walzer’s position alongside the approach of Amos Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger on the place of Judaism in the secularized world that is ours.
Jean-Charles Szurek pays him a particular tribute in his commentary on Wuhl’s final work, whose title — Une mémoire personnelle marquée par la Shoah (A Personal Memory Marked by the Shoah) — underscores its character as testimony. For, in this book, Simon Wuhl writes his own autobiography and traces his intellectual path, setting both against his parents’ history — especially his father’s — and against the history of the Shoah, which profoundly shaped the course of his life.