At the end of the Second World War, Hannah Arendt, in a text entitled “Creating a Cultural Atmosphere”1, proposed conditions for developing Jewish culture in a context of secularisation of Western societies, in the United States and Europe notably. Secularisation indeed expresses the tendency of social subjects to develop their thoughts and acts independently of any religious reference. It follows that religion has become an important component of culture, but no longer fashions behaviours and spiritual activities.

For Hannah Arendt, culture is the product of the secularisation of religion. It allows one to face the fear of oblivion consequent upon the Enlightenment rupture in the eighteenth century, the fear “of being dispossessed of the past proper to humankind, of becoming an abstract phantom similar to the human being who has lost their shadow”2. Moreover, culture is characterised by an openness of spirit, a critical and self-critical capacity—dispositions absent, according to Arendt, from all religions.

As concerns the Jews in the Diaspora who are steeped in a culture that is not theirs, it is necessary, says Arendt, to create a cultural atmosphere adapted to the secularisation of Judaism, “if one wishes to avoid that Jewish talents desert our community without being capable of conserving them within, as others do”3. She thus offers a few suggestions to favour the creation of such a cultural ambience:

First, one must rediscover the great religious and metaphysical tradition that theologians have known how to preserve, while approaching it in the new context of secularisation, freeing oneself from any imperative relating to the sacred and therefore untouchable character of this heritage.

Next, Arendt insists on the importance of the talented Yiddish writers of Eastern Europe who must be saved from confinement in a popular folklore, whereas they have been prevented from accessing recognition beyond the Jewish world for lack notably of the existence of a cultural milieu.

Lastly, it is important to make room for heterodox writers, often in conflict with the religious authorities, all the more so because they have played a precursor role in the work of adaptation of the Jewish tradition to the new conditions of reception in a secularised world.

And Hannah Arendt concludes that “the development of a Jewish culture or its absence will henceforth depend not on circumstances uncontrollable by the Jews, but indeed on their own will”4.

In this article, the theme of the link between secularisation and the tradition of Judaism will be approached from three types of questionings or responses:

I - The rupture of the link to tradition?

Debate between Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem

Does the Jewish tradition still have a topicality in the modern world? Or, on the contrary, is the thread of tradition definitively broken with the secularisation of modern societies, entailing for Judaism a loss of transmission and of internal cohesion across successive generations?

This question was at the centre of an epistolary exchange in the 1930s between Walter Benjamin, in exile in Paris, and Gershom Scholem, by then a professor of Jewish mysticism in Jerusalem. This debate, reported by Stéphane Mosès5, departed from a divergent interpretation of Franz Kafka’s work. For Benjamin as for Scholem indeed, although Kafka never speaks directly of Judaism in his writings, it does constitute the background of the questions raised throughout his work.

Walter Benjamin’s interpretation: a definitive loss of meaning of the message of the Jewish tradition

In an essay on Kafka, Benjamin remarks the recurrent introduction in this author of characters of students referring to the theme of the interpretation of biblical Scripture, whose meaning they no longer understand: they are disciples, he says, who have lost the Scripture6. For Benjamin, these students symbolise the destiny of individuals plunged into modern secularised societies that have definitively broken the links with the Jewish tradition understood as religious tradition.

Let us note that in the 1930s, Benjamin had himself broken with his theological period of the youth years and had drawn closer to the Marxist theses. For him therefore, in a world without God, the rupture with the religious reference is definitive. This does not prevent him from taking up certain fundamental concepts drawn from the Jewish religious tradition—such as Redemption, the Messiah, or messianism—and recycling them in a profane context, even one of revolutionary transformation. Thus, in his theses on the concept of history, Benjamin secularises messianism while disturbing Marxist orthodoxy when he proclaims that “for the Jews, every second was the narrow gate through which the Messiah could enter”7. For him, “there is no need to wait for the great final day of the ultimate Revolution; everything can be accomplished at each instant”8.

Gershom Scholem’s interpretation: a temporary, but reversible, loss of meaning

According to Gershom Scholem, the interpretation of Kafka’s texts is different: while he subscribes to the expression of a rupture with the religious tradition, he nonetheless emphasises that the characters are perpetually in search of meaning. As long as this quest endures, then, a return to a reconnection with the religious tradition is conceivable.

Stéphane Mosès thus makes explicit Scholem’s thought on the reasons for the rupture: if the meaning of traditional texts has become unintelligible, according to the historian of Jewish mysticism, it is because we are no longer capable of decoding it, and not because these texts mean nothing. But, Scholem specifies, there is indeed in Kafka “the hollow trace of a buried transcendence” and a search centred on transmission rather than an acceptance of a withering away of the link to tradition9. This question is moreover at the heart of Kafka’s famous Letter to His Father, in the form of a revolt against paternal inconsistencies in the face of an injunction of fidelity to Jewish values that have never been really transmitted.

This crisis of transmission in Judaism, according to Scholem, is linked to the secularisation that, at the dawn of the twentieth century, rendered obsolete the very conditions of that transmission, which used to take place in the private space of the study house and, in large part, in the family universe under the paternal magisterium. Nothing stands in the way of other forms of transmission of the Jewish message, on the model of the Christian world, which has known how to develop universities diffusing a knowledge in link with tradition, but also critical and in-depth when what was diffused by the Church no longer sufficed.

We have said, in this exchange between Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, the secularised vision of the Jewish tradition is never envisaged, not even as one of the possible options of the link to the Jewish tradition. This is all the more astonishing as, on the one hand, Benjamin had broken with his theological period, and, on the other, resources for a cultural approach to the Jewish tradition were already substantial with thinkers such as the historian Simon Dubnov (1860-1941) or the writer Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg—1856-1927), one of the pioneers of cultural Zionist thought. To say nothing of the Jewish settlement in Mandate Palestine, under the aegis of a secularised Zionism.

We will therefore now examine the responses brought by secular thinkers and authors to the question of the link to the Jewish tradition in secularised societies.

II - Michael Walzer: A cultural interpretation of the texts of the Jewish tradition

Michael Walzer (born 1935) is presented today as one of the most influential American theoreticians of society of the contemporary era. Endowed moreover with an in-depth knowledge of Jewish history and culture, he has always claimed a close interaction between his thought and his rootedness in a secularised, open, and progressive Judaism. His cultural interpretation of the Jewish tradition is strongly influenced by a family universe “intensely Jewish, secular, won over to socialist and left-wing Zionist ideas”10.

It is therefore quite naturally that Michael Walzer, in his writings on Judaism, applies himself to orienting his interpretation and his contribution to the development of the tradition in a cultural and not religious perspective. In particular, in his work published in English, The Paradox of Liberation, Michael Walzer interrogates the political and social reversals in countries such as Israel, Algeria, and India, where the secular liberation movements at the origin were replaced by counter-revolutionary and religious-radical forces11.

As concerns Israel, Walzer explores two orders of explanation to illuminate the causes of this socio-political regression:

First, the will of absolute disconnection advocated by the original secular Zionists with the cultural habitus of the different waves of immigration that joined the land of Israel up to the 1970s. Whereas the religious movements, ultra-orthodox notably, on the contrary carried out a work of cultural junction with the newcomers.

Second, in the cultural domain—nonetheless essential—secular Zionism did not succeed, according to Walzer, in producing a substantial and modernised corpus, endowed with an evocative power equivalent to that of the religious.

The original Zionist movement, Walzer explains, imbued with Marxist or socialist ideas, gave itself a double orientation from its creation in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century: on the one hand, finally accessing a full sovereignty over the memorial land of the Jewish people; on the other, internally, ridding the Jew of all the physical and moral “blemishes” inherent in the Jewish tradition of exile.

This tradition was considered en bloc as the expression of a voluntary submission of the Jews, under the influence of the rabbis, to all the forms of domination that were imposed upon them.

In this perspective, the first decades of the establishment of Zionism on the land of Israel at the beginning of the twentieth century—before the creation of the State in 1948, then up to the Six-Day War in 1967—were marked by a will of negation of the two thousand years of Jewish history, tradition, and culture in the Diaspora: the “Zionism” of the new Jew was to replace the “Judaism” assimilated to a mentality of submissive slave in exile. The two principal manifestations of this state of mind of submission—genuine diseases of exile in an early Zionist vision—were an attitude of servile obedience to the laws that oppressed them, on the one hand, and a state of mind of passivity in the waiting for the messiah and divine redemption, on the other. To be sure, the Zionists well knew that the culture of exile and emancipation in Diaspora was much richer, more varied, and more creative, but, to fashion the new Jew, they relied on a supposed mentality of submission in part of the Jews in order to advocate a radical rupture.

Thus, David Ben Gurion, leader of the Zionist left and then founder of the State of Israel, displayed from the outset the vocation of rupture of the Zionist ideology he embodied: “The worker of Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) differs from the Jewish worker of exile (…) He is not a new branch grafted on the old tradition, but a new tree.” Then, giving instructions for the integration of immigrants before the creation of the State in 1948, the Zionist leader specified: “Absorption implies, starting from masses—Jews uprooted, impoverished, and sterile, living parasitically in a foreign economy and depending on others—planting them in the country, integrating them in a productive activity, in agriculture, in industry, and in manufacturing, and making them independent and self-sufficient beings”12.

Some great thinkers and writers of the Diaspora or even Israelis had nonetheless strongly worried about this undiscerning contempt displayed by Zionism against a tradition repudiated en bloc, while they perceived all its richness, even if they were not religious. Micha Berdichevsky for example—at once in opposition with respect to religious hegemony, but a writer very inspired by the myths and legends of pre-modern Judaism—castigated, from the very birth of Zionism at the end of the nineteenth century, its ideology destructive of the Jewish tradition as such. And he wrote, evoking them with bitterness: “They feel all-powerful to change everything (…) to call into question all the ancient values (…) But if they are the conquerors, I am the vanquished (…) I sometimes have the impression of destroying myself”13. In the same sense, one of the first and most important theoreticians of Zionism, Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg), already cited, regularly insisted at the same period in Europe on the importance of a continuity between Jewish culture in the Diaspora and that of Zionism in the land of Israel. Finally, Hayim Nahman Bialik, considered today as the national poet of Israel, also pleaded for a continuity, but by carrying out a critical reappropriation of the Jewish tradition of exile.

But it is the orientation of David Ben Gurion and the principal leaders of the Zionist left that imposed itself, before and after the Second World War, until the Six-Day War of 1967. The absorption of the immigrants from the Diaspora was a priority of the policy of the proto-State, then of the State. The task devolved to teachers, social workers, and all public agents of integration was to act in a spirit of “coercion” rather than of “persuasion.” The will to disinhibit the Jews of the Diaspora could of course be understood, Michael Walzer admits. But the radicality of the rupture and the authoritarianism of the method engendered resentment and even a spirit of resistance that manifested itself by the pursuit of a transmission of the tradition within many immigrant families. This latent hostility prepared the ground for the rise of a renewal of religious fundamentalism, which has always sought to connect with the social base of the adherents of a millennial tradition that had been tempered, but remained fallow.

By what concatenations did the rise of religious fundamentalism, having become active and conquering, take place? According to Walzer, the reversal operated after the Six-Day War of 1967.

First, after Israel’s lightning victory, the Zionist fraction of the ultra-orthodox interpreted the seizure of territories supposed biblical and sacred as a divine message: that of a proximity with the messianic times. It was henceforth for these “zealots” a question of breaking with the passivity of waiting, and of working actively in favour of their advent14.

Second, secularised Judaism, by progressively banalising itself, did not succeed in producing a cultural memory sufficiently dense to substitute itself for the referential and symbolic power forged in the course of the two millennia of Exile. Which explains the resistance within families, where many Jewish immigrants from before the war acted like “marranos”—on the model of the Jews converted by force to Catholicism in the Spain of the Inquisition, who continued to practise the Jewish religion in secret—by following and transmitting the Jewish tradition of Exile, but also that of emancipation in the Diaspora.

Third and finally, a veritable renewal of religious fundamentalism was largely favoured by the cultural void consequent upon the negation of the Jewish memory of Exile, on the one hand, and by the weakness, the insufficiency of the evocative power of the alternative secular culture proposed. Whereas religious fundamentalism, even if it had broken with a certain Jewish passivity in Diaspora, remained on many other aspects in continuity with the spirit of this millennial tradition.

This said, Israeli civil society is in its great majority secularised. It will not turn back on its liberal and democratic vocation, which has not been fundamentally shaken by the permanent conflict and the episodic wars with neighbouring States. Hence a great opportunity for the vital forces of secularisation in favour of a much more important connection with the tradition of Exile and Emancipation in Israel as well as in Diaspora.

A secularised reappropriation of tradition

How to realise this programme and renew with the memory of Exile? How to surmount the contradiction, in Israel and in Diaspora, of a secularised Judaism that, on the one hand, has played a major role in twentieth-century Jewish history, while, on the other, it did not succeed in producing a culture sufficiently dense and transmissible, while largely occluding two thousand years of Jewish tradition? At a time when the instrumental recourse to biblical teaching has appeared, in Gershom Scholem’s words notably, as an artifice with an apologetic vocation, without continuity with the realities of the modern era.

Regarding the relation to the entirety of Jewish tradition—from biblical, medieval, and modern epochs in Diaspora—Michael Walzer extends the reflections of the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik on the necessity of an engagement making a distinction between the domains submitted to criticism and those susceptible of being assimilated within the new culture, in a spirit of negotiation with the holders of the diasporic tradition. Thus, aspects a priori incompatible with a secularised culture would be submitted to criticism—such as the hegemonic authority of the rabbis, the incitement to passivity and submission, or the inequality between men and women, for example. But other domains, which betoken a particularly rich and varied culture, could perfectly integrate themselves into a renewed culture. This is the case, notably, with many laws and maxims, ceremonies and practices, historical narratives and fictions, etc. Let us add the particularly admiring appreciation of Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg), himself one of the initiators of secularised Zionism, for whom the true exploit of secularised Judaism, qualified as “marvellous and unique,” is to have survived nearly two thousand years in dispersion, without land or sovereignty: “All the Diaspora followed a similar form of existence, in unity despite the separation of its multiple settlements”15.

Moreover, Michael Walzer signals that in the other direction, certain orthodox Jewish intellectuals open to dialogue, such as David Hartman, have already proposed that this religious current (very important in Israel and which strongly distinguishes itself from religious fundamentalism) integrate the achievements of secularised Judaism in matters of human rights, but also of social justice and equality in the context of modernity (equality between men and women, and equality between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens in Israel, notably).

Michael Walzer has not contented himself with theorising the necessity of a critical reappropriation of the Jewish tradition; he has put it into application, either by participating in collective initiatives in this direction, or, individually, by writing two works on the treatment of the political question in the biblical narrative.

On the collective plane, Walzer is one of the coordinators of an anthology concerning the political tradition in Judaism (The Jewish Political Tradition, Yale University, 2000). This initiative is considered by an American critic as one of the most ambitious intellectual enterprises on Judaism of the current era. It is a long-term action that collects a great number of texts on this theme, bearing on all the periods of Judaism from the early times of the biblical narrative to the contemporary era. Above all, it associates a great number of thinkers issuing from a plurality of academic disciplines and ideological orientations, charged with commenting on these texts from their own point of view. For Walzer, the more the spirit of the commentary appears as living and open to democratic discussion, the more important the impact of this collective initiative will be, inside as well as outside the Jewish world.

On the individual plane, Walzer’s two books on politics in the Bible correspond to two very different periods of the biblical narrative: De l’Exode à la liberté (Exodus and Revolution) (Calmann-Lévy, 1986), narrative of the Exodus and of the moral, juridical, and political constitution of the future Hebrew State; and Dans l’ombre de Dieu. La politique et la Bible (In God’s Shadow. Politics in the Hebrew Bible) (Bayard, 2016), analysis of the organisation and functioning of the ancient Hebrew State, during the few centuries of sovereignty of this people, in a unitary kingdom or divided between two sovereign lands.

III – Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger: power of the desacralised Jewish texts

The book Juifs par les mots (Jews and Words)16, co-authored by the Israeli writer Amos Oz (1939-2018) and his daughter, the historian Fania Oz-Salzberger, is inscribed within the framework of the publications of the American Jewish Posen Foundation. Acting for some forty years on an international scale, this institution publishes works centred on the reinforcement of a Jewish, secularised, and critical culture. The book Juifs par les mots, written beforehand in English to give it an international reach, responds to the aims of the Posen foundation, of the exploration of the centrality of the Jewish Writings—rather than that, biological, of blood—in the diversified continuum of Jewish history and identity.

Historical force and splendour of the great secularised Jewish texts

The two authors announce from the outset their conception of Judaism: “We are secular Jewish Israelis (…) Our identity is not nourished by faith”17. But this in no way means, they continue, that the abandonment of religious hold leads to a rupture with Jewish tradition—on the contrary: The great Jewish texts are the principal supports of their link to tradition; they have fashioned their cultural and intellectual construction before approaching more widely the vast non-Jewish culture that subsequently integrates itself into the patrimony of Judaism.

More precisely, for Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger, the exceptional radiance of the Bible does not stem from its sacred character. In other words, desacralisation does not suppress its power of attraction, principally on at least two planes:

First, as a major reference, in the West and beyond, on the ethical and juridical questions that have marked the political debates around the values and the regulating principles of societies in the course of history: In comparison with the Bible, they affirm, “no other literary work has so effectively chiselled a juridical codex, so convincingly laid out a social ethics”18. On this plane, Michael Walzer, in his book De l’Exode à la liberté (Exodus and Revolution)19, has illustrated by many examples the function of original matrix of reference exercised by the Bible and the Hebrew Law for a great number of non-Jewish political or social actors in the historical process of constitution of modern societies.

On the aesthetic and artistic plane next, its splendour is incomparable and impregnates the reader well beyond any reduction to scientific analysis alone, without rejecting it for all that. This is why the Bible has given birth to innumerable other books. Thus, even if scientists and archaeological discoveries rightly call into question the splendour of the reigns of kings David and Solomon for example, or demystify the question of miracles as established facts, “its literary production [that of the Bible] reveals itself as both grandiose and miraculous. This in a fully secular sense”20.

Whether one has a religious or a secular approach to the Jewish texts, what has allowed the transmission of Judaism from generation to generation, Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger specify forcefully, are the books, those in close relation with the Book, the Torah: “After the destruction of the second Temple, only the books preserved their sacrosanct character. Nothing else. The rabbis are only human, sacred statues and images not even conceivable. Very far from Jerusalem, deprived of tabernacles and menorah, there remained only the books”21.

The Jewish Writings have played such a role of seduction and persuasion that they have ensured a great fidelity to Judaism from generation to generation, for the young people of the ghettos, of the shtetls of Eastern Europe or of the Eastern mellah: “The centuries flowed, they emigrated, they moved, they fled, they lagged behind, and they carried their books on their backs”22.

For the two authors, it is clear that all the books that gather the texts of the Jewish tradition constitute a cultural patrimony common to all Jews. While their sense of Jewish history comes from the Bible, they in no way feel the need for it to be legitimised and sanctified by the word of God. A contrario, as has been said above, they do not require that the biblical narrative be historically fully proven (see below).

And even, an important point, the two authors in no way wish to base themselves on sacred texts to claim territories conquered, according to the Bible, by King Solomon for example: our heritage, they proclaim, “consists of a few geographical markers and a great library”23.

Cultural reading of the Jewish texts and critical spirit

For Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger, unlike a religious reading, the secular approach to the texts of the tradition, beyond a respect mingled with admiration, is compatible with critical, selective, and clear-sighted distance: “We do not like everything,” they recognise, and more still, “we attribute no factual or scientific certainty to a great deal of what is reported. We feel no binding obligation toward whatever it may be.” But they add as a counterpoint that they also discover so many words exact, solid, and judicious that they succeed in replacing faith with wonder24.

Let us return, more precisely, to one of the most sensitive questions: What about the historicity of the Hebrew Bible, the validity of the facts reported? Could it be that everything is pure invention, issued from the imagination of several authors? For Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger, it matters little whether the historical facts and figures really existed—in any case, in the forms reported by the Bible. For “the authors existed and their language existed.” As readers, they specify, “We know that these texts convey truths”; and, as Jews, “the fact that the Narrators were truly real is enough for us”25.

Another important divergence with the religious approach concerns the very conception of the interpretation of the texts which, for the two authors, must preserve a great freedom of appreciation without dogmatism, on the one hand, and privilege openness and exchange with non-Jewish authors, on the other. “Privilege discovery and surprise,” they counsel, instead of freezing the meaning of interpretation. And above all: “Recognise the defects of the texts and authors you love, and the merits of those who repel you.”26

According to Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger finally, it is possible to refer to the Talmud, a pure marvel, they say, capable of sometimes reconciling a religious reading and a secular reading, above all when it reports an episode rich in teachings for the reading of the Torah, as in the famous controversy around “the purity of the oven of Akhnai.”

In this narrative, one of the Rabbis, seeing himself in the minority in the discussion, attempts to prevail by appealing to miracles and even to the intervention of God. But the other sages are inflexible and reject any argumentation that is not founded on the interpretation of the Torah, including divine assistance. As one of the sages explains, the Torah was given on Mount Sinai as a reference for religious and human conduct, and God himself must bow before the majority if his interpretation is in the minority.

Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger conclude with insistence that in this luminous lesson of the Talmud, “the Torah has become a human domain. The verdict of the majority prevails over the All-Powerful in an erudite argumentation. No less.”

Conclusion

In our day, most Jews, including believers, live their Judaism in a secular fashion, without submitting their mode of life and of thought to the injunctions—whether religious or of identitarian assignment. They can therefore assume themselves as Jews in various ways, as believers, agnostics, or atheists.

While one can say that Spinoza (1632-1677) embodied a way of being Jewish outside religious orthodoxy, it is with the current of thought of the Jewish Enlightenment (La Haskala) in the eighteenth century that vast reforms were undertaken to open up Judaism and to open it more generally to scientific knowledge and general culture. This entry of the Jews into modernity continued in the nineteenth century with the development in Germany and France of currents of thought around a Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism). They transform the relations to the interpretation of Jewish sources thanks to the contribution of critical methods and scientific knowledge in multiple domains. It is also the period of the birth in Germany of the religious movement of the Reform, in rupture with orthodoxy, which applies itself to adapting religious life to modern society.

In France, a first synthesis between Judaism and modernity theorised in the nineteenth century the idea of a dissolution of Judaism into the ideal of progress and emancipation consequent upon the French Revolution, on the grounds that it “realises the ancestral promise of Judaism.” James Darmesteter (1849-1894), for example, advocates a full and complete assimilation, for Judaism would be, he thinks, one of the sources of the revolutionary thought of 1789.

But, at the end of the nineteenth century, Jewish thinkers, in Germany and France, call into question this slope of disappearance of Judaism. In Germany, Martin Buber (1878-1965) and Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), for example, embody a movement of return to the Jewish sources in this country, before emigrating to Palestine. In France, the brutal awakening consequent upon the Dreyfus affair calls into question, for writers such as Bernard Lazare (1865-1903) or Edmond Fleg (1874-1963), the dissolution-assimilation of Judaism begun within the intelligentsia of Franco-Judaism.

After the Second World War, in the 1960s, a collective reflection took shape within the Jewish thinkers in France, expressing itself around a “Jewish school of Paris,” animated by André Néher (1914-1988), Léon Askénazi (1922-1996), and Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995). Addressing themselves to religious and non-religious Jews, and beyond, to the whole of the cultural universe in France, it was a matter of bringing to life or back to life the texts of the Jewish tradition in connection with the contribution of the knowledge of the surrounding society.

From the end of the war in 1946, the creation of the Jewish School of Orsay has the ambition of training community leaders by the acquisition of a high-level academic formation and an in-depth study of the sources of the Jewish tradition, in the spirit of the science of Judaism. It has trained hundreds of male and female students over the course of twenty-three classes of resident pupils. However, despite the radiance of this institution not recognised within the official academic curriculum, the remarkable project of the Jewish School of Orsay, supported by private funds, was forced to stop after the departure for Israel of its director, Léon Askénazi, in 196927.

Moreover, the data on the distribution according to relation to religious practice—in Israel, France, and the United States—show both an important and lasting evolution toward the secularisation of Judaism, on the one hand, and a great attachment to Jewish identity, history, and ethics in a vast part of secular Jews, on the other.

The statistics give an account of this secular evolution after the war: in Israel, despite their recent visibility, the ultra-orthodox and the orthodox represent only 18% of Israeli Jews, while 40% declare themselves secular and 23% support a reformed Judaism, open to the evolutions of society (source Pew Research Center, 2016). In France, in 2015, 42% of Jews were not religious, 22% were not very religious and practising, while those declaring themselves very religious represented only 10% of Jews (source Statista, 2015). In the United States finally, as we know, the reformed current of Judaism, modern and in touch with society, is largely in the majority, while the rupture with the religious progresses rapidly among those under 35.

As concerns France for example, there exists a Jewish, secular, majority world that has remained very attached to Judaism. But its identity, not or little nourished by a religious teaching, Régine Azria notes, often boils down to support for Israel and the struggle against antisemitism28. More generally, Emmanuel Levinas deplored that, for millions of Jews assimilated to the surrounding civilisation, “Judaism cannot even be said to be cultural”: it is “a diffuse sensibility made up of a few ideas and memories, of a few customs and emotions, of a solidarity with persecuted Jews”29.

But, despite an increased visibility of the Jewish religious and even an activism of ultra-orthodoxy in Israel, observation shows an ineluctable evolution toward Jewish secularisation in the West, whatever the national configurations may be. Can one then maintain a link with a tradition—certainly perpetually renewed and enriched—in a Jewish civilisation of which the religious is the source and the major reference of its historical continuity?

For Walter Benjamin, we have seen, the rupture between Jewish tradition and secularisation is definitive—which Gershom Scholem contests. But both assimilated Jewish tradition to its exclusively religious inspiration. And this, despite thinkers such as Simon Dubnov or Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg) for example, who developed at the same period a conception of Jewish identity in touch with the secularised evolution of the Jewish world.

The greatest names of contemporary Jewish thought, such as Michael Walzer in the United States, Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger in Israel, inscribe themselves in the tradition opened by Dubnov and Ahad Ha’am, considering that the Jewish Bible, the Talmud, and all the great texts of religious tradition constitute a patrimony common to the entire Jewish people, whatever their relations to belief and to the practice of Judaism.

Thus, the authors of Juifs par les mots (Jews and Words) proclaim: “Religion is a central dimension of Jewish civilisation (…) [But] from the religious source there developed spiritual manifestations that intensified the religious experience (…): Languages, customs, lifestyles (…) and a Literature, Art, ideas, opinions. All this forms Judaism (…). It is a vast and profuse heritage”30.

We have seen, contrary to the two Israeli authors who have no difficulty in forging a secularised Jewish culture for themselves, Michael Walzer insists on the necessity of constituting a solid cultural corpus in touch with the secularisation of Judaism, including in Israel. This corpus is founded on a critical evaluation of the texts and practices of the religious tradition at the outset, by integrating the elements compatible with a secular and socially progressive approach. For Walzer, this work must be done in liaison with religious representatives. As in the example of the contacts he maintained with the modern orthodox rabbi David Hartman, the latter declaring that the revolutionary innovations envisaged by a certain secular Zionism, in the domains of equality, human rights, and more generally social justice, could enrich religious law as well as the orientation of the rabbinate31.

Michael Walzer’s recommendations are of course also valid for the French Diaspora, where one notes a great interest in Jewish culture in a public that is in its majority non-practising. This is notably the case for the proposal of an engaged, critical, and plural rereading of the texts of the Jewish tradition, religious or not, considered as a whole as constitutive of a patrimony common to all Jews.

But, unlike Israel and even the United States, where the educational and university conditions are compatible with a renewal of reflections on Judaism, it is not the same in France. This is what emerges from an important colloquium on Les Juifs, une tache aveugle dans le récit national (The Jews, a Blind Spot in the National Narrative). In his synthesis, Paul Salmona notes that “in this country, works on Judaism remain confined within an in-group on the margins of official curricula, unlike in neighbouring countries such as Spain and Germany, where particularly dynamic Jewish studies are better inscribed in the university context”32. It follows, beyond the domain of Jewish thought, but in connection with its development, that teachers at all levels of the school and university chain are ill-equipped in the face of the teaching of Judaism.

This finding leads to a principal demand for the inscription, by public authorities, of the domain of Jewish studies within the official programmes of teaching and research. Which would respond to a double objective: to integrate, on the one hand, Judaism within the national narrative, and to favour, on the other, a relaunching of reflections on Jewish thought, by adapting it to the demands of a French Jewish world that is in its majority secularised.

  1. In Hannah Arendt: Écrits juifs (The Jewish Writings), Fayard 2011, pp. 458-462.↩︎

  2. Ibid., p. 458.↩︎

  3. Ibid., p. 460.↩︎

  4. Ibid., p. 462.↩︎

  5. See Temps de la Bible (Time of the Bible), éditions de l’éclat, 2011, pp. 148-156 and Figures philosophiques de la modernité juive (Philosophical Figures of Jewish Modernity), éditions du Cerf, 2011, pp. 73-98.↩︎

  6. Cited by Stéphane Mosès, Temps de la Bible, p. 148.↩︎

  7. Cited by Stéphane Mosès, Figures philosophiques de la modernité juive, pp. 97-98.↩︎

  8. Ibid., p. 98.↩︎

  9. Ibid., pp. 76-77.↩︎

  10. Interview with Michael Walzer, in Philosophie magazine, no. 40, June 2010, p. 62.↩︎

  11. Michael Walzer, The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolution and Religious Counterrevolution, Yale University Press, 2015 (untranslated).↩︎

  12. Ibid., pp. 8 and 52.↩︎

  13. Ibid., pp. 64-65.↩︎

  14. Since December 2022, certain members of this Israeli religious and Zionist ultra-right, although in the minority, have managed to integrate the Netanyahu government thanks to a system of alliance. After explaining the conditions of the advent of this populist current with racist undertones, the sociologist Danny Trom even asks himself whether it might erase at a stroke “the political wisdom accumulated by the Jews along their exile and that Zionism could, in its own manner, gather.” See Danny Trom, “Israël: vers la rupture?” (“Israel: toward rupture?”), Revue K, January 4, 2023.↩︎

  15. Ibid., p. 129.↩︎

  16. Gallimard, 2012.↩︎

  17. Ibid., p. 17.↩︎

  18. Ibid., p. 20.↩︎

  19. Michael Walzer, De l’Exode à la liberté. Essai sur la sortie d’Égypte (Exodus and Revolution), Calmann-Lévy, 1986.↩︎

  20. Juifs par les mots, op. cit., p. 20.↩︎

  21. Ibid., p. 56.↩︎

  22. Ibid.↩︎

  23. Ibid., p. 138.↩︎

  24. Ibid., p. 112.↩︎

  25. Ibid., p. 81.↩︎

  26. Ibid., pp. 34-35.↩︎

  27. See Sophie Nordmann, “De la Haskala à l’école juive de Paris: Les lumières juives à l’épreuve de l’émancipation” (“From Haskala to the Jewish School of Paris: The Jewish Enlightenment in the Test of Emancipation”), in Le Télémaque, no. 52, pp. 67-78, posted on Cairn.info, 2018.↩︎

  28. Régine Azria, “La sécularisation du judaïsme” (“The Secularisation of Judaism”), in Le judaïsme, 2010, pp. 63-83.↩︎

  29. Emmanuel Levinas, “Judaïsme” (“Judaism”), in Difficile Liberté (Difficult Freedom), Poche-Albin Michel, 1963 and 1976, p. 47.↩︎

  30. Juifs par les mots, op. cit., pp. 233-234.↩︎

  31. The Paradox of Liberation, op. cit., p. 127.↩︎

  32. Paul Salmona, Les Juifs, une tache aveugle dans le récit national (The Jews, a Blind Spot in the National Narrative), pp. 37-38.↩︎

← Previous article · Next article → Back to issue 25