Jews and France, a trust to reestablish

Gilles Bernheim, Elisabeth de Fontenay, Philippe de Lara, Alain Finkielkraut, Philippe Raynaud, Paul Thibaud and Michel Zaoui
Translation by Douglas
French original: "Les juifs de France et la France, une confiance à rétablir"
(Gilles Bernheim et al., Le Monde, 2003/12/29)

The starting point of this essay are the thoughts shared last Spring by a few friends who were preoccupied by how difficult it is in our country for Jews and non-Jews to understand one another. They contemplated the malaise, the wound they felt in seeing persistent incomprehension: Jews had a feeling of being foreigners among their fellow citizens; non-Jews were shocked to see the Jews of this country come to define themselves as opposite the French, if not against them.

What was immediately felt by the participants in these encounters is the degree to which they were worried, both for France and for Judaism, which none of them can view with indifference. So they attempted to define this malaise, which they had watched develop, to determine its origins, to conceive of the positive issue, the new circumstance from which the current troubles could be arising.

First, one must recognize the malaise from its outward signs:

— the anti-Semitism that is widespread among a portion of the Maghreban immigrant population, the islamo-progressivism in which it is more or less smoldering and the blindness before such phenomena, long denied or deemed an expression of legitimate solidarity with the Palestinians.

— the rift between Jews and non-Jews over the Arab-Israeli conflict since the failure of the "Oslo process" and the descent into war, the incomprehension of the press and of opinion before certain important aspects of the life in Israel: the difficulty of having the Jewish people attain any political existence, the peril of being surrounded by nations that dispute one's existence.

Is the meeting of minds that occurred on the unveiling of the Geneva accords the beginning of a better understanding of this conflict in France? One can hope so.

The anti-Semitic assaults of the Fall of 2000, a first wave followed by several others, have aroused in France's Jews a worry that stems above all from the events themselves, and then from the weakness of protest in the press and on behalf of other groups. Whence the current divorce between the way that Jews have of experiencing the present and the view of things that prevails around them.

HOSTILE MENTALITIES

"Everything's ganging up on me," a young boy told a reporter on the rue des Rosiers last Spring. Indeed, there has been no lack of opportunities to be hurt in recent years: the Durban conference, September 11, Israeli-Palestinian violence, the Security Council debates on Iraq. At each of these moments, Jews had the impression of being separate, of not understanding and of not being understood, even of being stigmatized, repressed into a moral ghetto. Their bitterness has most consistently shown itself regarding the news coverage and commentary on the situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories.

It is difficult to debate the Middle-East tragedy when one has the feeling that the "vital link" that Jews have with Israel has become publicly inadmissible, that the situation over there is reduced to a confrontation between innocent victims and their executioner, that, consciously or not, criticism of the Israeli government's policies slowly devolves into the reprobation of the very existence of a Jewish state. On seeing the disappearance of a space of good faith, in which one can confront opinions, many Jews reacted in an exasperated or disconsolate manner, denouncing the media as a whole and, for the time being, suppressing their denunciations of the Israeli policies the better to form a common front.

This impasse, this hostile intertwining of mentalities results in the recourse to generalizations. In fact, it is other people's hidden agendas that one suspects, that one can no longer bare, and it is not easy to discuss hidden agendas. It is trust in the freedom to speak honestly that is absent. One measures this trust deficit by the prevalence of emigration fantasies, as by the rise of the view that in France, Jews have "too much influence."

To restore trust is, believe us, to regain, to redefine what could be, both for the Jews and others, not a total settlement but a common ground, a common world, shared values and a shared historical ideal. Such things exist in France, sometimes prominently.

This has grown worse. Sometimes one has the feeling that all that remains is the desire (fortunately felt far and wide) not to consent to a divorce. Is it possible to understand how this distancing has come about, to name the values and the aspirations which make us, Jews and non-Jews alike, happy to be together, in the same country? The events that worry us and tear us apart today must not block off the horizon. To the contrary, they constitute a duty for us to reflect on the definition of France and of French Judaism as historical communities that are worthy of continuance.

THE JEWS AND FRENCH IDENTITY

Indeed, how can one avoid seeing the direct link between the "new anti-Semitism" and the national identity crisis? Not only because the development in France of Islamic anti-Semitism is the result of a crisis of integration, but also because rejecting the Jewish State is as if required by the common mentality: the emancipatory view of the nation has ceased to be the cornerstone of European culture and nationalism has become an evil to combat in all circumstances. And so, not long ago, it was with a tragic misinterpretation that some Jews believed in a possible alliance between the affirmation of Jewish identity and the celebration of minorities and regionalities, in sum, of "the Other," as against the nation. To denounce in the same breath both the reprobation of Israel and also France's mustiness (a France reduced to its "demons" and condemned to perpetual repentance), is to deplore the effects of an illness for which we are cultivating the virus.

If the Dreyfus affair, if the Vichy era can teach us anything that is useful to-day, it is that in France the relation to Judaism is a litmus test for the nation's historical identity, its fidelity to itself. A test of the ability to be a nation for all, the affirmation of which is a contribution to humanity and not a chauvinistic pretense. By the same token, French Jews' choice of the Republic was the basis of their flourishing as individuals and as a community. The French diaspora is not just an exile or a happenstance. It is a positive way of life and of participating in history.

Does all this belong the the past? We do not think so. But is true that history is not a simple continuance and that Franco-Judaism has reached a turning-point that is decisive and has been misunderstood for several decades. Defining it and evaluating it is not easy. But it is remarkable that it should have been a turning-point not just for Jews and not just for France but for both at once.

In its classic era, the "contract of trust" between Jews and the Republic rested above all on a harmony between a Judaism that was heir to the prophets, on the one hand, and the values of the national motto, on the other. But it also rested on the power and the influence of the the land of the French revolution, on its capacity to relay this message, one to which the Jews can relate. One can say that despite Vichy, something of this pact survived until the 1960s, though in a weakened state. In the post-war era, French Judaism even experienced an intellectual and religious renewal (let's recall the names of André Neher and Emmanuel Levinas) which saw it participate more directly than ever in national culture, while Republicanism extended itself into contemporary progressivism, in the idea that the victory over Nazism opened the way to new times and was prelude to a world in which genocide would be impossible. The establishment of the state of Israel, viewed favorably by most Europeans, was evidence of this.

Such optimism helped blunt the memory of the extermination of the Jews, which had been kept in the background, closed off in an abolished past. Because this was the way that thinking about the drama had been elucidated by the time that the memory of the event, newly named Holocaust and then the Shoah, arose in the 1960s (when progressivist naïveté had begun to dissipate), it seemed like an unexplored novelty, a unique crime, a decisive point of reference and then a source of guilt that concerned not simply the Nazis but a throng of secondary or indirect officials: rather all of Europe, the peoples in their entirety. It is as if, until the 1960s, European history had thought itself strong enough, rich enough in dynamism and sense to digest, so to speak, this extermination, while since then, it is on the contrary the Shoah that bars the peoples of Europe from any historical hope and encloses them inside remorse.

What dissolved in the 1960s was the feeling, that had until then felt natural in France, of a history common to Jews and to non-Jews.

The influx of former colonists from Algeria, who had the feeling of being abandoned, widened a gap that was the site of the memory of the extermination. The year 1967 brutally exposed this rupture, marking the beginning of a bitter, recurring quarrel between France and Israel, France and its Jews.

A DEMANDING MEMORY

Thus Judaism found itself at the center of a redefinition of common existence, with the history of the extermination as a keystone to the dominant value systems ("Never again!"), but without any project or goal, whether for the Jews or for France (and Europe), to respond to the difficultly acquired knowledge of this extreme. The place of Jews in the national community, far from being reassured, found itself weakened. Let's say, to be brief, that the memory of the genocide is an entirely negative reference: it is a genocide, if not without Jews, then without Judaism, an abominable and absurd crime, of which almost the entire world is guilty, which acts as a foil to ourselves but of which we think nothing. In particular, we no longer ask why Judaism should have been its target. Whence a trap: either Jews claim to be incomparable victims, or they melt into the long procession of massacred peoples. In the first case, if they don't want to disappear, as misplaced survivors they shall be accused of casting a shadow over all the other victims whom the memory of the Shoah requires us to defend. In these conditions, representing the Palestinians as the quintessential victims, as they are the victims of the Jews, is therefore more than a misstep by the media. It is the logic of a vision of the world that reduces Judaism to extermination and views extermination as the height of Evil.

Surely, it was the mistake, the levity of the post-War era, to have persisted in thinking that modern history could be sufficiently explained by itself (by the avatars of industrialization and democratization), taking the genocide of the Jews of Europe for an episode, an accident to be got round. It is this forgetting, not so much of the facts but of their meaning, that has turned the memory of the extermination into a "vain memory," an overwhelming negativity, with consequences from which we have not freed ourselves: political decline, more generally a decline of the feeling of debt that leads one to wish to inherit and surpass, social life that is therefore viewed as a composition of individual or collective griefs, ultimately a post-national intoxication that to-day is turning itself on the Jewish people.

Despite our horrified denials, that of which we have all been incapable, Jews and non-Jews, French, Europeans, Westerners, is to answer the Nazis' criminal intentions by putting at the center of our thoughts and actions the very principles that they sought to flout and expunge.

The incomprehension and even hostilities that affect us today arise from a foundation of historical incapacity, an incapacity to which the poverty of our reflections on the extermination seems to be the key. The wounding divergence between Jews and non-Jews in France, the incomprehension with respect to Israel, reveals a fissure between those who feel caught, even trapped in a country no-longer capable of history, if not forbidden from it, and those who ally themselves with a people that, while threatened, can express itself. A secret resentment ceaselessly bleeds out of this difference. This incompatibility is not of our nature but our situation. We are before a sick reaction to a situation of impasse: exasperation and bitterness for Jews sometimes draped in sterile exceptionalism. The answer can not come as a denunciation but as political and moral creativity.

The reintegration, or rather the integration, of Judaism, of the ethics handed down by Judaism, of the heart of Law ("your neighbor against yourself") in our public life is the answer to Hitler of which we have not yet been capable, the one that would allow us to reunite Jews and non-Jews around a historical ideal. This conciliatory historical ideal for France and the Jews of France must concern all of humanity, at the heart of which we must construct relations of fraternity to which the memory of the extermination summons us and which the multiplicity of current complications makes necessary. It is not by confining itself to its nostalgia and wounds that the Republic can strike a new deal with the Jews but by relying on them to orient itself and to expand, to grow deeper, in the hope of a historical rebirth. Some of the dilemmas in which French debate is tiring itself could, under these circumstances, be viewed differently. Secularism would no longer seem like either a tabula rasa to be exploited by fundamentalism or the repression of all things religious, but as though it had a positive aspect that likened it to other ethical propositions and was a genuine basis for dialogue about Islam. The debate on communitarianism would therefore come to light differently if, after the Jewish experience of standing in for others, one gambled that every group and every people does not exist solely for itself but as a participant in an exchange for which humanity is the horizon.

Perhaps we need only say one thing, to form a diptych: our country and our time need Jews. We need to rediscover them in a positive light, surpassing the sort of fear mixed with envy that they inspire and, for the Jews, the victim's preoccupation with himself is a danger, an abdication and a temptation.

Gilles Bernheim is a grand rebbe, Elisabeth de Fontenay is a professor of philosophy, Philippe de Lara is a professor of philosophy, Alain Finkielkraut is a writer and university professor, Philippe Raynaud is a professor of philosophy, Paul Thibaud is an essayist and Michel Zaoui is a lawyer.

[Posted 2004/01/02]

Copyright © Watch 2001-2006.
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