Edward K. Kaplan
We do not introduce our masters. I simply want to convey to him, on behalf of everyone, our gratitude for having been, during the German occupation and immediately after, one of the few who had the courage and the competence to reinvent, if I may say so, principles that are now, twenty years later, taken for granted, and especially the fact that it is possible to approach Jewish thinking without losing substance, and at the very level of thought.
—Léon Askenazi, addressing André Neher, in La conscience juive face à l’histoire: Le pardon
This chapter traces the inception of André Neher’s significant role in the renewal of French Jewish intellectual and spiritual life after the Shoah. Born in 1914 in Obernai, in the Bas Rhin region of France, he was educated as both a secular intellectual and a religiously observant Jew. (His family moved to Strasbourg, which became French in 1918.) In 1936, aged twenty-two, he began to teach German language and literature at the Collège de Sarrebourg while also pursuing yeshiva studies in Montreux, Switzerland.1 Mobilized in 1939, Neher made a crucial life decision when the Vichy government removed him from teaching on December 2, 1940. Shocked at the indifference of his colleagues, he resolved to specialize in Judaic studies after the war. After publishing articles on German literature and Judaic topics in the early 1940s, and teaching Jewish children at the École d’Orsay outside of Paris, in 1947 he defended his doctorat d’état dissertation on the prophet Amos at the University of Strasbourg. (Neher’s thèse complémentaire, “Les douze prophètes dans le Talmud,” is also dated 1947; that year he also married Renée Bernheim, who became his close collaborator.) Neher published his dissertation on Amos in 1950, with the prestigious philosophy publisher J. Vrin. Five years later, in 1955, he was promoted to professeur de littérature juive at the University of Strasbourg. This prestigious academic post provided Neher with the authority to interpret sacred sources in a manner faithful both to Jewish tradition and to contemporary philosophical and ethical thought. I focus on how he thereafter combined sober philological scholarship and stirring interpretation, with the goal of making Jewish tradition relevant to his day. Put another way, André Neher sought to reconcile the often dissimilar ideals of academic scholarship, Jewish piety, and prophetic witness. Key to my concerns, therefore, is how Neher thus sought to repudiate the negativity of the Shoah and the French norm of assimilation by interpreting traditional Judaism in a manner congenial to French secular culture. To that end, he was a principal founder of the Colloques des intellectuels juifs de langue française (Colloquia of French-Speaking Jewish Intellectuals), inaugurated in 1957, and which continue today. At these annual conferences Neher became an eminent voice through his biblical lessons, along with the Talmudic lessons of Emmanuel Levinas.
After Neher abandoned his career as teacher of German literature, his initial writings on Judaism combine resistance to the Shoah and a scholarly methodology congruent with spiritual values. Neher wrote his earliest manifesto with his brother Richard, a dense, personal essay entitled “Transcendance et immanence” (Transcendence and immanence), printed as a pamphlet by Éditions Yechouroun in Lyon in the first trimester of 1946; the preface announced that the essay was conceived “en pleine guerre” and was inspired by their recently deceased father, Albert Neher, a traditional Jew who taught them the Bible.
At the time, the publication of “Transcendance et immanence” was judged by many dedicated Jews to be “an event in the world of Jewish thought; these twenty-five pages created a new orientation for Jewish Studies” in France.2 The authors’ insistence on the historicity of Judaism and the relevance of religion was seen as a rebuttal of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous analysis, both psychological and ideological, “Portrait of the Anti-Semite,”3 part of which first appeared in the December 1945 issue of Les Temps modernes. Late the following year, the enlarged book, entitled Réflexions sur la question juive (Reflections on the Jewish question), was published by a small press.4
Sartre’s phenomenology of the Other quickly became the normative conceptual model of Jewish identity after the occupation and the return of survivors.5 However, for traditionally educated Jews, the price paid for Sartre’s support was too steep. Famously, Sartre was said to define Jewish identity as originating in the gaze of the Other, often conditioned by anti-Semitic stereotypes.
André and Richard Neher’s 1946 essay opposed the view that Judaism had no history and that a Jew derived his or her identity from the anti-Semite. This work of filial piety intended to give meaning to the future after the atrocious events. Quoting their father’s last writing of June 1944, the brothers defined the goal of philosophy as to enable people to act: “It’s about locating the problem, clarifying the methodological givens, and only then, to approach the answer.” 6 The patriarch Abraham became the Nehers’ model for postwar French Jewish thinkers.
Essentially, the Nehers sought to reconcile the religious and the secular dimensions of human experience, not by absorbing one into the other, but through “contiguity,” that is, preserving boundaries for the sake of shared ethical action:
The mission for the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of students of Moses and of the Prophets, is to seek the absolute in the contingent, the extraordinary in the ordinary, the divine in the earthly, therefore not to surpass the physical, but to render it metaphysical, in such a way as not to demonstrate the identity of the two terms—what is easy to conceive, but impossible—but to demonstrate their contiguity—which is difficult to conceive, but possible. Possible, because the [Jewish] condition, instead of being a passion, is an effort. Indeed, where there is effort, there is a need for law, equilibrium, continuity.7
This essay was a preliminary map of André Neher’s doctoral dissertation and his subsequent interpretations of biblical categories of thinking. The definitions are subtle and sometimes confusing, but here is the essential message:
[Biblical time as] fusion, coexistence, rootedness, extension, chain. . . .
Consulting the time of history; it is fragmented, and we must turn our back to the future to find it only in the past. . . . But with Biblical Time, history is a chain. Not the past, but a covenant, a contract. Not the present, but a commitment, an effort. Not the future, but a mission.8
André Neher launched his postwar academic career with this activist conception of Judaic studies. But first he had to earn his French university credentials. Following the customary strategy, he began by publishing articles related to his dissertation. Most relevant here are “Fonction du prophète dans la société hébraïque” (The prophet’s role in Hebrew society) in the Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie religieuses (1948–49) and “Aspects actuels des études bibliques” (Present trends in biblical studies) in the Protestant journal Études évangéliques (January–March 1950).
Neher defined himself within the university system by his title and by his scholarly stance. In “Aspects actuels des études bibliques” he launched a frontal attack against the still dominant ideology of Julius Wellhausen and his historical-critical method. (Neher signed this paper “Chargé de cours d’Histoire du Judaïsme à la Faculté des Lettres de Strasbourg,” basically, assistant professor without tenure.) He audaciously defended the sociological approaches of Max Weber (1864–1920) and, to his credit, the little-known David Koigen (1877–1933) (Abraham Heschel’s mentor in Berlin).9
Both Koigen and Weber demonstrated what Neher considered to be the fundamental role of the covenant, the berith, in Israelite religion and society: “The first religious charter of the people of Israel, the Torah of Moses, was struck at the confluence of the berith [the covenant] and of Levitism. . . . [According to David Koigen], the liberation movement that in Egypt moved the people of Israel out of slavery, determined to an extraordinary extent the victory of the religious social contract of the covenant.”10 The conclusion of the earlier article, “Fonction du prophète” (1948–49), is even more explicit: “In Greece and in Rome, the oppressed, half-breeds, and slaves, were repressed above and beyond the limits of the social edifice. . . . In Israel, the common people actively participated in the national existence, through the voice of the prophets.”11 The final sentence restates the author’s ethical and religious ideal without ambiguity or pedantry: “the reintroduction of the humble person (the ‘little man’) in the grand drama of human society.12
It remains for us to analyze—or, more realistically, to characterize briefly—the books that consolidated André Neher’s reputation—for better and for worse—between 1950 and 1955. The book that earned him a professorship at Strasbourg was of course the doctoral thesis, Amos: Contribution à l’étude du prophétisme, published in 1950 by the Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin. (It was reproduced verbatim, with a new preface and bibliographical additions, in 1981.)
Neher’s dedication page points to its deeper purpose, to confront his excruciating solidarity with victims of the war: “TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER who with my mother made our household glow . . . with goodness, with wisdom[,] with faith in the Bible of which he wrote commentaries”; and, with the names of five men, “TO THE MEMORY OF my friends, classmates, students . . . executed by the Germans or died in deportation.”
The ideological battles within the budding field of French Judaic scholarship emerge clearly from book reviews. I can only suggest how three subsequent books, in addition to numerous articles and essays of a popular or scholarly nature, complete Neher’s definition of modern biblical Judaism. In 1956, Neher reached his widest readership in Moïse et la vocation juive (Moses and the Jewish calling), published in 1956 by Éditions du Seuil (but surely completed by 1955), a lively, popular book of 192 pages with abundant illustrations in its wide-ranging series, Microcosme (Maîtres spirituels).
Returning to 1951, the year after the academic study of Amos appeared, Neher published a small inspirational book, Notes sur Qohelet (L’Ecclésiaste), Editions de Minuit, 110 pages, “sous le patronage de l’Union des étudiants juifs de France” (sponsored by the Union of French Jewish Students); and in 1955, he extended the Amos book with the more academic study L’essence du prophétisme, Presses universitaires de France, 359 pages, in the Collection Ėpiméthée (directed by the philosopher Jean Hyppolite). These books anticipate the direction of Neher’s life’s work: defining the essence of prophecy and the universal vocation of Judaism and the Jewish people.
By 1955, Neher had not only earned a professorship in Jewish thought at a distinguished secular university but also contributed to religious publishing programs beyond any narrow Jewish designation. (In fact, there were not yet any dedicated Jewish publishers in France.) Neher’s choice of identity models for his contemporaries is significant: from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, through Amos, and then to back to Moses. For Neher, Jewish tradition provided not only a way of thinking, but a way of life.
From “Transcendence and Immanence” on, therefore, Neher was explicit about his heterogeneous or eclectic methodology, about his moral and theological commitments. He was writing to define biblical Judaism as a model of restoring and renewing French Jewish life, awareness of God joined with ethical responsibility.
In his avant-propos and introduction to Amos, Neher explained its “subjective” foundation: first, family and community—he dedicated the book to his deceased father and to classmates, friends, and students murdered by the Nazis. He also presented himself autobiographically as a role model, explaining his conversion from an academic career in German literature, in which Judaism played an ancillary role, to Judaic scholar and teacher. During the war he abandoned his dissertation project, “Germany in the Works of Heinrich Heine”; as he explained: “From then on, the goal of my work became clear in the method that I thought would introduce a type of historical theology which would not exclude either scientific certainty or philosophical inquiry.”13
Neher spells out his method and presuppositions even more explicitly by rejecting the individualism of existentialists such as Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel, the radical solitude of Kierkegaard, and even Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. (He does quote Benjamin Fondane with approval.)14 Neher, for his part, seeks to define a more authentic Jewish exegetical tradition, one that joins the individual and the community; to that end, he seeks to “rehabilitate the school of Jewish exegesis of the Middle Ages. . . . It is less about a school whose representatives would be united by one identical doctrine, than about bringing together thinkers engaged in a common attitude: the awareness being connected to the Biblical text by a sort of existential continuity. . . . These thinkers are very sensitive to the clearly sociological dimension of the Biblical style, as it reveals a doing [faire] rather than a done [fait].”15 In other words, Neher puts forward scholarship as commitment, as prophetic witness, as activism.
Two major reviews responded to this confession of faith in two radically different ways—though both recognized and appreciated, to different degrees, the author’s passionate manner of thinking and writing.
The earliest review came from France’s most eminent Judaic scholar, the Hungarian-born Georges Vajda (1908–81; he immigrated to Paris in 1927). Vajda’s judgment of Neher’s academic study of Amos was stormy and uncompromising with regard to details, but fair in defining his own professional standards. Representing the rigors of scientific philology, the prevailing approach to Bible study, Vajda defended the fortress of academic criticism, with some irony, from the very first sentence:
This work is superficially brilliant. [Cet ouvrage se présente des dehors très brilliants.] The author has a definite gift for literary analysis and a philosophical knowledge for which he should be commended. His multifaceted style, his “warm and captivating eloquence,” can clearly lead the reader to these glories. However, since we are dealing with a doctoral dissertation defended at a Faculty formerly renowned for its Oriental Studies, we must be forgiven for reviewing this book first as a work of philology and history, without taking into account the option of faith that underlies the author’s thinking (see Foreword), nor the value of edification that he can have in certain circles foreign to scholarly research.16
Vajda’s categories do not admit nuance or compromise with the strictest disciplinary frontiers. His examination of details in Neher’s thesis mercilessly goes on for seven tightly printed pages to denounce “a confused mass of arbitrariness and bias, of distortions of texts and of homiletical developments entirely without serious foundation.”17 Biblical scholars can judge Vajda’s expert opinions; for us, his abusive rhetoric implies a more interesting ideological debate.18 Here is Vajda on some of Neher’s details: “pure verbiage” (108); “free and fanciful” (110); “the three pages of declamation following this deplorable absurdity vanish in smoke” (110); “after so many absurdities and Sophistries” (110); “once again, exegesis turns into a sermon ” (111); “brilliant pages that are, however, hard to take seriously” (111); “this means nothing at all, despite the nonsense of the note j” (111). Vajda’s conclusion is more positive, as his final sentences express this regret that the author had expended his genuine literary talent to work in a false genre, an impossible marriage of inspirational literature and autonomous research: “The study of M. Neher is a midrash. Considered as such, it merits some interest. But its real contribution to historical and philological exegesis is almost negligible.”19 Here is the positive lesson I would draw: Neher indeed strives to develop “un genre faux,” an impossible alliance of faith, biblical solidarity, and critical philosophy.
And this is exactly what French Jews needed so soon after the war, according to Neher: connection with Jewish religious and ethical traditions, historical continuity. André Neher’s leadership in the Colloques des intellectuels juifs de langue française would become his primary vehicle—in addition to his writings—for such a program of revival, both Jewish and interfaith, as well as with secular thinkers of all backgrounds.
To conclude, I cite two reviews that were particularly sensitive to the possibilities of a modern French Judaism inspired by Neher’s model of committed, activist exegesis of the Hebrew prophets. One is the brief review by Robert Aron in the October 1951 issue of La Nef, titled “La pesanteur et l’histoire” (Gravity and history), a word play on Simone Weil’s notorious book of 1950, La pesanteur et la grâce (Gravity and grace). (Robert Aron had recently founded the Revue des Études juives, in which Vajda chastised Neher.) Sympathetically polemic, Robert Aron appreciated Neher’s attachment to God and to Jewish tradition as a challenge to Simone Weil’s negativity.
The most substantial of review of Neher’s Amos and, I would argue, the most authoritative, is that by the Protestant philosopher Paul Ricoeur entitled “Aux frontières de la philosophie” (At the limits of philosophy), in the section entitled “Le prophétisme” (prophecy), which appeared in the November 1952 issue of Esprit, the progressive personalist journal founded in 1931 by Emmanuel Mounier.20 In addition to his brilliant summary of the structure and content of the book, Ricoeur appreciated Neher’s demonstration of the universality of Jewish prophetic inspiration, which does not compromise its particularism.
Essential was Neher’s insight that Amos’s universalism reflects the covenant with Noah (Genesis 9–10).21 Ricoeur goes on to cite Amos to underline the “compenetration” of the ethical and the religious: “ ‘The omnipresence of God and the omnipresence of the neighbor [le prochain] are the foundations of the prophet’s metaphysical conception . . . [Ricoeur quotes Neher’s suspension points] God’s presence and the presence of the neighbor interpenetrate; their simultaneity constitutes the absolute demand and there can be no others’ (264).”22 Inspired by Neher, Ricoeur ends with an invitation and a challenge: “The question is to know if and how it is possible to philosophize this chosenness from this covenant, from this eschatology, in short, to know if reflection born of the Greeks can break away from its own particularism to accept the universality buried in another particularism: that of the people Israel.”23 Ricoeur acknowledges the gulf separating Athens and Jerusalem, but he hopes, with André Neher, that the Hebrew Bible will provide common ground and inspire shared hope.
1. See the complete bibliography and biographical sketch in Mélanges André Neher, preface by Eliane Amado Lévy-Valensi, Théo Dreyfus, Jean Halpérin, and Freddy Raphaël (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient Adrien-Masonneuve, 1975). See the recent volume edited by David Banon, Héritages d’Andrė Neher (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 2011). The Neher archives are stored at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. For further biographical details, see Sandrine Szwarc, “André Neher, philosophe,” Archives juives 42 (2008): 140–45. For invaluable background, see Sandrine Szwarc, Les intellectuels juifs de 1945 à nos jours (Paris: Le Bord de l’Eau, 2013), and Johanna Lehr, La Thora dans la cité: L’emergence d’un nouveau judaïsme religieux après la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Paris: Le Bord de l’Eau, 2013).
2. See Paul Zylbermann, “Évocation d’Andrė Neher,” http://judaisme.sdv.fr/perso/neher/zylberm.htm. See also David Banon, “Andrė Neher: Du souffle prophétique à l’humanisme maharalien,” Pardès: Revue européenne d’Études et de Culture juives 23 (1997): 207–15. In January 2012, a conference inaugurated the Chaire Andrė Neher at the Centre communautaire de Paris as part of the Institut Elie Wiesel.
3. See the special issue of October 87 devoted to Sartre’s book; Denis Hollier, “Introduction,” October 87 (Winter 1999): 3.
4. Sartre gave a widely publicized lecture at the Alliance israélite universelle on June 3, 1947; see Emmanuel Levinas, “Existentialism and Antisemitism,” October 87 (Winter 1999): 27–31; published partially in the Cahiers de l’Alliance, June 27, 1947, 33–46.
5. As often happens with intellectual trends, Sartre’s viewpoint, as liberating as it might have seemed for many Jews, became a cliché after it had inspired thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, until Alain Finkielkraut reexamined its presuppositions in his autobiographical work, Le juif imaginaire, in 1983. By then the Sartrian paradigm was no longer valid, starting with the November 1967 press conference of General Charles de Gaulle after the Six-Day War.
6. “Transcendance et immanence,” republished in Neher, L’existence juive (Paris: Le Seuil, 1962), 13.
7. Ibid., 15–16.
8. Ibid., 18.
9. See Martina Urban, “Religion of Reason Revised: David Koigen on the Jewish Ethos,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 16, no. 1 (2008): 59–89. See the chapter on Koigen in Edward K. Kaplan and Samuel Dresner, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Prophetic Witness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
10. André Neher, “Aspects actuels des études bibliques,” Études évangéliques (January–March 1950): 45.
11. André Neher, “La Fonction du prophète dans la société hébraïque,” Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie religieuses no. 1 (1948–1949): 42.
12. Ibid., the final sentence.
13. André Neher, Amos (Paris: Vrin, 1980), xvii.
14. Ibid., xvii–xix.
15. Ibid., xvii.
16. Georges Vajda, Revue des Ėtudes juives 110 (July 1949–December 1950): 107 (107-14).
17. Ibid.; the following references in parentheses are from the same article.
18. In the 1981 edition of his Amos, Neher himself admitted to “quelques défauts juveniles,” vii–xi.
19. Vajda, Revue des Ėtudes juives, 114, the final sentences.
20. It is strange and sad that Neher, who had been criticized for the careless bibliography of his thesis, made an incorrect reference in the 1981 re-edition of Amos; the “Mise au jour bibliographique” erroneously notes: “Ricoeur, Paul, ‘Limites de la philosophie,’ à propos d’André Neher, Esprit, mars 1951.’ ” The correct essay on Neher appears in the November 1952 issue of Esprit.
21. Paul Ricoeur, “ ‘C’est dans la portée noadihique de la berith que réside l’universalisme d’Amos,” Esprit (November 1952) 62: 763.
22. Ibid., 764–65.
23. Ibid., 765, the final sentences.