Is there a way out of the Jewish fate?
To find the answer I will use the same method used in my earlier book [Portrait of a Jew]: I will continue to tell of my own life. [ . . . ] What then did I do when I clearly understood that I belonged to the anxiety and the hostility, to the humiliation and the threat—to the oppression? [ . . . ]
This is an optimistic book since it describes a liberation, while the preceding one, Portrait of a Jew, described a misfortune. [ . . . ] Throughout history the Jew has almost always hoped for a solution to his problem, whether it be in assimilation or in the myth of “next year in Jerusalem.” Rarely do the oppressed accept their oppression. [ . . . ] Portrait of a Jew is not complete with the description of his misfortune, the myths which accuse him and the deficiencies to which he submits. We must also add his more or less courageous, more or less effective response to this misfortune. Only then is the picture complete, and that is what I am attempting here.
Towards the end of my adolescence I had had enough of being a Jew. [ . . . ] I wanted to taste every food, enjoy every pleasure; I would be proud of my body and sure of my mind; I would practice every sport and understand every philosophy [ . . . ]
Even the general unleashing of the catastrophe a little later did not greatly upset me. [ . . . ] The world was animated by extraordinary historical stirrings. [ . . . ] What importance could Jewishness—so fragile, so special and so superficial—play amidst the turmoil of my blood and of the universe? [ . . . ]
Today it is almost in bad taste to hide one’s Jewishness. I have been told that in the United States being Jewish has ceased to be inconvenient. Jews proud-of-being-Jews are found even in Paris drawing rooms, which pleases me greatly and irritates me a little. [ . . . ] There is no immediate danger in proclaiming oneself a Jew.
But such has not always been the case. On the contrary, since the time of the French Revolution the most common reaction of Western middle-class Jews has always been to cover up, camouflage their Jewishness. [ . . . ]
Today I am perfectly opposed to self-rejection, to all disguises, to all these attitudes of self-torture. I can scarcely hide my irritation at [ . . . ] dissimilating Jews. [ . . . ] Among those who reject their Jewishness are to be found the worst and the best. The careful and the vanquished. [ . . . ] There were also authentic rebels who dared question their fate. There were at the same time the grotesquely bourgeois and men of sublime stature. [ . . . ] I sought not so much to reject myself as to conquer the world. I rejected myself as a Jew because I was rejecting the place assigned to me, and in which my people were content to remain. I felt my Jewishness to be a collection of odious harassments and ridiculous rites. [ . . . ] On the Jewish side, a skein of outdated customs; [ . . . ] on the other, a system of accusations and injustices. [ . . . ] When we graduated from the lycée at Tunis1 many of us decided to cut ourselves off from the past, the ghetto and our native land, to breathe fresh air and set off on the most beautiful of adventures. I no longer wanted to be that invalid called a Jew, mostly because I wanted to be a man; and because I wanted to join with all men to reconquer the humanity which was denied me. [ . . . ]
In Europe, they called themselves, among themselves, Israelites. They were even successful in having themselves called Israelites by others. [ . . . ]
The unfortunate truth is that it has never been enough to affirm “I am not oppressed” in order to cease being oppressed. Neither in one’s behavior, [in] one’s mental habits nor in one’s concrete existence. [ . . . ] So the Jewish fate is too difficult to live? Well I make it vanish, I deny it: see, no more Jewish fate! [ . . . ]
It certainly was absurd to arrest this Jew who didn’t exist. Yes, but was a man arrested, tortured, killed? [ . . . ] It is a fact that the Jews were condemned in any case, whether they thought of themselves as Frenchmen, Italians, Poles or Jews. [ . . . ]
In talking with a Jew who repudiates his Jewishness, whether he is a middle-class liberal, a youthful rebel or a systematic revolutionary, you always meet with the same love of abstraction. Another French-Jewish philosopher, usually a discerning thinker, earnestly declared to me: “I am against the distinction between Jews and non-Jews.” As if it were a matter of a dispute about methods! A Russian-Jewish sociologist, learned and perspicacious in his own field, objected to me: “I have never considered my Jewish birth of any importance . . . except,” he added proudly, “when it is necessary to fight persecutions.” As if persecution were not also a social fact, heavy with meaning, which partly determines Jewish existence. A politician, whose courage I usually admire, tried at length during a discussion to demonstrate that one ought not to do more for the Jewish victims than for the others. A fine way of disguising the poison! [ . . . ]
I had convictions: one day the swords would be turned into plowshares, and this miraculous morality would be adopted by all, conquerors and conquered, oppressors and oppressed, and all human nature would shine forth as evidence of Justice and Love. [ . . . ]
As Jews of the Left we had at our disposal a method of reasoning which we used against any too-tenacious adversaries. It was a peeling-off tactic comparable to eating an artichoke. We started out with Stalin’s definition of a nation; then we considered each trait mentioned in this definition. We asked ourselves: do the Jews have a common language? Obviously not. Do they share a common territory? Not that either. Do they even have a religion? No! No! Most Jews can’t even remember the names of important prophets! [ . . . ]
What was this logic which led us to doubt our very existence? [ . . . ]
I decided to take for my starting point this fact: my separate existence as a Jew. [ . . . ] I had the right to rebel, to question it. [ . . . ] What is this existence? What is Jewishness? [ . . . ] I saw perfectly well that the majority of Jews were ignorant of Judaism or barely conscious of their Jewishness [ . . . ] I had to understand it and, to a certain extent, accept it.
The reader will protest that at one and the same time I am making a great fuss about Jewishness and also stating that it is only an incoherent survivor, a sort of historical monster, a fossil. The Jew does not live, he survives. He is not a normal being, but a historical phantom who still haunts the world because his harassments, his persecutions and his sufferings endure. [ . . . ]
This thesis contains both some truth and enormous ambiguity. I will return to the undeniable fossilization of Jewish culture. It seems to me quite useless to cry out in indignation like the traditionalists every time a courageous Jew or a non-Jew (Toynbee)2 dares suggest it. Nevertheless, the problem of the Jew’s existence cannot be confused with that of the value of his cultural heritage. [ . . . ] A living fossil—is he any less a living creature? Does this state keep the fossil from eating and drinking, from rejoicing and suffering and from fear of death? [ . . . ]
As a Jew I exist more than non-Jews! My uniqueness makes me exist more, because it makes me more cumbersome, more problematical to others and to myself, because my conscience is more painfully aware, because the attention of others is more directly focused on me; like the giraffe, an animal who has also tarried on in history, whose presence is felt more and who is more disquieting than the ultramodern dogs and cats of our apartments. His picturesque and inconvenient long neck often causes him to die of hunger or condemns him to circuses or forces him into cages.
Three times cursed, alas, but the Jew does exist and his existence is more weighty and worrisome than that of others; he has, up to this moment, led the existence of a giraffe.
Camouflage was an insufficient adaptation to life among non-Jews; it was actually necessary to resemble them. In short, I had to try to assimilate. [ . . . ]
How we argued the question in our anxious adolescent discussions! To assimilate or not to assimilate? [ . . . ] Could we? Would it be a catastrophe or the cure for all our ills? At times we maintained that assimilation was the worst kind of cowardice, at times a duty. [ . . . ] Let me say that I no longer feel that assimilation deserves either the excessive honor or the indignity then heaped upon it. [ . . . ]
I persist in thinking that Jewish conduct, Jewish destiny, cannot be understood without reference to the Jewish condition. This condition differentiated and separated us; we were oppressed. Basically, our painful problem, whether hidden or avowed, was simple: how to alleviate or eliminate the oppression? [ . . . ] The people as a whole instinctively adopted the other tactic of every oppressed person—trickery. To escape being too tempting a victim, one had to distract the attention of the persecutors. Wasn’t a change of identity the best means to this end? [ . . . ] Assimilation was but one further and even necessary step on the road to self-rejection. [ . . . ]
Jewry has never been an absolute, an impenetrable block; it is also the sum of relations with non-Jews. What Jew, living among non-Jews, has not been assimilated to some extent? [ . . . ] Before striving so ardently towards the European model, we were Phoenicians, then Berbers, then Arabs, in language, costume, and eating habits. [ . . . ] For the assimilated were to be found first of all among the rich who often moved to the newer sections of town where the houses and the cars were depersonalized. They sent their children to French schools, dressed in the latest Italian fashions, and traveled regularly to Europe. We were hurt by this too-willing and too-rapid change; to us it appeared a kind of treason. [ . . . ] We were so far removed from our parents in our dress, in our language, [ . . . ] we were frightened and embarrassed in our relations with them. Even our rabbis timidly tried on the robes of the Catholic priests, and in that they were only imitating the French rabbis. [ . . . ]
What is a specifically Jewish custom?
The oppression has lasted too long to leave the Jews with many sure landmarks; and he no longer knows what is his own and what he has copied from others. One has only to think how much of Africa has been left the American Negro! [ . . . ]
History has regularly forced us to abandon our sanctuaries one after the other, to move elsewhere, with new neighbors and under new regulations. On the contrary, assimilation was very often one of our most healthy reactions. [ . . . ]
Assimilation was necessary and, as long as the oppression lasted, assimilation had to fail. [ . . . ] I pointed it out in the case of the colonized, and it would be a simple matter to discover it with regard to women and Negroes. Insofar as the oppressed is driven to despair, he is led to reject and imitate his oppressor simultaneously. [ . . . ] The colonized admires and copies the colonizer before he combats him. The Negro, even in the midst of his revolt, reveres white values and tries to realize them in himself. But the process never completely succeeds because the colonized must remain colonized and the Negro must remain in his place.
To propose assimilation globally to a group is, in the final analysis, absurd. [ . . . ] It contradicts its own essence. [ . . . ] It is clear that a group, inasmuch as it is a group, cannot want to assimilate. It cannot want to go against its own existence, for then it would be rejecting itself. [ . . . ]
Does this mean that no Jewish community has ever disappeared? No, of course not. [ . . . ] A human group voluntarily accepts its formal death only to avoid total death. Jewish communities have only been assimilated when their only choice was between extermination and metamorphosis. [ . . . ] From this stem the disguises and the masks of the Marranos.3 One cannot ask a group to renounce its own existence in order to save itself since this formal existence coincides with its very life as a group. [ . . . ] That is the reason why an oppressor can almost never swallow up another people by violence, for violence, unless it is too extreme, awakens the oppressed and keeps him on the alert. [ . . . ]
I have been told that in America, Jewish leaders are no longer primarily preoccupied with anti-Semitism, but with disappearance through conformity. [ . . . ] These same American Jewish leaders, so convinced of the American Way of Life yesterday, are today extremely anxious to slow down a movement which they had fostered. And what is more, who dares say that we are completely through with anti-Semitism? [ . . . ] Here is the second objective impossibility of assimilation. In oppressive situations assimilation runs counter to the profound wish of the oppressor as well as that of the oppressed. [ . . . ]
In order to assimilate, I would have had to assimilate not only the model, but also the accusations and the injustices. I would have had to swallow the poisoned fruit. [ . . . ]
One must consent to the scorn and the accusation; one must appropriate them; and finally, become the accomplice of the insulters and the persecutors. One forgets too often that if assimilation fails, it is more because of the oppressor than because of any reticence on the part of the oppressed. The refusal of the colonizers rather than the hesitation of the colonized was responsible for the failure of colonial assimilation. [ . . . ]
I have, however, tried to answer this question in another book, The Colonizer and the Colonized. Oppression is too advantageous. Privilege is certainly the pivot of the colonial relationship. Why would the colonizer abandon a position in which he found so many benefits? If the privilege of the non-Jew is often more subtle, it is no less certain. [ . . . ]
He is surely not on the lowest rung of the social scale since the Jew is even lower. And if it sometimes happens that the Jew is not there, it is an anomaly and a shame which needs rectification; hence legitimatized racism. The scapegoat process fits into this mechanism. It is too convenient to have the Jew to crystallize all social, metaphysical, and individual evil. In short, the misfortunes of Jewish existence must help support and compensate for the misfortunes of non-Jewish existence. [ . . . ]
Stateless, the Jew serves as a reminder to the non-Jew that he has a country, without which he might not see its value. He rediscovers a past, a history from which the Jew is excluded, and must remain excluded. [ . . . ] In an economic crisis or simply in the competition for jobs, the Jewish rival is thus actually eliminated.
If the Jew did not exist, then he would have to be invented. No society deprives itself of the pleasure of inventing its own Jew, be he the foreigner, the gypsy, or actually the Jew; in other words a different being, therefore excluded and separate, therefore suspect, therefore presumed guilty, therefore a most suitable choice for the crystallization of collective anxiety—an expiatory victim. [ . . . ] This is the explanation of the rage caused by the Marrano; and what Jew is not, to some degree, a Marrano?The non-Jew is under the impression that he loses on all fronts: as a Marrano the Jew continues to exist, a foreign body, disquieting, all the more frightening because he is no longer mistrusted and, at the same time, he is no longer even useful.
I was not far from a horrible feeling which we had better call by its name, self-hatred. [ . . . ] This sort of self-destructive fury is, at least with most oppressed people, far more frequent than one might suppose. In this light it would be interesting to reread the autobiographical novels of colonized North Africans or the cruel tales of Negro novelists. [ . . . ] You will discover that the mechanism of self-rejection is once again at work. [ . . . ] They are gradations of the same impulse, easily recognizable in the diverse and multiple aggressions which the oppressed inflicts upon himself.
The other day I found a bundle of notes which I had entitled no less than “Anti-Jewish Writings.” In them I pointed out, stigmatized, or ridiculed the weaknesses, faults, and errors of my coreligionists in Tunis. Of course, I also proposed a vast program of psychological, moral and social reforms. We were to have a more precise political program, abandon commercial careers, be more discreet in public, speak more softly, etc. [ . . . ]
This self-contempt was also to be found in the Moslems, another group oppressed by colonization. [ . . . ]
Assuredly there is a certain Judeophobia of the Jew, as there is a Negrophobia of the Negro and an anti-feminism of women which are the logical end results of self-rejection. Fortunately this Judeophobia is never total for it would lead to death, which does sometimes happen. [ . . . ]
One can hardly take pride in one’s self-rejection. The Negroes who spend millions of dollars each year on illusory products such as hair straighteners and skin bleachers carefully conceal this activity. In an almost unbearable scene Richard Wright describes the reactions of shame and hatred of a young Negro woman, surprised during a hair treatment session. The number of Jews who shorten their noses do not all decide on this measure for purely aesthetic reasons, but they don’t acknowledge this fact. All this points to an absurd and cruel truth; these measures are the poisoned fruit of a too-long oppression. What inner anxiety and destructive forces have invaded these people to make them disfigure their faces so! The oppression must have been most effective if the oppressed tries so furiously to respond by delirium to the delirium of the oppressor!
For self-rejection has far-reaching and corrosive effects on a human being; it attacks his body, language, traditions, religion and culture. I remember the notices posted in the courtyard of the Alliance Israelite school: “Speak French!” It was, of course, in part a colonial rejection of the Arab tongue. But it was more than that, for we added with great seriousness, “We mustn’t speak Arabic; it sounds Jewish!” For over and above the Arab language we were aiming at our Jewishness. Elsewhere it was Yiddish or Ladino which had Jewish connotations. [ . . . ] To dress in bright colors was Jewish. To speak too loudly, to call out, to gather in the streets, was Jewish. [ . . . ]
I continue to find all cultural chauvinism ridiculous. [ . . . ] The collection of the Pirke Abot (“Sayings of the Fathers”) is as good a collection as any people possess; Jewish wisdom has its own originality among the wisdoms of the world. And, since I continue to recognize myself as a Jew, since I no longer wish to disappear, then I will simply no longer consent to this systematic mutilation.
In short, like all the oppressed, the contemporary Jew finds all his own culture progressively amputated. While in the ghetto he was content to be a parasite of his own past, he now decides to forget it. For the face of the oppression has changed; to survive today, it is better to resemble our oppressor. And so we had to tear out our souls and scour our features; shorten our noses and get rid of our vain nostalgia. [ . . . ]
Let there be no mistake, this feeling against the Jew who calls attention to himself and to other Jews is already a kind of self-hatred. [ . . . ]
I have even known some Jews who were frankly anti-Semitic. I was amazed to see some of my school friends from good middle-class Jewish families join a political organization which had an avowed anti-Semitic program. [. . . One] thought he had found a way out by joining the Jeunesses Croix de Feu4 and working fanatically with them. [ . . . ]
Self-rejection can never be a real answer to an oppressive condition. Actually, it leads to this paradoxical result: the Jew rejects himself to ward off the rejection of others, and in so doing he confirms their rejection and consents to the condemnation and the sanctions which they exact. The internalization and passing on by the oppressed himself is one of the most dramatic aspects of the oppression.
My young life at home and at school was regulated by daily ritual and religious holidays which were never questioned; Saturday was our holy day of rest. [ . . . ] Unlike many European Jews, I needed no particular deliberation or historical impetus to return to the Jewish world. I knew from the start, and without regrets, that I was part of it. [ . . . ]
One day a young scout leader came to wait for his troop at the lycée; [ . . . ] this was the beginning of my entire political life. [ . . . ] Twice a week, for some years, I learned all that the regular school could not teach me: the doctrines and precepts of revolutionary action, plus a very good Jewish education, ranging from the Bible to the most modern Hebrew poets. On Sundays, we would set out for the country, pretending to be Israeli pioneers. [ . . . ] This is how I broke my first pair of glasses, in a fight with an opposing group, the Betarim, whom we pompously called our “Fascists.” [ . . . ]
I had to know the meaning of a resolute attachment to Jewry, a serious adhesion to Judaism and, finally, a deliberate acquiescence to my fate as a Jew. [ . . . ]
If one accepts oneself as a Jew, just what does one accept? [ . . . ] Of what did this well-known Jewish culture, of which we were so proud, consist? What was the value of this celebrated religion? [ . . . ]
During one of my recent visits to Tunis, once again overwhelmed by the misery of the ghetto, I wrote an article which was, perhaps, too full of pathos. [ . . . ] I concluded by advocating the disappearance of the ghetto. [ . . . ] It was necessary, I felt, to tear down the ghetto walls and disperse the people throughout the modern and airy sections of the city. [ . . . ] To my astonishment, I brought down on my head the most violent protests in the name of “Jewish spirituality.” I underestimated, it would seem, the “immense wealth” of the ghetto, the “intensity of its inner life.” [ . . . ]
Concentration had certainly more effectively maintained our family and religious traditions. [ . . . ]
If this famous spirituality could only flourish on the dungheap of misery and sickness, I would not be inconsolable at its transformation—which is what happens, after all, to all Jewries as soon as they have access to Western civilization. [ . . . ]
The wall and wooden doors, more than a collective prison imposed by others; it was an inner wall, real and symbolic, which the Jew had built. [ . . . ]
It is true that only the ghetto permitted the intense communal life of the Jew and defended him against erosion without and within. [ . . . ] Every Jewry [ . . . ] is the conscience of a ghetto; its nostalgia for a more homogenous and warmer community is the nostalgia for a lost ghetto. There is no doubt that a Jew who wished to affirm and fully live his Jewishness had to strengthen or reconstruct a kind of ghetto and carefully guard its walls, whether real or symbolic. [ . . . ]
In the space of a few months I visited the Mea Shearim section of Jerusalem and the Hassidic community near Spring Valley, outside New York [City]. I was struck by the similarity of their collective attitudes. [ . . . ] I have described at length in The Colonizer and the Colonized and Portrait of a Jew what must be encystment of the oppressed. Spring Valley and Mea Shearim are extraordinarily concrete incarnations of this. Mea Shearim especially, with its life rigorously enclosed within walls blind to the outside, its crowding of a community on top of itself, its continuous growth towards the center in successive layers, forms a strange and disturbing little abstract city. [ . . . ]
Every ghetto is to some extent a world outside space and time. [ . . . ] “The Jews of the Diaspora,” writes an Israeli humorist, “recite in their morning prayers, ‘My God, give us this day our daily ghetto.’”
In the extreme, the Jew who accepts himself as a Jew tends to construct a small but complete world, mental as well as material, inside the world of others. He takes all kinds of Jewish newspapers and magazines, builds a library of Jewish works, lines his walls with Jewish objects, sees almost no one but other Jews, introduces Hebrew or Yiddish words into his conversations, often grows a beard and puts a yarmelkeh [sic] on his head. He decides, in effect, to lead an exclusively Jewish life. [ . . . ]
I do not ridicule or condemn this abnormal rejection of the world, just as I did not completely condemn the temptations of self-rejection. [ . . . ] What discomfort and fear can force a man to this desperate act: to withdraw his child from the world of other children and put him back into the educational system of the Middle Ages! [ . . . ]
The Jew who rigorously accepts his Jewishness must lead a marginal life, separate from the life and thoughts of the rest of humanity. [ . . . ] Judaism is not only a religion. It is a mental attitude and a total conduct, individual and collective, which includes a religious dimension. [ . . . ] Not only a spiritual heritage, but also the institutional implications and group customs. My daily life, my marriage, the burial of my friends—all these must be conducted in a special way. [ . . . ] In doing this I make a point of my differences and multiply the extent of my separation? [ . . . ] I choose to retire without a fight in order to protect myself from a world which rejects me.
Imagine what eating exclusively kosher food would really mean! A limited choice, purchased in a few prescribed places, specially prepared and cooked in special pots. It would be infinitely less difficult to have acute liver trouble or be a total vegetarian than to be completely Jewish in one’s eating habits. What self-imposed exclusion from the world and its riches, from so many human relationships and even most trips! Such an ancient and extraordinary taboo, perpetrated on human beings. [ . . . ] The Jew must forgo the important and symbolic bread-breaking communion with the entire universe, except other Jews—Jews with the same degree of orthodoxy at that. [ . . . ] All considered, however, the life of the Jew who accepts is probably more troubled than that of the Jew who rejects his Jewishness, since the former adds to the difficulties created by others those difficulties he inflicts on himself. [ . . . ]
The effort to alleviate Jewish misfortune by self-affirmation, far from saving the Jew, in the end precipitates other disorders; it imposes one type of alienation in place of another. I have already shown how this encystment also ends by creating a veritable network of protective institutions for the oppressed. [ . . . ] These protective institutions are both havens and swamps which shelter and engulf the oppressed. [ . . . ] Encystment and protective institutions are, in this sense, one of the solutions to oppression. They are possible adjustments to a hostile or reputedly hostile universe; the prices paid for not having to face it and be wounded by it every day. [ . . . ]
Far from resolving the conflict with the non-Jew, abolishing the threat, it substantiates it and makes it seem insoluble and final. To form a little Jewry in the midst of a non-Jewish world is to separate one’s life from the life of others. To confine oneself to a tradition, no matter how illustrious, is to separate one’s thought from the mainstream of universal thought. [ . . . ] “To live among Jews,” “to live a Jewish life” in non-Jewish surroundings, like it or not, is to confirm and reinforce our limitations and mutilations. [ . . . ] As with any place deprived of air and sunshine, there was a mustiness and decrepitude on the inside. [ . . . ] I could never have developed my full potential in this humid, collective intimacy.
I have tried two or three times to participate actively in the life of a Jewish community, but I found nothing but mediocrity, fear and Machiavellianism, on a small scale, all around me. [ . . . ] This is probably the reason for the pallor of our community and spiritual leaders and, conversely, the reason why most of the great Jews of modern times have been men of revolt and rejection and not of faith. Freud hit hardest at Jewish mythology, Marx was almost malignant and Einstein was interested in Judaism only out of solidarity and a kind of politeness. The dramatic, sword-point relations between Spinoza and the Jewish group of the times is well known. On the other hand, who remembers the assailants of that great philosopher? [ . . . ]
The oppressed who encysts himself plays dead like certain animals, so that he might better pass through the shadows of history, like the celebrated rabbi who thus succeeded in saving the Torah by placing himself live in a coffin in order to cross the Roman lines. [ . . . ] Encystment has never prevented the world from periodically crushing the Jew who was encysted in his institutions, rites and laughable exorcisms; it did not stop the Nazis unleashed against the Warsaw ghetto.
On the contrary, encystment blinds and disarms the oppressed in his state of artificial sleep. [ . . . ]
The only resistance in the Warsaw ghetto came from the sons of Hashomer Hatzair, who were revolutionaries and atheists. In any case, I understood, for myself, that you cannot save a people by putting it in a catalepsy.5
Can Judaism mean nothing more to you than this misery and this mockery? The irresponsible ghetto, the suffocating family, the mean rabbis of your youth! . . . Judaism is made up of those eternal values which the Jews have offered the world and which the world has generally adopted! Even those rites whose significance you pretend you cannot grasp are but an imperfect means of materializing those values and of venerating them.
After the publication of my two novels and particularly my last book, Portrait of a Jew, this was the objection I often heard. [ . . . ]
Judaism is a monument of moral and religious values, it is true, but it is not only that. Certainly Judaism is more than the ghetto of Hara whose memory revolts and fascinates me [ . . . ] Of course, Judaism is not merely the Jewish community of Tunis, the thought of which awakens in me an ambiguous nostalgia. But it is also that. Judaism is more than a garland of pure values, sublime stars perched at the zenith of humanity, which only the clairvoyance of the Jewish doctors can perceive. It is also the manner in which these values are lived, or even rejected, by the mass man in the street. It is both dogma and ritual, institutions and beliefs, mental attitudes and collective behavior. Judaism is all of these at once, because to be a Jew is to take all these into account. [ . . . ]
Judaism is above all a way of life, a concept of existence in its relationship to a divinity and to other men. Theory and practice, ethics and religion form an indissoluble whole. [ . . . ]
To understand Judaism, you must of necessity refer to the concrete existence of the Jew. I tried to show this in my last book. [ . . . ] To understand the Jew you must of course take Judaism into account, but to understand Judaism you must refer to daily life as lived by the Jew.
To be a Jew, I have been told time and time again, is to “live a Jewish life.” Now what is a Jewish life if not the aggregate of the Jew’s positive and negative relationships with other Jews and with non-Jews, according to the will of God if he is a believer? To be a Jew is to live in a certain way, to marry and bury one’s dead as do the mass of Jews. It is also not to live like the majority, not to attend the same church, not to celebrate the same holidays. Finally, it is the misfortune of living in a hostile world with all the ensuing psychological, cultural and historical consequences. To be a Jew is, briefly, to share a communal destiny, both positive and negative, which unites Jews among themselves and separates them from everyone else. [ . . . ]
Under a pile of tangential or baroque details, I felt I had to discover the structural principles of the edifice and the intentions of the collective architect. [ . . . ]
Its complexity seemed to me to revolve around three main axes: monotheism, election and Messianism. Or, more explicitly: a belief in one Supreme and Moral God, the Election of the Jewish people to receive the Law, and Messianism, which will recompense and save the chosen people. Let me say right away that in this trinity monotheism did not appear essential to me. [ . . . ]
Paradoxically, monotheism and moralism can no longer distinguish the Jewish religion from other religions, nor the Jew from the non-Jew. [ . . . ]
By accepting the famous Ten Commandments I could not see in what way I was distinguishable from non-Jews. [ . . . ] The truth is that rules of morality, the search for the best conduct, was something Jews had in common with the rest of mankind and, I might add, this is how it should be.
In the same way neither the uniqueness of the divinity nor any of the ideas associated with this—the concept of the Almighty, omniscience, the creation of the world from nothingness, the revelation to man, center of the creation and interlocutor almost worthy of God—are today indisputably Jewish property. [ . . . ] Theology and theodicy, the largest part of religious philosophy, are today Christian. [ . . . ]
Moral monotheism has not, for some time, been sufficient to assure Jewish singularity. [ . . . ] I am convinced that the faithful who are courageous enough to be lucid and sincere would admit that in Judaism today the divinity has been de-emphasized in favor of man, or more precisely, in favor of the double relation of man to God: Election and Messianism. Thus the insistence of numerous and intelligent commentators (Buber, for example) on the importance of the Dialogue between the Jew and his God. [ . . . ] The Jewish God is today certainly he who chose the Jewish people, who ordained a mission and who will send the Messiah. [ . . . ]
The Election elicits and confirms most of the other Jewish themes. The Jew was chosen by God to carry out a mission. [ . . . ] Then, immediately following, the notion of exception and choice. [ . . . ] Then comes the idea of oneness: that of a people and a responsibility which find nourishment in the oneness of God. [ . . . ] What is this people trying to say about itself? It is clear that it is trying to translate the feeling of an exceptional destiny. [ . . . ] Jewish history has been an essentially tragic one. [ . . . ] It is enough to read a true historian, a Graetz or a Dubnow, to see it clearly. Jewish history is punctuated by catastrophes. [ . . . ] The cataclysm which threatens the very existence of the Jewish group is so often repeated that it renders this existence a constant menace, an endless near-disaster, a rescue which is never final. [ . . . ]
Exile is certainly one of the most frequent and familiar events in Jewish existence. Indeed, one might even divide Jewish history into periods from exile to exile, from conquest to conquest: Assyria, Babylonia, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Islam, Christianity. [ . . . ] Have we not just gone through a bitter experience in North Africa where we thought ourselves safe from such upheavals by virtue of our deep roots in these countries where we were contemporaries of the Phoenicians? [ . . . ]
Jewish mythology situates the mythical birth of the people of Israel at the end of an oppression: “Remember the time when you were a slave in Egypt!” is one of the most haunting refrains in our collective memory. Moses, the first great man with whom the people identify, is first a liberator. All Jewish history, written and oral—that is to say, the image Jews have forged of themselves—is constructed or reconstructed in this perspective: oppression-liberation. In this regard the passage from Biblical to Talmudic culture is singularly enlightening. The Bible is the literature of a relatively free people, still fighting for its threatened freedom; the Talmud is the literature of an oppressed people who have almost given up, without ceasing to hope. [ . . . ]
All the power of dreams, all the inventiveness of the Jewish people were thus mobilized to explain the tragedy and alleviate the despair. Thanks to this antithetic invention, [ . . . ] the mysterious election of a small people from among all the others, the sublime mission confided to them alone, the pact of eternal alliance with God—these mold for the Jew a glorious, superb and exacting destiny. [ . . . ] The Election is the other side, which is the curse, the sublime distinction of the sad fate of the exiled. [ . . . ]
Abraham, the first patriarch to have the honor of signing the alliance, was he not already, and for that very reason, a solitary man? Moses, the hero par excellence, the interlocutor of God and legislator of the people, did he not complain bitterly of his solitude, caught between God and man? [ . . . ] Isolation is the corollary of Election. [ . . . ] To play the role which the divinity proposed, Abraham had consented to circumcision, exile and even the sacrifice of his own son. How could the Jew, the entire Jewish people, not in their turn endure the uprooting, the assassination and the pogrom if God exacted it, if their election is bought at that price? [ . . . ]
But couldn’t the Jew resist this divine choice and refuse this awful distinction? He does! Judaism is full of these protests. Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Job, the Prophets, major and minor, all complain, groan and sometimes revolt. But they always submit in the end, recognizing their mistake. Why? Because they discover that they were morally wrong, not merely metaphysically wrong. [ . . . ]
A painful need to understand consumes the Jew: why this cruel fate? Why is he thrown into this terrible history which crushes him, punishes him permanently? The Election explains it all, is consolation for everything: it reassures and flatters him, it demands and attracts. [ . . . ] It is the classic example of the sanctuary-value.
The other aspect of this fundamental relationship of man to God is Messianism, probably the second cardinal of Judaism. [ . . . ] Messianism first appears as the hope of an effective liberation of an oppressed people. [ . . . ]
As far back as I can remember I find the Messiah, half-man, half-event. [ . . . ] “When the Messiah [literally the Savior, the Anointed of God] comes,” he will load us with favors, resurrect the dead, avenge us from our enemies, and lead us back to Jerusalem. . . . In short, totally transform our condition. [ . . . ] “When the Mashiah comes,” as if we hoped without daring to believe. [ . . . ]
In most of the ritual texts themselves the personality of the Messiah varied considerably. [ . . . ] The Messiah is very often pictured as a real and relatively commonplace person. He is sometimes a civilian, sometimes a soldier, a layman or a priest, and even once a non-Jew! Cyrus, King of Persia, who allowed the exiled Jews to return to their homes, was also called Messiah by the Prophet Isaiah, to the horror, it is true, of the Jewish community. [ . . . ] There isn’t even one Messiah, but several. [ . . . ]
In short, Jewish history has continuously generated Messiahs. [ . . . ] Every time the collective misery worsens, the need of the Messiah springs to life. [ . . . ] Bar Kochba, the last Jewish military leader who fought the Romans, and in our time, Theodor Herzl, the Viennese journalist who undertook to found the new Jewish state, were thus acclaimed; not to mention the seventeenth century Sabbatai Zevi or the eighteenth century Jacob Frank, who were unjustly called false Messiahs after their failures. Actually, why false? Which Messiah has been completely true to date? Have they not all been relatively false since the Diaspora remains and the people have not yet been completely liberated? [ . . . ]
That is what Jewish tradition taught me when I endeavored to decipher it. [ . . . ] Judaism is the reflection of the Jew on himself, mournful meditation on his isolation and his fragility and on his hope of finding a way out. What is Messianism if not this obstinate, frenzied expectation of the end of a misfortune which is almost without exit? The Messiah, first a human liberator with the help of God, was transformed into a myth and another great sanctuary-value. [ . . . ]
The Jew must continue hoping in order to continue living. One day, thanks to the Messiah, the Jew, Cinderella of history, separated, despised and beaten down, will shed his rags and his cloak of ashes, to appear at last to the dazzled eyes of humanity, as what he has, mysteriously, never ceased to be: the chosen, the predestined, the prince of peoples. In a word, the Jew will again become a free man. Yes, that is what Jewish tradition suggested to me: if I accept myself as a Jew, it is only the beginning of a new conquest and the confirmation of the oppression. That is my true mission, and that is how I might one day obtain the equivalent of the coming of the Messiah on earth: freedom.
Culture was our undisputed birthright, our originality in relation to other peoples, our title of nobility and our visa for the future. We were weak, without a country, without a flag, permanently humiliated, periodically crushed . . . but we were Princes of the Spirit. [ . . . ]
Exactly what did this famous culture consist of, if it excluded practically every activity of importance in the world, including that of the Jews themselves? Since the masterpieces of Jewish painters were not Jewish, nor the great music of the Jewish composers, nor the literature [ . . . ]
I have told how my first ambition was to become a philosopher; and I willingly prided myself on the idea of uninterrupted Jewish philosophy. [ . . . ] How do you distinguish it from Christianity and the secular humanism with which our lives and all our intellectual efforts are saturated? [ . . . ]
The advent of a great Jewish philosophy almost became a reality in the Middle Ages. And much might be gleaned from the interminable and obsessive Talmudic meditations, or the fascinating delirium of the Cabala. [ . . . ] With the best will in the world the Talmud cannot be considered a philosophical structure either in intention or in fact. [ . . . ] Past Jewish philosophy has never been anything more than one long rumination on the law. The interest of our traditional texts lies elsewhere. They contain, more than a philosophy, a continuous telling of our collective life. [ . . . ]
Let us simply say that we were not one of those rare peoples who created an original philosophy and that we had other claims to glory. [ . . . ] From Bergson to Husserl, including Brunschvicg, the much esteemed Wahl, Jankélévitch, Schuhl, or even Levinas who came nearest to these preoccupations, can anyone seriously affirm that their thought is a continuation of Judaism or even stems from it? [ . . . ] Spinoza, the greatest of them all, was violently rejected; it is a fact that he did philosophize outside the tradition and often against it. [ . . . ]
Thus attempts at suggesting a Jewish point of view, gleaning anything and everything having any relationship to Jewish science, Jewish chemistry or medicine, seemed at best an exercise for collectors, museum curators or minor historians. [ . . . ]
“The Jewish contribution to civilization” has been much discussed. But what exactly does it mean? The nature of this contribution becomes equivocal as soon as you try to define it. If this influence is limited to the religious and moral tradition, then it is limited to a past which no longer acts directly on us since Christianity has largely taken it over. [ . . . ] At best it is “the contribution of certain Jews to civilization,” and, above all, not necessarily as Jews. So we can paradoxically affirm that at the moment Jews can at last contribute effectively to the common culture, their culture ceases to be Jewish. [ . . . ]
“So what!” you will perhaps say. “Isn’t it enough for you to finally become artists, philosophers and scholars! Why do you insist on creating a Jewish art! A Jewish philosophy! . . .” [ . . . ]
I am only sure of this: I wanted to get to the bottom of the Jewish fate as it was imposed on me. I was looking for a decisive answer to my problem—that of a Jewish man living among other men. I had provisionally decided that the answer lay in accepting myself as a Jew, in claiming my Jewishness, if necessary. This led me to look at exactly what I was accepting, what I should lay claim to. Now what is Jewish affirmation without a Jewish culture—without art, without philosophy, without religion, without Jewish values, without Judaism? [ . . . ]
To seek out a specifically Jewish culture would be a regression, an intentional delusion and the abandonment of enviable progress. [ . . . ]
In saying that the Jew’s only culture was universal culture, or that it belonged to some other people, was once again stating that there was no Jewish culture. [ . . . ]
Having decided to accept myself and my people, I failed to see what there was in them and in myself and my people, I failed to see what there was in them and in myself to promote. For my affirmation to be meaningful it had to have some content. I had to affirm a particular being complete with a face, a language and a particular culture. Until now, all that I could discover in common with my people was a questionable past, our eternal misfortune and our sad solidarity. I perceived with terror that our famous culture was but one long tenacious nostalgia, the deceptive shadow of distant splendors. [ . . . ]
The Jews who are grouped together, encysted, more or less consenting prisoners in a ghetto, real or symbolic, are able to maintain some degree of specific culture. But has it any value? It is a scholastic, sterile and inadequate culture—the ghetto culture of oppressed and broken people. [ . . . ]
I am aware that this inquiry into our cultural asphyxiation will upset many of my readers, Jews and non-Jews alike. [ . . . ]
For what is Jewish art if not an art of misfortune, meditation on this misfortune, and on the means of delivery from it? [ . . . ] The same infinitely repeated story of mortal danger, whether collective or individual, followed by some unexpected deliverance. So it was with Isaac, with Job, with Esther (whose sacrifice is not even exacted by God), with the Maccabees . . . [ . . . ] What oppressed group has really had a culture? What have women created up until now? Or the proletariat? Or, for many years, the colonized? Or even the American Negro? A culture cannot be fashioned with catastrophe alone or in continuous misfortune; you cannot create a great culture in a great oppression. [ . . . ]
Here I would like to propose a distinction which has a certain methodological importance: as a Jew, I received a tradition. I do not have a culture at my disposal. It is true that we have had an extraordinary cultural past, but it is equally true that our present is at best mediocre. [ . . . ]
“But all the same, there is the Bible! The Talmud! You may reject their mystical value but you cannot ignore these cultural moments!” [ . . . ]
No tradition, no matter how fabulous, can ever replace a living culture, either in glory or in effectiveness. [ . . . ] Culture is invention and renewal, renewal based on a certain tradition, but also constant adaptation. Culture is at least a continuing tradition. [ . . . ] The Talmud has been closed since the fifth century, the Cabala, for all practical purposes, since the thirteenth century and the Bible for so long. . . .
What’s even worse, this same solidity and the rigidity of this formidable tradition have contributed to the smothering of all Jewish culture. How do you go about reaching the height of such a monument? How do you dare to measure yourself against it? The guardians of the tradition have also led a veritable war. [ . . . ] An almost constant condemnation of the plastic arts, a sterilizing disdain of music, distrust of all literature other than religious literature. [ . . . ] The work of the great poet Judah Halevi is, in a way, a war machine against philosophy and philosophers. [ . . . ] During the seventeenth century we see the frightful curse against Spinoza. [ . . . ] Martin Buber is the only one I am aware of who has tried to create a work of universal dimensions which is Jewish in its genesis and its extensions.6 Even this unique and great Jewish philosopher of ours was bitterly criticized by the traditionalists. (According to them, Hassidism, in which Buber said he found inspiration, is fictitious; therefore the consequences of his deductions have nothing to do with the “true” Judaism.) [ . . . ] I do not want to put Jewish tradition on trial. Without a country, without an army, without political power, without any of these attributes through which a human group is embodied and identifies itself, what could the Jew do but hold desperately onto a distant past? [ . . . ] Oppressed peoples, no longer having a history, also stop having a cultural history. [ . . . ]
Tradition had become unlivable, but nothing had replaced it nor could replace it. [ . . . ] It was probably one of the major conflicts of Kafka who, without clearly saying so, fought throughout his career against the crushing heritage, which he nonetheless accepted. I have shown in one of my essays how Freud courageously accepted the challenge, how he dealt tradition—its institutions and myths—its hardest blows, while always affirming that he belonged to it, even insisting on what he might have owed to his Jewishness. Although the accusations against Spinoza were vile, it is true that he questioned the very foundation of Judaism without, however, ever agreeing to break off his affiliation. [ . . . ]
The respectful rumination on the law and the encystment in its immovable institutions exclude all living culture and all social future. [ . . . ]
In an oppressive situation, self-affirmation generally runs the risk of becoming a confirmation of that oppression. Perhaps in accepting myself as a Jew, I was in some ways accepting myself as an oppressed person. [ . . . ] Can one really accept oneself as a Jew? Can one really accept oneself as a proletarian or as a Negro? Really, this was a simple matter of not knowing the meaning of misery! [ . . . ]
Jewish existence, accepted or claimed by the Jew, was necessarily an existence which had been defined by others. [ . . . ]
These chapters seem to me to deserve several criticisms: I have not insisted enough in them on the positiveness of the Jewish culture. I am particularly anxious to point this out because the eclipse of its culture, by others and in its own eyes, constitutes a part of the condition of a dominated people.
I would therefore ask the sympathetic reader to refer to another of my writings, “Culture and Tradition,” where I set forth precisely and unequivocally the essential points of my theses, namely:
(See also the chapter “The Heritage” in Portrait of a Jew.)
I have written in the past that a Jew can only be of the Left; this apparently astonished and irritated some readers. I still maintain that this is so. [ . . . ] The Jew remains a dominated person, in other words, permanently threatened. If he gives any thought to the matter at all, if he has the courage to admit it to himself, how can he fail to want a new arrangement of a society which is so continuously hostile to him? [ . . . ]
It is true that the parties and governments of the Left very quickly gave us reason to doubt their ability to resolve our problem. Relatively speaking, we had certainly furnished the different parties of the Left with the largest contingent of hard-core militants, but this did not put an end to the hesitations and muddling of the European Left with respect to us. [ . . . ]
Once and for all I convinced myself that an oppressed person must never expect others to hand him his liberation. [ . . . ]
The history of our relations with the Left—of our messianic hope of being delivered by the Left—is the history of a great derided hope. Forty years after the Russian revolution anti-Semitism remains a fact in Socialist countries and among the militants of many political parties and unions of the European and American Left. [ . . . ]
They try to explain that it is not exactly racism. [ . . . ] Maybe so; in any case, it looks savagely like anti-Semitism to me. [ . . . ]
I maintain that a certain rejection of the Jew, be it clear or confused, is part of the thought of the very great majority of Occidental Socialists. [ . . . ] The failure of the European Left, with regard to the Jewish problem, was no accident.
The fact is that there exists in the Marxist tradition, with regard to the Jewish problem, an original sin: it is Marx himself. [ . . . ]
The Jews are concentrated in certain branches of the economy because they are excluded from the other branches. The economy is, as I have said before, one of the Jew’s sanctuary-institutions. But extending this observation to the absolute, Marx condenses all Jewish existence into its economic aspect. (In passing, it is interesting to note that the Marxist reduction coincides with the anti-Semitic accusation, which also makes the Jew out to be an absolute economic figure.) And, most unfortunately, Marx’s essay “The Jewish Question,” which is his worst sociological work, has become the Marxist Bible for everything concerning the Jews. This has resulted in the immense dilemma of post-Marxist thought on this subject, and a plan of action, or rather non-action, which is perfectly sterile. [ . . . ]
I repeat, I continue to think that the Jew, as a threatened minority, cannot allow himself, even today, even in Israel, to break with the forces of the Left. For us, the triumph of democracy, humanitarian and egalitarian ideals in the world, is a question of life or death. [ . . . ]
On meditating on this incapacity I discovered a notion which for me is fundamental: that of the specific liberation of each oppressed people. [ . . . ] The oppression of the Jew still being a particular oppression. I had to discover a specific solution.
What can we do today to become an autonomous people, so that we may function freely and completely as such? [ . . . ]
In The Colonizer and the Colonized I made an important distinction between what I called the inquiry and the wish. [ . . . ] We must clearly distinguish between the inventory of a reality (psychological, social, political) and the different plans which can be formulated concerning it (wishes, decisions, opinions). [ . . . ]
Thus all that I have written on the subject of dominated men—the colonized, the Jews, the Negroes—is essentially descriptive. [ . . . ] I certainly suggest solutions to these different misfortunes, these are always additions. [ . . . ] If I am practically certain that I am not mistaken in my portraits of the Jew or of the colonized, because I have lived through colonization and Jewishness, I sincerely admit that my practical proposals may appear fantastic, since we pass from the inquiry to the wish. [ . . . ]
I believed I had discovered, along the way, that the Jew is one of the major figures of oppression of our time. Jewishness was largely the negative result of my corrosive, destructive relations with non-Jews. Even its positivity, which still existed, was heavily mortgaged by the oppression. This condition, as impossible to reject as it was to accept, remained, therefore, unlivable, unacceptable, as long as these relationships remained unchanged. [ . . . ] The real discussion which I would like to see opened is this: is this portrait a good likeness? Does the Jew recognize himself? Do the non-Jews recognize the Jew? Have I succeeded in showing the singularity and originality of the Jewish condition? [ . . . ]
I find that the solution seems to impose itself irresistibly. [ . . . ] The oppression of the Jew, like all oppressions, must be understood in its specificity. This means that its solution must also be specific. [ . . . ] Oppressed as a people, and a living as such, the Jew must be liberated as a people; he must see an end to his insolvency and rediscover the full dimensions of his life. [ . . . ]
Since a people cannot, even today, live and determine its destiny freely except as a nation, the Jews must be made into a nation. In short, the specific liberation of the Jews is a national liberation and for the last years this national liberation of the Jew has been the state of Israel. [ . . . ]
These two propositions (necessity of founding a Jewish nation, and a Jewish nation in Israel) do not have the same logical value. The Israeli solution, in other words, locating this nation in Palestine, was in a certain way historically contingent. It might have been installed elsewhere. [ . . . ] Today, however, the debate is closed for it is out of date: history has also imposed the second proposition on us. [ . . . ]
The national solution is not one of several; it is the only definitive solution, because it is the specific solution to the Jewish problem: Israel [ . . . ] must be the frame of reference for the Diaspora which must in future redefine itself in relation to it. [ . . . ]
Those who insist on holding on to the notion of the Diaspora, [ . . . ] invested with a so-called mission throughout the world (which legitimizes the dispersion!) must realize, as we all must realize, that they are holding on to the misfortune, bringing up the rear guard, retarding the liberation of their people. [ . . . ] What has religion done for this people to date? It has helped them to survive, which is already saying a great deal; but I must repeat that it has not loosened the noose by a single inch. On the contrary I greatly fear that it serves as an alibi. [ . . . ]
Neither the perpetuity of an improved Diaspora, nor Socialism, nor a more adaptable religion, more easily tolerated by others, nor a modus vivendi with the Christians, nor even an amiable pro-Israelism—Jaffa oranges and Tel-Aviv singers—are real solutions. They are at best compromises which do not fundamentally change a condition which demands a radical transformation. [ . . . ]
We did not have a choice between the Diaspora or Israel, assimilation, religion, universality, socialism or Israel. There was no either . . . or possible in Jewish existence, unless it was the choice between oppression and liberty. [ . . . ] If Israel did not exist, it would still be necessary to invent it.
I do not underestimate any of the difficulties, imperfections or errors of this young state. The actions taken by its governments have often shocked me. I have never denied myself the right to question them or denounce them; regarding the status of the local Arabs, for instance, or the North African immigrants. [ . . . ] I only criticize what exists and ought to function better; I never question the existence itself; just as no scandal, no error can make us doubt the necessity of decolonization. [ . . . ]
I continue to think that nationalism is far too frequently an alibi for hatred and domination. I cannot forget that the Jew was always one of the first victims of nationalist crises. But history has convinced me, at least twice, that a nation is the only adequate response to the misfortune of a people. In the case of the colonized I had already discovered that their liberation would be national before it could be social, because they were dominated as a people. [ . . . ]
In short, the nation is before the Jew and not behind him. Like the colonized, he has to fight for his national liberation and create a nation for himself. [ . . . ] Since the nation is still the most effective historical form, the Jew must adopt this form to rid himself of the oppression and live as a normal people among other peoples. The nation is not a preliminary, it is an ending. [ . . . ]
We must pass through this national stage. [ . . . ] Were we obliged to accept continued servitude, dispersion, domination and the impossibility of ever developing ourselves? [ . . . ]
The Jewish state in Palestine was perhaps a catastrophic error. His devotion to the traditional dream was perhaps the last trick played on the Jew by his religion. Was it really necessary to return to that old country, Biblical yes, and omnipresent in the entire culture of the people [ . . . ]?
I made my trip to Israel! [ . . . ] The country is about as big as a pocket handkerchief. [ . . . ] Israel is a real desert, a waterless desert of stones. And this tiny and disinherited domain, which you could almost cross in a single glance, is still disputed from within by its ancient inhabitants, suspicious and sarcastic, and is on all sides surrounded by hating populations. [ . . . ]
In view of the extraordinary disproportion in populations, the inexorable reinforcement of the Arab forces, their humiliated remembrance of so many successive defeats, their at least partial feeling of having right on their side, the too facile political diversion which a war with the Jews would constitute—in view of all this how can we avoid the anguish of asking ourselves if our gathering in the heart of so many hostile multitudes will not one day be transformed into history’s final trap? [ . . . ]
How could we avoid being worried by their smoldering and ever-wakeful hatred? [ . . . ] Did we have to exchange one anxiety for another, one danger for another? [ . . . ]
And yet I too am able to see that this mythic delirium, the aberration of founding the new Jewish state in Palestine, has perhaps contributed to the restoration of this people’s collective health. [ . . . ]
Peoples probably need myths. The Israeli nation has renewed a cultural tradition, fossilized though it may have been, a language which was almost dead and a religion which had been arrested for centuries. [ . . . ] The oppressed’s first need is to return to himself, in other words to his language, be it sick, to his tradition, be it a phantom. In this restoration of himself he is obliged to utilize the stones of his past. It is as much a question of reconstruction as of construction. In our case we also had to put an end to the exile. [ . . . ]
Today we are no longer defending a myth, but a reincarnated myth, a dream come true—the most solid of realities. Today three million men live in the new Jewish nation, one quarter of the total Jewish population. [ . . . ] This tiny corner is our only recognized bastion. Its destruction would be the greatest disaster of contemporary Jewish history, perhaps since the fall of the Temple, greater than the massacre of six million, because of its significance. [ . . . ]
Only a national solution can exorcize our shadowy figure. Only Israel can infuse us with life and restore our full dimensions. [ . . . ] Let me finally get to the bottom of this difficult problem—that of the culture of the oppressed. My treatment of it apropos of the colonized and apropos of the Jew has been much criticized. I will try to be precise.
A people must have a common culture. [ . . . ] The Jewish people exist because they possess a religious and cultural tradition, institutions and collective habits of thought and behavior. (Here I differ from authors like Sartre who have only seen in it enormous negativity, above all psychological.) [ . . . ] To be Jewish is a culture and a condition, a condition of oppression and a defective culture, practically reduced to its traditional aspect. [ . . . ]
For this people to regain their full dimensions the twofold misery had to end. The condition imposed by others had to be abolished and the culture freed from its defensive girdle. There was effectively a double oppression: an objective external oppression [ . . . ] and an auto-oppression, resulting from the other, [ . . . ] but having its own laws whose consequences were just as harmful—encystment, [ . . . ] the very negation of a living and lively Jewish culture.
The doubly caused asphyxiation could only be remedied by breaking the yoke of the servitude and also the encystment. [ . . . ] It was high time to restore liberty to Jewish culture for it is the sine qua non of normal development. [ . . . ]
In our rediscovered liberty each element of the convalescing Jewish collective consciousness—art, philosophy, the sciences, ethics and politics—will have to take its proper place. [ . . . ]
Far from marking the end of the Jewish religion, [ . . . ] this opening up to the world might again offer it its real opportunity. Like the other disciplines, religion will at last find freedom of expression, a progressive adaptation to the needs of the modern Jew, without having to limit itself to the role of watch dog which was necessary in the dispersion. [ . . . ]
De-sanctifying the Jewish tradition will restore the greatest fertility to it. [ . . . ] What Christian tradition has become in the culture of the Occident. [ . . . ] The inspiration of every thought, secular and profane, of art, ethics, legislation and philosophy, and this just because it is no more than the inspiration, the source and not the guardian or iron collar of every moment, of every effort. [ . . . ]
I am sure that when terminated, this great mutation will restore this people to history and to themselves, [ . . . ] which is a thousand times better than this permanent alienation born of suffering and anguish. In any event, they will be able to distinguish between the profane and the sacred, celebrate the sacred if they so desire, but live the profane without being haunted by ghosts. Far from being lost, the Bible and the Talmud and the Cabala will at last become what they deserve to be, an inexhaustible reservoir of themes, designs and symbols, inexhaustibly fruitful, monuments of world literature and not merely religious works; incomparably superior in my opinion to the Iliad and the Odyssey. [ . . . ]
Paradoxically, even assimilation will at last become possible. [ . . . ] By becoming a free man the Jew gains at the same time the freedom to cease being a Jew. [ . . . ]
I am now resigned to the fact that, for yet a long time to come, anything contained in books having to do with oppression, descriptions of the colonized, or of Jews, will gratify neither the colonizer nor the colonized, neither the Jew or the non-Jew. It is easier for me to argue over some technicality that varies from one country to the next than to discuss the broader patterns of relevance that I posit.
This is why I am grateful to Richard Marienstras for having tried to locate this recent book on The Liberation of the Jew within my overall body of work. His summary, I have to admit, is indeed excellent. I also thank him for his “broad endorsement and the few reservations,” even though his review is mostly about those reservations (R. Marienstras did insist on telling me in person that the requirements of column space meant that much of his endorsement ended up being cut; I am clearly unlucky with the Jewish press).
That said, he asserts “that one cannot sketch out a portrait of the Jew in the world.” In other words, my chosen method was not the right one. I should have undertaken a series of individual monographs of the many shades of existing Jewry.
His objection is not a bad one. Those individual portraits indeed need to be painted, and this is precisely what I achieved, finally, with my Portrait of a Jew. And I took quite a bit of heat for it: it’s only about North African Jews, it’s only about the Sephardim, etc.!
But I think we all agree that this kind of splitting, unless it provides for a meaningful consolidation, unless it highlights the themes common to the vast majority of Jews, would lead to the denial of the very existence of Jewishness, of a Jewish people. For it does most certainly exist, through its various segments, common institutions, cultural traditions and behaviors, and also, alas, a common fate, too often tragic. In short, there exists a common Jewish condition.
Once that has been established, we can proceed to analyze various types of Jewishness at all kinds of levels, sometimes emphasizing difference—North African couscous versus Polish stuffed carp—and sometimes stressing what is identical: the Passover ritual, the unanimous concern over a resurgence of Fascism.
This refusal to consider the Jewish condition globally again explains Marienstras’s astonishment at the space I devote to religion and, correspondingly, to the need for a certain demystification. (In this regard, he is being somewhat inconsistent when criticizing my emphasis on these themes while claiming elsewhere that I supposedly know nothing about the importance of religious faith.) Religion carries enormous weight in the Jewish cultural tradition and in the daily life of a majority of Jews still today, even those who call themselves agnostics. By that I mean religion continues to regulate, via family institutions in particular, most collective behaviors. Even in France, where Jewish culture is absent, or highly formalized where it exists, a Jew who is in any way demonstrative of his being Jewish will channel this act through some ritual gesture. Do I need to make myself clearer on this subject, or are people simply deaf to certain points, no matter how loudly or often they are proclaimed?
But for this very reason—the prodigious weight of religion in Jewish existence—no nonreligious Jewish philosophy or art has emerged. Hence, I said, without undermining religion as such, that a desacralization was in order if we ever hoped to see a truly autonomous Jewish culture develop. And I might add that this problem is not specific to Jews: it is common to all young nations, as we can see today in Africa and Asia. [ . . . ]
Likewise, this cultural alienation is not confined to Jews alone. Critics quibble when I challenge notions of Jewish culture, pointing to such successes as the Spanish Golden Age or to Yiddish writers. But where have I ever denied the existence of these felicitous interludes? All I wanted to show is that the fate of Jewish culture has always remained precarious, always threatened both from within and without: from the inside by artists aligning with the majority (and I am not saying this is bad, but am merely observing) and from the outside by mean and brutish tragedy; we mustn’t forget that Yiddish literature died a violent death! The result being that any kind of continuity has been impossible. [ . . . ] And, with regard to literature, what is a literature that has been pulverized into several dozen different languages? The least one can say, then, is that Jewish readers hardly benefit from a culturally healthy situation when they are unable to access a sizable portion of Jewish literature. If that isn’t cultural alienation, then what is? [ . . . ]
The reality is that no one can argue the extent of this or that alienation that I describe, nor can they claim that no alienation exists where I have pointed it out in my various books. So, once again, must I resign myself to this splintering? [ . . . ]
Let me state simply that such a premise, apart from its denial, once again, of the Jewish people’s common destiny, implies the entrenchment of oppression, the status quo. Or even assimilation, perhaps, in the short term. We could be less stubborn about the idea of collective survival. Personally, I am not invested in it as some mystical prerequisite, and I never denounced assimilation outright, where it had been possible, and I have put this in writing. But oppression, no, it is unacceptable. Here, one has to choose. It is a matter of ethics, perhaps, of pride, or whether or not one has the stomach for it, but I for one cannot abide it. I concede and understand that it doesn’t feel great to live in a minority situation, always suspect and threatened. But once we decide to do something about it, to redress this situation of dominance, then we have to be bold enough to put forward a specific solution, one that takes real, objective conditions into account. And those real, objective conditions include the fact that we are considered as a people and are treated as such, not always but in most cases, and to variable extents depending on the individual and the particular kind of Jewishness at issue.
This is why I am ultimately so astounded when intelligent readers, those who read carefully, are so surprised that I conclude with Israel. As if I needed to end with something moving, to wrap things up satisfactorily, even though the nationhood issue was vigorously addressed throughout the whole book, and by that I mean the reconstitution, in all of its dimensions, of this people that had been crushed for so long. Just as decolonization, where the reconstitution of the colonized into full-fledged peoples, and eventually into nations, issued logically and inevitably from the colonial project.
Allow me to reiterate, regardless, to R. Marienstras that his text, especially the beginning, is among the most perceptive pieces written on The Liberation of the Jew and that I wholeheartedly thank him for the seriousness with which he undertook his critique.
I must admit I am delighted to finally see an Israeli edition of The Liberation of the Jew.
This book was written before the 1973 Yom Kippur War, even before the 1967 Six-Day War, which is to say that it owes nothing to the more immediate political concerns, nor to the passions aroused in each of us at that time.
I had already published another essay, Portrait of a Jew, where I attempted to systematically assess the Jewish condition by way of one particular person’s existence: my own. I then deemed it necessary to examine the various ways of overcoming the oppression of the Jew—hence the origin of The Liberation of the Jew.
In this work, [ . . . ] I showed the deep sociological, cultural, and political connection between Israel and the Diaspora, and I concluded with the logical necessity for Zionism and the State, its ultimate outcome, for the existence of Jews today. [ . . . ]
This premise, so obvious at present, did not immediately resonate as positively as it deserved to, even in Israel. There are two mutually reinforcing reasons for this.
For a long time, people would claim that Israel’s destiny was radically different from that of the Diaspora, so that what Jews scattered around the world were experiencing, feeling, and thinking seemed somehow outdated. [ . . . ] Israel had no wish to accommodate their fantasies, hopes, and fears. You would hear repeatedly that Israelis were no longer Jews. Conversely, many Jews who were more or less integrated among various peoples feared that this enhanced emphasis upon their connection to Yahweh would jeopardize their hard-won assimilation.
The Liberation of the Jew, as you will see, [ . . . ] takes an opposite view with regard to this dichotomy. I emphasize, on the contrary, [ . . . ] the unity of the Jewish people.
I shall not flatter myself [ . . . ] by recalling [ . . . ] how much recent events have broadly confirmed this [ . . . ] perspective, often painfully so. Israel was delighted to discover that the Diaspora was not only its surest ally; it was affected whenever Israel was at risk and was distraught before even knowing the full extent of the threat. The people of the Diaspora made the definitive discovery [ . . . ], in the turmoil and anguish of armed conflict, that Israel was an expression of themselves, perhaps the dearest part of who they were.
I did not feel I had to change a single line of this book, and you will understand why, [ . . . ] nor amend the essence of its conclusions:
Obviously, that is not all there is to The Liberation of the Jew. I would be pleased [ . . . ] if the reader discovered, beyond the Jew, the more general mechanisms of oppression and liberation described in this book, those found among most oppressed peoples, so numerous in the world. I would hope that the reader would kindly attend to my reflections on the problems of language or religion, common to most of the oppressed, or the distinction I posit between culture and tradition, etc. But I know from experience that, when jostled by current events, the reading will [ . . . ] engage only the more political perspectives. [ . . . ] Let us simply hope that the day is near when we shall at last be able to do the kind of research that is less immediately constraining.