Revisiting the Jewish Question

Elisabeth Roudinesco

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745683744
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología judía

What does it mean to be Jewish? What is an anti-Semite? Why does the enigmatic identity of the men who founded the first monotheistic religion arouse such passions? We need to return to the Jewish question. We need, first, to distinguish between the anti-Judaism of medieval times, which persecuted the Jews, and the anti-Judaism of the Enlightenment, which emancipated them while being critical of their religion. It is a mistake to confuse the two and see everyone from Voltaire to Hitler as anti-Semitic in the same way. Then we need to focus on the development of anti-Semitism in Europe, especially Vienna and Paris, where the Zionist idea was born. Finally, we need to investigate the reception of Zionism both in the Arab countries and within the Diaspora. Re-examining the Jewish question in the light of these distinctions and investigations, Roudinesco shows that there is a permanent tension between the figures of the 'universal Jew' and the 'territorial Jew'. Freud and Jung split partly over this issue, which gained added intensity after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the Eichmann trial in 1961. Finally, Roudinesco turns to the Holocaust deniers, who started to suggest that the Jews had invented the genocide that befell their people, and to the increasing number of intellectual and literary figures who have been accused of anti-Semitism. This thorough re-examination of the Jewish question will be of interest to students and scholars of modern history and contemporary thought and to a wide readership interested in anti-Semitism and the history of the Jews.

1

Our First Parents

As Hannah Arendt eloquently points out, we must avoid confusing anti-Semitism, the racist ideology that spread from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, with anti-Judaism, which developed in the West once Christianity had become the state religion under Emperor Theodosius at the end of the fourth century. It was in this period – in other words, over forty years after the Council of Nicaea (summoned in 325 by Emperor Constantine) – that Christianity finally transformed itself into an official religion imposed by the secular power: Jesus had announced the Kingdom, and what arrived was the Church. The pagans, who had previously been the persecutors of the first Christians, were now persecuted in their turn, just as survivals of Graeco-Latin culture were eradicated: the Olympic Games were banned, and homosexuals were put to death – at that time they were labelled ‘sodomites’ and were already regarded as perverts because they represented an attack on the laws of procreation.

The Christian anti-Judaism which then spread throughout Europe – until the age of the Enlightenment – rested on the same principles, with one difference: for Christian monarchs, Judaism was far from being a form of paganism. So the Jew was neither the enemy from outside, nor the barbarian from beyond the frontiers, nor the infidel (the Muslim), nor the heretic (the Albigensian, the Cathar), nor the other, foreign to himself. He was the enemy within, placed at the heart of a genealogy – the first parent, according to the Christian tradition – since he gave birth to Christianity: the founder of the new religion was Jewish.

The Jew as bearer of Judaism was thus all the more hateful as he was simultaneously inside and outside. He was inside because he existed within the Christian world, but outside because he did not recognize the true faith and lived in a different community from that of the Christians. If Christianity was to become the only universal monotheistic religion – and Christ to cease being a bearer of the Jewish name – it still needed to be rid of its Jewish origin, which was now deemed insidious. The sexual theme of the treacherous, perverse Jew, with unnatural morals (it was claimed that Jewish women slept with goats), was ubiquitous in the anti-Jewish persecutions of the mediaeval period, and this is why the figure of the Jew was often associated with that of the sodomite and the committer of incest.

Evidence for this can be found in the astonishing legend of the Jewish curse, repeated by Jacobus de Voragine around 1260, which turned Judas into an equivalent of Oedipus, destroying the genos (dynasty) of the Labdacids and thus the family order too, and combining incest with parricide. Here is the story in outline: Ciborea, pregnant with Reuben, dreamt that she would give birth to an accursed child, sullied by vice, who would bring about the ruin of the Jewish people. After the birth of this son, called Judas, she got rid of him, putting him into a basket on the open seas. But the frail vessel was shipwrecked on an island whose queen was barren: she adopted the child. When he grew up and learned that he was not the son of his parents, Judas fled to Jerusalem and entered the service of Pilate. One day, the latter came to taste the apples in a neighbouring garden: Judas hurried across and quarrelled with the owner, unaware that it was Reuben. He killed him, and Pilate bequeathed on him Reuben's wife and his belongings. When he discovered that he had killed his father and married his mother, Judas went over to Jesus and became his disciple. But he later betrayed him and hanged himself.¹

In short, throughout the long history of the mediaeval world, the Jew was simultaneously devil and sorcerer, his father's murderer and his mother's husband; but he was also both sexes in one. Furthermore, he was often described as an animal, embodying a highly particular duality of male and female: he was a union of male scorpion and female sow. In the order of humankind, he abolished the difference of the sexes and the generations, being incestuous and double-sexed (masculine/feminine), and, in the order of animal existence, he disregarded the barrier between different species, indulging in unnatural copulation. A master of poisons, of usury and knowledge, lustful and gluttonous, he was thus the incarnation of absolute horror.

The Jews were denounced as deicides until the Council of Trent:² in Europe they formed a ‘community’ that was assigned to no particular territory: a community at once visible and invisible, a wandering community. Confined to practising trades from which Christians were debarred, the Jews were accused of all sorts of repellent activit­ies linked to their status as transgressors of sexual difference and the separation between species: bestiality, ritual murder, incest, child stealing, profanation of the host, consumption of human blood, polluting the waters, exploiting lepers for their own purposes, spreading the plague, laying all sorts of plots. But especially, and for the same reason, they were regarded as holding the three great powers proper to humanity as such: the power of finance, the power of intellect, and a perverse power over sexuality. So it then became necessary, in order to reduce the power attributed to them, to force them either to convert or to accept a continual humiliation: ‘Talmud-burning’, wearing elbow caps, yellow hats, or badges of infamy, and confinement within Jewish ghettoes – or ‘jewries’ [‘juiveries’] – under strict surveillance.³

This anti-Judaism – which aimed not to exterminate the Jews but to convert them, to persecute them, or to expel them – was not a form of anti-Semitism in the modern sense, since it occurred at a time in human history when it was God – not human beings – who governed the world.

The Christian anti-Judaism of the mediaeval period actually presupposed the principle of divine sovereignty – of a single God (monotheism) – while anti-Semitism, which saw the Jew as the specimen of a ‘race’, and no longer as a partner in a divine covenant (even one that was decried), rested on a transformation of the religious Jew into a Jew-by-identity, the bearer of a stigma – in other words, a ‘remainder’: Jewishness.

Embodied up to the eighteenth century by divine right monarchs as supported by the Roman Catholic Church,⁴ the God of the Christians decided the future of the world, while the God of the Jews, invisible and unrepresentable, continued to promise his people the coming of a Messiah and a return to the Promised Land. For as long as the West remained Christian, Jews and Christians had one and the same God, even though the relationship between the two groups and this one God was not identical.

For while Christianity is a religion of individual and collective faith, represented by a Church – and even more by the Roman Catholic Church – Judaism is a religion of belonging, accompanied by a cult of memory, of a thinking comprised by glosses and commentaries and obedience to ancestral rites affecting clothing, the body (circumcision), food (kashrut), and behaviour (Sabbath). It is based on the primacy of an original and endlessly renewed alliance (or testament) between God and his chosen people.

In other words, the Jewish religion is different from the two monotheisms to which it has given birth. Ever since they have existed, the Jews have designated themselves not simply as Jewish – in other words, as observing a religion called Judaism – but as a mythical people and a nation, springing from the Kingdom of Israel and then Judaea (Zion), with Jerusalem as its holy city. Consequently, according to the Jewish law (Halakha), every Jew remains a member of his people, even when he has ceased to practise his Judaism and even when he rejects his Jewishness by converting. And when a non-Jew converts to Judaism he becomes Jewish for all eternity, whether he wants this or not.

To be Jewish, then, is not like being a Christian since, even when he abandons his religion, a Jew continues to be part of the Jewish people and thus the history of his people: such is his Jewishness, his identity as a godless Jew, as opposed to the Jewishness of those who remain religious. This idea was never taken up by any other religion: according to Jewish law, you remain Jewish (in the sense of Jewishness) even when you have stopped being Jewish (in the sense of Judaism). And you are a Jew once and for all, without any possibility of changing, either by descent through the mother or by conversion.

The German satirist and journalist Ludwig Börne, who converted to Lutheranism in 1818 and then settled in France, the native land of human rights and the emancipation of the Jews, summed up the principle of this always suspect and forever fraught identity: ‘Some reproach me with being a Jew, some praise me because of it, some pardon me for it, but all think of it.’⁵

And this people, ever since its mythic origins, has been characterized by the cult of its own memory. It never stops remembering catastrophes (Shoah) that have always been visited upon it by God, each time condemning it to exile and scattering (diaspora or galut), and thus the loss of its territory and its holy places: Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the First Temple built by Solomon, the Jews were taken off into captivity in Babylon, they returned from captivity, they rebuilt the Second Temple that was then destroyed by Titus – and of which only a wall of cries and lamentations (the Wailing Wall) would remain – and they were persecuted by the Romans, who renamed Judaea Palaestina,⁶ and then by the Christians.

The history of the Jewish people is the history of eternal suffering, of profound misfortune, and of boundless lamentation that finds expression, throughout the expulsions and the massacres, in the dream – which can never be realized without some catastrophe – of a return to the Promised Land: ‘The Everlasting will scatter you among all the peoples from one end of the earth to another. He will make your heart restless, your eyes languishing, your soul suffering.’ Until the rise of Zionism, a result of the desacralization of the European world, the Jewish people would remain the people of memory, of looking back, perpetually awaiting an entry into history.

And when the new religion (Christianity) was proclaimed, a religion to which Judaism had given birth and which in a sense subsumed it, the Jews then had to fix the oral Law (Torah), in Jerusalem and in Babylon, in texts and commentaries (Mishnah and Gemara), so that Judaism would become an orthodox corpus of unified rules (the Talmud). Remember the land that is always promised (Eretz Israel) by Yahweh to the ancient Hebrews, the people of the Bible, wandering and nomadic; remember the land that is always lost and regained; remember the Everlasting and his uniqueness; remember Noah, the father of the ark and the covenant, Abraham, the common ancestor of the three monotheisms,⁷ and Moses, the founder of the law; remember what remains of the Jew when the Jewish people is scattered and when the Jew is no longer altogether Jewish. ‘Next year in Jerusalem’: such is the complex fate of the Jews.

In this regard, Jewish mysticism has always borne a certain messianism of return and withdrawal, since the redemption promised by God can come about only in two ways: either by a spiritual regeneration leading to internal exile or by a concrete and collective break that finds expression in departing for the Holy Land, a land that can be granted by God only through the voice of a new Messiah.

This indeed was the choice made by Sabbatai Zevi, who, under the Ottoman Empire in the middle of the seventeenth century, proclaimed himself to be the Messiah. After inflicting severe mortifications on himself, and having swung several times from a state of melancholia to a state of exultation, he defied Jewish law and was subjected to a herem.⁸ With the help of his disciple Nathan of Gaza, abandoning the attempt to imbue himself spiritually with God's intimate presence, he so roused the Jewish communities of the East that he convinced them to work towards the rebirth of the ancient Kingdom of Israel. He was imprisoned, and agreed to convert to Islam before being exiled to Dulcigno in 1676, abandoned by the faithful.⁹

At the end of a magnificent study of the main currents in Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem describes how, in its final phase, Hasidism, which had followed Sabbateanism, eventually transformed its theoretical search, and indeed its mystical quest, into an inexhaustible source of narratives: everything has become history, he says – in other words, history as memory. And he relates this anecdote, borrowed from a Hebrew storyteller (Maggid):

When the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer – and what he had set out to perform was done. When a generation later the ‘Maggid’ of Meseritz was faced with the same task he would go to the same place in the woods and say: We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers – and what he wanted done became reality. Again a generation later Moshe Leib of Sassov had to perform this task. And he too went into the woods and said: We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the secret meditations belonging to the prayer, but we do know the place in the woods to which it all belongs – and that must be sufficient; and sufficient it was. But when another generation had passed, and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down on his golden chair in his castle and said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done. And, the story-teller adds, the story which he told had the same effect as the actions of the other three.¹⁰

Even beyond the world of Hasidism, this anecdote bears witness to the sense of belonging and identity experienced by the Jews and defined as a ‘remainder’ and as a ‘remember!’, making the return to the Holy Land at once possible and impossible.

Jacques Le Goff relates how Louis IX, in the middle of the thirteenth century, behaved towards the enemies of the faith: heretics, infidels, and Jews. He regarded the first group as the worst since they had practised the faith and then denied it, thereby becoming traitors, felons, and apostates, ‘infected by the stain of perversity’. He advised burning them or expelli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• 1: Our First Parents
• 2: The Shadow of the Camps and the Smoke of the Ovens
• 3: Promised Land, Conquered Land
• 4: Universal Jew, Territorial Jew
• 5: Genocide between Memory and Negation
• 6: A Great and Destructive Madness
• 7: Inquisitorial Figures
• Index