The terrible twentieth century forced us to call into question a European modernity so confident in its achievements and in the heritage of the Enlightenment. With two world wars and the Shoah, it taught us not to associate too naively the idea of modernity with that of progress; it tempered the enthusiasm of the Jews who had thrown themselves with passion toward this modernity, obliging them to weigh the price they had had to pay for that entry.
It is hard to give a single definition of it. For it is a long-running process — perhaps even a continuous one — from the moment a society emerges from tradition and repetition.
One could broadly define it in Europe as a change of perspective: emancipation from tradition, a process of autonomization that allowed the individual to win his freedom in relation to the group and to the religion that governed so many dimensions of his private and public life; the development of science; secularization.
It certainly exerted an immense attraction on the Jews, for, to them, it represented something more still: a promise of liberty, of equality, respect for difference, the possibility of existing outside the ghetto and of taking part in civic life.
And one of the first consequences of modernity in Europe was the appearance of the Enlightenment, and, in its wake, that of the Haskala, the movement of the Jewish Enlightenment, of which Spinoza was the precursor and Moses Mendelssohn one of the principal architects, through his rational approach to religion and his faith in reason and tolerance.
But one may wonder whether, beyond the name of Mendelssohn and the Haskala, there were not, for the Jewish population, successive entries into modernity.
As Alessandro Guetta points out, the Italian Jewish community — through its rich cultural production, through its rational apprehension of questions of History and culture — was among the first to follow “the Jewish path toward modernity,” and to create intellectual models that would later be developed in Germany and in the east of Europe. Although the Italian Jews (50,000 at most) were never numerous enough to exert a decisive influence on the other European communities, names such as those of Samuel David Luzzatto (1800-65), a native of Trieste and professor at the rabbinical college of Padua, and Elia Benamozegh (1823-1900), a native of Livorno and of a Moroccan family, are those of great precursors in dialogue with modernity.
For her part, Ariane Bendavid shows how the Jews, in the course of their multi-millennial history, have always known how to adapt to changing cultural and political realities and to whatever appeared, each time, as a form of modernity. Citing Yuri Slezkine, she recalls the extraordinary identification of the Jews with the fundamental forces that “shape the modern world”1, but she also stresses that, since Antiquity, “adopt and adapt” seems to have been the credo of a not insignificant part of them — which would explain the unique phenomenon of Israel’s persistence across the centuries, despite its exile, its dispersion, and an environment so often hostile.
Another question: in this process of integration, how does one preserve the essential? One may wonder what the consequences of modernity have been within the Jewish population of Europe.
We thus enter the modern period of Western societies. Simon Wuhl, referring to a few Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century — notably Simon Dubnow, Horace Kallen, and Michael Walzer — examines the place to be given to the collective belonging of diaspora Jews and to their cultural identity (whether that identity be religious, intellectual, artistic, or ethical in nature). Such a questioning was able to prompt in Dubnow a reflection on the necessity of preserving cultural rights, alone capable, in his view, of countering the dilution of the collective Jewish personality. Likewise, in Walzer, this questioning gives rise to a “Jewish thought of cultural differences” that leads him in turn to critically interrogate French-style laïcité.
Another question concerns the success and development of the phenomenon of secularization within Jewish modernity.
Ilan Greilsammer recalls that Zionism, from which the State of Israel was born, was from the outset bound up with the question of modernity, and that the dream of Israel’s founding fathers was to create a liberal, modern, and democratic state governed by the separation of powers. But he stresses that, for part of the population, accepting the instruments of modernity did not mean accepting the ideology of modernity. Hence the compromises that Ben Gurion had to make with the religious forces — and the paradox of a modern state, a start-up nation, where the civil status of citizens continues to depend on the rabbinate.
Concerning the domain of culture, Léa Veinstein examines the case of Kafka, who ran up against an insoluble contradiction, whether regarding his relation to the modern world or his problematic Jewish identity. She cites Stéphane Mosès who, gathering texts by Kafka, by Benjamin, but also by Scholem, Freud, and Rosenzweig, traces the traits common to a generation of sons who underwent “the derangement of the processes of transmission within Judaism,” an effect of “the entry of Western Jews into modernity.”
Meanwhile, examining the Jewish modernity of the painters of the École de Paris, Itzhak Goldberg observes that it remains astonishing to group under the name École de Paris artists who all come from elsewhere. He recalls that, if one can note the presence of numerous Jewish artists within modernity — even if they rarely figure as pioneers — it is because the arrival of these creators, who engage for the first time in secular art, is practically contemporaneous with the first waves of the avant-garde. Finally he raises a question that, for all, poses itself acutely: “How does one articulate modernity and a vernacular culture, Jewish and Russian, for the question of identity, the anxiety of the loss of identity, is central in the work of Chagall — and perhaps common to Jewish life and to modern art?”2
Two films by the filmmaker Yolande Zauberman are also discussed. One is very recent, M., dealing with sexual violence in the ultra-Orthodox milieu in Israel: it is the subject of an interview of the filmmaker with Monique Halpern and Jean-Charles Szurek. The other film is older; it is Moi Ivan, toi Abraham, analyzed by Anny Dayan Rosenman. In both cases, the appeal of modernity does not come without internal struggles, opposing the individual’s desire for freedom and the coercive force of the group and of tradition.
The dossier continues with an interview of Izio Rosenman by Brigitte Stora, on his path and his commitments as a left-wing, secular Jew, informed by a family tradition of the left and by the violence of History. An interview in which he evokes values stemming from the ethical tradition of the prophets — values essential to him in that they sustain hope in mankind, even if they are coupled with an anxious vigilance.
Finally the dossier closes with a reflection by the historian David Biale, drawn from his book Not in the Heavens — The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought and translated by Martine Lebovici, on the theme of Heritage, understood here as cultural heritage. David Biale describes new developments both in Israel and in the USA, evoking the calling into question of the old categories tied to modernity and the fact that henceforth religion is imbued with the secular and the secular imbued with religion. He recalls that some of the religious movements in Israel are creations of modernity as much as responses to it, while in the USA a so-called “post-modern” generation regards its identity as modifiable, fluid, in a sense “à la carte,” moving beyond the historical opposition between secular and religious.
Outside the dossier, we reproduce the contributions of a round table devoted to the immense Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever, in which Rachel Ertel, Carole Ksiazenicer-Matheron, Claude Mouchard, Guillaume Métayer, and Martin Rueff took part — all of whom evoke the modernity, the breath, the incandescence of a poetry that deployed its power in its confrontation with History.
Norbert Czarny presents the work of Eduardo Halfon, a Jewish and Guatemalan writer, too little known in Europe, whose every novel — from Monastère to Le Boxeur polonais or again to Deuil — constitutes one of the pieces of a complex and comical family puzzle, still in the making. He represents that third generation after the Shoah which has sufficient distance, in space as well as in time, to embrace past and present.
Finally, we wished to pay tribute to our friend Rolland Doukhan, who passed away in December 2020, one of whose short stories we publish here: Le contre sens.
And today? We are witnessing a calling into question of the achievements of modernity and the Enlightenment, expressed through irrational approaches and through a perversion of the freedom of thought won in the time of the Enlightenment, in favor of approaches that challenge the universality of truth and reason in favor of so-called alternative truths. With the development of conspiracy thinking, of hatred of the other, of populism, it is democracy that is endangered. Marine Le Pen’s scores prove it.
The invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia, with its destruction, its massacres, and its barbarity, shows us how fragile our situation is and how threatened by totalitarianisms.
What future?
Good reading.