The divide – simple separation or terrible rupture – lies at the heart of Judaism. It is its very essence. Withdrawal of a Name, divine word become an unpronounceable tetragrammaton, the lack of existence of the first man, constitutive of his counterpart, his sexual half without which he—ich—would not exist, election of a people nevertheless condemned to endure wandering, outside of a temple destroyed and forever to be rebuilt. Between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, primitive Judaism and modern Jewishness always play a game of cat and mouse on the winding roads of Israel.
Separation does not necessarily mean the opposite. Should we then, following the example of Elisabeth Roudinesco’s latest work, limit ourselves to approaching this “other” as its opposite, as its recurring negating temptation, the reversal into its contrary? Certainly, in a mirror and a cascade, anti-Judaism, then anti-Semitism, and anti-Zionism engender, complement, and succeed one another in human history, causing in its victims the tragic and slow parthenogenesis of a Jewish consciousness. Courage, being only an extension of lucidity, is like a doubly millennial gestation, forcing into being a salvific nation with forceps.
There is almost, if one dares say, a double pleonasm in this “return to the Jewish question” proposed by the historian of psychoanalysis: Judaism is necessarily a “question.” This inquiry continually “returns” within a community eternally commanded—Midrash obliges—to “search for itself.” An enigma ultimately devoid of solution, like a famous Talmudic proverb: the answer is the grave.
This “question” apparently does not interest Elisabeth Roudinesco. She seeks rather to “transcend Jewish and anti-Jewish historiography.” While making brief incursions here and there into religious exegesis, also drawing from the realm of psychoanalysis, she prefers to adhere, as the guiding thread of her reflections, to the more political, if not engaged, allegory of a human whose courage sways the will of God, from Jacob’s struggle with the Angel to the outcome where the name Israel was bestowed upon the valiant wrestler. At the risk, in thus playing on all three fronts, of disorienting the lay reader even more. Or the purist. But is Judaism not situated by design at the triple crossroads of religion, politics, and the unconscious? A multifaceted approach where intellectual giants serve as “points de capiton” for her thought, gathering along a very scholarly—but also very scattered—gallery of often unknown portraits and texts, the decisive stages of this “Jewish question.”
Elisabeth Roudinesco traces back to the early footsteps of Christian then medieval anti-Judaism, essentially confessional persecution of a Jew “accused” of being both “inside and outside”—persistently—in a society marked by exclusive monotheism. A tyranny that later becomes more “social” and stigmatizes its “financial powers, intellect, and sexual perversion.”
In the fight against religious obscurantism, nourished by Enlightenment philosophy, the French Revolution “emancipates the Jew”: “give everything to the Jew as an individual, refuse everything to the Jew as a nation,” declared Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre in 1791 to express his ideal of universality. “Nation,” despite Elisabeth Roudinesco’s confusion on the subject, should be understood at the time—and this, since the Middle Ages—as a community of people grouped according to their language, religion, or common geographical origin. An emancipation which, the academic specifies in a development as reasoned as instructive, constitutes a crucial phase: some “French and Jewish thinkers” would consider these “Enlightenments” the “original crucible of the upcoming Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianisms.” They would reproach the revolution for, in some way, secularizing the faithful and distancing them from their “religion of belonging.” By secularizing, the author indicates to illuminate this “paradigm shift,” the thesis of the “first parent” is “racialized.” It paves the way for anti-Semitism, a later concept coined in 1879.
An anti-Semitism which would also be “the engine of a revolution of Jewish consciousness.” Always masterful in her demonstration, despite the sometimes unpleasant impression of a book formed of successive cards, Elisabeth Roudinesco summons great philosophers, illustrious writers, and political leaders. She demonstrates all the ambivalence—the interweaving of their thoughts, just like the curious reversal into the opposite of their argumentation—of the discourses of those who, for example, violently condemn anti-Judaism to better pave the way for anti-Semitism. Or who draw from it, like Theodor Herzl from Drumont, “a driving force” to implement “a vast program of evacuation of European Jews to another territory.”
The permanent mutation of the virus of anti-Semitism, but also the adaptation of the latter to Zionism, itself arising from “the desacralization of the European world,” the denialism of genocide, a phenomenon combining “conspiratorial theory” and “delirious mode of interpretation,” offers Elisabeth Roudinesco the opportunity to remind that “anti-Semitism is also a matter of the unconscious.” A distorting prism of which the philosopher Hannah Arendt was also a victim, target of sharp criticisms for having been “perceived at the opposite of the ideas she defended” in her reflections on the “banality of evil” and during the Eichmann trial.
By emphasizing the numerous passages where she settles scores with certain ambiguities of Freudian orthodoxy—Anna Freud’s speech in Jerusalem in 1977, Jones’s politics endorsed by IPA leaders—we also cannot overlook the historian of psychoanalysis’s conclusions, an appeal to “Israelis”: choose between “secular democracy” and the “Jewish character of their State,” the latter option presenting, according to her, the risk of a “religious and racialist becoming.” Perhaps too quickly forgetting that Judaism was, in the light of Mordekhai Kaplan’s reflections, a civilization before being a religion. A conclusion in the form of an ultimate swing return, opposite this time to a book starting with the mention of the XXXII article of the Palestinian Hamas Charter, a piece of anthology of a virulent and “regressive” anti-Judaism.
Elisabeth Roudinesco, “Retour sur la question juive,” Coll. Bibliothèque idées, Editions Albin Michel, 2009.
